As I was walking out of a screening of “The Backrooms”, I was stuck on the idea that the film, which leaned into a 90s aesthetic with elements like VHS found footage, was directed by a guy who was born 6 years after the 90s ended.

I’m 40. Is this just my first experience of seeing a period piece and realizing that I’m old enough that my childhood was the period? Why was Kane Parsons reaching back into the era of my childhood to tell his story when it would have worked perfectly well in the 2020’s?

I got home and started to shape my thoughts into an essay titled “The Backrooms, Cheap AV equipment and the democratization of nostalgia,” to explore the way that Gen-Z (and it’s successors) reach back into the 90s and early 2000s as a place to ground themselves and to try and discover a feeling of nostalgia for an era they never experienced. I wrote a few sentences and then abandoned the project because I felt that, like the Backrooms, it would be an interesting exploration with no real destination.

But then I happened upon this quote from a post on Nostalgia Japonica - Real Japanese Aesthetics that hinted maybe something was there. The article titled “Japanese Aesthetics for Life and Death: In Praise of Shadows, Fades, Fragments” has the flavor of a manifesto written explicitly to explain the work of a Gen Z art collective working out of Japan.

What draws us more are fragments of the past drifting around, and the afterimages of bright futures that haunt us. The postwar order is now breaking down, images of the past keep flooding our feeds, and it feels as if the ghosts of futures once dreamed of are haunting the whole world.
Now we feel we can’t grasp our reality without facing even a bit of what those broken pasts and lost futures mean to us.

There is a stated belief that, at least for this particular art collective, to explain the present, they must piece together something from the past.

However eloquently this article supported my hypothesis, if it were just a single art collective working out of Japan, that’s hardly enough to say anything general about Gen-Z. And yet, a quick google revealed countless articles, posts and essays exploring Gen-Z’s obsession with the 90s. And though there are many theories, I want to add one more voice trying to understand the phenomenon.

My childhood was exclusive to me. There are pictures of key moments that I could share with others, but the vast majority of my early life lives on only in memory. I share pieces of it with those who were there at those moments, and to some I have told the stories. But otherwise it is mine.

I am a millennial, born in 1986.

That exclusivity is not a reality for my children. To be blunt, a creep at Google or Apple could get into my Photos account and piece together a pretty clear picture of our family’s day to day. They could track every hairstyle my children wore. There would be no milestone left un-photographed, or even filmed. Though I now regret it, my children have lived much of their life on camera. It wouldn’t be a complete picture, but it would be an authentic capture of what happened with dramatically more granularity than my childhood. Key moments, yes. But also drawings I didn’t want to throw away, but did want to keep a record of. Things I really didn’t want to film, but my kids asked me to. The first time any child did anything. And then pair this with the sharing of photo albums and the vicarious living-with of those who are members of those albums.

Family members who my children have never met can recount their lives to them as if they were Truman Burbank on the Truman Show.

I am compelled by this idea in an essay by Mandy Morris titled “The Last Generation to Remember Together”:

Nostalgia grows out of the possibility of being forgotten, taking shape in the space between what happened and what we remember, needing moments that are retold differently over time. When everything is recorded, there is little room for that transformation, and memory begins to function differently.

Today, everything is recorded, and perfectly replayable. As Mandy points out, the lack of fear of forgetting changes our relationship to memory. But I believe the more important observation in the Gen-Z situation is that there is no space between what happened to wonder, question, imagine or transform. Millenials are so terrified of forgetting that we document everything— a practice which ends up obstructing the formation of meaning.

Working through a mystery, I believe, is one of the great generators of meaning. I look at a photo of myself at my 7th birthday and I find the next photo representation of myself a few months later and all I can do about the in-between is piece together clues from the two images. But the act of filling in that gap reminds me that there are an endless chain of “whys” that connected photo 1 to photo 2. As Mandy Morris notes, in the retelling of these memories, we grow in our understanding not just of ourselves, but of our families and the contexts which formed us. I have been left speechless as I look through old photos and see a photo of me and my mother that mirrors an image of my wife and my own son. But it was not the photo itself that I was silent before, but the beyond of the photo. Did that moment mean the same to my mother as the parallel moment did for my wife? Was it just a passing event, or a habit? The speechlessness is a byproduct of the understanding that comes from walking beyond this photo into my own past and my relationship with my mother. Of retelling my story to myself from memory.

Assuming my children inherit my iCloud account, I do not believe they will have this opportunity. They have been too documented by both photo and video to have big questions about the space between.

I teach Highschool Film Classes and part of that job is watching and listening to what highschoolers are watching and thinking about. I’ve been struck by how many have asked the explicit question, “What was life like in the 90s?” It seems to be an era of particular fascination for the generations that follow after mine.

As a sort of regular ice-breaker, and to help me get a pulse on student tastes, I begin Monday classes by asking if anyone has been watching any film or television over the past week. There has been a sharp uptick in media from the 90s and early 2000s, and frankly, minimal interest in current work. Many students report that they watched through Friends, or Twin Peaks, or the “Before Trilogy”.

I’ve heard audible gasps from 16 year olds after I’ve cleaned out an old cabinet and they see a handheld digital camcorder. The idea of filming something on it is exciting enough that some have gone through the work of tracking down secondhand batteries and chargers to make the camcorders functional and then proceeded to do their class projects on them.

When everyone has a truly great camera in their pocket, why this fascination with old forms of media capture that are technically inferior in every way—which we also see in the opening scene of the Backrooms, which is presented as VHS found footage?

I obviously can’t speak conclusively, and there is almost certainly not a single answer, but my operating theory is this—Gen-Z and their successors have grown up on visual media, as they live through the fragmented and incoherent chaos of the present, like the artists at Nostalgia Japonica, they are looking to the past for meaning.

Research has demonstrated a much deeper connection for Gen-Z (and following generations) to visual media. They were the first generation to grow up with visual dominated social media platforms, and there are plenty of studies—particularly by marketing agencies—to show that Gen-Z consumes way more short form video content and visual media than earlier generations.

But why land on the 90s?

I suspect it is the ubiquity of VHS Camcorders that marked the era. Gen X and Elder Millenials were the first generations to be visually captured in enough detail that one can start to feel the everydayness of the content, but it was still cost-prohibitive enough to leave gaps, and room to wonder. Not just a moment captured in time, but hours of life in motion. Like the Lumiere’s capturing the simplicity of a train arriving at a station or workers leaving a factory, but in the modern home, and simple, and relatable.

And the inherent quality of the media itself leaves room for the imagination--faces outlined, moving, but ultimately unclear.

The photo above is from a Home Video uploaded to Archive.org. One can find countless videos like the source video online.

To my eye, images like the above allow for visual narratives that invite participation, room to imagine and create within the image. Horror filmmakers understand this in the use of found footage. Consider again the opening sequence of The Backrooms— Canted angles, shots of the floor, dropped cameras, allow the imagination to enter the story and it is so much more terrifying than anything you could actually see. The following clip is from the original Backrooms YouTube series. This is one of the earliest monster reveals in the series and presented here with an intense lack of clarity.

To put a fine point on the conclusion being drawn here, the prevalence of data over story in the infinitely documented present has removed the space needed for meaning-making—for the individual to enter into the images and create a place for themselves. And so, Gen-Z (and beyond) have turned to the past, to the last place where gaps existed, but that also spoke to their predominantly visual mode of communication.

The project as a whole feels like contemporary rehash of the struggle the early moderns had after the First World War.

In the wake of violence seen on a scale never before experienced, when technology brought hope but then betrays its uses for great evil, when everyone is aware that information is no longer neutral but a weapon itself, how does one ground oneself? Where does one find meaning?

In the world of art, at least 2 major schools of thought developed to answer this question. Consider the way a poet from each school treats a generally insignificant and everyday thing.

First, William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Likely a poem you encountered in a High School English Class, and a poem that suggests very much with very few words. For me, the question that hovers over the work is, “Why does so much depend upon the red wheelbarrow?”

Well, no argument is made. It is merely stated “The wheelbarrow matters. The wheelbarrow is meaningful.” And it is the language of the poem that provides the context of meaning. Details are provided about the wheelbarrow but there is no effort to actually justify its existence apart from the words stating that so much depends upon it. This mode of thought is associated with the Neo-Modernists, who looked to ground meaning in the absolute present.

Gertrude Stein is another writer in this category. Though she would insist that “repetition” doesn’t truly exist, she would repeat words in order to “break” any history the reader had with them and allow them to hear the word as if for the first time and to understand it’s meaning in the here and now. Meaning is accessible through direct contact with the thing itself.

Compare “The Red Wheelbarrow” then to a poem by T.S. Eliot who is wrestling with the same loss of meaning. For the sake of space, I will present only the first 2 and last 2 stanzas of his work “Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.”

POLYPHILOPROGENITIVE
The sapient sutlers of the Lord
Drift across the window-panes.
In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word.
Superfetation of, TÒ ÈV
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.

[Ommitted Stanzas]

Along the garden-wall the bees
With hairy bellies pass between
The staminate and pistilate,
Blest office of the epicene.

Sweeney shifts from ham to ham
Stirring the water in his bath.
The masters of the subtle schools
Are controversial, polymath.

Far from the repeating of the familiar that Gertrude Stein practiced, we begin with a kitchen sink of greek word components to create a term that T.S. Eliot constructed for this poem. In the full poem, from here we pass through the creation of the world, the Gospel of John, 3rd century theologians, 15th century art schools, nature framed through the lens of the holy sacraments. And to where? To Sweeney, who we know from external context to be a Boston-Irish Boxer, shifting on his buttocks in the bath.

Like the red wheelbarrow, the everyday still matters to Eliot, but only because it is contextualized in the grand sweep of history. The past gives the thing meaning. Eliot, and by extension other “Paleo-moderns” like James Joyce and Ezra Pound, have been labeled by some thinkers as “Proto-postmodernists,” in their exploration of the ways that meaning is entirely dependent upon context, over and against the William Carlos Williams school emphasizing inherent meaning in things.

One can quickly see other variations of the Paleo-modernist theme in James Joyce’s Ulysses which translates a day of the very ordinary Leopold Bloom’s life by passing it through Homer’s Odyssey. What right does Leopold Bloom have to occupy 700 pages of anything? Well maybe he has none, but the significance of his day can be constructed through the bulwarks of the past.

It is in this Paleo-modern approach that I see echoes of the Gen-Z project to stop the hemorrhaging of meaning in the present.1

But to understand the remedy for the loss of meaning, we need to properly diagnose the problem. And here I think Byung-Chul Han’s notion of the Erotic vs the Pornographic in the experience of beauty to be very helpful.

For Han, Beauty is essentially “Erotic.” He writes in Saving Beauty

Concealing, delaying and distracting are also spatiotemporal strategies of beauty. The calculation in halfconcealing produces a seductive gloss. The beautiful hesitates before appearing. Distraction protects it against direct contact. It is essential to eroticism. Pornography is without any distraction. It gets right down to it.

The argument continues to develop until it begins to illuminate our modern digital existences, and particularly as it revolves around “data.”

Data have something pornographic and obscene about them. They have no inside, no flip sides; they are not ambiguous. In this, they differ from language which does not permit things to come into perfectly clear focus. Data and information deliver themselves to total visibility and they make everything visible.

For Han, the culture of Data is fundamentally Pornographic—it is raw, exposed, and barren of mystery and therefore meaning. Or perhaps we might say the meaning of everything becomes commodification. Nothing is held sacred because it is all outward focused and driven by the utility of sharing for a “like.” Take a scroll through your Photos app and consider how much of your photo roll was taken with the intention of sharing as opposed to remembering.

Han additionally explores the idea of the cinematic technique of close-up as “pornographic,” such that, even if it is not of a sensitive part of the body, it removes mystery entirely.

I don’t think it is then crazy to push this idea to the comparative quality of photos today against the technologies of the past. The phone cameras now algorithmically fill in the lack of detail. We can zoom incredibly far and still parse the image. Think again of the quality of VHS recording, or the faded polaroid.

Over against the Pornographic is the Erotic. The Erotic attracts because there is mystery in it. It is veiled. It leaves room to wonder and to question.

I suspect everyone who looks at the above image will see it differently. The lack of clarity is actually an invitation to piece together a narrative. I would claim it is Erotic, by Han’s definition. And as you begin to provide the narrative, you create and discover the meaning present in the image, as well as it’s personal significance to you.

This is another image pulled from a arbitrarily chosen VHS recording uploaded to the Internet Archive. I have no personal connection to it, but even still it evokes something in me.

Imagine a similar image but captured with the clarity of the iPhone 17. If I have a question about what they hold in their hand I pinch-to-zoom and have an answer. My questions about the image are answered with a data-like approach.

The personal media produced by the current generation is to be consumed. And so clarity and efficiency and the abolishment of mystery are of upmost importance.

Though Han is using the terms Pornographic and Erotic beyond the limited use we typically encounter the terms, note that Gen-Z has been widely documented to support restrictions on pornography and to oppose sex and nudity in TV shows at a significantly higher rate than Millenials.

Data is ugly. Raw exposure is not beautiful. And Gen-Z seems to be longing for the beautiful.

It has been popular to call Boomers to account for the damage they have caused society economically, socially, spiritually and in, it would seem, any other possible way. So I am trying to pay attention when I start to hear voices calling out Millenials for the destruction they bring to the table in their avoidance of sincerity and insistence on blood for injustice.

And here is where I become hopeful.

You have perhaps heard the line “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.” The Millenial generation, enamored, or perhaps simply overwhelmed with tools for the accumulation and processing of data are quick to find the monsters—the CEO whose carbon-footprint is massive, the billionaire who has funded x-many terrorist organizations, the politician who accepted so many dollars from X, Y, and Z—and it is not that this isn’t important. But frankly, I am of the opinion that however valuable the data can be, we humans aren’t meant to process that much. We aren’t designed to be data consumption machines. I am incapable of processing all the pain in the world coming at me in endless feeds. So what do Millenials do with the overwhelm? They focus their rage to attack the monster.

In his Substack Article, “Millenials Tried Being Angry. It Didn’t Work.” Samuel D. James makes a compelling argument that films like “Project Hail Mary” signal a shift from this Millenial posture of rage. He writes:

“There’s reason to suspect that Gen-Z audiences in particular are tired of the guilt, fury, and exhaustion of nonstop activism. Project Hail Mary is a movie for people who care about saving the world but don’t care about assigning blame before they do it.”

Evil is real and must be opposed, but if it is merely opposed without a vision of the good life it hinders, it is simply a pro-forma exercise. It lacks a teleology.

Additionally, when the injury is produced by on-demand, perfectly repeatable data, the wound can never heal. The possibility of forgetting is a necessity for nostalgia to form, but forgetting also allows retelling that heals. A story of pain can be made into a story of redemption if there is space to retell it, space to re-enter the story and walk a different path through one’s memory. This is not to lie to oneself, but to return to the story as the person you have become and see the old world from a place of growth.

Consider the fear many have of AI’s violent takeover when it determines statistically that humans are the most destructive force on earth and should therefore be eliminated. The machine has no narrative, only imminent directive. The Millenial Generation tries to live like the machine, never forgetting, seeking justice.

To return to the Paleo-moderns—they channeled history because not only was there mystery in the gaps that allowed for the construction of narratives, but it also signaled that history might be headed somewhere. It cannot be mere accident that T.S. Eliot eventually became a convert to Christianity (and interestingly even served on an advising council to the Anglican Church with none other than C.S. Lewis!) and many of his works after his conversion do not simply try to understand the present in light of the past, but to understand that history itself is moving toward redemption.
Read the echoes of Julian of Norwich’s famous quote in Little Gidding from Eliot’s Four Quartets

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Compare that to what he concluded in The Hollow Men 17 years earlier.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Hope that looks beyond the darkness.

And so what I hope I see in the work of many Gen-Z artists and following generations is a return to hope. The 90s, sitting on the cusp of great technological development where optimism can run high and is documented in such a way that the viewer can enter in and provide meaningful narratives in the space between VHS tapes and in the rolling scan lines of the screen, becomes a base for the visually oriented artist to plant a flag and look past the Millenial Rage to a better future.

The Backrooms film itself is about a man’s failure to deal with his past. And it does not seem unimportant that Kane Parsons goes back to the 90s, not only to a slower time, but in that time creates a fictional place that provides virtually infinite space. Clark, the protagonist’s, psyche generates the backrooms from the undealt with trauma of his past, an infinite maze where figures from the past spawn in ugly variation. The film itself serves as a caution that data cannot solve our problems. There must be space and we must take time to enter into our stories to process our pain, our history, and even our hopes. Clark, after all, wanted to be an architect, and it seems he accomplished this, but only in the darkest ways. If we will not allow space to exist in healthy ways in our memories, it will come to haunt us in unhealthy ways. We will either create vacancy to fill with meaning, or will live with a vacancy of meaning.

I homeschool my kids. I want them to think well and think differently. I workout and love when my children join in, learning to tune their bodies toward strength and health. I love nature and I think there is profound grace in merely existing in natural places. At least once a year I look at a piece of property in Nebraska, far away from the hurry of modern life, that I could buy outright with the partial equity I have in my California 900-square-foot condo.

As I watch the opening of Captain Fantastic, a man and his children reading great literature around a campfire before breaking into song together, then heading to bed in the home they built and maintain as a tightly functioning unit, I think I’m seeing a glimpse of a dream.

And there is absolutely a lot of beauty in the image.

Ben Cash has retreated with his children into the woods of the Pacific Northwest. They have no electricity. No phone. Not even an address. The plan was that he and his wife would raise them there, the way they wanted, uninfluenced by anything they didn’t want. It would be their own Utopia. But as all Utopias go, things didn’t work out. Ben’s wife suffered from issues that required her removal to a hospital far away.

Despite this guarded, literally conservative approach to the past, it becomes clear that Ben adopts and instills ideologies that actually tear down tradition. What seems like grounded aspiration toward “the good life”, and an authentic liberal arts education, dissolves into a utilitarian will to power. The oldest son, Bodevan, reveals he is a Maoist (one tenet of which is that the works of tradition must be replaced, lest the habits of tradition maintain their power1), and we realize that far from using the wisdom of the past as a lens through which to judge and navigate the present, the works of history are just words and works inside an insulated and isolated environment for the children--and one which cuts them off from the actual operation of the world. Bodevan himself admits as much.

At this point in the film, there would be a beautiful onramp to take this fear-based world of the opening act, and drive it into a place where the children’s love of literature and nature and beauty, where their love for one another and cohesion as a really large family is channeled into a truer and richer vision of what it means to live in the wider world. It does not take this opportunity. And this is where the film begins to falter (and from hereon spoilers will be present.)

The difficulty with a story in which characters aggressively challenge moral centers, either because they exist in the past or because they are ideologically incompatible with lifestyle preferences is that it makes a meaningful landing place for a story difficult to establish.

Ben Cash has a code. He has strong beliefs, and though he makes clear that he and his wife think organized religion is “the single most dangerous fairy-tale ever invented”, one might argue, “You don’t need religion to be ‘moral’.” As it turns out, for this film, you can actually ignore that philosophical question because by any reasonably acceptable standard of morality, Ben fails. Disgusted by the offerings of a restaurant (at which they were presumably going to dine and dash), they leave and execute an elaborate plan to steal all the food they want from a grocery store (including a birthday cake with which to celebrate Noam Chomsky Day). They steal the food and they celebrate. Spouting mantras like “stick it to the man,” and “power to the people”, and this after dismantling businesses run by people we have no reason to believe are any more well off than they are.

The third act could have been an atomically impactful gut punch in concluding the story of a man who desperately loves his kids and is willing to sacrifice everything for their sake. However, at his wife’s funeral—the objective destination of the story—metaphorical funeral bells begin to sound for the weight this story carries.

Ben has led his children across the country to take them to their mother’s funeral so that he and they can have closure. He has been threatened with arrest if he shows up, but even still, he defiantly enters church, steals the stage and in his eulogy states:

It was at this point that the film cut itself off at the knees. I have been profoundly impacted by films that take deep issue with organized religion. That is not my qualm. The issue is the insistence on the children’s mother as being nothing more than “rotting flesh.” So why’d they come? Why does this matter? Why does all of this drama need to happen? And at the end of the day the answer is, “Because Ben wants it to.” That’s it.

The story cannot reach beyond this point. It has torn down anything it could have reached for because the world of the film refuses transcendence.

It actually brought to mind another film that tried a similar push for impact without transcendence—Everything Everywhere All at Once. I really did enjoy that film, but after all the relentless chaos, energy and story the filmmakers attempt the line, “Nothing matters, so we have to be kind.” and my response, “WTF? Why? Why not ‘Nothing matters, so prey upon the weak. Nothing matters, so murder those who annoy you. Nothing matters, so exploit everybody and everything you can get away with.” These are all equally valid conclusions—assuming we want to allow that “validity” can even have meaning here without the ability to reach beyond the material.

Sadly, from the funeral scene on, Captain Fantastic falls into a weak sentimentality. Where else could it go? Having established that Mrs. Cash is only rotting flesh, the children continue to warmly fawn over that rotting flesh until they can burn that rotting flesh by the seaside and dump her ashes in a toilet at the airport (which was her request). Be reverent or don’t, but the attempt to do both does not land here.

(Martin-Shaw inspired aside: I did think it deeply meaningful that the children had contact with the body of their deceased mother. We live in a culture that lives in mortal terror of death and tries to tuck away in corners and under carpets. Here Ben allows his children to mourn well and we could learn a lot from it. Transcendence is on display, whether or not the filmmakers acknowledge it.)

It is frustrating to me, because in many ways the filmmaking is astounding. The patience Matt Ross exhibits in following Ben and his struggle with how he should lead his children into the world is beautiful. The final shot of the film is a moment to live in, and Ross’ choice to cut all music and allow us to sit with the sound of the family living together is truly marvelous. But the question of “why does this matter?” looms too large in the frame for the story to have the impact it seems to want to have.

(We could also talk about Ben’s choice to have his kids attend the local public school, for which they will be so profoundly over equipped that it could have been played as a joke.)

Stories are echoes of the larger story we live in through redemptive history. You can try and live off the borrowed capital from the Old World which infused everything with Transcendent weight. But if you actively defy anything beyond the material world, you will inevitably land in the realm of the arbitrary where you can do or not do, but nothing will ever amount to anything more than an opinion.

The film certainly divided the audience in that theater. The man to my right stood up during the closing credits and told his girlfriend that it was the worst movie he’d ever seen. My friend, who sat to my left, not hearing this comment looked me in the eye to state that this was “The End of Cinema.”

He did not mean that this was the concluding chapter in the history of film, but that what Malick had done in his intensely controlled, but emotionally lush, thematically rich combination of visuals, dialogue, sound and music is the very thing that cinema was uniquely designed to do. Cinema found culmination in this work. The Tree of Life could not exist in any other form. It would not be a good book. It certainly isn’t a song. Impossible as a stage play. It does and can only ever exist as film.

Three years before the The Tree of Life was released, in 2008, I saw trailers for the Wachowski Brothers’ Speed Racer. It looked stupid. The ridiculous saturation. The cliched lines. Unintelligible flashing lights trying to pass for action. And after the profound disappointments of the Matrix sequels and V for Vendetta, I had exactly zero interest in seeing it. If I had any doubts in my resolve and had cared to read critical reviews (which overwhelmingly panned it), I would have been steeled in my opinion that this was not a film worth my time.

Here we are 18 years later, and in that intervening time, I never stopped hearing voices—often of those I respected deeply—using phrases to describe the film as a “misunderstood masterpiece” or “an avant-garde blockbuster that was too ahead of its time.” I saw Jupiter Ascending—the first film I ever hated—and read about the travesty of Cloud Atlas, which continued to affirm my opinion that The Matrix was a fluke and the Wachowskis have no actual talent for filmmaking.

But the voices didn’t stop. “The greatest racing film ever made.” “Should have won the Oscar for Editing.” “An art-house film disguised as a racing movie for kids.”

So this past week I caved. I teach high school film classes. It was Senior Ditch Day and AP exams were happening at the same time, which meant my class attendance was virtually non-existent. Why don’t we give it a go for the few stuck in the screening room with me?

I’ll say it. “I was wrong.” And I have never seen anything like Speed Racer.

In the final racing sequence of the film—amidst a blur of flashing lights, blurring lines, car sounds and flashbacks—I was surprised to recall my friend’s statement about the The Tree of Life as “the End of Cinema”. And in one particular moment during which I could no longer parse individual images—even if the film where paused, I could not tell you what I was looking at—I still had no doubt what was happening. It was emotion painted on celluloid, and in total service to the story.

But it is not just speed and overwhelm on display. Michael Bay is another filmmaker often, and perhaps rightly derided for form over substance, but I would defy anyone to claim he isn’t a master of visual exposition. The opening of Armageddon is case in point. Several storylines kicked off with minimal dialogue and zero confusion. It may not change you, or ask anything of you, but for what it is, it is masterful. So too here we see the visual medium used in ways to create meaning in exclusively cinematic ways.

Speed Racer is not the first to utilize the techniques that it champions, but is the only film I’ve seen to make it part of it’s essential vocabulary. What other filmmakers might do once in their film with a wink and played for laughs, the Wachowskis fully commit to. Instead of shot-reverse-shot, in a film about speed, why not just whip the camera from car to car.

Is it ridiculous and over the top? Absolutely. Does it play perfectly into the momentum and emotion of the moment? Absolutely.

It’s fun to imagine the early pioneers of film being confronted with the pure cinema on display here. What would the Soviets, who theorized techniques of film editing based on the limited film processing techniques of the 1920s and 30s, say when faced with the vision of a character as a child, transitioning to a shot of the same character as an adult via the head of a character in a third location providing commentary that contextualizes both shots at the same time?

A cocktail of Pudovkin’s “Parallelism,” showing two different incidents occurring at the same time, his “Simultaneity,” which we commonly refer to cross-cutting between two scenes happening at the same time, “Leitmotif,” which repeats shots to create a cumulative meaning over the course of a film, all assembled in a comprehensive blend of Eisenstein’s “Metric,” “Rhythmic,” “Tonal,” and “Overtonal” montage.

Buckle up, Comrade.

To put a fine point on it—the strength of this film is the editing. With perhaps the exception of some quieter family moments, every single shot is planned to the nth degree because of an intricate tie to the shot that comes before and the shot that comes after (or, as seen above, simultaneously!).

