The night I saw Killers of the Flower Moon I dreamed wildly, fitfully. Until I went to bed, I spent my waking hours thinking about the film, and then I suppose I continued to think about it as I slept. I have many questions about it. There are so many details I’d like to discuss. I wish I had seen it with friends, rather than (as is customary for my job) by myself with only my notebook to aid in exegesis. Killers of the Flower Moon, which was directed by Martin Scorsese, screen-written by Scorsese and Eric Roth, and based on the monumental nonfiction book of the same name by David Grann, is a tremendous feat of filmmaking, but it’s not a simple one, not an easy one.

Killers of the Flower Moon unfolds on a heretofore obscure event in the history of 20th-century America: the regional genocide of the Osage people during the 1920s. David Grann’s book, published in 2017, is responsible for bringing this history to a wide national audience. In the 1870s, the United States had removed the Osage Nation from their lands in Kansas, relocating them to a reservation in an undesirable, inhospitable patch of land in Northeast Oklahoma. But that land turned out to be rich with oil, and the Osage people quickly became wealthy. In the 1920s, Grann notes, the Osage were the wealthiest people (per capita) in the whole world.

In this region, the usual socioeconomic dynamics of America had been upended—the long-oppressed Native people had access to a kind of life that had exclusively been designed and intended for white people. And because of this, the Osage people found themselves in terrible danger. The white men in the town began to kill the Osage for their money—but not simply that, as if that isn’t terrible enough. The Osage people were courted, cornered, cajoled, conspired against, and legally captured by the greedy, jealous white people in the region—swearing friendship and loyalty, ingratiating themselves into their families, marrying into the Nation, taking control of their finances, and milking them every way they could. Killing them was only the final step in the systematic destruction, dilution, dehumanization, and devastation of an entire people, culture, and history. It is an act of such profound evil that it seems both impossible to comprehend and all-too-possible to believe happening in America.

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon begins with the story of the Osage Nation’s windfall, but quickly shifts perspective, filtering it through the eyes of a white outsider, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). A World War I veteran, Ernest travels to Oklahoma to live in the home of his uncle, William K. Hale (Robert De Niro), an affluent cattle rancher who prides himself on his friendship with the Osage. He has positioned himself as both a benefactor and steward of the Osage people, using his influence to provide them access to fine goods and vanguard healthcare, centralizing himself in their proceedings and culture. He speaks the Osage language, he lightly arranges marriages between some white men and Osage women, he becomes a trusted force in the Osage County way of life. That he likes to be called King suggests that his deference is a ploy, that he has disguised self-interest as benevolence. It’s not long before Ernest—plain-spoken, dim, impressionable, giggly, and acquisitive—notices Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a beautiful, pensive, no-nonsense Osage woman. Working as a cab driver in the town, he flirts with her, tries to get to know her. Hale approves of their mingling, informing Ernest that Mollie’s full-blooded Osage status means that she has full headrights to her family’s wealth. Ernest is attracted to Mollie’s lifestyle as much as (if not more than) he is attracted to her. When they marry, countless Osage men and women have already been reported dead (of causes ranging from health issues to gunshots), but the film is not ambiguous about the connectedness of the murders to each other, as well as acts of swindling and robbery of the Osage people that have been taking place in the background—acts that Ernest is already involved in.

Grann’s book is a little more openended about who exactly committed many of these uninvestigated, unprosecuted, and unsolved murders—he puts forth compelling theories, but ultimately is unable to state conclusively given how much time has passed and how little hard evidence there is. But it does tie a conspiracy together under Hale’s aegis (one of many masterminds of numerous plots against the Osage). The book’s main frame is Mollie finding herself at the center of the mass death of her people and family. A secondary, later frame is the work of a man named Tom White, an agent with the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation who is eventually sent to figure out why so many Osage are dying (he’s played in the film by Jesse Plemons, but it’s a rather small role). Then, Grann’s book unfolds a story about the birth of the FBI. Scorsese’s film is less interested in the investigation than the machinations of Hale, Ernest, and other white men—as well as Ernest and Hale’s ability to justify killing of a group of people who are not only their Osage neighbors and friends but also literally their own family. These murders are myriad and slow, part of an overall poisoning of Osage culture, heritage, and lifestyles. Most of these murders unfold as creative acts of nutritional and psychological torture; the white men have gotten the Osage addicted to alcohol and to sugar, encouraging their spirals into depression and despair.

The film counts down the deaths of Mollie’s family—her two sisters, Minnie (Jillian Dion), Anna (Cara Jade Myers), and her cousin Reta (JaNae Collins)—as well as Hale’s close friend Henry Roan (William Belleau). Mollie knows that she is next. She doesn’t know that Hale and Ernest are poisoning her, too. Ernest seems genuinely fond of her but has (as a white supremacist, as all of these white people fundamentally are) accepted the idea that helping to kill his wife’s family is just something he has to do.

Scorsese’s film, which is 3 hours and 26 minutes, is a gut-wrenching story told with ample thought and care—it is clearly invested in doing right by the Osage people of then and now. The Osage’s participation in the making of the film has been well-publicized, but it’s clear, when viewing the film, that Scorsese not only wants to get the historical details right without exploiting the Osage or their suffering but that he also wants to tell the story in the most respectful, collaborative way possible. In one scene in particular, Scorsese acknowledges a kind of lurid true-crime reportage that (he wants to make clear) this film is not. At the same time, in order to be its most respectful and compassionate version, the film might have focused less on Ernest. Scorsese likes an antihero, and a man who experiences such absurd self-denial that he can’t fully understand the impact of his being a serial killer annihilating his wife’s family for personal gain, is certainly that kind of protagonist. Scorsese is perhaps too curious about fleshing out Ernest’s feelings and conflicts instead of accepting that he is a walking contradiction, made into such by white supremacy. It seems very easy to understand that a man like Ernest Burkhart, an idiot fashioned into his true self by cultures of racism and misogyny, might believe he loves his Osage wife and yet find it justified to kill her entire family, because he subconsciously he regards them all as things to possess, property to be claimed, resources to be mined.

Most of the performances in the film, from Lily Gladstone’s almost-cipher-like Mollie to Jesse Plemons’s awkwardly-dogged detective White, are excellent. Gladstone, in particular, is the film’s glowing center, and whenever she is not onscreen, her absence is not only palpable but painful. Killers of the Flower Moon also boasts a fantastic ensemble of character actors, including John Lithgow, Louis Cancelmi, Ty Mitchell, Gene Jones, and the great Tantoo Cardinal as Mollie’s mother, Lizzie Q.

Scorsese has referred to both DiCaprio and De Niro as his muses, and frankly, I wish he’d get some new ones. As Ernest, DiCaprio delivers a solid performance, but it’s the kind of frowny-faced, Southern-drawly one we’ve seen a lot of from him—I found his performance cartoonish and lacking any of the particularized pathos he tries hard to summon. De Niro, while obviously a more than capable actor, delivers a serviceable performance, but it feels wrong for the film. Maybe it’s hard to see De Niro as a small-town guy. His Hale is almost distractingly recognizable, out of place (and occasionally slipping into his New York accent). No one’s better than De Niro at playing dangerous when it takes the form of creepily calm, but this isn’t Hale’s vibe. Hale—a charismatic bureaucrat—should seem more unassuming. I’d want a Michael Stuhlbarg, a Tracy Letts, maybe a Henry Czerny. I’d want a Burl Ives type—someone who could entwine paternalism with paternity. John Goodman? Then again, I find myself wondering if Jack Nicholson from a decade ago could have pulled it off—he’s maybe a little too palpably sinister, but even that feels more in line with the film’s thematic trajectory.

Anyway. The film’s long runtime promises immersion in this time and place, but I still found myself at times feeling like a stranger there; I’d forget who some side characters were rather than recognize them as if they were my fellow townsfolk. In a way, the sprawl of the film is too great—and again, I think this is because the film spends so much time mapping out Ernest’s emotional states. But technically, the film is extraordinary—as a gallery of shots, it’s mesmerizing. Scorsese loves to play with cameras (inside and outside the frame) and ask questions about media, and this reliably innovative approach also breaks up the narrative when it starts to sag.

The emotional weight of what Scorsese has achieved with Killers of the Flower Moon is significant; the night I saw the film, I dreamed about some of the film’s most dramatic scenes from the perspective of a tormented spectator, the same tormented spectator I was when literally watching the film. In my dreams, I’d be running towards imminent, heartbreaking disasters, yelling at characters to run away, to turn around, and I could never arrive in time, never save anyone. Despite some of its pitfalls, Scorsese’s film swells with humanity and heart, leaving a tremendous impression of the real-life horrors that took place in Osage County in the 1920s. He removes the distance between our moment and this one, a century before, making us feel the horrors that happened to the Osage people—people who, after centuries of persecution and belittlement, were finally given a share of American prosperity and were forced to pay a price for it.

After J.D. Salinger published his story “Hapworth 16, 1924” in The New Yorker in 1965, he decided to stop publishing his works. Although he had resigned from his nearly twenty-year-long stint in the literary spotlight, retreating to a home in Cornish, New Hampshire, and beginning a reclusive lifestyle, he assured The New York Times in a rare interview in 1974, that “publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

Salinger’s most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye, has sold more than 65 million copies. His self-imposed exile was hardly acceptable to many among the throngs of readers longing for his next words, and, eventually, after years devoid of Salinger’s stories, some jilted readers turned Salinger’s inexplicable silence into the contemptible, purposeful isolation of a man who believed himself above the rest, with many attempting to do whatever they could to draw him, and the unpublished works he seemed to be hoarding, back into the public eye.

