Sehnsucht and flying

This week while running Christmas errands—including a couple trips to urgent care—I listened to the latest episode of The Rewatchables, a 100-minute conversation about F1, which was great entertainment both in the theatre and at home.

The movie is bookended with scenes in which the main character, skilled “never-was” driver Sonny Hayes, is asked about the money involved in racing. Both times he says, “It’s not about the money.” Both times he’s asked in response, “So what is it about?” The answer comes just past the midpoint of the movie, when Sonny opens up to Kate, his romantic interest. After explaining his past—early promise, a near-fatal crash, anger, resentment—he describes realizing that what he’d lost in his youth was his “love for racing.” That’s what it’s really about. And that love is both rooted, sustained, and occasionally manifested in a specific experience. Sonny:

“It’s rare, but sometimes there’s a moment in the car where everything goes quiet, my heartbeat slows, it’s peaceful, and I can see everything. And no one, no one can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again, but man, I want to. I want to. Because in that moment—I’m flying.”

Kudos to Brad Pitt for selling this speech. I felt it.

What the discussion on The Rewatchables made me realize, in reflecting on this expression of longing and its fulfillment at the climax of the movie for the nth time since watching F1, is that Sonny is describing a sensation for which we actually have a word: Sehnsucht.

Sehnsucht is a loanword from German meaning “longing” or “yearning” or, in the prosaic translation possible, “desire,” but implies much more than these. Far from a rational want or need or a simple appetite which can be gratified materially, Sehnsucht is sharp, long-lasting, oriented toward something far-off, rare, but obtainable, and is as sweet to endure as it is to fulfil. It was an important concept to the German Romantics and—the point of this post—CS Lewis.

Lewis wrote about Sehnsucht explicitly in a few places (and there’s an academic journal dedicated to Lewis’s work by this name), but his most memorable and poignant descriptions of it some from his memoir Surprised by Joy, in which Sehnsucht plays the title role. In the first chapter, Lewis describes three childhood incidents that awakened in him a sense of and permanent desire for “joy.” This aching desire proved yet more poignant by breaking in unexpectedly—while peering into his brother’s toy garden, when reading Squirrel Nutkin, when reading an English translation of skaldic poetry—and unpredictably. Lewis:

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to all three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is the kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.

As Sonny Hayes might put it, “It’s not about the money.”

F1 is satisfying because it makes us feel Sonny’s Sehnsucht, a source and object of desire worth orienting one’s entire life around, and the joy, too deep for words, that comes with its satisfaction. This speaks to people—look at the climactic scene on YouTube and browse the comments. I’m not going to pretend that F1 is high drama, but it’s exquisitely crafted entertainment and, in the person of Sonny and his sweet, unsatisfied desire to “fly,” dramatizes beautifully an aspect of the human heart that is all too easy to ignore or, in our age, simply smother.

But of course Lewis would remind us that even Sehnsucht is not desire itself, but a pointer beyond: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. . . . Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”

Tellingly, despite getting the girl, saving his friend’s team, raising a younger driver to maturity, and winning the big race, F1 ends with Sonny back on the road, chasing that feeling of flying.

The Odyssey trailer reaction

Matt Damon as Odysseus in the teaser trailer for The Odyssey (2026)

To say that Christopher Nolan’s treatment of Homer is highly anticipated would be an understatement. By the time I discovered the first teaser for The Odyssey this evening while doing some last-minute Christmas shopping for my kids, the official trailer on the Universal YouTube channel had been up twelve hours and already had 9.8 million views. (Addendum: In the time it’s taken me to dash off these thoughts and observations, the trailer has cleared ten million views.)

So, in a very real sense, what I think doesn’t matter. Here are my thoughts anyway.

I’ve mentioned recently that, while I like Nolan generally and love a couple of his movies, I think his success and the leeway studios have given him since he wrapped up his Batman trilogy have led him further and further into self-indulgence. This peaked with Tenet, which was entertaining because Nolan is a spectacular showman and completely incomprehensible because, with its involuted story, he leaned hard into all of his own worst instincts. Part of what kept it from being a pure disaster was that its slick near-future world was fitting for his style: Inception and Interstellar both fit the bill, as does the futuristic Wayne Enterprises tech of his Batman movies, especially The Dark Knight Rises.

But imagine that recognizable Nolan aesthetic—matte black tactical gear, brushed steel and brutalist concrete, affectless acting, and obsessive rejection of linear time—transferred to… the Bronze Age.

I follow a number of gifted historical and archaeological artists on social media and the scuttlebutt is that Nolan’s crew reached out to some experts in Mycenaean material culture and then ghosted them. It shows. Homer’s world was a world of elaborate courtesy and protocol, gold, jewels, and precious metals, and suits of burnished bronze armor that thundered when their warriors leapt from their chariots to do battle. Matt Damon’s crew from Ithaca look like someone asked an LLM to blend 1950s sword-and-sandal Romans with a SWAT team.

That’s harsh, I guess. I’m not particularly hopeful. As much as I like Nolan, he has to be one of the filmmakers least suited to this kind of story. (Let me second what some of those historical artists have wished for: a Homer adaptation from Robert Eggers.) If I hope anything, I hope I’m wrong.

With (most of) the negativity out of the way, here are a few things that impressed me in this teaser:

• The IMAX cinematography looks atmospheric as Hades, so to speak. Hoyte van Hoytema is working with Nolan again and a number of the brief glimpses we get of major episodes from the Odyssey look good in strict filmmaking terms.

