Coddling or Civil War

While psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book about today’s rising Anxious Generation is atop the best-seller charts, a documentary based on one of his prior books, The Coddling of the American Mind, is making its way to cinemas and college campuses, criticizing the latter institutions’ tendency in recent decades to teach politicized hypersensitivity instead of robust debate. The compelling thing about approaching the issue from a psychological perspective instead of the usual political-philosophical angle is that we get to hear students, in their own words, describe how debilitating and disempowering it is to train themselves to expect microaggressions and oppression at every turn—especially for liberal, non-white immigrant students, who had expected America to be the land of open, unfettered discourse. Until you’ve seen young Nigerians explaining how left-liberalism and intersectional analysis leave them feeling paranoid and socially isolated, you really aren’t qualified to harangue the rest of America about how we need to have a “serious conversation” about race, gender, you name it.

Coddling of the American Mind is but one of 10 recent movies I’ve noticed that wrestle, with varying degrees of sophistication, with the question of how to achieve conflict resolution before the world gets demolished.

The most prominent current cinematic warning about what it looks like when a society can’t resolve its disagreements in a civil fashion is Alex Garland’s admirably straightforward Civil War, which depicts fictional war reporters making their tense way between regional factions in a collapsed near-future U.S., traveling toward an embattled Washington, DC. I’ve seen at least one review call the film a denunciation of Trump and right-wing secessionist sentiment, but it’s pretty evenhanded in making all factions—including the war reporters themselves—look pretty bad (and not implausibly so). Of course, evenhandedness and timeless antiwar sentiments aren’t good enough for the stupid commies over at Jacobin magazine, and their Eileen Jones complains that the film should blame the right and not even mention phenomena such as “Portland Maoists”—nor make an offhand reference to an “Antifa massacre” without clarifying who was doing the killing. Garland gets it right, though: War degrades the morals of all sides, and in the end the worst villain is the strongman who tries to impose unity on all involved. It’s not Stalin in this case, as Jacobin might prefer, but an authoritarian served by homicidal, sadistic troops, and that’s bad enough.

I was pleasantly surprised to see how many of my favorite conflicts were represented in the excellent satirical horror thriller Late Night with the Devil, depicting a floundering late-1970s talk show host (David Dastmalchian) doing battle one night with low ratings, his own egomania, and what may well be an actual demon possessing one of his guests. I hadn’t expected another of the guests to be a roughly accurate parody of one of my intellectual heroes, James “the Amazing” Randi, who like the character seen here started out a magician and ended up using those skills to expose most, perhaps all, supernatural claims as hoaxes or delusions. I also didn’t expect this film itself to produce conflict on another front, namely the debate over whether films should use A.I.-generated imagery, which crops up briefly here as Halloween-themed placards at the in-story commercial breaks. Whether you fear conquest by crass mainstream TV, demonic forces, cynical skepticism, hoaxers, or A.I., Late Night with the Devil has something for everyone.

That would’ve been the trippiest thing I saw this month had I not just seen 2012’s surreal sci-fi/horror comedy John Dies at the End, from writer-director Don Coscarelli, whose Phantasm movies I wrote about one year ago. I noted then that they seemed likely to have influenced the TV show Supernatural, and presumably Coscarelli agrees, since the later John Dies at the End looks in part like a parody of Supernatural, a sort of balancing of the cosmic scales of artistic influence. But the more dreamlike the movie, the more weird coincidences and resonances it tends to spark in the brain, so I was almost unfazed when John Dies at the End turned out to feature Clancy Brown—whose performance as an apocalyptic, reality-hopping Lex Luthor I’d just written about in my column two weeks ago. That’s still a less weird Coscarelli-coincidence than me seeing New York’s skies red from wildfires and a black Hemi muscle car in the streets immediately after I finished watching very similar imagery at the end of the Phantasm films. One of you would let me know if this is all an illusion, right? Or some sort of ironic, nested, recursive reality, like that episode when the (derivative) character Harvey Birdman briefly became an attorney for a (duplicate) Hawkman?