When these endeavors, some of which resulted in unauthorized adaptations of both his books and his own persona, came to light, occasionally exploding into unprecedented legal battles, the ever-resisting Salinger was regarded sort of as a cantankerous ghost of an author—a once welcome houseguest rattling dusty chains at the unassuming newcomers he thought were messing around with things he left behind. Thus, Salinger’s public legacy, a gnarled mess of copyright enforcement designs, First Amendment controversies, and the persistent desire to be left alone by the press, is one of America’s most unique. Yet his belief that total ownership is not relinquished with public publication, as well as his radical enforcement of copyright law and reliance on the right to privacy, revolutionized the role of the “author” in modern culture, and consequently helped preserve both his identity and his works as masterful and mythic American originals.

Though he led a shrouded life, there are aspects of Salinger’s life that remain indisputable facts, even through the monasticism and mystery, and Kenneth Slawenski, the diligent biographer (and manager of the Salinger fan website deadcaulfields.com for nearly two decades) released his own clear chronology of Salinger’s life shortly after the writer’s death in 2010 at the age of 91. In this biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life Raised High (later renamed J.D. Salinger: A Life), Slawenski details the private life of Salinger as much as he can—usually referring to historical and public documents.

As he details Salinger’s personal life with very public records, Slawenski paints a vivid picture of Salinger without attempting to violate the privacy he desired in his later years, particularly detailing the relationship Salinger had to the character Holden Caulfield, as influenced by his numerous attempts to publish The Catcher in the Rye, as well as the stories about Holden that he had written for himself during the war. Slawenski draws a deep comparison between these two figures (the writer and his creation), perhaps extrapolating better than any other biographer the sensitivity and sincerity of the most famous recluse of the twentieth century.

Salinger was particularly sensitive to appropriation. “Suppose you had a coat you liked,” he told the Times in 1974, “and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That’s how I feel.” Decades before Slawenski, in 1986, Ian Hamilton, a popular British author and a literary critic for The London Sunday Times, had attempted to write his own biography of J.D. Salinger. Salinger refused to grant permission, but Hamilton wrote it anyway, relying on many of Salinger’s letters that belonged to collections in the libraries at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Texas. Salinger then sued for damages on the grounds of copyright infringement, unfair competition, and breach of contract, and the case went to court in 1987.

Hamilton argued that his use of Salinger’s personal letters was legitimate under the copyright policy of Fair Use, which legally allows the incorporation of works within others under certain circumstances. Hamilton believed that the use of the letters fell under the “criticism, scholarship, and research” category permitted under Fair Use, and therefore that his utilization was permissible, while Salinger argued that, as the letters were unpublished when Hamilton used them (although Salinger registered them for copyright protection during the beginning of the case), a defense under Fair Use would be invalid, since the policy really referred to published works.

The case was settled using the four principles of Fair Use. Factoring in Hamilton’s transformative utilization of the letters, the fact that letters were unpublished, the large amount of text taken, and the fact that any reproductions and interpretations of Salinger’s letters might interfere with the library traffic aimed at viewing the originals (Hamilton reproduced the “most interesting” parts of their contents) it was decided that Hamilton’s actions were not protected under Fair Use. Salinger’s copyright suit extended beyond this, though—at various points in the text, it is clear that Hamilton blurred paraphrases and quotes from these letters, mimicking Salinger’s style when recounting. According to the case brief, upon cross-examination, Hamilton explained that he used Salinger’s style to prevent using “a pedestrian sentence I didn’t want to put my name to.” The court declared that,

When dealing with copyrighted expression, a biographer (or any other copier) may frequently have to content himself with reporting only the fact of what his subject did, even if he thereby pens a “pedestrian,” sentence. The copier is not at liberty to avoid “pedestrian” reportage by appropriating his subject’s literary devices (Salinger v. Random House, [24]).

Salinger was declared the winner, and Hamilton’s mimicking biography was invalidated. In this moment, both Salinger’s rights and his individual voice were vindicated. However, several years later, Hamilton came out with another book, In Search of J.D. Salinger.

In this self-justificatory, first-person biographical narrative, Hamilton analyzes the Salinger he had just encountered at court, and does not responsibly detail Salinger for biographical purposes, preferring to drag down to human level the aloof literary deity who had fought desperately to keep his elevated, and inaccessible status. And he succeeds—Hamilton’s memoir is exceedingly subjective, influenced by his own legal frustrations and the rather cartoonishly Caulfield-esque desire to tell his audience a sort of truth. “Obviously Seymour Glass is Salinger in disguise,” Hamilton writes, comparing Salinger to another lovable, suicidal teenager, this time from Seymour. “It’s evident Salinger has a saint complex. He wants to be a saint. The trouble is, he doesn’t have a saintly personality—quite the opposite—he is egotistical, ill tempered, unforgiving. But he wants to be a saint because saints are above the humans, they are unstoppably superior.” Hamilton is the proponent of this view of Salinger—a haughty relic frozen in time.

Despite his hammy, albeit sleazy, approach, Ian Hamilton helped build Salinger’s famous persona. He turned an introvert into an outsider, a writer into a caricature. The case gave Salinger a threateningly nitpicky reputation he would wear for the rest of his life—the verdict raised opposition because it seemed to infringe upon the First Amendment right to free speech, by censoring what people could reproduce in their own writing. However, Salinger’s lawyers argued, Salinger’s First Amendment rights had actually been trod upon, as, by publishing Salinger’s words without permission, Hamilton had infringed upon Salinger’s right not to speak.

*

In 1982, the writer W.P. Kinsella included a characterized version of Salinger in his novel Shoeless Joe, a story about an Iowa farmer who is encouraged by mystical voices to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield so the spirits of the eight scandalized baseball players of the Chicago White Sox could play ball again. When this literary Salinger learns about the baseball ghosts, he is delighted, and agrees to help the protagonist. Salinger the writer, however, was not amused with this harmless addition to Shoeless Joe. In a 2010 interview with McLean’s John Geddes, Kinsella mentioned, “his lawyers wrote my publisher’s lawyers saying he was outraged and offended to be portrayed in the novel and they would be very unhappy if it were transferred to other media.” Kinsella was careful in his construction of the character: “He was pretty much an imagined Salinger,” he said later “apart from being a recluse. I made sure to make him a nice character so that he couldn’t sue me.” Although Shoeless Joe is more of a commentary on the magic of American pop culture (baseball meets its match in the grown-up Catcher in the Rye), it does express Salinger as a character, instead of a person with a right to privacy.

Shoeless Joe was adapted into the film Field of Dreams in 1988. It starred Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Amy Madigan, Ray Liotta, a young Gaby Hoffman, and the legendary Burt Lancaster (in his last feature film performance). The film was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Writer/director Phil Alden Robinson removed Jerry from the story, replacing him with a similar but distinct enough character named Terry: Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), a major force in the 60s literary scene, author of the perennial classic The Boat Rocker, now a recluse. Ray is instructed, by the voice he hears in his cornfield, to find the writer Terrence Mann and take him to a baseball game.

In 1988, a headline reading “GOTCHA CATHER,” along with a black-and-white photo of a shocked, silver-haired, sixty-nine-year-old Salinger, appeared on the cover of the New York Post. Paparazzi photographer Paul Adao had jumped out at Salinger and taken the candid in Salinger’s town of Cornish, and the canted photo shows the elderly man attempting to punch the camera out of the photographer’s hands. Myles Weber suggests that it inspired Don DeLillo’s Pen/Faulkner Award-winning 1991 novel Mao ii, which is about an reclusive writer’s inability to shake his fame. However, not everyone received the photo with this same sympathy; the photo is the worst violation of privacy the author could have experienced—goofy, and disrespectful in its physical transformation of a rarely-seen, celebrated author into a kooky old hermit, or, given the title, an old Holden Caulfield.

In the late 1990’s, however, two works were released which also challenged Salinger’s privatization of his life. The writer Joyce Maynard, who, at age nineteen, dropped out of Yale to live with the twice-divorced Salinger in 1972. In 1998, she published a memoir about her time with him called If You Really Want to Hear About It. In 2000, the long-suffering daughter of J.D. Salinger and his second wife (Claire Douglas, who also dropped out of college at age nineteen, in 1954, to live with him) published her own memoir, Dream Catcher, about her relationship with her father. Both books, with titles punning on The Catcher in the Rye (in a similar tradition to Hamilton’s Holden-heavy biography), reveal intimate details of Salinger life. Critics of Maynard’s book called hers opportunistic, especially considering she auctioned off her personal letters from Salinger shortly after the publication of her book. (They were bought by Peter Norton, who immediately returned them to Salinger.) But Maynard’s story revealed another important facet of Salinger, a creepy side—that he was an older man obsessed with young girls.

Margaret’s book, published while her father was still alive, should be the most accurate representation of her father thus far. However, her tale conjures up a lost soul, an ex-soldier, and an antisocial wanderer, and seems to be, at least in the tradition of her father’s prose, a kind of epic catharsis. Margaret justifies the publication of her book on the grounds that she has the First Amendment right to share her own story—which just happens to be influenced by her father.

However, shortly after it’s publication, Salinger’s son Matt (the caretaker of his estate), published an open letter in The New York Observer, discrediting his sister’s account on the basis that she was unwell:

Of course, I can’t say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up. I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes,” Salinger explained, going on to claim, “she remembers a father who couldn’t ‘tie his own shoe-laces’ and I remember a man who helped me learn how to tie mine, and even-specifically-how to close off the end of a lace again once the plastic had worn away.

Words like Matt Salinger’s are rare, in that they respectfully acknowledge Salinger’s personal desire for solitude. More importantly, they, in a rich, J.D.-esque tone, serve to remind audiences of a deeper Salinger, one who, as noted by Dennis L. O’Connor, wrote about the sadness of anti-Semitism, the horror of war, and the crime of sexual exploitation, the importance of spirituality, the wonderfulness of children, and “the importance of human dignity.”

Though Salinger, himself, was adapted often, his works faced this fate even more. According to Myles Weber’s “Reading Salinger’s Silence,” it is not uncommon for writers to long for solitude—Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo all chose lives outside the spotlight but, unlike Salinger, they also chose to keep publishing. In addition, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye uniquely defined a generation, so his case is closer to that of the equally dormant Harper Lee, author of the 1960 Pulitzer-Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird. In the 1993 edition of the novel, Harper Lee explained her unique silence in its short introduction: “Mockingbird still says what it has to say.” Lee’s refusal to publish is still distinct from Salinger’s, largely because she handed over the film rights to her masterpiece within two years of publication. Until the Times interview in 1974, Salinger’s perspective on his rights to his works were, according to Weber, “I have my reasons.”

He also adamantly refused to sell film rights. “The Catcher in the Rye” he explains in a letter, “Is a very novelistic novel. There are readymade ‘scenes’—only a fool would deny that—but, for me, the weight of the book is in the narrator’s voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it.” According to Weber, the main reason for Salinger’s onslaught of fan-driven literary boosterism is that only Salinger understood why he stopped publishing—and it’s because people don’t understand that he stopped.

However, the more Salinger’s fans tried to bring him back, the more he grew frustrated, and grew more antisocial. In 1977, Esquire magazine published an anonymous short story called “For Rupert—With No Promises” written with the intent of making it seem as if he had begun to publish again. As it turned out, Esquire’s fiction editor, Gordon Lish, wrote the story. He claimed, “If Salinger was not going to write stories, someone had to write them for him.” Ironically, Gordon Lish was the recipient of Don DeLillo’s dedication in Mao ii, the story allegedly inspired by Salinger’s desire for solitude.

*

On December 8, 1980, an ex-mental patient named Mark David Chapman shot world famous musician John Lennon to “stimulate the reading of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.” A few weeks after his arrest, he sent a note to the New York Times, explaining his motives.

He says that he desired to “’stimulate the reading of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye,’” and “’if you were able to view the actual copy of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ that was taken from me on the night of Dec. 8, you would find in it the handwritten words ‘This is my statement.’’”

According to his note, Chapman identified with the novel’s protagonist, Holden, who, in the book’s conclusion, is institutionalized and brokenhearted. Chapman said, ”My wish is for all of you to someday read ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ All of my efforts will now be devoted toward this goal, for this extraordinary book holds many answers. My true hope is that in wanting to find these answers you will read ‘The Catcher in the Rye.'” At his trial, he read out loud the novel’s titular passage, about Holden’s wanting to catch children from falling off a cliff as they played.

In Daniel Stashower’s remarkable study, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Holden: Speculations on a Murder,” he suggests that

Holden Caulfield and Mark Chapman were faced with the same crisis: an assault on innocence. Holden Caulfield could not find a way to preserve innocence forever and was forced to entertain the notion of growing up. If I am correct in my speculation, Chapman found a way. Taking as a model the only character in The Catcher in the Rye who achieved perpetual innocence, Chapman found his course clear. For John Lennon’s innocence – which was essential to Chapman’s man’s own spiritual well-being—to remain intact, Lennon himself would have to die. Only then could his innocence, like [Holden’s deceased brother] Allie’s, be preserved forever.

Salinger’s themes, through the plight of Holden, are angsty, endearing, and easily relatable; the book, which finds new (mostly teenage) fans each year would not have needed Chapman’s help garnering publicity, but, this unfortunate linkage of the text to his action, presented a real-life association Salinger neither intended nor wanted: Holden’s appeal to frustrated, unwell, incel-trending young men. In 1981, following the attempted assassination of then-president Ronald Regan by John Hinckley Jr., police found a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his hotel room. In 1989, the actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered in her apartment by her stalker, Robert John Bardo, who was reported as carrying a copy of the novel when he broke into her home.

Stephen Whitfield notes that a commentary on the appropriation of Catcher by mentally ill young men can be found in John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation from 1990. The troubled young protagonist, Paul, who lies to a wealthy New York Family to ingratiate himself into their home, discusses Catcher with his new family, reading the play as

…a touching story, comic because the boy wants to do so much and can’t do anything. Hates all phoniness and only lies to others. Wants everyone to like him, is only hateful, and is completely self-involved. In other words, a pretty accurate picture of a male adolescent. And what alarms me about the book-not the book so much as the aura about it-is this: The book is primarily about paralysis.The boy can’t function. And at the end, before he can run away and start a new life, it starts to rain and he folds….

Stashower notes, of the popular misreadings of Catcher,

Simply put, it appears Chapman misread The Catcher in the Rye. He took the ‘catcher’ passage to be the novel’s solution, when in fact it is the crisis. No one who has read The Catcher in the Rye will argue that Holden Caulfield was a seriously disturbed sixteen-year-old. He wanders through New York with a genuine desire, to quote an old Beatles tune, to “take a sad song and make it better,” but he doesn’t know how to begin. As a result he develops an all-purpose, self-protective cynicism… Holden Caulfield wants to stop reality. He wants to keep the children in the rye field from growing up. But growing up is the natural order of things. It cannot be stopped.

Meaningful critical interventions, aside, The Catcher in the Rye became cursed by such misreadings, such real-life appropriations. Copyright protections can stop a work from being copied, pirated, poached. They can’t stop it from being misunderstood.

*

Perhaps after this flurry of horrific, real-life infringements, the legacy of Catcher began to wear on its creator. In 2009, Salinger encountered a different kind of brazen opportunism in the Swedish writer Fredrik Colting, who published an unauthorized sequel to Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye in 2009, under the pseudonym J.D. California.

As Salinger had consistently renewed the copyright on The Catcher in the Rye, his estate sued Colting for copyright infringement. The unauthorized sequel, Coming Through the Rye: 60 Years Later, tells the story of “Mr. C,” a 76-year-old Holden Caulfield, who escapes from his nursing home and travels back to New York City to recapture his forgotten youth, before he meets none other than J.D. Salinger, his creator, who has magically brought Holden to life, so he can kill him and finally be rid of his annoying legacy.

By 2009, Salinger was ninety years old and completely deaf. The court evaluated 60 Years Later as a Fair Use case. While the book transformed the original, the new work took far too much (including the “heart”) from the original, and it might destroy the market for authorized sequels. (For those interested, pages 6-7 of the affidavit signed during the case by literary agent Phyllis Westburg detail Salinger’s specific contractual appropriation/adaptation rights).

The court declared Salinger the winner of the dispute. Although this second decision was extremely reminiscent of the 1986 decision, which many feared rattled too close to the First Amendment, Salinger was within the right. According to “Copyright for Functional Expression,” by Lloyd L. Weinreb and published in the Harvard Law Review, an author of a work automatically has copyright over their works, even if it is has not been formally approved, and regardless of the personality of the author. Coulting, and many others, violated that basic principle. Although it does increase his miserly image, Salinger’s reinforcement of this right is justified.

However, Salinger’s militant enforcement of law to protect his own personal interests also set negative precedents. For example, the verdict in Salinger v. Random House, which had prevented the copying of unpublished materials, made it impossible for the University of Maryland to legally microfilm their deteriorating collection of personal papers bequeathed to the library by Katherine Anne Porter. Therefore, at the time, it was both impossible and illegal for the University of Maryland to perform a necessary procedure to save some of their highly valuable documents. The laws towards unpublished works have since changed, but this instance indicates absurd and unexpected social ramifications of national verdict that Salinger had only sought for his personal vindication.

Although the circumstance involving the University of Maryland is tied to a copyright decision that Salinger unluckily and coincidentally spurred, Salinger has reacted with surprising zeal against innocent adaptations, as well.

In 1998, for example, Salinger threatened to sue the Lincoln Center Film Society if they screened an Iranian film called “Pari,” based loosely on Franny and Zooey, and directed by Dariush Mehrjui, who did not want any compensation for showing the film in America, preferring to give the film to the United States as a peaceful “cultural exchange” (McKinley, The New York Times). In this case, Salinger’s desire for privacy borders on inappropriate and obsessive—refusing to overlook a slight infringement in the name of the global peace he, a World War II veteran, allegedly desired badly.

Salinger’s ultimate legacy will be preserved by his estate—which is currently run by his widow, Colleen Salinger, and his son, Matt. Matt Salinger has already sent a bill through the New Hampshire legislature that would allow commercial use of one’s identity to be inheritable after death. The bill, which Salinger had hoped would prevent the sale of popular merchandise (t-shirts, hats, mugs, etc) with the Paul Adao photo (as well as the ubiquitous 1950 black-and-white photograph by Lotte Jacobi) on them, was vetoed on the grounds that, it would “inhibit constitutionally protected speech and result in needless litigation to judicially establish what should have been made explicit in this bill,” according to New Hampshire Governor Lynch (Ramer, The Huffington Post). History has come full circle—Salinger’s legacy has once again been tied to restrictions of the First Amendment.

The estate has not resisted the publication of Slewenski’s biography, perhaps because Slewinski clearly wants little from Salinger or his estate, and prefers to present the facts, allowing them, and not yet another interpretation of the man, to speak for themselves.

Salinger’s tradition has already begun to change, simply because his static identity had changed—he died. Both Myles Weber and Ian Hamilton suggest that Salinger had already created his own posthumous identity by retreating into solitude so early into his career. Therefore, Salinger’s real death brought about his public rebirth. For example, fifty letters that Salinger had exchanged with his English friend Donald Hartog from their meeting in 1938 through the 1980’s, which had clandestinely been possessed by University of East Anglia since Hartog’s death in 2007, were being made available to the public to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Salinger’s death. In these letters, Salinger discusses average things with his friend (such as his love for Burger King Whoppers and his favorite tennis player Tim Henman). Salinger’s death is slowly unfurling his humanity (Gabbatt, The Guardian).