• Anne Hathaway as Penelope looks pretty woebegone in her brief appearance. I like Hathaway but wonder if she has the requisite cunning for the woman who was so perfectly matched to Odysseus. (My ideal casting: Rebecca Ferguson, who combines regal beauty with obvious, potentially terrifying intelligence.)

• I like the shots in Polyphemus’s cave, but am puzzled that we actually get a brief glimpse of a giant, shadowy form entering behind Odysseus’s men. Word was that Nolan’s Odyssey would be demythologized to some degree. Perhaps not? Or will the adventure scenes be Odysseus’s exaggerated retelling? If Nolan indulges in his nonlinear storytelling it will surely be when Odysseus is rescued and hosted by the Phaiakians and tells them his story—a portion of the poem that, to be fair, lends itself to Nolan’s thing.

• We get a glimpse of Benny Safdie as Agamemnon near the beginning. Ridiculous Greek fantasy armor. Perhaps an artifact of Odysseus telling an embellished version of his story?

• We don’t see him in the trailer, but Jon Bernthal is listed as playing Menelaus. I’d like to have seen him—or someone like him—in the lead. Bernthal looks tough and has unbelievable charisma. Somehow he keeps getting slotted into second-fiddle roles behind flat, awkward leads (e.g. “The Pacific,” in which he by all rights should have played John Basilone, and “The Walking Dead”). Robert Pattinson is also slated to play Antinous, one of Penelope’s suitors, which should give him plenty of opportunities to steal the scene.

• Back to the trailer. We get brief glimpses of the Trojan Horse. No idea what the Achaians are doing hoisting it out of the sea, but the shots of the warriors crammed inside look great.

• Near the end we get some eerie shots of what appear to be Odysseus’s journey to the underworld. Not at all what I imagine when reading the story, but exceptionally atmospheric and spooky. Rightly so. Curious to know if we’ll see a bored, disillusioned Achilles.

• Devotees of ancient Greek shipbuilding are upset about behind-the-scenes images of the ships here. I know just enough to identify them as clinker-built, which is right for the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings but obviously wrong for Mycenaean Greece. That may or may not bother you.

• We end with an Odysseus and Penelope before the war, who seem much weepier and worrisome than the figures from Homer. Homer’s Odysseus cries, to be sure, but only after twenty years of bloodshed and captivity. Maybe it’s just that I have a hard time taking Matt Damon seriously when he channels high emotion. (His outburst as General Groves in Oppenheimer came across to me as impotent rather than righteous rage.)

So—we’ll see. This is a teaser trailer with perhaps a minute of footage, after all, and much of the film’s staggeringly large cast doesn’t appear at all. (Keeping Zendaya—as Athena!?—offscreen might have been a smart move.) It will certainly trade in spectacle, and maybe that will be enough. I’ve loved plenty of other atrocious historical films on that level (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), but something else those movies had going for them was strong performances and surehanded storytelling. Again—we’ll see.

I’m with those who were hoping for something a bit more meticulous in its reconstruction of Homer’s world, something we still haven’t really seen onscreen before. But that, for better or worse, is not Nolan’s forte. Even from this teaser it’s clear that he’s put his unmistakable stamp on the story. My hope is that, even without material fidelity to the original’s world, Homer himself will once again prove so strong that his power will shine through despite the filmmakers.

Against director’s cuts

Here’s a very good Substack essay that dares to say something I’ve thought for a long, long time: the theatrical cuts of The Lord of the Rings are better than the extended editions.

The author, Ryan Kunz, offers several good arguments in support of this unpopular opinion, not the least of which are the pacing problems introduced with the extra footage but largely absent from the theatrical cuts. This is what initially disappointed me about the extended editions twenty-odd years ago. In The Fellowship of the Ring’s climactic battle against the Uruk-hai, Howard Shore’s excellent music is chopped and stretched to accommodate additional action and orc blood, leaving seams in the soundtrack that I was never able to ignore. I actually resented the changes for breaking up the music. Fellowship, which is still my favorite and, I think, the best-crafted of the three movies, does not benefit much simply from being longer.

Few movies do. The movies that have actually been improved by a director’s cut are few and far between. Das Boot and Kingdom of Heaven come to mind.

But these are rare exceptions. Most often a director’s cut is a sign of bloat, of creative restlessness, or a studio cash grab. Sometimes a director in the grip of an obsessive spirit of experimentation simply won’t leave a movie alone, as in the multiple competing cuts of Blade Runner and Oliver Stone’s Alexander. Much more commonly, a director’s cut simply offers more movie without actually integrating the extra footage well—quantity over quality, the whole problem with the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings. Apocalypse Now: Redux and the director’s cut of Gettysburg, which has many of the same pacing faults I complained about in Fellowship, also fit the bill. The cheap, vulgar version of this is the spate of unrated DVDs from the early 2000s—especially in the horror genre—which were excuses for a volume of gore and nudity that would have precluded theatrical release.

And yet that spirit is not entirely absent from the Lord of the Rings extended editions. I remember when each came out, year after year, the first two were announced with a breathless promise that they would be not only longer but R-rated. This suggested a prurient interest in gore for its own sake that bothered me at the time. (Remember Peter Jackson’s background.) One almost sensed the disappointment as each extended edition, year after year, was slapped with the same PG-13 as the theatrical cuts.

In addition to bloat and pacing problems, the footage included in director’s cuts often consists of already inferior material. Most of the additional footage in Gettysburg is clunky talk, as when Pickett’s Charge is stopped cold for a monologue from General Trimble, complete with awkwardly looped score. Kunz also notes the cringey, anachronistic humor in The Two Towers. Théoden’s line in the same film, improvised to Jackson’s delight by Bernard Hill, that “No parent should have to bury their child” is similarly cringeworthy. A parent burying their child, not a father burying his? And in what world before our own would this be a reasonable expectation? The filmmakers betray their sentimentalism here. This is a scene that undermines its own sense of the tragic and the tone of the movie.

The ready availability of the director’s cut or extended edition, especially when it becomes expected, can also be a crutch, as I noted regarding Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. This was a disaster of a movie that Scott—notice that he’s popped up three times now—was already asserting would be improved by a longer cut before it even hit theatres.

There is also a fanboy dimension to all of this. As Substacker and fantasy author Eric Falden noted in his restack of Kunz’s essay, there is a certain maximalist “mimetic” quality to some fans’ devotion to the extended editions that feels purely performative. The way this is communicated is usually the giveaway: “Watching The Lord of the Rings again—extended editions, of course.”

That’s off-putting and sets off my anti-joining reflexes, but the artistic considerations have always been most important to me. Jackson, like any good filmmaker, worked really, really hard to make Fellowship, the trial balloon, the best movie it could possibly be, taking the fullest possible advantage of the medium—tight structure, fast-pacing, telling exactly as much story as it needed to in a surprisingly light and economical three hours. Its runaway success led to perceptible slackness in The Two Towers and The Return of the King, a slackness that turned to bloat by piling on additional footage for the extended DVDs.

This may have proven good fanservice, but it is not good filmmaking—or, lest we forget, adaptation. The Lord of the Rings excels as a novel. The movies should excel as movies.

Food for thought. I’m not against director’s cuts per se, of course, and I don’t hate The Lord of the Rings extended editions, but I think director’s cuts have to do much more to justify their existence—and fans’ devotion to them—than simply be longer.

Jones on Scott on the Middle Ages

For the anniversary of Agincourt over the weekend I started reading Dan Jones’s Henry V, a biography released late last year. I’m enjoying it so far, though I am still skeptical of the stylistic decision to write the story in present tense. I may have thoughts about here if and when I review it.

I began reading with some wariness but I came around quickly when, in the introduction, Jones strongly, straightforwardly argued for Henry’s greatness, something he aims to prove in his book, and several chapters in, when Jones dropped this footnote about a high-profile incident of trial-by-combat in France just before Henry’s time:

This case was the basis for the 2021 film The Last Duel, which made the 1386 battle between Carrouges and Le Gris a vehicle for a ponderous meditation on the politics and ethics of twenty-first-century sexual abuse.

The Last Duel was a Ridley Scott movie, of course, which means that it was only ostensibly, superficially historical. And “ponderous” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Don’t take my word for it.

I love many of Scott’s movies but this presentism afflicts every one of his historical stories except, perhaps, his first feature, The Duellists, where the point is very much the look and technical perfection of the visuals. Style over substance may be Scott’s other besetting sin, but when he caves into that temptation there at least he’s not indulging in middlebrow navelgazing. I first wrote about this here with regard to Kingdom of Heaven way back in 2019 and—more recently and specifically on Scott’s cavalier disregard for history—before the release of the disastrous Napoleon. And of course I wrote about The Last Duel here. In the years since I saw it, my positive impressions have faded a great deal but my misgivings remain.

It’s just nice to see such succinct confirmation of the problem. Jones knows how to use a footnote.

Young Washington trailer reaction

“COLD DEAD HANDS!” William Franklyn-Mille in Young Washington (2026)

Let me start with a favorite passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing in 1858, less than sixty years after George Washington’s death:

“Did anybody ever see Washington nude? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.”

This is not only funny—and I love the reactions it gets from students—it succinctly gets at a problem with iconic historical figures. Some are so important, so mythic, that a version of them with ordinary human qualities stripped, planed, and sanded away supplants them in our historical imaginations. In American history this may be more true of George Washington than anyone else. Tellingly, even in commenting on this phenomenon Hawthorne gets something wrong: Washington didn’t wear powdered wigs.

Last week a new trailer for an Angel Studios release called Young Washington came to my attention—fortuitously as I was pulling up a video for my US History I class. The film appears to cover George Washington’s experiences during the first couple years of the French and Indian War, from the ill-fated patrol in which, as the 21-year old commander of a small force of Virginia militia, he accidentally precipitated a global war, through the Battle of the Monongahela, in which a British force was cut apart and nearly annihilated and where, as a volunteer aide-de-camp to the fatally wounded British General Edward Braddock, Washington helped save what was left of the army.

Here are Variety and The Hollywood Reporter with more details.

As it happens, this is one of my favorite stories to tell in class, and I’ve long thought it would make a great movie. So discovering a trailer for Young Washington has gotten me both excited and anxious.

If you want to get at the person beneath the mythology and iconography—especially of great and consequential leaders like Washington—it requires deep interest and long, purposeful study. Most people can manage perhaps one of these, more often neither. For them, a good historical movie can untangle the bundle of traits and props that make up the imaginary versions of historical figures, presenting them with a real human being perhaps for the first time. But the movie has to be good. The damage of a false movie portrait can be permanent.

What follows are rough impressions and questions based on this early trailer for Young Washington:

• This teaser is heavy on battle scenes—not that I’m complaining. I’m pleased to see throughout the representation of regulars (paid, uniformed professionals), militia in a wide variety of clothing, and allied Indians on both sides. I doubt Young Washington will nail this the way The Last of the Mohicans did but that this complexity is so clearly visible even in this trailer is heartening.

• Ben Kingsley plays Lieutenant Governor of Virginia Robert Dinwiddie. Dinwiddie was Scottish and twenty years younger than Kingsley when the French and Indian War broke out.

• The Angel logo appears over what looks like Braddock’s expedition, which set out into the wilderness of western Pennsylvania with a long wagon train and no road. Great atmosphere in this shot.

• Washington’s leather-looking coat at approx. 0:20 is a good spot to talk about uniforms and costumes. I’m not a mid-18th century guy but beyond the basic red-for-British/white-for-French the uniforms don’t look right to me. The leather coat is of a piece with modern Hollywood’s tendency to give the star slightly more contemporary-looking costumes, e.g. Orlando Bloom’s boot-cut hose in Kingdom of Heaven. The Revolutionary War spy series “Turn” gave Abraham Woodhull similar modern takes on 18th-century clothing: leather when everyone else is in wool, hipster toboggan, bad boy scowl. At least our young Washington isn’t constantly glowering.

• Scenes of Washington surveying the Virginia wilderness: A+ for effort. Can’t comment on 18th-century surveying equipment but the outdoor clothing looks better than the uniforms and the landscape looks exactly right. People tend to forget Washington’s work as a surveyor (and his chance to get a look at what’s out there right before it became available to speculators) so it’s good to see him working his day job.

• The film provides Jane Austen fans with a ball. Washington is accurately shown not wearing a wig but inaccurately—unless this is an accident of low light and color grading—as a brunette. Washington had red hair. He was also 6’2” at a time when that placed him head and shoulders above most other men, something you don’t really get here (but that HBO’s “John Adams” miniseries nailed). Even as a young man he was striking and physically imposing.

• A French officer goads Washington with “You are not British yet they send you to speak for them. So that when you fail they’ll have someone to blame.” This introduces some sketchy interpretation. Washington and all the other colonials absolutely considered themselves British at this time. It’s a later nationalist myth that we strapping Americans had already discovered ourselves to be a new, independent species and were just waiting for the right time to buck off the shackles of the Old World. (Even the great Last of the Mohicans tacks into these waters a bit.) See Fred Anderson’s books below for more on that.

• The wagon train in the woods features in a few quick shots, presumably of Braddock’s defeat at the Monongahela. Can’t comment at this point how accurately the film will portray the battle overall, but these shots capture the chaos well.

• After the Battle of Jumonville Glen and his surrender at Fort Necessity (and I can’t be sure that anything in this trailer relates to that event), Washington left the Virginia militia to volunteer as a gentleman aide-de-camp to General Braddock, played by Andy Serkis. As with Kingsley’s Dinwiddie, we don’t get much to judge by here, but Braddock comes across as rather hostile to Washington—a bit of lordly British stereotype. Washington actually liked Braddock, wrote positively of him, and learned a lot during his month under his command.

• Scenes of combat in the forest look appropriately messy, panicked, and dirty, with a mix of men fleeing and courageously holding their positions. It’s also atmospheric as heck. Points for that. The one thing we miss is the massive primeval trees of the colonial American woodlands, something no movie would probably be able to recreate now.

• We also get Washington taking unofficial charge of part of the battle. Washington was not only physically large and powerful, he was ridiculously brave. You might know that he found multiple bulletholes in his coat following the Battle of the Monongahela (which Kingsley’s Dinwiddie seems to allude to at the beginning of the trailer) but he also had two horses shot out from under him. Braddock, before he was mortally wounded, also demonstrated immense courage and had several more horses killed beneath him. I’ll be curious to see how the film treats his relationship with Washington and how they’re depicted in battle. A lot of movies about heroic figures downplay the courage of others to make their subjects look better—a trap I hope they avoid.

• Some other famous names associated with Braddock’s expedition: Daniel Morgan, Horatio Gates, Benjamin Franklin. Curious to know if any of these will show up in the film. It would make sense to include Franklin, as he later told stories—including in his Autobiography—of having tried to warn Braddock about his plan of attack.

• A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot at 1:27 seems to show the moment Washington’s patrol started a global war: allied Iroquois leader Tanaghrisson “The Half-King” killing French officer Joseph Coulon de Jumonville in cold blood. Describing this moment never fails to startle students.

• A final name-drop shot gives us an appropriately young-looking Young Washington. He doesn’t seem to have much human personality in this teaser but, well, it’s a teaser.

Lots to dig into here, and for what it’s worth I enjoyed the trailer—and picking it apart for historical clues. For now I’m curious but not particularly optimistic. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

In the meantime, if you want make an effort to get at the real young Washington and his time—whether you end up seeing the movie or not—let me recommend the following:

• For a good shorter biography that pays attention to Washington’s early experiences in the French and Indian War as well as his pre-Revolution life of surveying and land speculation: Washington’s Revolution: The Making of America’s First Leader, by Robert Middlekauff.

• For the fascinating, underappreciated story of the French and Indian War, I’d recommend either of two books by Fred Anderson: The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War or, for a much more detailed version, his mammoth Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766.

• For Braddock’s expedition against Fort Duquesne specifically there’s Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, by David Preston.

Young Washington just started shooting in Ireland last month and won’t be out until next July 4th, so who knows what the final product will be like? We certainly don’t need, per Hawthorne, Washington nude—even HBO didn’t give us that, shockingly—but if we can get past the stately bows and powdered wigs to the real young man who fought for king and crown in the French and Indian War, who struggled to master his temper, who trooped through the forest bearing chains and compass and later rifle and sword, and who wrote to his brother describing how “charming” the sound of whizzing bullets was, I’ll be glad.

Merrill’s Marauders

Jeff Chandler as Gen Frank Merrill inspects his exhausted men before the final assault In Merrill’s Marauders (1962)

There’s a scene in Norman Mailer’s war novel The Naked and the Dead in which the recon squad at the center of the story are ordered to drag an artillery piece into position in the jungle. They must first get it across a river and then up a muddy, deeply rutted track to the top of a hill with no mechanical assistance. It takes all day. And it’s agonizing. Mailer makes the reader feel—for pages and pages—the messy, clumsy, impossible effort as well as the inevitable frustration when the gun finally slips loose and slides right back down the hill into the river. The reader ends the chapter as exhausted as Mailer’s soldiers.

Precisely that note of weariness and exhaustion is the salient mood of Merrill’s Marauders, an unusual 1962 World War II movie I recently rewatched with my sons after an interval of many years.

I don’t intend this post as a proper review—if you’ve found your way here you probably already know something about the movie—but I do want to draw attention to this aspect of exhaustion. Few of the classic 1950s and 60s World War II films approach their subject with the attention to labor, repetitiveness, and sheer tiredness that Merrill’s Marauders does.

Briefly, Merrill’s Marauders tells the true story of a special US Army unit deployed to Burma in support of British efforts there. Burma is a neglected corner of the war anyway, and the unfamiliarity of the story as well as its realistic, serious depiction of the wastage and attrition of the campaign make it worthwhile viewing.

This is despite the movie being quite rough around the edges. Wikipedia diplomatically calls it an “economical historical epic,” which being translated is “low budget movie.” It shows in different ways, most obviously and jarringly in a sequence incorporating stock footage from Battle Cry, a film about Marines in the Pacific, into a film about the US Army in Burma.

That Merrill’s Marauders works at all can be credited to its director. Sam Fuller was himself a veteran of the war and would go on to write and direct The Big Red One based yet more directly on his experiences. Presented with this story and a small budget, Fuller mostly dealt with his constraints artfully and used his funding where it could make the most difference. The film begins in medias res, with the Marauders already worn out and their numbers depleted after weeks on the march in the jungle, and it ends not with the final great battle to take their objective but on a character-centered moment just before the action—a daring move that works perfectly. That’s the writing. Technically, a pair of mid-film assault sequences are staggeringly well executed, as is a climactic defense against a banzai attack.

Action punctuates the separate acts of the story but the subject is really the men themselves, their leader, General Merrill, and their exhaustion. At several points in the film they are declared used up by the unit surgeon, utterly incapable of more, and yet when they receive new orders they pick up and carry on. There is heroism in the combat scenes but a no less extraordinary heroism in the long marches through jungle and over mountains in between. One senses that Fuller, a combat infantryman himself, understood well the drain of boredom and endless work and wanted the audience to feel it in their bones.

Where Merrill’s Marauders differs most starkly from the scene I opened with from The Naked and the Dead is in its earnestness. Mailer’s novel is a bitter, cynical story in which endurance and courage are rewarded with yet more pointless hardship. Merrill’s Marauders believes in its men and their work. The war is terrible and wastes good men, but their unromantic, plodding tenacity is something to be admired.

The film’s best moment, for me, and one that illustrates beautifully the place Merrill’s Marauders reserves for sincerity and goodness, is not General Merrill’s final scene—a calvary-like passion complete with pietà—but a quiet one near the middle. The Marauders, despite their weary, malnourished, disease- and leech-ridden condition, have liberated a strategically important rail junction from the Japanese. While Merrill considers the situation, his men sack out anywhere they can sit or lie down. The Burmese natives appear—they’re all women and children, a fact with dark implications that the film wisely leaves us to intuit. An old woman approaches one of the toughest sergeants in the unit and gratefully offers him rice. He breaks down weeping before he can finish eating it.

If few of the classic war movies portray the weariness and sheer effort of the war as little more than a discomfort or inconvenience, fewer still offer us moments like that.

Merrill’s Marauders is a unique little movie, telling a unique story with the sharp perspective of a veteran spiritually unwearied by cynicism. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t seen it, or revisiting if you have.

Notes on Christopher Nolan’s best movie

Alley (Andy Serkis), Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), and Angier (Hugh Jackman) in Tesla’s Colorado laboratory in The Prestige (2006)

A few days ago I started rereading The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, a World Fantasy Award winner about Victorian magicians locked in a mutually destructive rivalry. I last read it as a senior in college almost twenty years ago. It’s very good—much richer and more absorbing than I remembered—and rereading the book has also got me thinking about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation.

The book and the film are quite different (Priest was, it’s worth noting, in awe of the movie) but I don’t intend to examine those differences here. The movie has been one of my favorites since it came out and has rewarded years of viewing. But what I’ve realized now, to my surprise, is that after almost two decades and seven more films, The Prestige remains Nolan’s best movie.

I write this as a fan of Nolan—not a fanboy, but a fan, someone who likes and appreciates what he does and looks forward to each new Nolan project. I don’t intend to disparage his more recent movies, most of which I’ve liked. I just think that, with hindsight, The Prestige stands out as a work produced 1) at the height of Nolan’s powers and 2) before he became distracted by some of the qualities that have defined—and occasionally weakened—his subsequent movies.

Some notes toward refining my argument:

• Technically The Prestige is pretty much perfect. Wally Pfister’s anamorphic cinematography is beautiful and atmospheric and incorporates handheld work for a subtle contemporary feel without succumbing to the Bourne-style chaos of the mid-2000s. It also, like Barry Lyndon and Amadeus, allowed for shooting by candlelight. (Read American Cinematographer’s article on The Prestige; I ate this up when the movie came out.) The film feels real and authentic, a mood enhanced by the costume and set design, which establish the easily-caricatured Victorian London as a real place.

• Also on the technical side: the editing (by Lee Smith, who has cut several other Nolan movies) is excellent, probably the best of Nolan’s career. It’s really the editing that makes this movie. Though The Prestige tells its story along multiple chronological timelines, jumping forward and backward in time with occasional flashes forward or backward as characters remember or reflect, it does so effortlessly. Despite its complexity it is easy to follow and requires almost no internal explanation.

• The music by David Julyan is, as so often with Nolan’s films, there to enhance atmosphere and mood rather than to soar on memorable leitmotifs. It does its job perfectly, without distraction or—as in the last few Nolan films—drowning out dialogue.

• The performances are also excellent, the standouts being Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, both of whom play two roles. This is where rewatching The Prestige most pays off—once you know what’s going on with Alfred Borden it’s easy to see, through Bale’s performance, that he’s two people with distinct, conflicting personalities: one cautious and softspoken, one aggressive and brash. This has the unique effect of making the ending more powerful after the twist has been revealed.

• Of course, all of this technical and artistic craft is in the service of a good story, which is the best reason to watch any movie. There are plenty of technically admirable movies that are not interesting, entertaining, or meaningful. The Prestige is all of these.

Why The Prestige stands out so much in retrospect: it has, on paper, a lot of Nolan’s tics and preoccupations—multiple identities, family tragedy, crime, deception, the nature of reality, and memory—but allows them to arise naturally from the story. By contrast:

• Music: I enjoy some Nolan movie soundtracks (Interstellar is perhaps the last great one), but since Inception they have gotten more bombastic and intrusive. This is, perhaps, emblematic of the rest of my complaints below.

• The Prestige was the last of Nolan’s movies to be shot before he began his ongoing experiment with large-format filmmaking, especially IMAX. He has used this as more than a gimmick—like 3D, which he rightly avoided—but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the form has started to overwhelm the story. The frequent switching between formats and aspect ratios in his more recent movies is also just distracting. I find myself wishing more and more for a film with a single consistent visual technique, especially one as wonderful as what Nolan and Pfister created in The Prestige.

• More seriously, even if we disregard form or technique, the structure of Nolan’s movies since has become a more and more overt, obvious part of the story. Where The Prestige smoothly moves the audience back and forth through several different timelines, both trusting the audience enough to understand and expertly editing the film to make its structure intuitive and invisible, his movies since Inception call attention to their structure and require frequent, heavy-handed exposition. (Despite these efforts, the “[Nolan movie] ending explained” genre on YouTube continues to thrive.)

• Related: The Prestige uses, like many of Nolan’s movies before and since, non-linear storytelling. Again, it does so effortlessly and without calling attention to itself. More recent movies like Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, and most obviously and incomprehensibly Tenet use it as a flourish. When some critics wonder whether this kind of chronological tossed salad is necessary for these stories, they’re not being unreasonable.

• I wouldn’t call The Prestige a special effects movie, but several sequences rely heavily on effects—Tesla’s lab, Angier’s transporter machine, and subtle shots of the Borden twins working together. They’re seamlessly integrated, even the digital effects Nolan now has a reputation for shunning. Nolan’s insistence on practical stuntwork and in-camera effects is laudable, but it sometimes feels—like the large format film—like a gimmick that is taking over his movies. Witness all the jokes online about Nolan finding real cyclopes or having his actors throw real thunderbolts for his Odyssey project.

• Finally, The Prestige is rich, dense, intricately plotted, but tight, running just over two hours. With the exception of Dunkirk, which Nolan said he wanted to feel like the third act of a much larger story, every movie from The Dark Knight on has been two and a half hours long or longer. I like or love several of these, but the feeling of sprawl and self-indulgence is palpable, especially when the increasingly showy plots require multiple scenes of people talking about what’s going on for the audience’s benefit.

In short, The Prestige perfectly unites story and form. Nolan continues to make good movies, but with their increasing emphasis on spectacle, teasing structure, and technical gimmickry, he has never quite struck the same balance he did in The Prestige.

Again, these are note and observations. Perhaps more thoughts later, especially once I’ve finished rereading the novel and watched the movie again.

I’ll end by noting that Nolan and his brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, did an excellent job adapting Priest’s novel. This second reading impresses upon me more than the first just how difficult this story would be to construct for the screen. I’m glad they took the effort—and over several years, which I think may be yet another factor distinguishing The Prestige from the films since—because the story is brilliant, surprising, suspenseful, and moving, and deserved to be told well.

Casting Chesterton

Last week on his microblog, Alan Jacobs shared the news that the BBC has ordered a new series called “The Detection Club.” Per the BBC’s press release, the show will follow Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and GK Chesterton as they team up to solve mysteries in 1930s London. The show is set to shoot next year.

Jacobs briefly considers the cast, which is as yet unknown. I have little or no opinion on who would make a good Sayers or Christie, but the idea of someone playing Chesterton in a drama immediately caught my interest. A few informal thoughts if I were the one casting Chesterton:

Prerequisites: Chesterton was unusually tall (6’4”), fat (fluctuating but often near 300 lbs), and had a mustache. These, plus a small pince-nez spectacles, a crumpled hat, and a cape and walking stick should factor into a bare-minimum visual impression. (Cf my old Churchill-in-a-box post.)

Chesterton late in life, c. 1931

Jacobs notes with regret that, with the death of Richard Griffiths a few years ago, “the ideal for GKC” is lost. I’m not sure I agree. My perception may be skewed by having only ever seen Griffiths as Uncle Vernon in Harry Potter, but though matching some of the superficial particulars for Chesterton—tall, fat, wild-haired, mustachioed—he had a sinister air that I’d find insurmountable. The attitude or air or even vibe of an actor playing a real person is as important as appearance, I think.

Someone adept at capturing a historical figure’s vibe without looking much like him is Timothy Spall. He came to mind on the strength of his performances as Churchill (in The King’s Speech) and David Irving (in Denial). It’s a commonplace to call a gifted character actor a chameleon, but Spall is the real deal. He’d have a lot to work against—he’s too short and, at least in the last few films I saw him in, too thin for Chesterton—but I think he could convey the strange combination of puckishness and intelligence that a Chesterton should have. He may also be too old but, if the series is set in the 1930s, that may be appropriate for the end of Chesterton’s life.

Similar: Eddie Marsan, another favorite of mine. Marsan is a smidge taller than Spall and looks a smidge more like the actual Chesterton. (He’s also a London native, like Chesterton.) That said, he tends to play either intense or petulant men, which wouldn’t work, as a Chesterton needs generosity of spirit and literally enormous bonhomie to be believable.

A somewhat obvious choice—who would probably resist the potential typecasting—is Mark Williams, who has played Father Brown since 2013. Williams is taller than either Spall or Marsan, heavyset (sometimes, anyway), and can do friendly absentmindedness better than just about anybody. Playing Chesterton would be a natural extension of his Father Brown, not least since he has always played Father Brown more like Chesterton than the Father Brown of the short stories, anyway.

An unusual possibility that occurred to me almost immediately: Nick Frost. Frost is about the same height as Spall but I wouldn’t have guessed it—he looks bigger onscreen. With a mustache and pince-nez I think he could very well look the part, and I think he’d sell Chesterton’s good humor.

A final serious suggestion: Mark Addy, who is tall, heavyset, looks more like Chesterton in the face, and can do both comedy and drama well. That said, he tends to be more restrained—or at least less manic—than some of these other options, though that might work well for an aging Chesterton.

All of this is predicated on the BBC treating the project seriously, of course. The presence of Christie as a character gives me pause, as I just recently noted the habitual malice toward her work among those adapting it for TV and film. Christie, Sayers, and Chesterton were all serious Christians and one hopes the show doesn’t avoid, downplay, or simply ignore that fact in favor of whatever the progressive posture du jour is when the series goes into production. The casting will show the BBC’s hand.

What I most hope they avoid is obvious Funny Fat Man stunt casting: James Corden or whoever. A fun mystery centered on affectionate, respectful portraits of three great writers sounds immensely appealing to me right now. One more farce sending up the dead and their vanished world does not.

Three items on learning by doing

Item: This morning Alan Jacobs shared a short post on Allan Dwan, who happened into the director’s chair by accident in 1911 and directed his last film in 1961. Along the way he gave Lon Chaney his break, discovered Carole Lombard, and—like many such early filmmakers—innovated both artistically and technically, those two aspects being deeply intertwined in filmmaking. Jacobs:

It’s fascinating to see how this industry—this art form—developed when nobody knew how to make movies. Dwan himself was the first to figure out that you could dolly a camera backwards, putting it on rails or a truck and backing up. (This actually disoriented viewers at the time, made them feel woozy). He helped D.W. Griffith figure out how to do a crane shot for Intolerance. All such techniques had to be improvised—and when an improvisation worked it became an invention. You basically had to think like an engineer, and Dwan was an engineer.

Item: Also this morning, Ted Gioia shared an essay on children and music lessons with a special focus on why so many kids quit not only the lessons but the instrument. In his own experiences with lessons, despite hating and quitting his piano them he kept playing on his own. Then:

I made up my own songs. I learned other songs I liked by ear. I actually played the instrument more after those awful lessons had been terminated. . . .

So I developed without jazz teachers, both as a musician and as a music historian. There’s some irony in that. I had access to amazing professors at illustrious universities, but jazz wasn’t part of the curriculum. In the field in which I made my reputation, I had to teach myself.

I’m not especially proud of that. Too much of what I’ve done in life has happened outside official channels. I’ve missed things by not accessing the right teachers at the right time. Things I did learn, I might have learned faster with proper guidance.

On the other hand, you learn very deeply when forced to invent your own pedagogy. And I take some comfort in knowing that there were almost no jazz teachers for the generations that came before me. Many of the jazz pioneers learned by doing—and they turned out okay.

The improvisatory, trial-and-error quality of both stories is fascinating, and both Jacobs and Gioia more or less directly point out that learning this way takes a long time—but one learns “very deeply.” Think of one of the greats in any field—filmmaking, music, writing, painting, science, even law, politics, and war—and they will almost certainly have started at the bottom, learning the nuts and bolts. Here’s a short list of directors who started off as gofers on the crew of low-budget director Roger Corman, for example.

But when you learn by doing, once you’ve mastered your art—insofar as that is possible in any art—a funny thing happens: your expertise translates into style. Which leads me to this third and final piece:

Item: Last week I saw this interesting Substack note from novelist Aaron Gwyn (whose excellent novella The Cannibal Owl I’ve just read and loved):

We all love a stylish writer, whether mannered and showy like Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy or “invisible” like Elmore Leonard. But how will a writer or artist of any kind know what his strengths and weaknesses are without doing the work?

I remember learning once, when our kids were small, that playtime dangers are not to be avoided but embraced. Climbing trees, going up slides the wrong way, jumping off of swings, doing pretty much anything on a trampoline—these are how children learn what their bodies are capable of. It both teaches them limits and gives them confidence in what they can do. But they have to do it.

This is what I hate most about AI “writing”: by offering finished products without the process, it robs writers of all kinds—whether novelists, students, or office drones drafting e-mails—of the work. It tricks people into thinking they’re able-bodied adults while bypassing the whole childhood playground experience. It’s not only instrumental and pragmatic, it weakens the person who uses it without their even realizing it. But perhaps worst of all, the work, the nuts and bolts, is not only how you master the craft and art of writing, it’s one of the most fun parts of it.

Perhaps more thoughts on that later. But for now, read all the items above and note especially the importance of play and enjoyment in Gioia’s post on music lessons, and consider how AI advocates consistently portray writing—or whatever the process in question—as time-wasting drudgery. Someone is lying.

Archetypes vs particulars

F1 and Top Gun: Maverick—both movies about men wearing helmets in vehicles? Or more?

“That’s just like Top Gun: Maverick.” This from my daughter halfway through my explanation of the plot of F1, which I finally saw Tuesday night. I had just finished describing the way veteran driver Sonny Hayes was brought in to teach cocky young driver Josh Pearce and the conflict that brewed up between the two of them. This, to her, instantly brought to mind Maverick and Rooster.

She didn’t mean this declaration as snark or criticism, just old-fashioned excitement at recognizing a parallel, and the thing is, she’s right. I love both movies, and their stories do, superficially, have a lot in common. Does that mean that Top Gun: Maverick and F1 are, at base, the same story? Or that they’re in some way inferior or unoriginal?

I’d say no, and that both succeed magnificently as entertainment on the strength of something I’ve preached about over and over here: particularity.

Back in the spring I railed a bit against overemphasis on vague “themes” and “archetypes” and especially “the Hero’s Journey” as interpretive schemes for stories. These approaches fixate on similarity to the detriment of the specific stories they interpret, which are often oversimplified in the service of strained, banal, misleading comparisons.

And yet, whether archetypes in the full Jungian sense exist, the human mind was designed to recognize and respond to patterns. We generalize for reasons beyond time-saving heuristics. And comparing stories—tens of thousands of them over thousands of years—does reveal recurring patterns, motifs, stock characters, and structural conventions. Here is one early pitfall: those who argue that because there are really only X number of plots, creativity and originality are illusions and nothing but rearranging what has been done before. This plays nicely into the rise of the AI lovers, who argue for AI “art” and “writing” by dismissing actual art and writing along similar lines. But that’s another error for another day. For now: ye shall know them by their fruits.

That said, I’ll call these recurrent patterns and conventions archetypes for now. But like Plato’s forms, these don’t exist in any undiluted version anywhere. We have to discern them within the particulars of stories—vivid detail being “the life blood of fiction.”

Every story, then, must balance the archetypal and the particular, the general and recognizable with the concrete and specific. We understand this intuitively and condemn stories that don’t strike this balance well. A story that leans too heavily in the direction of archetype, of familiar patterns, or that fails to develop believable specifics and defaults to the archetype, we call stereotypical or clichéd. Both of these words come from the world of printing, of reproducing precisely the same thing over and over.

To return to Top Gun: Maverick and F1, they do have many similarities. In both, an over-the-hill legend butts heads with an arrogant but gifted upstart before both learn how to work together to succeed at a goal. This is a story familiar not just from these two movies, but from many, many other action and especially sports movies. No debate there.

What keeps these two movies from being rehashes of old clichés is their attention to the particulars, not just with regard to the highly specialized worlds in which they take place in order to feel realistic but also with the characters invented to tell the story. Sonny Hayes and Maverick are both veterans in their fields who are called back to action, but under different circumstances and vastly different pressures. Both might be loners, but Sonny literally wrecked his burgeoning F1 career and went on to decades of aimless waste and Maverick, whatever has happened in the years between his two films, is still successful, in fact at the top of his game. Sonny, a freelance race car driver, is called back as a personal favor to his old friend Ruben. Maverick is ordered back because he is in the military. His personal drama comes through his relationship with Rooster, son of his dead co-pilot Goose, while Sonny has no history with Josh Pearce and their relationship develops as a professional rivalry. And the overall stakes could not be more different—financial ruin for Ruben or nuclear war with Iran.

The two films also explore different thematic territory, but the particulars, the specific details that make this story itself and not that story, that make this character a memorable individual distinct from that character, could be listed at much greater length.

Particularity not only makes stories and their characters feel real—what would either of these movies be without their attention to naval aviation or Formula 1 racing?—but keeps them fresh. Stories that simply hew to the archetype fail as stories. Compare Star Wars, which, despite being famously archetypal, still feels real and vital, both lived in an living, and something like Eragon, which does many of the same things and fails.

Stories that lean too far into the particulars are much rarer and usually incomprehensible. You hear much more complaint about cliché, and for good reason. But a story that feels familiar but attends studiously to its vivid, concrete specifics can be not only well-crafted art, but a crowd-pleaser.

* * * * *

I’ve written about particularity several other times over the years: with regard to Song of Songs, romance, and “humanity;” Cormac McCarthy’s novels, which could not have taken place anywhere but where he set them; and James Bond and Honeychile Rider, a particular man and a particular woman with particular histories, not stand-ins for “men” and “women.” Particulars being “the life blood of fiction” comes from John Gardner, whose concept of fiction as a “fictive dream” has profoundly shaped my writing. I wrote about that in some detail here.