Lest anyone walk away from this with the impression I think The Tree of Life and Speed Racer ultimately stand on equal footing, I’ll say clearly: The Tree of Life is the sort of film you watch, rewatch, digest and walk differently afterwards. Speed Racer, well, not so much. Though it is worth saying out loud that despite the incredible play the Wachowskis use in the film, there is a genuinely sincere core, which is perhaps why the film works. Every other film I’ve seen where “MORE!” felt like the guiding principle could not take itself seriously at any point. And yet, at the center of this story is a nuclear family who cares, who expresses care, and who stick together. The filmmakers don’t seem to be winking at the camera either—”See isn’t this cute in the middle of this chaos”—and I think it serves as a landing place for minds and senses overwhelmed by the rest of the movie.

Will Speed Racer endure? I don’t know.

Is Speed Racer the “End of Cinema?” Hardly.

But I do believe Speed Racer is a place where many could rediscover the play that ought to be present in a work of art and to be inspired to continue to push the medium to create greater meaning and joy in the stories that are told.

Watch this silent, 8 second video excerpt from John Hess' awesome Filmmaker IQ series.

Now reflect on how you felt and what you thought about as you watched.

I'll presume you thought something like "that man was confident, was attacked, then afraid." Maybe you felt vicarious fear on his behalf.

If I'm correct so far let me highlight some assumptions you made.

1. That the man and the gun were in the same place. Do we have confidence that the gun wasn't in Brazil and the man in a research lab in the arctic?

2. That the 3 shots you saw happened sequentially. We assume we are watching things as they happened. Why?

3. That the man is reacting to the gun. Perhaps he is watching a woman across the room trip, and she is try to prevent spilling a bowl of pasta.

4. That something happened before this scene with the man and the attacker.

We could go on, but what is extraordinary about this video (and as we will see, any video that features editing) is that the sequence of shots generated ideas and feelings in your heart and/or mind and you didn't question how it did so.

Let's do it again.

You're likely more aware now of your thoughts and feelings, but isn't it interesting that the EXACT SAME CLIPS, REORDERED, can create an opposite story? More accurately you created an opposite story in your interpretation of the clips.

All of this is happening on a pre-conscious level. You did not reason your way through the 10 seconds --

I see a man. He looks afraid. He likely is afraid. I now see a gun. It seems spatially oriented toward the man. He is reacting to the gun. He is afraid of the gun. etc.

By constant exposure to moving images, we have been trained to intuitively understand the operation of film and video. (Though I even wonder if one who had never seen an edited film, would correctly process a scene when seeing it for the first time.) When an edit occurs, we understand there is a connection between the shot that comes first and the shot that follows. Though it may be more accurate to say we feel a connection between the shots. In the viewing of a film, we are not building an argument, but being guided, even manipulated, on an emotional journey. When editing is done well (and all the other elements of production are working), we are guided right along with the intention of the filmmaker.

So what is the effect of repeating such emotional journeys?

James K. A. Smith, in "Desiring the Kingdom", argues that we are liturgical animals. To (hopefully not too grossly) reduce his argument: Our actions are not primarily a result of an unending chain of rational choices, rather a pre-rational movement toward ingrained desires or "loves." Our loves are shaped by liturgies (and here he uses liturgy not just to describe Sunday morning services, but any activity, secular or sacred, that shapes and aims our desires and thereby forms who we are.) A liturgy might be watching TV after coming home from work, at which point we expose ourselves to various competing images of "the good life." Notice that it's been many years since commercials made arguments for their products. As Smith posits, they've discovered by simply presenting their products within a vision of "the good life as seen on TV," we, who see that vision possibly once every half hour, begin to desire that life and implicitly sense that we need that product in order to achieve it.

I used to believe myself immune to the world of advertising. I worked as a video editor. I knew the tricks advertisers used. I knew their arguments were non-sense. Until one day my wife asked me to buy laundry detergent. I approached the cleaning product aisle and scanned the dozen or so brands of detergent. I focused in on Tide and the generic brand. I told myself "I don't want the cheap stuff." I reached for the Tide. "What's the difference? Is the other cheap in price or actually quality?" I stop and scan the bottles. "What makes a good detergent?" I have no idea. "I'll just get the generic brand." I grab it and begin to walk away, but my gut tells me I've made the wrong choice. My gut speaks "Do I really want my wife to use a laundry detergent that will not produce the happiness that comes with 'the good life?'" I buy the Tide.

This was not rational. But I felt little choice.

***

As I teach Film Studies at a Christian High School, I hear a lot of conversation about and guidelines for film viewing. They mostly boil down to "avoid sex, violence, and profanity. And make sure the 'message' is good." These guidelines might have more nuance, or context, but the driving idea is that if we watch representations of evil, we will be more inclined to evil, with the assumption that representations of evil always operate on the surface level or that they can be uncovered with a critical reading of the film's subtext. And we ought to avoid such representations of evil.

For example, in an imagined film version of "Crime and Punishment" we watch Raskolnikov murder Alyona Ivanovna, the pawnbroker. Assuming our students believe murder to be wrong, they could reason "Alyona did nothing wrong. She should not have been killed. Raskolnikov is a murderer and has committed evil." This would require little more than "looking skills" and a moral center. We could demand more of our students and in a critical reading of the whole film we might conclude that the filmmaker himself believed the murder to be wrong and was using the scene as a piece of his "argument." This reading would recognize actions in the story as illustrative of ideas which combine and contrast to create subtext. Neither reading would be necessarily inaccurate.

So what more do we want? The student has wrestled with the moral implications of Raskolnikov's actions and placed them in a larger worldview context.

In the aforementioned example, we equip our students to recognize the communication of text and subtext created by parsing actions inside the story. But we completely ignored stylistic subtext. Imagine if Quentin Tarantino directed the scene. What we could possibly get is a story that says "this is wrong", but as the film cuts from closeups of the knife, to the glee on Raskolnikov's face, underscored by a soul stirring piece by Quincy Jones, we find our hearts saying, "Hell yes!"

Are the edits and production elements able to be turned into truth claims that we might analyze and assess their validity?

Or, to deal with a concrete example, how might we turn either of the video clips at the beginning of this essay into a syllogism so that we can analyze its truth value?

I don't believe it's possible. Because the edits are not engaging us on a rational level. They are aimed at our heart.

Imagine, or better yet, remember a time when you screened a film for violence, sex and profanity and discovered it had an acceptable amount to view by yourself or with someone younger than you. The film begins and we see a great injustice served against the protagonist. Over the course of the film the protagonist overcomes enormous odds until he finally confronts and (in a PG way) destroys "the bad guy." We cut from the bad guy's look of defeat to the protagonist's relieved face. Our heart rejoices, we might say, because "justice is served--and God loves justice." How often do we see this same pattern? Like water carving a path over time, each destruction of a "bad guy" in such a way orients our hearts to rejoice in his or her destruction. We wait for the Pavlovian dopamine kick as we watch their final downfall. In this way, it serves as a liturgy. But where else is it directing our hearts?

I'd argue that when we watch such a scene, we are not engaged in rational consumption, perhaps weighing the wrongs against the justice served. We are already emotionally connected to the protagonist. We want what he wants and receive the denouement with pre-conscious rejoicing.

It's one of the reasons "Continuity Errors" pass so often in film and television. It's often not that the editors didn't catch it, but that they gambled (most often correctly) that the viewer would be tracking with the film emotionally and the take with the continuity error would better serve the emotion of the scene than trying to be spatially accurate.

So what?

Another article would be necessary to begin an outline of what Christian Education ought to achieve -- Though I'd point any curious reader to James K. A. Smith's "Desiring the Kingdom" as an extremely thoughtful place to begin. But I'd propose that one goal ought to be equipping students to parse and dialogue with the media they encounter in the world--the media which is shaping their hearts and loves.

We require High School students to take 4 years of English courses. Partly, because it is the language we speak and the study of it will allow students to communicate more effectively. But I also believe it's founded on the idea that the written word is where students will encounter and dialogue with culture. I sometimes informally poll my students at the beginning of a school year. "How many of you have read 5 books this year?" Maybe a hand or two. "How many of you have watched at least 10 videos this morning?" Most hands go up. The written word is not the place our students (or let's be honest, most of us) are spending their time. And yet, as they dialogue with film and tv, their equipping has been "watch out for Sex, Violence, and Bad Words."

Like they study grammar in English, to train students to understand the way film and television (and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok etc.) are orienting their hearts, they need to understand the operation of film and television which at bare minimum is the juxtaposition of images over time to create an emotional response to what is represented on screen. And they should understand that the emotional journey, good or bad, wears grooves into our hearts that will eventually direct our actions.

Students, or people, will never be able to watch film and TV on a purely rational level, nor do I think they should. There is great beauty in the emotional journey film can take one on. But as students begin to reflect on their loves, their visions of the good life, if they are not able to parse the formation of their desire through a medium they encounter daily, if not hourly, they will be woefully unequipped to the task. Alternatively, and more importantly, they will not be able to train their hearts to love a beautiful vision of the good life.

The short answer to the question, I believe, is that every element in their production is suffocated by "The Message." At the end of the day, the important thing is not that the employee was entertained or see the great plain of human potential open before them, but that he fully understands that he should not take money out of the cash register, or that she knows the proper way to disinfect a conveyer belt or that coworkers know protocol for announcing an office relationship. Anything that gets in the way of this message theoretically increases the probability that an employee will steal, improperly disinfect, or engage in illicit, covert office romance. Therefore, anything that dilutes the message must be cut.

And I think this is probably fine for the medium of the training video.

But what about films? Shouldn't they communicate good messages?

The issue is that I believe many of the greatest films don't have "a message." Certainly they have a point of view, but in many of the movies I love, the point of view is aimed at a question.

Martin Scorsese's "Silence" is a film I think about often (and already wrote about here). It's the story of two 17th Century Jesuit Priests who smuggle themselves into Japan to preach the Gospel. What they find is that the Christians in Japan are brutally persecuted. The priests are caught and expect the same or worse, but instead discover the Japanese won't touch them. In fact, the protagonist finds he is treated like royalty—with the exception that he is forced to watch the peasants who ascribe to the faith he preaches suffer until he, the priest, recants. And so the priest is forced to consider "Is the preservation of mortal life more valuable than preaching what I believe to be true with all my heart and in fact the key to eternal life? And if I don't preach, will those I have preached to hold fast to the faith? And if I recant and stop their suffering, will they even still hold fast? Am I causing the suffering? Would Christ approve of my decision? Why won’t HE just give me an answer?" By the end of the film we don't have much in the way of answers. Martin Scorsese has said he believes in the Gospel and that the ending of the film is hopeful. But it's not easy and if I were forced to identify what it was saying, I would list off questions.

Film, done honestly, allows it's characters to live and breath and move in ways that might not cleanly support a moral system. But by allowing them this freedom, we gain insight into what makes us human which in turn allows us to test and better understand our moral systems (and so much more!).

I'm going to risk offending here, but I believe all of this directly relates to faith based movies as a genre. In the days when movie theaters were open, I liked to go to the theater and try to identify the faith based films by the first 30 seconds of the trailer. It was always easy because "The Message" was basically announced from the very beginning and hammered home throughout the 2-3 minute runtime. When you get to see the actual film, you discover that the message is no more nuanced.

In fairness, I've heard that the Kendrick Brothers, for example, do not consider themselves to be filmmakers, but preachers who use film. And so why would I hold them to any other standard?

For me, it's just such a violation of the power of film.

Roger Ebert wrote that film is "a machine that generates empathy." In no other art form are you so literally forced to see the world as another sees it. Unless you turn from the screen, you are seeing a story from the angle the storyteller wants you to, in the timing the storyteller wants you to, focusing on the subjects that the storyteller wants you to. Why would we use this power to point the camera at 2 dimensional characters who have no life outside of driving home one very specific moral idea? Why use a feature length film to do what 2 sentences could do more clearly?

I guess it can be entertaining... But it also just becomes another sort of training video, though instead of making cheese burgers, it's instructing you how to be a good Christian.

But what if, instead, we point the camera at our best attempt to capture human beings and the struggles they have with the wild complexity of this fallen world--particularly as they try and follow their moral compasses, to do what is good, to pursue "the good life"? I think this is what the Bible does (and as an aside, I'd point out that the "heroes" of our faith fall short of the clear demands of God's law far more often than the heroes of faith-based cinema).

Can we talk about Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac? I get the parallel with God the Father and Jesus, but we can't just leap over the fact that God adopts the voice of Moloch and demands Abraham murder Isaac for no discernible reason outside a test of faith. Truly, I believe in the goodness of God, but I have questions, and I defy anyone to give me a simple explanation for what's going on here. To simply jump to "God will provide" and not to sit in the middle of these questions that certainly Abraham wrestled with is going to short-change us a lot of what the Biblical narrative has to offer.

Christ uses narrative to speak of himself in scriptures, and when does the parable not end with something like "The disciples didn't understand what he was talking about." (Luke 9:45, Luke 2:50, John 10:6, Luke 18:34, John 20:9) Was Jesus a bad communicator? Should he have cleaned up his story to make the message clear?

Let me be clear-- none of this is an argument for lack of clarity as a mark of greatness. And then to return to an earlier distinction-- I think great film does have a point of view, which requires solid beliefs about reality and people. But I believe rather than forcing characters to jump through hoops to prove a moral conclusion, the film allows them to work through human problems in messy ways that might not leave a clear answer at the end, but if it's honest and we wrestle with it, will actually illuminate the moral obligations and challenges in our own life.

If we are trying to prove a point, or convey a message, through film, it's as if we were forging a path through a jungle and focusing exclusively on our destination and the path to it. If someone comes behind and is either not interested in the destination or is starting from a different place, what good or even interest is it to them? Like the training video, if the viewer isn't trying to learn to use the deep fryer or even trying to work at McDonald's why bother with it?

On the other hand, creating a character and sending them off in pursuit of a question is like tracking a wild creature through the jungle. We don't know where they'll go, and it will be messy and we'll probably get hurt, but we'll discover so much along the way. We'll cross dozens of well worn paths. And we may actually still end up where we wanted to go in scenario one. But the thing is, we've been led by a desire for discovery. We haven't forced the journey. Because we're willing to earn some scars, we'll discover realities and beauty far outside our comfort zone. And because of the paths crossed, we will find many other sojourners to invite on our journey through this great "empathy machine". What a powerful place to start loving our neighbor.

One more clarification--I do not mean that the work in pursuit of the question is not focused, or refined. Take "Jurassic Park" as an example. Whether it's Steven Spielberg or Michael Crichton asking the question, I feel the film is exploring man's relationship to nature, particularly in his role as "Scientist." And from the opening shot we see man literally facing off with nature.

How man should respond to nature is carried throughout the film. The Lawyer, the Park Creator, the Paleontologist, the Saboteur, and the Chaotician all provide perspectives on how man ought or ought not to respect nature. And certainly there are lessons to be drawn from what we watch, but because the film maintains integrity in the questions it asks, it allows us to enter in and explore the question from where we are and to see the many sides of the question.

The film then is sort of a recounting of Spielberg's or Crichton's quest to answer the question.

(We might be tempted to think that Ian Malcolm's famous line "Life, uh, finds a way" is actually the message of the movie, but the whole premise of the film is that the dinosaurs did not, uh, find a way and needed to be resurrected from extinction.)

I recall the writer Jeffrey Overstreet saying something to the effect that his favorite works of art are the ones in which it feels like the creator was just about to discover something. And I like that because the posture that allows the creator to discover something is Humility. And isn't that what's lacking in so many "message-driven" films (secular or sacred)? I'm not saying they should be uncertain, compromise truth, or any such thing. But the creators should recognize the limits of their perspective. We are not God and his truth is certainly bigger than our understanding. To uncover the scope of its reality, we will have to trek from home though uncomfortable territory. This requires asking questions we don't know the answer to, and using the means available to us to pursue those answers.

In several lectures, Marilynne Robinson has discussed how literature ( and she would categorize film as a subheading under "Literature" ) can allow us to expand the scope of our experience. Honest reading (and viewing) of Honest writing allows us to compound our experience with the lived and interpreted experience of others. We can see the world so much more broadly. And in turn, to love so much more broadly.

I don't expect a Wendy's rap video could effectively do as much.