The last book published by J.D. Salinger, a 1963 collection of stories called Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour—an Introduction, has a curious, and similarly human, dedication. “If,” Salinger briefly states, “there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.” It is hard to imagine, however, that this anxious and extant idealist who, with the dedication in Seymour, entrusted his most autobiographical work simply to anyone who cared enough to read it, is the same man accused of being a strange, old version of his own characters, in the words of Weber, “a fledgling actor in his adolescence… now sinking his teeth into the role of a lifetime, that of a reclusive artist,” and, in the words of Hamilton, “an egotistical, ill-tempered, unforgiving man… who wants so badly to be canonized.” Salinger was well aware of his inadvertent public persona; in the 1974 Times interview, he stated, “I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.”

In other words, before his death in 2010, Salinger became the ghost in the machine of American literature, embodying the battle between preservation attempts of his exterior works, and therefore the maintenance of their immortality, and the need for self-preservation and an undisturbed, peaceful human existence. And a battle it was, indeed.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter hoists sail underneath an excellent conceit. The film is an adaptation of a single chapter from the 1897 novel Dracula, Chapter VII, which is an account of a ship’s voyage chartered from Varna, Bulgaria to Whitby, England. The novel Dracula is epistolary and this account is the Captain’s Log, which records strange things happening aboard the ship. Crew members start disappearing and the sea grows tempestuous. Sailors begin reporting seeing a strange man in the shadows of the vessel. “God seems to have deserted us,” the Captain writes. By the time the ship reaches its port, everyone is dead.

The sailors do not know that they are transporting Count Dracula from his Carpathian empire to his new English home, but to readers of the novel who have spent the novel’s four opening chapters in Castle Dracula while the Count negotiates the sale of an English estate, it’s evident that he has begun his journey from his ravished homeland to a bountiful new world. The doomed voyage of the Demeter is a logical bridge between these two parts of the novel, but it’s often reduced to a single scene, or even expository shots of a ship leaving Eastern Europe and/or arriving on the shores of England.

It is a very clever idea to zero in on this oft-underrepresented section for two reasons. One, the story suggested by the Demeter‘s log is one of incredible drama and terror, an opportunity to explore what must have been, to that doomed crew, a terrifying and dramatic mystery. Two, the tale of the Demeter is, when you think about it, a standard horror movie: it’s about a group of people who find themselves in a remote location with a powerful evil entity or serial killer (or both) who picks them off one by one.

The film, written by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz and directed by André Øvredal, is well-versed in its source material, which doesn’t usually technically matter to the quality of a movie but which in this case helps greatly, since this film’s focused relationship to the book is its main selling point; Dracula has been remade so many times that studying the basics feels important for a film that by its very nature promises to burrow into the forgotten details.

That being said, it also takes up a very difficult task: it’s well-known at this point that Dracula does ultimately arrive in England after ravaging the ship and feeding on its crew. It’s quite a challenge to build the necessary rhymes and rhythms of the horror genre when it’s an incontrovertible fact that the entire venture is doomed anyway. It’s hard to get the audience to care about characters who are mere footnotes in the original novel and who literally must die.

For these reasons, I’m grading The Last Voyage of the Demeter on a curve. To make up for all these obstacles, the movie has the good sense to lean into what a horror movie with these restrictions CAN do to move an audience: steep itself in atmosphere and dabble in gore. The film is equal parts rich and nasty, baroque in its rendering both of day-to-day life on a cargo ship in the late 19th century and the carnage that takes place on its final trip.

The film takes its time before the scary stuff, allowing the audience to learn about the ship itself, architecturally as well as culturally. Then, when the waters get choppy, the fog rolls in, and the vampire gets loose, the film becomes a shadowy Victorian nightmare. Visually, including in the design of its vampire, the film takes much inspiration from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu, one of the few Dracula films that captures in great detail the terrors on the ship where the Count (or “Orlock,” as he is named for copyright purposes) has stowed away. One of the film’s most frightening sequences, in which the Count stalks the last of the crew, feels tonally in sync with The Last Voyage of the Demeter, even though they are separated by a century’s worth of filmmaking innovations.

But The Last Voyage of the Demeter‘s Dracula is almost the least satisfying part. He’s not in it so much, and when he is, it’s as a Orlockian, Kurt Barlow-looking goblin. And don’t get me wrong… that’s scary. It’s plenty scary. He’s ugly as hell. But Dracula the guy is the inspiration for 126 years’ worth of entertainment, and he has more of an impact when he’s a suave foreigner than when he’s his skeletal batlike avatar, or at least when he shape-shifts between the two forms.

There are two Dracula films this year—this and Renfield—and both under-use the Count. It’s almost as if these films are scared to, and I get why. He’s one of the most interesting and complicated characters ever created—he’s evil and yet sociable, human and animal, a monster and a gentleman, ubiquitous and omnipotent and yet with many restrictions, invulnerable but with many opportunities for vulnerability. He might literally be the devil. He’s also a feudal landlord from Eastern Europe attempting to fit in busy metropolitan London. That’s a lot to factor in, or even to pick and choose from, when designing a Dracula for your movie. The Last Voyage of the Demeter‘s choice to make him more monster than man works well for the jump scares but also depersonalizes, uncomplicates him as a villain.

But this film is mostly about the crew dealing with an unknown, threatening presence among them—like in Alien (1979). Not to recklessly compare movies, but I’d say that this doesn’t work as well because the audience of The Last Voyage of the Demeter has so much more information about the monster than the audience of Alien. And also because the audience knows that Dracula himself is way more interesting than any of the regular guys pulling the lines and steering the ship, even though the actors do their damnedest.

Liam Cunningham plays the dignified Captain Elliott, who permits a young doctor named Clemens (Corey Hawkins) to join the crew before the ship departs Varna. Because Clemens is Black, the mostly Slavic and Irish crew treats him with a bit of racism, but no more than he’s experienced before, he explains. The first mate, Wojchek (David Dastmalchian) is a bit suspicious of him, but the Captain’s grandson Toby (Woody Norman) and Toby’s dog both take a liking to him. So does a veteran sailor named Olgaren (Stefan Kapicic). But things grow complicated after they discover all the livestock have been slaughtered and find a young Slavic woman named Anna (Aisling Franciosi) inside one of the many crates of dirt that are being stowed aboard in the hull.

Amid these strange developments, the crew focuses their suspicions on the wrong newcomers, worrying about the two strangers above deck (Clemens and Anna) instead of realizing that there is a worse one below. The film doesn’t really turn itself into a witchhunt before it becomes a vampire hunt, which feels like a missed opportunity to complicate an otherwise very, very simple film.

Still, when Dracula does materialize, the film becomes a bracing game of hide-and-go-seek with the devil. And if that’s all it accomplishes, that isn’t worth nothing. The film might bite off more than it can chew, but it’s still a dark, deluxe vampire slasher. And, like, I’ll drink to that.

Do you remember the scene in Singin’ in the Rain where Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse dance a romantic, longing modernist-ballet number? That scene is a dream sequence within a dream sequence. Gene Kelly’s character, an actor in late 20s Hollywood, is pitching a movie to a studio head and the film allows the viewer to watch the description he is conjuring. In this imaginary scene, a “young hoofer” comes to Broadway with dreams of being a star, and has them stymied for a while, along the way meeting a beautiful woman—Cyd Charisse—who is dating a gangster. He imagines falling in love with her anyway, and so the film takes us to that fantasy, which takes the form of a windy dance on a blue-and-pink-tinted soundstage.

What we’re watching is so far removed from the plot of the actual Singin’ in the Rain—which is about the Hollywood community adjusting after the advent of sound technology—but it doesn’t matter. It is a beautiful scene, a stunning bodily representation of desire and passion in the brief moment they are allowed to manifest. Movies don’t exist just to relay plots; they have tools and qualities all their own that permit experimentation, and even allow the visual exploration of abstract things like feelings, thoughts, and ideas.

It is known, via a Letterboxed profile curated by the writer-director-Greta Gerwig, that her new film Barbie takes some inspiration from Singin’ in the Rain, as well as other musicals from Hollywood’s Golden Age, including Kelly’s even more abstract An American in Paris. Gerwig’s Barbie, a dramatically hyped mainstream film about the famous Mattel doll that was created in 1959 and went on to become one of the most influential pop cultural forces in history, shares an essence with these movies.

It is an inventive, highly wildly conceptual thought experiment—not merely about the doll Barbie or even her complicated legacy and what she represents, but also about what it means to be a woman. It takes place in a similar kind of space as “the movie musical” writ large, a genre of alternate reality in which emotions and thoughts can be explored through music, song, dance, and other stuff that doesn’t happen in real life.

Barbie combines the rules of the movie musical’s imaginary netherworld with the investments of a Beckett or a Ionesco play. We’ve all seen plays where human actors play unwieldy concepts like “the city of St. Louis” or “polio” or even real material things like “bullets.” That’s the variety of inquiry Barbie is; yes, it explores the complex figure of the Barbie Doll through cinematic conventions of faux-documentary, movie-musical, and traditional Hero’s Journey narrative, but it also is simply an unreal experiment, a highly symbolic exercise where theoretical entities get to speak for themselves, and where real people get to tell anthropomorphized theoretical entities what effects they have on the human experience. The whole movie is a mise-en-abyme-heavy dream sequence, a fantasy of a dialogue between real women and womankind’s evolving, go-getting golem plaything.

I was fascinated by Barbie, which was written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, and which earnestly takes on a lot of hard work and mostly pulls it off. Compellingly, Barbie literalizes the abstract and abstracts the literal as it progresses. Gerwig’s own (presumed) thoughts and research into three-score years of Barbie frame the story, especially via the movie’s opener, a 2001: A Space Odyssey pastiche in which little girls discover the Barbie doll for the first time; the narrator (Helen Mirren) reminds us that, before Barbie, little girls could only play with baby dolls, pretend to be mothers; Barbie was the first grown-up doll. She was the first major girl-marketed cultural signifier insisting that a girl could be someone other than a mother. And not only that, but that she could be someone glamorous and exciting.

After this, the film follows a day in the life of a blonde Barbie, the main Barbie, the “Barbie you think of when someone says ‘think of a Barbie,'” the film calls her. She is played by Margot Robbie, who also produced the film. She lives in Barbie Land, a realm where the souls? subconscious minds? astral projections? of literal Barbie Dolls live and interact together. While their doll-bodies are being played with in the Real World, their selves live here, though they take on the characteristics of the things happening to their doll-bodies in play. This means that Barbie Land is kind of magic; outfits change spontaneously depending on the activity, Barbies float from one level of their Dream Houses to another—as if they are being played with by invisible hands.

Barbie Land is a paradise of female empowerment. The narrator reminds us how Barbie has taken on many more meanings and identities since her debut in a bathing suit in 1959, and that the Barbie concept is diverse in terms of representations of female excellence and perfection. Barbie is all women, the narrator reminds us, and she is a reminder that women can do anything. In Barbie Land, the Barbies—beautiful, accomplished, happy in all their different appearances and jobs and roles—run a supportive, productive world. There are also Kens, who do not have jobs or purposes. Barbie’s Ken (Ryan Gosling) lives for her, longs to unite more with her, wants her to love him. In interviews, Gerwig has noted that Barbie, and not Ken, is the main draw of Mattel products, and analyzed its fascinating implications: “Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie’s position in our eyes and in the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.”

Gerwig notes the potential for Barbie’s incredible progressiveness and takes advantage of it—telling a story about a Barbie who discovers that, in actual life, women are seen as the accessories. For the record, I don’t think the film advocates that people of any gender should be accessories to those of another gender, but Barbie still allows us to revel in the delight of an all-female paradise for a while.

Anyway, one day, our Barbie begins to experience an existential crisis—she begins to wonder about dying and freak about about “forever” and stasis. Her feet loosen from their arched position and land flat on the floor. Panicking, she goes to see an oracle-style Barbie known as Weird Barbie, maimed with crayons and perpetually in a split position after her doll self got “played with too hard.” Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) explains that Barbies are psychically connected to the children playing them, and so in order to correct these out-of-place crises, Barbie has to travel to the Real World and find that girl and help her assuage her concerns.

Barbie heads on a journey to the Real World, accompanied by Ken, who longs to prove himself to her. But when they arrive in the modern world (Los Angeles), they discover something jarring: the world is not, in fact, a feminist society in which women get to exercise (and be celebrated for) their skills and aptitudes, but… the opposite. Barbie herself grows very depressed, while Ken feels empowered, by this rift. Ken runs back to Barbie Land to tell the other Kens that “men rule the world” in reality while Barbie discovers that she’s unwittingly something of a villain there. She discovers, from a group of tween girls, that not only is Barbie not a feminist hero, but is also a controversial and outdated toy who has contributed to and participated in the creation of impossible, unhealthy, and problematic standards for women, not to mention the glorification of capitalism and the mass production environmentally-poisonous plastic. And she discovers Mattel, an FBI-style entity determined to keep the existence of the Avalon-like Barbie Land a secret.

While evading the Mattel G-Men, Barbie winds up meeting her playmate, who turns out not to be a child, but the mother of a child. She, Gloria (America Ferrera), has always loved Barbie, but her love for Barbie cannot override the frustrations and problems of her regular life, including a lack of professional and creative fulfillment (she’s a secretary at Mattel). But something happens when they’re together, and Barbie decides to bring her new friend and her Barbie-hating preteen daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) back to Barbie Land to help empower them. But when they get there, they discover that Ken has brought the idea of male supremacy back, taken over the paradise, and brainwashed all of the brilliant, accomplished Barbies into serving them and ornamenting their spaces.

Barbie isn’t a subtle movie, and that’s okay! Subtlety is overrated. It’s clear now, if it hasn’t been before, that Barbie slings many, many metaphors about the state of female existence in its current moment. Barbie is about a jealous, women-hating current that runs deep in male perspective. Ken is ultimately a bit of an incel (even though he’d be called a Chad BY the incels), and in Barbie we watch as all the progress, works, dreams of women are dismantled and erased and destroyed by men who need to feel like they control powerful women in order to feel powerful, themselves. It’s a movie that feels like it’s about Abortion Bans and the January 6th insurrection and our Post-Trump society just as it feels (sadly) timeless.

But even more insightful is what happens to Barbie when she realizes her world is a disaster. She grows depressed, begins to hate and doubt herself. She feels unattractive, unimportant, like a failure. Gerwig was influenced in writing the screenplay by the 1994 nonfiction book Reviving Ophelia, about the sudden, mass self-confidence and depression crisis that hits girls around puberty. “They’re funny and brash and confident, and then they just—stop,” she explained of the phenomenon to Vogue. “…All of a sudden, [girls think], Oh, I’m not good enough.”

Watching Barbie, this moment (when Robbie’s Barbie collapses into despair, feeling like a failure because she can’t fix the horrible things happening around her), was one of the most intuitive moments I’ve ever seen on film. Even more so is when Gloria comforts her, by acknowledging the horrible double-standards that make women feel this way, universally, delivering a heart-rending, passionate soliloquy that provides the film’s heart as well as its thesis statement. I cried a lot during the Barbie movie, but I really cried here.

Barbie not only understands what it’s like to be a woman, but has a lot of love for women, which is refreshing. It also has a lot of love for childhood, but it doesn’t allow the nostalgia for girlhood to muddle the empowerment of adult women. Barbie is a genuine masterpiece for its studies in making the intangible tangible, and this is epitomized by its magnificent production, set, and costume design.

The Barbie Dream Houses don’t have walls, just like in life. The Barbie World doesn’t come with food, just adhesive decals and plastic pieces. There is an extroardinary tactility, solidity to this world that is so reminiscent of playing with Barbies, like how McKinnon’s defaced Barbie almost always has her legs split apart. Watching the film, I remembered the feel and movement of these toys. There’s a Proust joke in Barbie, but I’m not joking when I’m saying that if Proust saw Barbie, he’d write another 1,000 pages. That’s how evocative Gerwig’s direction is. There are whole scenes in the movie that seem intended just to allow the audience to feel.

Robbie, who demonstrates tremendous physical comedy skills while also relaying depths of humanity, is wonderful as this torn Barbie. Gosling, whose relentless commitment to his character is astonishing, would be the film’s scene-stealer if Robbie wasn’t such a strong anchor. But Ferrera is the best part of the star-studded cast, a phenomenally real woman.

Barbie is so insightful in its symbolic intervention that when it returns to its Hero’s Journey/Barbie-vs. Mattel plot, it becomes a lot less satisfying. Mostly because, after watching ideas come to life, becoming reminded about the tethers to branding and commercial interests feels irrelevant and almost contradictory and even occasionally unpleasant. There’s a little too much humanization in the end, actually, partially of entities who might not deserve it, in a story that is, ultimately, about women. Things get messy and very, well, imperfect.

Still, I spent the nearly two-hours of Barbie noting how thoughtful and ambitious it was. Personally, I felt very seen and understood. I was moved and even felt a little appreciated, in a universal way. And that’s not an easy to do with a main character who is essentially a lump of plastic shaped like a person. But there is nothing fake, nothing false about Barbie. To Barbie, life may be plastic, but it’s also profound.

On a beautiful Sunday at the end of April, I attended an illustrious event at Downtown Manhattan’s Metrograph movie theater: a screening of the Paul Schrader classic 2017 film First Reformed followed by a discussion with Schrader, himself. But this was more than a special showing, it was a celebration commemorating First Reformed‘s recent existence as a book. Archway Editions—the indie publisher committed to printing and reprinting esoteric and special mongraphs, novellas, plays, and other texts—had just published Schrader’s screenplay as a book. In true Archway fashion, it is a pristine, pocket-sized edition, a sleek paperback issue of the screenplay Schrader wrote himself.

A profoundly literary film, First Reformed begs to be read just as much as watched, though this might not seem like an obvious way to consume it. Indeed, in English classes in school, we read plays, but we don’t read screenplays.

But we should! The screenplay is a fascinating art form with tons of visual language that we see translated for us onto the screen but don’t get to read firsthand. A screenplay is much more than a scene-for-scene menu, an outline for how to make a movie—it’s a piece of writing that has to summon imagery on such a level that the imagery feels actionable and it’s clear how to render it all real.

Fortunately, now more than ever, you can read screenplays in book form. Starting with First Reformed, I’ve compiled a list of some of the nicest editions of published screenplays, for your reading pleasure.

Screenplays:

First Reformed, Paul Schrader
(Archway Editions)

First Reformed is the story of a pastor at a small, historic, tourist-trap church in upstate New York, whose faith and soul are tested when a prisoner introduces him to the existential realities of earth’s climate crisis.

Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan
(Grove Press)

Often considered the best movie that no one ever saw, Margaret is Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright Kenneth Lonergan’s masterpiece. The story of a high-school girl in New York City whose life is changed after witnessing an accident, its release was delayed for 4 years, finally premiering in an edited version in 2011. This illustrated edition publishes Lonergan’s original screenplay—what amounted to the Director’s Cut that was released in 2012.

Get Out,  Jordan Peele
(Monkeypaw/IN-FO.CO)

Featuring an introduction by writer and scholar Tananarive Due, as well as annotations by Jordan Peele, this black-and-white (because, well, yeah) edition of Get Out, Peele’s Oscar-winning horror satire about race (and a myth of post-racism) is a perfect companion to the film.

Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig
(A24)

A24 has actually published several of its acclaimed screenplays in beautiful, illustrated hardcover editions, and Lady Bird is the sixth. You can also grab the incredible screenplays to Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, and Robert Eggers’s The Witch, among many others.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson
(Opus Books)

Wes Anderson’s movies often inquire about the relationship between different kinds of storytelling; how many of his films begin with shots of characters reading the book that the very movie promises to imagine? Including The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is a movie about a girl reading the memoir of a man who met a man who told a story about someone else. And now you can read it!

The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola
(Black Dog & Leventhal)

The granddaddy of all screenplays, The Godfather is published in this 50th Anniversary Edition, annotated and featuring “commentary on every scene, interviews, and little known facts.” Assembled by Jenny M. Jones, it contains a foreword from Francis Ford Coppola, himself.

Screenplay-Novel Hybrids:

Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson, Pat Cadigan and William Gibson
(Titan Books)

Steampunk queen Pat Cadigan wrote a novel about William Gibson’s unpublished screenplay for an Alien sequel that was never made.

Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu
(Pantheon Books)

Charles Yu’s National Book Award-winning novel-in-a-screenplay-format is the story of a young guy, Willis Wu, who is a background character in a police procedural TV show until the day he stumbles into focus and discovers the protagonist he has always been all along.

There are things you want from an Indiana Jones movie. You want Indy to yell directions at a stunned, fuddy-duddy academic while trying to dodge bullet spray. You want Indy to shove the lid off a big stone tomb, and maybe even yank an antique out from the stiff grip of the skeleton inside that tomb. You want to watch him shimmy through a cavern full of vermin and translate an ancient language very quickly by sight. You want him to growl at Nazis. You want the hat and the whip and the grin and the eye rolls and the French horns.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a good student of the canon that came before it. It is the fifth in a series which was originally intended to have five installments but for a very long time (the nearly two decades since the release of Last Crusade in 1989) only had three. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny faces many of the same challenges that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the long-awaited fourth volume, did—namely, how to capture the pleasures of the original franchise while delivering a new, compelling story.

And, of course, how to rely on Indy as an action hero now that he’s considerably older; his character is 58 in the fourth film, and 70 in the new one. (In each film, Harrison Ford, the series’ star, is 65, and 80, respectively.) Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny works very hard to do right by the series, while also remaining realistic given newer constraints, and for the most part, it pulls it off. It is a rousing, genuinely entertaining return to adventure with cinema’s greatest action hero. I’d probably rank it higher than #4.

The movie begins with a flashback to 1944, when a 45-year-old Indy is, once again, embroiled in yet another attempt to rescue a priceless historical artifact from the Nazis, aided by a bumbling British scholar named Basil Shaw (Toby Jones). But he winds up picking up another relic, the Antikythera—part of a dial designed by the Greek mathematician Archimedes that is believed, by some, to have the ability to plot cracks in the fabric of time that can allow for travel through it. The Antikythera is the hobbyhorse of Nazi physicist Dr. Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who believes that, instead of Biblical artifacts, it is the instrument the Nazis should use to win the war.

The opening sequence—in which Indy and “Baz,” as Indy calls him, attempt to flee the Germans and bring along the Antikythera—is a nailbiting romp made possible through de-aging CGI that transforms present-day Harrison Ford into his 45-year-old self. Mostly, it’s an extremely impressive computerized reconstruction, although it’s not the only CGI thing going on; there are a few nighttime scenes on an over-stylized careening train that made me feel like I was watching a much darker sequel to The Polar Express.

It’s worth reiterating that, taking in this opening sequence, which is 25 minutes long, I was genuinely unbothered by Indy’s younger-looking, ever-so-slightly rubbery visage, but I did worry that this portended a heavy reliance on CGI, overall, at the expense of practical effects. A lot of the fun of the original Indiana Jones trilogy is the handmade component, that scenes do in fact feel like they take place on soundstages decorated to look like caves via spray-painted foam, and that their incredible action sequences are combinations of editing tricks and impeccable choreography. But the good news is that the rest of the film, which features our regular, naturally-aged Harrison Ford, does indeed return to this more tactile approach to action filmmaking.

This is the first Indiana Jones film not directed by Steven Spielberg, and while you can sense his absence somehow, the efforts from director-surrogate James Mangold are sufficient. It’s a fact that nobody is as creative and thoughtful as Spielberg in terms of shot construction; chances are, an individual still by Spielberg contains more imagination and meaning and character than a whole scene by Mangold. But Mangold is a more than capable technical director, and the film still works. Mostly, I think this is because of the insane magnetism Ford emanates whenever he plays this character; he has been, many times before, the salvation of this franchise, which has been known to occasionally lean into weird narrative experiments and traffic in some casual racism. Ford’s just as great here, mixing his character’s cocky, scrappy, wiseass personality with some of the age-appropriate crankiness that he, as an actor, has made his shtick on talk-shows and in interviews.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ends on a happy note, depositing Indy into a satisfying domestic situation. After its opening sequence, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny begins in earnest in 1969 in New York City, at a bit of a low point. Marion (Karen Allen) is divorcing him, and he lives in a messy apartment down the hall from some annoying hippies. For ten years now, he’s taught archaeology at Hunter College, boring the very demographic of undergraduates he once enthralled.

A bright spot in this surprisingly bland grind is a visit from Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the now-deceased Baz’s daughter/Indy’s goddaughter. She wants Indy’s help in tracking down the Antikythera, the thing her father was obsessed with until the day he died (man, I love when an Indiana Jones movie features a professor dad with a handwritten notebook full of well-researched details pertaining to one historical object), after his fateful encounter with it while fleeing Nazi territory. But Indy’s not planning on embarking on another breakneck adventure… at least for a whole minute or so, until a group of people start chasing and shooting at them.

The CIA, mostly in the form of a field agent named Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson), is on Helena’s tail. And so is Dr. Voller, who, in the many years since World War II, has, in Wernher von Braun-fashion, been working for the U.S. Government on their rocket program, and has helped America get to the moon. Voller, now known as Schmidt, has two lackeys, a trigger-happy, Southern-drawling psycho named Klaber (Boyd Holbrook) and a giant named Hauke (Olivier Richters), and let’s just say that they don’t play by the CIA’s more restrained rules. Voller is using his American connections to track down the Antikythera, and will stop at nothing to get it.

So, Indy and Helena wind up on a cross-Mediterranean journey, hunting artifacts, outrunning Nazis, dealing with various personal ambitions and or crises. They are aided by a Short-Round-esque Moroccan pickpocket named Teddy (Ethann Isidore) and a suave Spanish sailor named Renaldo (Antonio Banderas, who does not get enough screen time) and, in a wonderful cameo, Indy’s longtime Egyptian friend Sallah (John Rhys-Davies).

I don’t want to spoil too much about the plot, but I will say that the film has several incredible setpieces, ones that we haven’t seen in Indiana Jones movies before, and therefore feel extremely distinctive. There are also, don’t worry, motorcycle chases and horseback chases and car chases through outdoor markets. There are some incredible whipcracks and punches and kicks. The stuntwork and effects are masterful, a treat even if you somehow don’t care about the rest of it.

I’ll also add that it’s charming how the film’s MacGuffin is a time-traveling device, while it’s also a flashback-laden farewell to a beloved character who rocked cinema for forty-two years. Ticking noises abound, characters are really into their watches, the mise-en-scene is full of clocks. Even though time has marched onward, Indy’s still our guy. He shouts “it belongs in a museum!” while gripping an antique. He still gets dewy-eyed when he comes face-to-face with history.

Whatever else is entertaining about it, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a joy for how it takes us down memory lane with this character and his friends, one last time. Let’s do it all again, for old times’ sake.

Truthfully, I’ve been struggling to write a review of Past Lives since I saw a preview a few weeks ago. It broached a very tender part of my soul and I’ve been having trouble going back there simply to write 1,500 words. Let this be an endorsement that Past Lives, which was written and directed by Celine Song, is an excellent film, a beautiful and moving film, a film which captures so perfectly the secret uncertainty of choosing a path and allowing it to define your life.

Past Lives is framed via a simple, sequential three-act structure, like a play, with each part set 12 years away from the previous one, meaning the story takes place across 24 years. It begins around 1999/2000 in Seoul, South Korea, exploring the deep connection between two 12-year-old friends, Na Young (Moon Seung-ah) and Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min). Na Young’s family is planning on moving to Canada, though—so shortly after Na Young and Hae Sung, who have giggly crushes on each other, go on their first (parentally supervised) “date,” they are separated, seemingly forever.

The second act drops in 12 years later on a much older Na Young (Greta Lee), who has long gone by her English name Nora. She is 24 in 2011/2012, living in New York City, working at becoming a playwright, and she and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who still lives in Seoul, reconnect over Facebook, beginning a short, nostalgic Skype correspondence that rekindles their feelings for one another.

Nora is gleeful that her childhood best friend/boyfriend (though those might be the same things at that preteen age) never forgot her—not only that, but also that he has also evidently been looking for her in the years since their last encounter. But she is about to go to a writer’s residency in Montauk, and Hae Sung is traveling to China to learn Chinese, and Nora realizes they will not be able to develop their relationship, or even see one another, in person for a long time, and so they break off communication to avoid slipping too far into something that will never be real.

The third act, which houses the bulk of the film (both in terms of time and emotional heft) begins another 12 years later, in 2023/2024. Nora and Hae Sung have not spoken since their video calls nearly a lifetime ago, and they are both successful adults. Nora is a playwright in New York, and she is married to a novelist named Arthur (2023’s indie cinema MVP John Magaro), whom she has been with for nearly the whole time she has not spoken to Hae Sung. But things are about to change. Hae Sung is visiting New York City on vacation for a few days, and he and Nora are about to meet face-to-face for the first time since they were children.

Their meeting is impossibly loaded; their relationship throughout the past 30 or so years has had countless layers and degrees of connection and distance. Indeed, when Nora and Hae Sung finally see each other, walking over to one another in a park on a sunny spring day, all they can say for a while is the simple exclamation “woah.”

All the layers are the point; Nora speaks about the Korean concept of “In-Yun,” which translates to “providence or fate” but is also, more abstractly, the suggestion that your encounters with people in this life reflect how close you knew them in a past life. Nora and Hae Sung have had literal past lives together as children and young adults, but also, the film wonders about that deeper concept; all three main characters (Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur) wonder if the two long-lost companions are soulmates on a cosmic dimension, unaligned in this present lifetime but destined to be with each other throughout the eons, nonetheless.

The film doesn’t get hung up on the nostalgia of this whole affair, or fall into any traps about love triangles. It instead traces the strong emotional connections that exist in normal life. Nora and Hae Sung spend two days wandering and talking through the city together. They don’t do anything in particular. They walk and talk. Visually, the film is about navigating landscapes—moving your body through spaces, while the landscape, on its own, moves through time.

It’s a story where connections are truly communicated via distance and absence rather than proximity and access. Nora and Hae Sung stroll by Jane’s Carousel on the Brooklyn Bridge waterfront but don’t ride it. They take the subway and hold onto the same pole but do not touch hands. Past Lives isn’t a grand romance of freeing experiences, so much as a love story of thoughtful restraint. It couches itself in the ordinary and uneventful, relying on the characters’ emotional connections to draw the complicated webs between them rather than thrust them into bond-forming setpieces. For this, it is devastatingly effective.

Watching Past Lives feels like what living and loving are like in reality; with all the symbolism and narrative applied by characters’ thoughts and questions and ideas, rather than by life itself. In-Yun is the framework of the film, not by the film itself but by the characters. “What a good story this is,” admits Arthur. “Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later and realize they were meant for each other.”

Arthur adds, “In the story I would be the evil, white American husband standing in the way of destiny.” But he is not. That’s too simple. Arthur loves his wife, and isn’t so much jealous of Hae Sung as privately overwhelmed by his fear of losing her. But he does not want to prevent her from seeing her old friend—even, her old love. He truly cares for her and wants her to be happy. When he meets Hae Sung, he likes him a lot, too. He might even understand if Nora left him for Hae Sung, because he appreciates what he perceives to be a perfectly plotted love story.

The three main characters in the film don’t exactly doubt their choices, in light of Nora and Hae Sung’s reunion—but they do toe that notion before deciding not to give into it. These are characters who do not want to upend their lives, destroy what they have built; and not throwing their homes and worlds asunder is hardly a sacrifice, either. These are characters who are happy with their lives. And yet, there is something—there could be something—to all of this, if they let it happen.

The subtlety, the normalcy, the control of Past Lives is what makes it so devastating[—what gives it such power and pathos. I didn’t realize until five minutes before the film ended that Song’s meticulous direction had carefully been holding my emotions in place, back like a dam; when she orchestrated the lifting of that barrier, I felt my feelings roll out, rush out, in a tremendous wave. I didn’t shed a tear until the film’s final moments, but I left the theater sobbing. (For the record, the film has the best final line of a movie since Casablanca.)

Via the concerns and fears of its wise (but not artificially so) characters, the film asks what it means to be someone’s soulmate, and the answer winds up being just as interesting as the inquiry. Past Lives is about how we feel like there might be something more to our existences than single lifetimes of paths taken and not taken. But Past Lives also takes us past the concept of “bygone crossroads,” proving, in the dialogue of its stunning climax, that there are ways to think about our possible past lives and past selves beyond the paradigm of the “road not taken,” too.

When I was watching Asteroid City, the new film from Wes Anderson, I kept thinking of a line from The Fabelmans, the Steven Spielberg movie that came out last year: “in our family, it’s the scientists versus the artists.” Asteroid City is a film about a group of strangers in September 1955 who all wind up in a desert town made famous by an ancient asteroid impact, now populated with scientists doing astronomical research and atomic bomb testing.

It had seemed, from the advertisements, that Asteroid City would be Wes Anderson’s first sci-fi movie, and it is, but it’s also more a film exploring the relationship between science and art—the shared investments of scientists and artists—and how everyone is equally in pursuit of an understanding of what it means to be alive and a part of the universe.

In Asteroid City, a science competition for extraordinary youths presented by the Research and Experimentation Division of the United States Government brings five families to the small town of Asteroid City, which doesn’t have much besides the military science facility, a diner, a hotel, and the asteroid itself. We learn the most about the Steenbeck family: the father Augie (an excellent Jason Schwartzman) and his son Woodrow, or “Brainiac” (Jake Ryan), and his three mischievous little girls.

Augie, a former war photographer, doesn’t know how to tell his kids that their mother has passed away from her long illness three weeks before they began their trip to take Woodrow to the award ceremony of the science competition in which he is a finalist. Unsure how to handle things, Augie calls his father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), to watch the girls. Woodrow, meanwhile, has befriended the four other nerdy finalists—especially Dinah (Grace Edwards), the daughter of movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson).

Asteroid City, the place, is a visual portmanteau of different eras of the American West—part John Ford cowboy-canyon vista, part Los Alamos (the secret pop-up town in New Mexico where the Manhattan Project built the Atom Bomb), part 50s Palm Springs retreat, part Looney Tunes Road Runner cartoon. And it is in this place, at a moment when teen geniuses, rowdy kids, scientists, cowboys, military officers, teachers, and parents all gather for the unveiling of America’s greatest future scientist, that the town gets a visit from an alien who wants the asteroid back.

The film is a retro-futuristic treat, a creative throwback extraterrestrial invasion movie, festooned with the hallmarks of a 50s sci-fi B-feature. And yet, it’s something else entirely. I don’t usually feel the need to discuss the theater viewing experience of a movie I’m reviewing, but I will say that, as I was exiting the theater, I overheard a group of guys behind me express frustration at the film’s large-scale existential focus, because they had hoped Asteroid City was going to be a more charming Mars Attacks! and their hopes had been dashed.

Indeed, the promotional materials do not prepare us for the big twist of Asteroid City, which happens in the literal first second of the movie: a Twilight Zone-seeming frame narrative that isn’t ultimately Twilight Zone-esque at all, one that dramatically changes the genre of Asteroid City from sci-fi tribute to something far more meta and philosophical, transitioning not between different levels of reality, but between different levels of imagination and inquiry. It is about, in the words of one character, “infinity, and I don’t know what else.”

I won’t say what is really going on here, but I will say that this dimension allows Asteroid City to really, really be about how humans search for meaning, and how we deal with phenomena we do not understand. The film is about not knowing what to do when we are confronted by the limits of our knowledge and analytical ability. It is about trying to discover something deeper about our roles, our parts, ourselves—trying to gain control and form structures to handle the near-torturous mystery of life. (Nothing better epitomizes this than a character who divvies up the desert into housing plots and sells that real-estate via vending machine.)

After seeing the film, I wish I had counted how many times characters say the words “I think”—there are lots of sentences like “I think I know now what I realize we are,” rhetorical gestures of uncertainty and the struggle for discovery and the exertion of introspection. The film’s script, which was written by Anderson from a story he co-created with Roman Coppola, is one of his sharpest and most ambitious.

As always with Wes Anderson films, which feature large ensemble casts and numerous spectacular setpieces, Asteroid City is in large part about being part of a production, and what that means. In movies in which everyone’s role is relatively small and there are no call-sheets on set, everyone must work together to make the movie what it is. In this film, being part of a production is just like being a part of human civilization—we all have our little parts to play in the grand scheme of things, and no one is more important than any other. Sometimes we wait around for our purpose, and sometimes, we wonder what our purpose even is.

But it’s not a dark film. Tonally or optically. Mostly, except for a few black-and-white interludes, Asteroid City is a bright, sherbert-colored movie—a visual carnival of oranges, yellows, and turquoises. Like all Anderson films, it is a film about trying to make human connection, and visually, we are instructed not to be afraid of what we don’t understand about all the forces in the universe: time, space, death, being, love. It brings these big questions down to tangible examples; this is a film with multiple love stories and many, many parent-child relationships. It is about reaching for one another amid the strangeness, the unknowability of the universe, and finding someone just like you reaching back.

The conceit of writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s new film, You Hurt My Feelings, is perfect. It’s about a writer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) who, completely by accident, overhears her husband confiding to his brother-in-law that he does not like her new book. He’s been assuring her that it’s great for so long that now he thinks it’s too late for him to say that he doesn’t really get it. He feels awful, now she feels awful. It’s probably the realest premise that I’ve ever seen at the movies.

Holofcener is one of Hollywood’s greatest and comparatively under-sung writer-directors. She got her first Oscar nomination in 2019 for co-writing the screenplay of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, but her oeuvre extends long past that, at least to 1996’s Walking and Talking, a movie about a woman whose anxiety heightens when she learns that her friend has gotten engaged. Holofcener makes movies about women’s experiences—their everyday relationships, anxieties, reflections, frustrations, obligations, and above all, insecurities—knowingly representing these themes with the heavy, dramatic magnitude they often have in real life.

Her films live at this granular level, asking how life not only involves but is also often inevitably defined by little things that happen, or the little things we perceive to be happening. Her films are about the great impact of, say, a snide offhand remark said by a stranger, or a quick glance in the mirror that seems to confirm suspected unattractiveness. Some of her films are unsettling in their representations of what these seemingly mundane factors can wreak (like 2001’s harrowing non-comedy Lovely and Amazing). Others are social satires (like 2013’s true comedy Enough Said). Her subjects are mostly mom-age middle/upper-middle class white women, who sometimes act as mechanisms for her own embedded criticisms of race and class, and sometimes seem to be merely incidental and autofictive beings. All of her films manage to offer existential commentary while also presenting an unvarnished authenticity.

Holofcener is one of the absolute-best dialogue writers in the business, and she is never better than in You Hurt My Feelings, but it’s not just that her characters talk like real people. They think like real people. Films don’t need to be realistic in order to be good, of course, but, like a photorealistic painter, Holofcener manages to stun for how perfectly she does capture real life. More than simply feel “real,” though, there is a truth to her films; her film’s don’t just suggest “this could happen,” but seem to say “this did happen at some point, maybe even to you.”

You Hurt My Feelings is a relationship comedy with this kind of calibrated hyper-realism. In the movie, Beth (Louis-Dreyfus) grows upset when she learns that her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), has not told her the truth about his feelings for her new manuscript, a believable premise if there ever were one. The movie asks, though, if Beth is more upset about the fact that he has not been honest with her—or that he doesn’t like her writing. But the film is clear that it’s not so simple; Don explains that it’s not that he doesn’t like the book, but that he doesn’t fully understand it despite having faith that many others will. He explains that his many exhortations, upon his countless rereads, were intended to help her feel focused and good about writing the book she had clearly wanted to write.

Although this tiny, maybe-not-even-a-betrayal is the focal point of the film, it doesn’t dominate the narrative; instead, it becomes a lens through which to view all of the film’s interactions. More than simply argue that to love someone means sometimes lying to them, the film is about how all relationships require occasional little lies. It’s a film about upholding the social contract: participating in a society in which we all know that sometimes what we must do is encourage others when we are secretly skeptical of them, praise others’ accomplishments when we are secretly unexcited by them, promise that everything will be great when we have no idea if it will.

Not only do both Beth and Don overly cheer on their twenty-something son Eliot (Owen Teague, who, shoutout to casting, looks exactly he could be their kid), who is working on a play but has a day job in a weed store, but Beth’s sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins, another win for biologically believable casting), admits to Beth that she tells her actor husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), that he’s good whenever he’s not. And Beth, who teaches writing at the New School, is only ever reassuring when her students announce questionable story ideas in workshop. Everybody lies! Everybody.

But the film has much more to do than simply point this out. You Hurt My Feelings is just as much about not knowing how to provide constructive feedback as it is about copping out and not providing any. Don, a psychologist who has begun phoning it in, can’t help but do more than nod and zone out when his patients talk. Some rather aggressive complainers (Zach Cherry, David Cross, and Amber Tamblyn) are frustrated at him for not figuring out a way to solve their problems, and Don struggles to remember that his job involves figuring out a creative means of offering meaningful critiques and recommendations to those asking for them.

Similarly, Beth, as a teacher, seems to merely nod when her students use workshop time (and their own stories) like personal therapy, working out their own issues via words. It is both of their jobs to actually intervene in their clients’ confessions, and yet they both can’t figure out how to do more than say “good job” and hope those people will work things out on their own.

The kerfuffle between Beth and Don actually teaches them how to become meaningful listeners, confidantes, and guides, not only for each other but for all the people around them. In representing all of this resulting from Beth’s book, the film has a lot to say about what the work of a writer actually is. Beth starts out the film with a memoir already under her belt, secretly wishing that her life had been a little harder so her story would have been more exciting and the memoir would have done better, instead of recognizing that the job of the writer is principally to connect with readers, regardless of how extreme the subject matter might be. She fires her longtime agent Silvia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) and replaces her with a yes-man because Silvia doesn’t seem impressed by her new book. Beth wants to take the easy way out as a writer, so why is she mad when Don does the same thing by not offering any criticism? Why is she mad when he mirrors her own behavior?

The only way to become a better writer, and write a better book, is to confront things as they are, to interrogate them, to break them apart and to do so messily. Nothing good ever comes from easy work, the film sneakily reminds us: not books, and certainly not relationships.

Master Gardener is the third in Paul Schrader’s “God’s Lonely Men” trilogy, in each film of which a weary middle-aged man who has previously experienced alienation from mainstream society contends with his haunted past and hazy future, reflecting on these things, and his rote daily existence, via diary-keeping—a technique that suffices until his world is challenged by knowledge of something greater, and tested by a newfound bond with a distressed young person. Via these characters, the films in this trilogy tend to pair and interrogate the relationship between two normally unrelated topics: religion and climate change (First Reformed, 2017), gambling and the War on Terror (The Card Counter, 2021), and horticulture and racism (Master Gardener, 2022).

Schrader is an accomplished, highly literary storyteller and his interests (particularly in the masculine-coded concepts of destruction and violence) have produced some of film’s most fascinating inquiries into the ills of modern society, from Taxi Driver to Affliction to American Gigolo, to First Reformed and The Card Counter. First a film critic and then a screenwriter (responsible for classics like Raging Bull and Obsession and famous for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma), Schrader’s later work as a director is epitomized by the triad of films about “God’s Lonely Men,” three anti-social anti-heroes in crisis: a self-loathing pastor, a troubled gambler, and a secretive gardener, all reckoning with the sudden collision of themes, lives, selves once kept at a distance. Many of his protagonists, but especially these three, can be read as homages to Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film Le Samouraï: cool, reserved, highly-competent professionals whose adherence to rituals and observances leaves them unprepared to confront unforeseen cataclysms.

It’s almost never useful to compare films in a director’s oeuvre to one another; despite similarities, each is its own discrete contribution. But Schrader’s films are designed to reference each other—or, really, The Card Counter and Master Gardener are designed to reference First Reformed—so please forgive me while I place them all side-by-side for a moment. In First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays Ernst Toller (no, not that Ernst Toller), a cheerless reverend at a small antique church upstate who keeps a diary of his own stark life the same year he happens to encounter a distraught climate activist who opens his eyes to the ravishment of God’s green earth by greedy corporations, as well as the ways God’s own church is influenced by corporatization to the point of disregarding the stewardship of the planet.

That film, a simmering hagiography of a soul in turmoil, provides the blueprint for Schrader’s subsequent two films, not only thematically, but also stylistically, in the terms I mentioned in the opening paragraph. The films are dark, lonely meditations into their protagonists’ natures, told via their floridly-written, allusion-rich journal entries, as they finally confront aspects of their lives and their worlds they have kept at bay for so long.

The Card Counter inherits the framework of First Reformed, but reworks it enough for it to feel distinct; Oscar Isaac plays William Tell (no, not that William Tell), a former military interrogator and now card-counter, who carpetbags from casino to casino, living out of austere motels, until he meets a young man who informs him that he knows his true identity, as a soldier who served jailtime for his role in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The young man asks for Tell’s help committing an act of revenge against one of Tell’s military superiors. This film slowly explores the human capacity for both empathy and cruelty, teasing out the relationship between “keeping one’s cool” and”losing it.”

I don’t have as conclusive a reading of the forces at work Master Gardener, arguably the film in this trilogy with the toughest conceit. Joel Edgerton plays Narval Roth, a taciturn head gardener of Gracewood Gardens, a privately-owned estate with gardens that are open to the public. Narval manages a team of polo-clad young people, overseeing their work but also instructing them in the history, philosophy, and science of horticulture.

He answers to no one, except Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), the wealthy owner of the estate, who throws his carefully cultivated world out of order when she demands he take on an apprentice, her grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell). Maya is biracial, the daughter of the “wayward” daughter of Norma’s sister, who left the family and “fell in with a bad crowd,” as Norma purrs. Maya seems to be her only relative left, so she is eager to draw her into the family—but not enough that she doesn’t insist that she work on the family’s land first.

Maya is a curious, intelligent twenty-something, quietly accepting of the fact that she’s a minimum wage worker on her great aunt’s estate. Norma wants Narval to educate her, teach her about the maintenance and culture and theories of horticulture, so that she might be able to pursue a career in the field in the future. Maya takes kindly to this earthy finishing school, especially because she likes Narval, her soft-spoken teacher.

The movie appears to take place in the South (it was filmed in Louisiana), and the house looks like a plantation manor, so it seems like there might be some interesting explorations into contemporary white supremacy, the way Norma insists that Maya be fashioned into a more refined version of herself in order to be welcomed into her family tree, and simultaneously wants Maya’s self-improvement to take place via farmwork, metaphorically beneath Norma literally in the dirt.

But the film wobbles from here on out, mostly because we learn about the haunted Narval’s past as a soldier of a Neo-Nazi militia, before turning state’s evidence against the group and going into witness protection. Under his clothes, he is covered in White Pride and Hitler-fandom tattoos, which now he looks at disparagingly in the mirror. He likes his current life as a peaceful caretaker of the Gracewood Gardens, is glad to have distanced himself from the silo of racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and violence in which (he explains) he was raised.

That Maya and Narval form a bond while he also has flashbacks to things that his proud boy/hillbilly cult leader told him about the importance of “pulling out the weeds,” suggests that Master Gardener will become a thriller about the insidiousness of white supremacy, intertwining a reading gardening as a kind of fascism (or at least, a way to disguise it). In other words, perhaps Narval’s solitary salvation in gardening for a racist white lady becomes an outlet for the very impulses that allowed him to thrive in a fascist cult in the first place.

Master Gardener doesn’t till this ground, though, which is fine, but it also doesn’t do anything else productive with all of these rich, ripe, and (productively) thorny thematic concerns. What begins as an incredibly fruitful plot soon wilts and shrivels into a wandering love story; and the kind of discipline and restraint that Narvals brings to his gardening becomes, exactly, the element missing from the story itself. Master Gardener quickly forgets its powerful portrayals about white supremacy and racism when it becomes interested in whether or not its protagonist can be redeemed, can be saved, and, in giving him some way to carry this out, represents Maya as needing to be saved by someone, too.

If this narrative shoot were to blossom into a meaningful development (unlikely as it is), we would need a clearer understanding of Narval’s life or background, a focused explaining of how he has come to be changed in the first place. But more importantly, this whole angle not only misses out on saying anything thoughtful about race in America, but also robs Maya of the opportunity to be more than a plot device, perhaps (especially in light of Swindell’s elegant performance), the greatest sin of all. What results is a confusing film, overgrown in some areas and under-seeded in others.

Instead of becoming as thoughtful and risky an exploration as The Card Counter, Master Gardener becomes a game of 52-card pickup. It’s as if Schrader has a deck of cards and instead of laying them out strategically, throws them all in the air and lets them come down where they will. Instead of become the focused sermon of First Reformed, Master Gardener becomes one of those themed themed refrigerator poem packs. It has a lot of terms on the table, but shuffles them around until they say almost absolutely nothing.