For a nice model of keeping your sanity—barely even yelling or getting angry—after the end of the world, Arcadian offers you an uncharacteristically sedate and fatherly Nicolas Cage protecting his two sons from decidedly unexplained but rather cool monsters who bang on the cabin at night. The convincing, low-key emotional dynamics are what matters here, but for U.S. audiences, the film’s also a rare chance, I’m guessing, to see movie monsters that were probably heavily influenced by the surprisingly baroque ancient monster/shapeshifter lore of Ireland, where Arcadian was shot. Usually, if you can’t quite figure out what a movie monster looks like or how it operates, it’s evidence the special effects budget was low or the writers didn’t think things through. Here, the tension—and the bafflement of the characters about how the world ended up this way—is nicely heightened by the fact the monsters seem to be crazy, confusing, balled-up, long-armed, giant-wheel-forming, snarling-bear-like, pointy-fingered masses of who-the-hell-knows-what.

By contrast, the two main characters in Godzilla x Kong may finally have become boring to me, or maybe it was the two hours of almost nonstop CGI, or the fact this movie is basically just the prior entry, Godzilla vs. Kong, again but much lamer—despite having the same director, the same ridiculous premise, and some of the same cast. At least Godzilla and Kong are learning to work together against a common foe, like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Sumerian warrior heroes who I think I recall being evoked in some of this film series’ early marketing materials, or possibly in a spinoff animated series.

The mainstream DC Comics movies have finally worn me out, so there’s little chance I’ll wander farther afield to see the trans supervillain satire The People’s Joker, out now.

In a sane world, if anyone accused me of being an uptight masculinist for avoiding that one, I’d be able to defend myself by pointing to my eager anticipation of next month’s distaff Mad Max spinoff Furiosa.

But social and philosophical evolution don’t seem to happen nearly as fast in the real world as in the oddly-accelerated, transmogrified fantasy landscape where dwell Furiosa and Max—ostensibly all set within the lifetime of one gruff cop who used to live in a fairly normal world, as you may recall. In the real world we’re still wrestling with the same social conflicts we had in the 19th century, apparently, or so the makers of tales like the acclaimed Poor Things would have you believe. So constraining is male, capitalist society, that film tells us, that a gal’s best hope for freedom is becoming, well, essentially a socialist frankenwhore, which might’ve been a better title. In its least-grating moments, this film feels as if it, along with the works of Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton—not to mention Willy Wonka and steampunk—belongs to some timeless but Baron Munchausen-like style that should henceforth perhaps ditch specific era-names like steampunk or stitchpunk and simply be dubbed whimsypunk. I think we’ve had enough of it, whatever it is. Indeed, I think I enjoyed the comedy-horror travails of the young ballerina vampire in Abigail more than the faux-naïve autistic-leftism of Poor Things, though both could do with a little shortening.

Similarly, call me déclassé if you must, but I bet I’ll also end up next month preferring Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes to the pretentious-looking yet crude eco-drama Sasquatch Sunset (which features Elvis’ real granddaughter playing a Bigfoot). With its logging allusion in the trailer, Sunset looks like it aspires to tell us more about our possible real-world doom than the Apes movies do, but I’m so encouraged by the way the current Apes movies have quietly, unostentatiously recapitulated the films of the original 1960s/1970s series (without the time-travel loop and so in normal chronological order) that I suspect the fifth film in the current series will indeed end up involving caves and a doomsday-bringing atomic bomb. That is to say, very roughly speaking, that if you watch the 21st-century films and think back to the originals, Rise of = Escape from, Dawn of = Conquest of, War on = Battle for, Kingdom = just plain Planet, and perhaps in a few years something will = Beneath.

I’m hoping apes of all kinds, us included, find ways to resolve their ugly differences before that last one ends in a planet-killing fireball. But next week: a column with some revolution, for May Day.

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey