FilmFisher Undefended Lists of 2019

While writing for FilmFisher regularly a few years back, I contributed to a monthly feature called “Undefended,” where each writer submitted a top-five list based on a themed prompt. As you can see below, I really got into making these. With the recent relaunch of FilmFisher and its migration to Substack, I thought it would be nice to revisit my Undefended lists and put them all in one place. Here are the ones I created in 2019. Click on the list titles to see the original articles with the other contributors’ lists.

P.S.: Spider-Man and other Marvel projects, and Westerns by the Coen Brothers and others, make multiple appearances on these lists.

Best of 2018 (January 2019)

1. Best Picture: Mission: Impossible – Fallout

2. Best Director: Bob Persichetti Jr., Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

3. Best Actor: Josh Brolin, Avengers: Infinity War

4. Best Actress: Zoe Kazan, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

5. Best Screenplay: Ethan and Joel Coen, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Marriage (February 2019)

Conventional wisdom would say that most movies either end with the euphoric beginning of a marriage or begin with its bitter end. I wanted to challenge that narrative by highlighting some movies that portray marriages in the middle that are healthy and instructive:

1. William Powell and Myrna Loy’s legendary chemistry would make any of the six Thin Man films worth watching, but the third one, Another Thin Man (1939), has this added bonus: it lifts a scene right out of Chesterton’s Manalive (probably accidentally). One of the ways Nick and Nora Charles stay in love is by pretending they’ve never met before.

2. In It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), George Bailey (James Stewart) discovers that his marriage to Mary Hatch (Donna Reed), far from distracting him from his sense of mission and vocation, is actually one of the key reasons he is able to do real good in the world. [To a lesser extent—but I’d hate to leave it out—the same idea is at play in 2006’s Amazing Grace. In it William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffud) regains his resolve to fight the slave trade (and recovers his singing voice, literally at the altar) when he marries Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai). After the wedding, however, the marriage subplot largely recedes into the background, hence the bracketing of this example.]

3. In A Beautiful Mind (2001), the courtship of John and Alicia Nash (Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly) is sparked by the volatile fuel of eros, but through adversity their marriage matures and is sustained by agape.

4. In The New World (2005), John Rolfe (Christian Bale) marries Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), even though she is still in love with Captain Smith (Colin Farrell). When Smith reappears, their commitment to each other is tested and confirmed. Ultimately it is death and not another lover that severs their bond, all too soon – yet neither of them parts with any regrets.

5. Tie: In Disney movies it is hard to find a functional nuclear family, and in superhero movies the heroes rarely ever get married or have kids. But in The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), the marriages and households of Pacha and Chicha (John Goodman and Wendie Malick) and Clint and Laura Barton (Jeremy Renner and Linda Cardellini) serve as oases of stability and joy in the midst of worlds turned upside down by self-love and self-reliance. (Surely it isn’t a coincidence that Tony Stark is a less over-the-top version of Kuzco, or that both families live in the countryside, have two young kids (a boy and a girl), and are expecting a third.)

Double Features (March 2019)

I have ordered my choices by the time gap between the films’ releases, from the shortest to the longest.

1. Ratatouille (2007) and The Wind Rises (2013) — 6 years: Legendary auteurs in animation meditate on the meaning and value of the creative life by telling the stories of craftsmen who work in non-artistic mediums. (Fun Fact: Both craftsmen are coached by imaginary personifications of their European-accented idols.)

2. A Civil Action (1998) and Amazing Grace (2006) — 8 years: A life spent and a career risked showing mercy and seeking justice can never, in the grand scheme of things, be considered wasted. (Consider this: Amazing Grace is one of the best films about Christians ever made, but the people most responsible for its excellence are probably not Christians. And A Civil Action arguably has a more compelling conversion story or moment than any movie by or about Christians.)

3. Citizen Kane (1941) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) — 21 years: Somehow two of the most towering achievements in the history of cinema are also two of cinema’s most terrifying indictments of the hollowness of human greatness. Life is hell when we try to be our own gods, let alone the gods of others.

4. Triple Feature (I had to break the rules somewhere): The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), and Where the Wild Things Are (2009) — 32 years: Our imaginary friends are among our earliest teachers. They helped us know ourselves, understand our worlds, cope with our earliest traumas, and ultimately grow up. Perhaps our imaginary friends also taught us to love our real ones, and prepared us to seek after the friend who, though invisible, is more real than anything we see.

5. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and The Truman Show (1998) — 52 years: While we pursue the American Dream of comfort and respect, what we really need is to be a part of a genuine, interdependent community, and to know the God who is both sovereign and good.

Heroes (April 2019)

5. Tie: Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2011-2019) and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) in the Mission: Impossible franchise (1996-2018—minus M:I:2). Two mythic American boy scouts who sacrifice their personal lives for the sake of what they hope is the greater good. Two men who, in their commitment to protecting the little guy, often find themselves at odds with the institutions that enlisted them for that very purpose. “I’m with you till the end of the line.”

4. Frodo, Sam, Pippin, Merry, Éowyn, Théoden, Faramir, and Aragorn (to name a few) in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Although I could have listed the entire trilogy, Return of the King particularly strikes me as a film about a host of heroes. “My friends: you bow to no one.”

3. Neville, Lupin, the Weasleys, and Snape (and many others) in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II (2011). Same principle as with #4. It’s no accident I failed to put Harry on the list. It’s not that Harry isn’t heroic, but what is significant about his story is just how many people are willing to lay down their lives to help him, and how he would have utterly failed if they hadn’t. “I’m sorry. I never wanted any of you to die for me.” “Others will tell [my son] what his mother and father died for. One day, he’ll understand.”

2. The farmers and the gunslingers in The Magnificent Seven (1960). One of the gunslingers, Bernardo O’Reilly (Charles Bronson), insists he is not a hero and points to a deeper, truer version of heroism. But even he becomes a true hero in the end. “Responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists [your fathers] until finally it buries them under the ground. And there’s nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage.”

1. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) in the Spider-Man Trilogy (2002-2007). It’s not just predictable, it’s almost mandatory. I can’t think of any other film or franchise, superhero-based or otherwise, that deals with heroism so directly or profoundly. “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

Honorable Mention: The multiple Spider-Folk of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018).

Summer Break Movies (June 2019)

1. High Noon (Fred Zimmermann, 1952) – Before Star Wars and superheroes, Westerns were the genre of summer. As in 12 Angry Men, it is also a blazing hot summer day, but here Gary Cooper fails to convince even one person to take his side. Figuring out why that is the case would make for a fantastic post-movie discussion.

2. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) – The epitome of the brainy blockbuster that doesn’t skimp on thrills or on thoughtfulness. It is also a great present-day follow-up to High Noon. Make it a double feature.

3. Treasure Planet (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2003) – I associate the summers of my youth with reading adventure novels, watching epic films, traveling, and growing up. Treasure Planet takes all these things and melds them into a near-perfect package. (Ironically, the film was released in November – but that might help explain why it flopped at the box office.)

4. The Sandlot (David Mickey Evans, 1993) – This list would be incomplete without at least one baseball movie, and Sandlot is about what summer means to us when we are growing up. But if you are looking for a baseball film that is more substantial (and less given to juvenile humor), Field of Dreams or Moneyball would also do.

5. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) – The earliest definitive summer blockbuster, and still one of the best.

The Best Trailers of the Decade (July 2019)

1. Trailer, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012). The Hobbit films went from being disappointing to being outright terrible, but this trailer is still a perfect encapsulation and wistful reminder of all that they could have been. Note to directors: If you can have your composer score your trailer and introduce the leitmotifs of the film, do it.

2. Trailer #1, Foxcatcher (2014). Steve Carell is terrifying.

3. Trailer, Logan (2017). I haven’t even seen this movie, but this trailer is incredible. This is how you use a song to structure your trailer and give it an emotional arc.

4. Trailer, Avengers: Endgame (2019). Sure, much of the trailer is fairly generic, but it opens and ends so well, and Marvel should be credited for how the trailer is 100% emotion and 0% plot. Thanos demanded silence, and he got it.

5. Teaser, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). When you start with a scene that riffs on Wild West showdowns and North by Northwest, use the same tagline as The Phantom Menace teaser, and end with that ominous image and that bombshell, you have figured out the secret to movie trailer alchemy.

The Best Film Music of the Decade (August 2019)

The hymn-inspired True Grit and hip-hop-infused Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse would have been on my list, but since they’ve already been claimed I’ll put two honorable mentions as my #5 and #4.

1. Hans Zimmer Double Feature: Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014).

2. Michael Giacchino: Dawn of / War for the Planet of the Apes (2014, 2017)

3. John Powell: The How to Train Your Dragon Trilogy (2010, 2014, 2019)

4. Alan Silvestri: Selections from the Marvel Symphonic Universe (2010, 2012, 2018, 2019)

5. Justin Hurwitz, et. al: La La Land (2016)

The Best Scripts of the Decade (September 2019)

1. True Grit (2010). Screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on a novel by Charles Portis.

2. Moneyball (2011). Screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin and story by Stan Chervin, based on a book Michael Lewis.

3. Locke (2013). Screenplay by Steven Knight.

4. The Wind Rises (2013). Screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki.

5. Arrival (2016). Screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based on a short story by Ted Chiang.

Tied Honorable Mentions:

• Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Screenplay by Joss Whedon, based on comics created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

• Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017). Screenplay by Rian Johnson, based on characters created by George Lucas.

The Best Performance of the Decade (October 2019)

In chronological order:

1. Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross in True Grit (2010)

2. Andy Serkis as Caesar in The Planet of the Apes Prequel Trilogy (2011-2017)

3. Chris Evans as Steve Rogers in Marvel’s Infinity Saga (2011-2019)

4. Barkhad Abdi as Muse in Captain Phillips (2013)

5. Adam Driver as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy (2015-2019), or as Paterson in Paterson (2016)

FilmFisher Undefended Lists of 2018

While writing for FilmFisher regularly a few years back, I contributed to a monthly feature called “Undefended,” where each writer submitted a top-five list based on a themed prompt. As you can see below, I really got into making these. With the recent relaunch of FilmFisher and its migration to Substack, I thought it would be nice to revisit my Undefended lists and put them all in one place. Here are the ones I created in 2018. Click on the list titles to see the original articles with the other contributors’ lists.

P.S.: There’s a lot of Harry Potter on these lists.

Action Scenes of the 2000s (July 2018)

1. The Mines of Moria chamber fight (“They have a cave troll.”), then the chase (“to the bridge of Khazad-Dûm!”), then Balrog face-off (“You shall not pass!”) in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

2. Another three-parter, the Geonosis arena battle(s) in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), complete with monsters and men, comic relief and pathos, and every young boy’s wildest dream come true: hundreds of Jedi with lightsabers going into battle together.

3. Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and James Norrington sword-fighting on a runaway mill wheel in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006).

4. With the help of only a feather, tiger villain Tai Lung escapes from an underground prison and defeats hundreds of rhino guards in Kung Fu Panda (2008).

5. One last three-parter: Tom Cruise survives drowning, then survives a car chase and crash, then survives a motorcycle chase and crash in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015).

Truths and Lies (August 2018)

1. “Mr. Carter, if the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.” (Citizen Kane, 1941)

2. “Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” (Return of the Jedi, 1983)

3. “Will I lie to myself to be happy? In your case, Teddy, yes. I will.” (Memento, 2000)

4. “We have protected innocence that I’m not willing to give up.” (The Village, 2004)

5. “Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” (The Dark Knight, 2008) / “It is time to trust the people of Gotham with the truth.” (The Dark Knight Rises, 2012)

Teachers (September 2018)

I hope the examples are so similar and specific you won’t mind me listing double. 5 Common Teacher Archetypes:

1. The Gifted “Chosen One” Student Turned Novice Teacher of an Unlikely Resistance: Jack Black’s Po (Kung Fu Panda 3, 2016), and Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2007)

2. The Truly Awful Principal with Cruel and Unusual Punishments for Students Who Use Magic: Pam Ferris’s Trunchbull (Matilda, 1996), and Imelda Staunton’s Dolores Umbridge (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2007)

3. The Hapless, Lanky, and Paranoid Disney Cartoon Teacher Who Should Not Be Teaching: Lou Romano’s Bernie Kropp (The Incredibles, 2004), and Ichabod Crane (The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, 1949)

4. The Morally Ambiguous, Rough-Around-the-Edges Teacher (Complete with Peg Leg and Artificial Eye) Who Mentors the Protagonist Under False Pretenses: Brian Murray’s John Silver (Treasure Planet, 2002), and Brendan Gleeson’s Mad-Eye Moody (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2005)

5. The Whimsical Professor (with an Affinity for Magical Furniture) Played by Jim Broadbent: Professor Digory Kirke (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 2005), and Professor Horace Slughorn (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2009)

Scares (October 2018)

1. While Jonathan goes outside to move his car, Aunt Abby and Aunt Martha go to check on the window seat… (Arsenic and Old Lace, 1944)

2. After the Halloween party, Ichabod Crane rides into the forest… (The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, 1949)

3. Donovan chooses, poorly… (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989)

4. The drums, the disappearance of Alan Parrish, and the mosquitos… (Jumanji, 1995)

5. Harry and Hermione follow Bathilda Bagshot to her house… (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I, 2010)

America (November 2018)

In order of historical period:

1. John Adams miniseries (Tom Hooper, 2008)

2. Good Night, and Good Luck. (George Clooney, 2005)

3. JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991)

4. Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014)

5. The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

Time (December 2018)

1. In less than an hour and a half, a marriage begins and is severely tested, a career of public service ends in defiant bitterness, and the true character of an entire community is exposed in all its cowardice and pettiness in High Noon (1952, dir. Fred Zinnemann).

2. A time-obsessed, proudly resourceful man is humbled by three years of isolation on an island in Cast Away (2000, dir. Robert Zemeckis).

3. A man and his wife learn the secret to slowing down time, grow old together in a dream, and return to waking life as middle-aged adults, only to be haunted by the repercussions of tampering with time in Inception (2010, dir. Christopher Nolan).

4. The audience witnesses the mundane yet beautiful moments of seven ordinary days in the life of a bus driver/poet and his artist wife in Paterson (2016, dir. Jim Jarmusch).

5. Six parables on the shortness of life and the brutal and banal suddenness of death in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018, dir. Ethan and Joel Coen).

Bonus Round: In what could have been the seventh chapter of Buster Scruggs, with a similar concept as the one found in Inception, three brothers attempt to outwit Death with his own instruments in the animated montage of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I (2010, dir. David Yates).

Reintroducing FilmFisher

I am pleased to announce that the Christian classical film-review website FilmFisher was relaunched recently, now on Substack. Please consider subscribing!

Thanks to then-editor Timothy Lawrence, I wrote a number of reviews and articles for the site from 2018 to 2021, and a few of those pieces have been migrated over to the new site:

• An Ode to Po: Celebrating Goodness in the Kung Fu Panda Trilogy

• Avengers: Endgame

• Wonder Woman and the Bronze Serpent

Mend My Rhyme, Ten Years Later

It’s surreal to think that it has already been ten years since I released Mend My Rhyme: The George Herbert Project, on April 4, 2015. In this short, seven-track album, I took eight poems by the Anglican devotional poet George Herbert (1593-1633) and set them to music, singing five of them, reading two of them, and—yes—making an attempt at rapping one them. I listened to the album again this week and was pleased to find I’m still happy with it.

The Inspiration for the Album

I had been introduced to George Herbert’s poetry in my British Literature class during my senior year of high school. Three years later, during my sophomore year of college, three things converged in Spring 2014 to give me the idea for making a tribute album. First, I had been listening to Heath McNease’s album The Weight of Glory (2012) and its “hip hop remix” The Weight of Glory: Second Edition (2013); in both versions of the album, each song is inspired by a different work by C. S. Lewis. Second, I was memorizing Herbert’s “The Pulley” to recite it, and writing an essay to analyze it, for an English composition class. Third, I had been working on an instrumental track in Apple GarageBand, just for fun. When it somehow occurred to me to wonder if “The Pulley” could be read over that instrumental, and it worked, I realized I could do a project in the style of McNease’s Lewis tribute, only this time almost all the words (I invented a chorus for “Paradise”) would be the author’s own.

Incidentally, the initial reason I became interested in Herbert’s poetry in high school was because of what Lewis had said about him. In the memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes that, while he was still an unbeliever, he found that Herbert “seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment; but the wretched fellow, instead of doing it all directly, insisted on mediating it through what I would still have called ‘the Christian mythology’. … The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed [as] … Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores” (HarperOne, 2017, pp. 261–262).

The Structure of the Album

I realized that the poems I had selected from Herbert’s book The Temple generally fell into two broad thematic categories: poems about restlessness apart from God, and poems about finding rest in God. This “rest”/“restlessness” contrast is explicit in the first track, “The Pulley.” From there I discovered I could order the tracks in a fittingly poetic fashion. I hadn’t yet discovered and become obsessed with chiastic structure—but of course the structure would turn out to be very close to chiastic.

• Track 1, “The Pulley,” is about restlessness, and the poem is read (A1).

• Track 2, “Paradise,” is about rest, and the poem is sung (B).

• Track 3, “Vanity II,” is about restlessness, and the poem is sung (C).

• In track 4, “Love I and II,” “Love I” is about restlessness, and is rapped, whereas “Love II” is about rest, and is sung (D).

• Track 5, “Denial,” is about restlessness, and the poem is sung (C).

• Track 6, “Love III,” is about rest, and the poem is sung (B).

• Track 7, “The Dedication,” is about rest, and the poem is read (A2).   

The Artwork of the Album

I had a lot of fun working with my friend David Rhee to create the cover and liner notes booklet for the album. Because I took centuries-old poems, which Herbert would have written by hand, and turned them into very modern songs, which I produced using only digital instruments, we wanted the artwork to reflect that convergence of old and new, organic and artificial. David also wanted me to have a hand—literally—in the production of the artwork. For the cover, David put a parchment-like texture, covered with the words of the poem “Denial,” in the background, and put my handmade trace of Herbert’s portrait, enmeshed with two intersecting red bars (suggesting a cross and modern art), in the foreground. Inside the booklet, each track was given its own page. For tracks 2 through 6, we found stock images online that fit with the themes or imagery of each poem, and I traced them by hand just as I did the Herbert portrait. For track 1, “The Pulley,” we couldn’t find a good image of a pulley lowering a bucket, so I drew that from scratch. For track 7, “The Dedication,” David took a photo of my own outstretched hands for me to trace.

What I Would Do Differently

Herbert scholars and lovers of classic poetry generally may be horrified by what I’ve done with these poems, but I was relieved, on revisiting the album this week, that at least I didn’t do as much violence to the construction of the poems as I might have. My one regret in terms of respecting the source material is that the way I interpreted “Love I” and “Love II” ignores Herbert’s punctuation and line breaks. I had an underdeveloped understanding of the craft of poetry at the time of composing the tracks, but the semester I was finishing up the album I wrote another essay on Herbert, this time on “Easter Wings,” which helped me appreciate how Herbert uses line lengths and enjambment. If I had composed “Love I and II” even a few months later, I might have tried to pause a musical phrase only where there was a comma, period, or line break in the poem, so that the shape of the songs would always match the shape of the poems.   

The other things I would differently would be to not experiment so much with the stereo mix, and to not record the vocals for all the songs in a single half-day session. Granted, I was renting a recording booth and I had one chance to get it all right, but that wasn’t a good choice for my voice.

Introducing Rearview Mirror

I just launched a Substack called Rearview Mirror, which I will be using to post a monthly recap of everything I published online the previous month (articles, Notebook posts, Jedi Archives posts, Letterboxd reviews, etc.). The debut post can be viewed here. For a streamlined way to keep up with all my work across the web, or to show your support, please subscribe to Rearview Mirror.

New Article: 32 Books for 32 Years

When I published the article “31 Albums for 31 Years” in August, I wrote that “Here’s hoping there will be a ‘31 Books for 31 Years’ article soon, and not a ‘32 Books for 32 Years’ article later!’” Oh well.

A P.S. on Letterboxd

In my last post, I explained the rating system I use when reviewing movies on Letterboxd, which I referred to as “Facebook for Film Buffs.” On that note, it’s worth noting and expressing my appreciation for how unlike Letterboxd is from Facebook and other social media platforms.

What with the recurring temptations to compare my circumstances to that of others or get angry at someone’s half-baked or insensitively-worded opinion, I’ve found checking Facebook to be spiritually hazardous. But checking Letterboxd does not tend to upset my mood if I’m having a good day or worsen my mood if I’m not. Sure, every once in a while I will read a film review on Letterboxd that bothers me, but that’s much better than getting depressed or worked up almost every time I check Facebook. I also have more control over what appears in my feed on Letterboxd than I do on Facebook. It helps that, whereas Facebook has become overrun with advertisements and the algorithm favors the “friends” who post the most, Letterboxd doesn’t disable my ad-blocking browser extension and I only follow a few other users. It also helps that I don’t know personally most of the users I follow: if I should decide to unfollow one of them, it’s less emotionally taxing to do so than to “unfriend” someone. 

I am not on any other social media platforms, but I feel reasonably confident in guessing that Letterboxd doesn’t feed into self-aggrandizing performativity like Instagram does, into political polarization like Twitter/X does, or into the diminishment of attention-spans like TikTok does. Maybe some Letterboxd users are bent on amassing followers by any means necessary, and no doubt some vitriolic users and comment sections should be avoided. Maybe there are some users who restlessly flit from page to page for hours on end without reading any of the longer, more substantive pieces of amateur criticism. But I don’t think the platform’s very architecture incentivizes these behaviors, as is the case elsewhere. It doesn’t seem to have the same addictive properties and character-deforming tendencies.  

Maybe the reason Letterboxd works so well as a social media platform is that it is about only one, and one very specific, thing: movies. People join the site because they love to watch movies, to read and write about them, and to share and find recommendations. There is no other reason to create an account. On other platforms, a user is more likely to be tempted to use his account to promote himself or his pet causes. But Letterboxd doesn’t work as well for crafting a public persona or building a brand. It doesn’t turn the user’s attention back on himself, but to something outside himself. 

Of course, the temptation that C. S. Lewis describes in The Great Divorce, to love what you have to say about something rather than love the thing itself, may be ever-present for anyone who engages in film criticism, online or anywhere. And Letterboxd does have serious flaws. But  they aren’t the same flaws as the ones that have made the other major social media platforms so destructive for individuals and our social fabric.

How I Rate Films

Five years ago, in the beginning of 2020, I started using a rubric when rating films on Letterboxd. I had been using this “Facebook for Film Buffs” website for logging and reviewing films for a few years already, but I became dissatisfied by the lack of precision and consistency in my star ratings. For example, two films could each receive four stars from me but for different or even conflicting reasons. So I created a rubric that takes into account each of the driving factors I consider when evaluating a film. It was an experiment at first, but five years of using it has proven its usefulness and reliability. I haven’t made any changes since I instituted the rubric in February 2020, except that one year later I added “Excellent Films” alongside “Favorite Films” as an alternate designation for five-star films—because not all the films I consider excellent are my most favorite, and not all my favorite films are the most excellent.

The rating system has four categories: Content, Craft, Rewatchability, and Recommendability. The first two categories are more objective and have to do with artistic quality. The second two are more subjective and have to do with whether or not I think the film worth dwelling on or commending to others. This way I can recognize a film for being well-made while registering my strong disliking for it, and I can celebrate a film I love even while acknowledging its flaws.

The Rubric:

CONTENT
5 points: A masterclass in screenwriting/storytelling
4 points: Accomplished screenwriting/storytelling
3 points: Skilled screenwriting/storytelling
2 points: Competent screenwriting/storytelling
1 point: Incompetent screenwriting/storytelling

CRAFT
5 points: A masterclass in filmmaking
4 points: Accomplished filmmaking
3 points: Skilled filmmaking
2 points: Competent filmmaking
1 point: Incompetent filmmaking

REWATCHABILITY
5 points: Film friend
4 points: I want to watch it again
3 points: I am open to watching it again
2 points: I am unlikely to watch it again
1 point: I won’t watch it again
0 points: I regret watching it at all

RECOMMENDABILITY
5 points: Strongly recommended
4 points: Recommended
3 points: Recommended with reservations
2 points: Ambivalent
1 point: Not recommended
0 points: Do not watch!

The Rating Scale:

The points from each category are added up, divided by four, and rounded up to the nearest whole or half star rating. To each star rating, I’ve attached a representative adjective (or two, in the case of five-star films) that I think fairly describes virtually all the films to receive that rating.  

19–20 Points = 5 Stars = Favorite/Essential Films
17–18 Points = 4.5 Stars = Excellent Films
15–16 Points = 4 Stars = Great Films
13–14 Points = 3.5 Stars = Good Films
11–12 Points = 3 Stars = Decent Films
9–10 Points = 2.5 Stars = Passable Films
7–8 Points = 2 Stars = Mediocre Films
5–6 Points = 1.5 Stars = Failed Films
3–4 Points = 1 Star = Bad Films
2 Points = 0.5 Star = Terrible Films

The Rationale: 

When evaluating Content, I am thinking about the narrative: plot, pacing, character development, dialogue, theme, and the moral vision or lack thereof implied by all of these. I think the best films in this category, what I call “Masterclasses in Screenwriting/Storytelling” (which I keep a running list of here), would be great picks for studying how to create narratives for the screen, stage, or page.

When evaluating Craft, I am thinking about all the big and little things the cast and crew are doing to realize the narrative through visual and auditory means: casting and acting, production design, cinematography, editing, music, sound design, and special effects. I think the best films in this category, what I call “Masterclasses in Filmmaking” (which I keep a running list of here), would be great picks for studying what these various arts can accomplish when used to their fullest potential.

I keep the Content and Craft categories separate, because a great script could be given less-than-great execution, and the beauties of an excellently-produced film can often make up for deficiencies in the storytelling.

I don’t give 0s in the Content or Craft categories, because even incompetently written or incompetently produced films evidence some talent behind them. How else would the project have seen the light of day and come to my attention, let alone persuaded me to give it a try? Having made some films myself and knowing how many skillsets and resources and how much perseverance and tenacity it requires to finish one, I’ll give any film some credit just for existing.

When evaluating Rewatchability, I am thinking about how much time I would want to spend with the film in the future. Is this a film I want to revisit? Is it one I can see myself rewatching many times? Here I am not only considering how much I enjoy the film but the shaping influence it could have on me: would that influence more likely be for good or for ill? I think the best films in this category, what I call “Film Friends” (which I keep a running list of here), are the ones that have had the most positive influence on me so far and the ones I want to keep having the strongest influence on me. (I got the term “Film Friends” from reading an article by my friend Timothy Lawrence.)

When evaluating Recommendability, I am thinking about how readily and enthusiastically I would encourage someone else to watch it. With so many films that one could benefit from watching, so many films that one could be harmed by watching, and so many films that, if nothing else, could be a waste of one’s time, I think I have a responsibility to others to make careful distinctions between levels of recommendation and levels of non-recommendation. I think the best films in this category, designated as “Strongly Recommended” films (which I keep a running list of here), are the ones I could most heartily encourage almost anyone to watch, provided it is appropriate to the person’s age or tastes.

I keep the Rewatchability and Recommendability categories separate, because there are some films I love for particularly anecdotal reasons and therefore others may not find the same value in them, and there are some films that I think everyone who values great filmmaking should see but I don’t have as personal a connection to them. 

It’s possible for a film to be so awful I would give it 0s in the Rewatchability and Recommendability categories, but in the past five years the worst scores I’ve given have been a few 1s. This is either because I’m too forgiving and hate being harsh; or it’s because I can reliably predict which films I would most regret watching and would most emphatically urge others not to watch, and so I won’t watch them to confirm my suspicions; probably it’s both.

Fun Facts:

• From the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2024, I rated 357 films with this rubric. 

• The score I assigned the most in those five years was 16 points (which translates to four stars), given to 69 films. The next most common score was 14 points (which translates to three-and-a-half stars), given to 49 films. This tells me my scoring system is well calibrated. I think there would be a problem—either with my system or with my critical disposition—if most films scored either very high, very low, or around the median.

• To date, the lowest score I have given to any film using this rubric is four points to Spider-Man: No Way Home. In contrast I have given a perfect score of 20 points to 31 films—not a few, but not many. I call the films that score fives in all four categories “The Essentials” (and keep a running list of them here).

• At the time of writing this post, I have 56 films listed as “Masterclasses in Screenwriting/Storytelling,” 77 films listed as “Masterclasses in Filmmaking,” 52 films listed as “Film Friends,” and 68 films listed as “Strongly Recommended.” This indicates, rightly, that I am most picky about what films I embrace as friends and the most broad-minded in how I judge something to be a masterclass in filmmaking. It must be because I am a writer and a literature scholar that I am more picky about what scripts I call masterclasses than I am picky about which films I can strongly recommend. The record of the past five years shows that my first desire for a film is that it be good for me; my second is that it tell a good story exceedingly well; my third is that it be good for others; and my fourth desire for a film is that it be made with excellence all around.

Looking for Home Across the Stars, Redux

Last October, I wrote a long post and a short follow-up post on homes/homelessness in Star Wars. Now, over at The Jedi Archives, I have a new post about the significance of the Lars homestead in Episodes II, III, IV, and IX. 

There is a homecoming at the end of the Skywalker Saga, but although a specific location is involved the homecoming is spiritual rather than geographical.

New Article: 31 Albums for 31 Years

I finally published this article today. It was supposed to be “30 Albums for 30 Years,” but better one year late than never! Here’s hoping the follow-up doesn’t become “32 Books for 32 Years.”

The Jedi Archives: The First Eight Posts

I’m having a lot of fun contributing to Tim Lawrence’s Jedi Archives project. Here are links to my first eight posts:

Pieces of Junk: Escapes from desert planets in the first film of each trilogy.

So Uncivilized!: Escapes from desert planets in the third film of each trilogy.

Dangerous Idealists: Similarities and differences between Obi-Wan, Mace Windu, and Count Dooku.

Doing Her Duty: Parallels between Episodes II and VIII.

Bombs Away!: The significance of the Resistance bombers in Episode VIII.

Jabba the Hutt: An Oligarchic Soul: Jabba the Hutt matches Plato’s profile of the oligarch.

The Empire Strikes Back Against a New Hope: Episodes IV and V form a chiasm.

The Force Awakens from the Revenge of the Sith: Episodes III and VII also form a chiasm.

Some More Dangerous Idealists

In my most recent post for the Jedi Archives, “Dangerous Idealists,” I wrote about how Obi-Wan, Mace Windu, and Count Dooku fall along a spectrum that illustrates how idealism can put someone on a dangerous path toward sacrificing people and principles for the supposed greater good. Two classic works of American literature that I read in the past few months also dramatize this temptation and its consequences.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), the narrator Miles Coverdale joins a nascent utopian community that is doomed from the start—but not, as the reader would expect, because of flaws in its own ideals or the failure of its members to live up to those ideals, though those are issues at Blithedale, too. Instead, the community is ruined chiefly because a prominent member is a more inflexible idealist than everyone else at Blithedale and his ideals are opposed to theirs. Mr. Hollingsworth is a philanthropist who came to Blithedale, it turns out, not because he believes in its vision but because he wants to seize its land for his own social-reform project. He is so convinced of the righteousness of his own cause, he either does not see or does not care about the unrighteousness of lying about his intentions and betraying other idealists. As more than one character realizes, Mr. Hollingsworth will abandon a friendship as soon as he realizes the friend cannot be made into a cog in the machine he would build. But the worst consequence of his zeal is not the communal and relational costs, but the cost to his own soul. As Coverdale summarizes at the end of the novel:

“The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn from Hollingsworth’s character and errors, is simply this:—that, admitting what is called Philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to the individual, whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes. It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart … I see in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan’s book of such;—from the very gate of Heaven, there is a by-way to the pit!” (p. 243 in the 1983 Penguin edition). 

As the adage goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In fact, Hawthorne’s novel warns that the greater the intentions, the greater the peril, since “the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism” (71). The word “egotism” is key. It isn’t actually true that Hollingsworth lives for his ideals, though he may have started that way. He lives for himself. To apply C. S. Lewis’s tripartite terminology in The Abolition of Man, when the idealist Head suppresses or cuts out the relational and principled Heart, the Head won’t be able to subdue the self-seeking Belly on its own.

The language of Head and Heart is a good segue to the other novel I have in mind, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). (I only just now realized this novel was published exactly a century after Hawthorne’s. Uncanny!) In fact, Ellison uses the terms “head” and “heart” frequently enough that I wonder if he had read The Abolition of Man, which came out a few years prior.* At one point, the unnamed narrator who calls himself “an invisible man” gives an impassioned impromptu speech about an elderly couple being evicted from their apartment. He says of the woman that “She’s let her religion go to her head, but we all know that religion is for the heart, not for the head” (p. 278 in the 1995 Vintage International edition). His speech draws the attention of a Socialist-type organization called the Brotherhood, who want to use his oratory to build inroads into the Black community in Harlem—although some in the Brotherhood are worried his speeches are too emotional, even anti-intellectual. One of the brothers says his debut rally speech “was the antithesis of the scientific approach. Ours is a reasonable point of view. … The audience isn’t thinking, it’s yelling its head off” (350, italics added).

For the rest of his time with them, the Invisible Man will be at odds with the organization because he is not willing to sacrifice the claims of the Heart for the agenda of the Head. The leader who recruited him, Brother Jack, believes that “There’s hope that our wild but effective speaker may be tamed”—hope that the Head can subdue the Heart—so “For the next few months our new brother is to undergo a period of intense study and indoctrination under the guidance of Brother Hambro” (351). Later, Brother Jack is even more explicit: “you were not hired to think. … you were hired to talk” (469-470). But the indoctrination fails. The Invisible Man cannot stop thinking in ways that run counter to a rigid ideology that has no real sympathy for his own people. Ultimately he realizes the Brotherhood does not care about him or the Black community at all except as pawns in a much larger game. Brother Hambro tells him at their last meeting that “there’s nothing to be done about [the violence in Harlem following the death of a Brotherhood member] that wouldn’t upset the larger plan. It’s unfortunate, Brother, but your members will have to be sacrificed” (501). Brother Hambro goes on to say, “We follow the laws of reality, so we make sacrifices” (502). To the Brotherhood, only the Head—or more specifically, the heads of the Brotherhood committee—has access to “the laws of reality” and the wisdom to know how to obey them. The Heart is expendable, as it was for Mr. Hollingsworth, and once again the result is not enlightenment and progress but manipulation and betrayal.

[*Here are two suspiciously Abolition of Man-like statements spoken by people in the Brotherhood: [1]  “You have to be pure in heart and you have to be disciplined in body and mind” (394). [2] “At the proper moment science will stop us. And of course we as individuals must sympathetically debunk ourselves” (505).]

Why "Presents"?

“One must choose a corner and cultivate that.” (Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James)

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.” (Master Oogway in Kung Fu Panda)

“[Time’s] present is God’s present, and you should be that: present.” (“Be Present (Live from Catalyst Atlanta)” by Propaganda)

When I created this website in January 2017, seven years ago now, I gave it the name, “Robert Brown Presents.” There were two reasons for this.

First, the name is a nod to the show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (This is also why my picture on the home page is in black-and-white cameo.) Similar to how that show was a way for the great director to share his favorite kinds of stories, this website is a way for me to share the things I’ve made or the things I care about. 

Second, ‘present’ is one of my favorite words in the English language, and I can summarize  much of my life philosophy just by expounding its different senses. Senses 1 and 2: We present presents to others. I want to live my life as a gift to God and neighbor, and make things I can offer as gifts. Senses 3 and 4: When we use the phrase “be present,” we mean presence in place and in the present time. So much of my creative work and so many of my thought projects are attempts to answer the essential question, “How should I live, here and now?” More pointedly, as a Christian on this side of glory, “How should I live in the tension of the already-not-yet?” (If these questions resonate with you, you might enjoy my poems “Yet,” “Ground,” and “Borgesian.”)

Broadly speaking, this is what “Robert Brown Presents” exists to do: to present presents—articles, Notebook posts, poems, songs, podcast episodes—that might help others be present. They’ve certainly helped me.

Introducing The Jedi Archives

For the past several years my friend Timothy Lawrence and I—but especially Tim—have been on a “damn fool idealistic crusade” to change the conversation about Star Wars, emphasizing its consistency and continuity across the decades and its moral-philosophical dimensions. The latest result of that endeavor is Tim's The Jedi Archives, launched on Substack today. Each post will be a short, thought-provoking blurb on some element in the films or shows. (For example, the debut post is on the significance of the monsters encountered in the third film of each Skywalker Saga trilogy.)  Most of the posts will be Tim's, but I will also be contributing with some frequency. If you like Star Wars at all—or wonder what’s the big deal and would like to see it from a new angle—I highly recommend checking it out and subscribing. 

If you are new to Tim’s work on Star Wars, a great place to start is to read the short appendices on “Star Wars Ring Theory” (an idea first popularized by Mike Klimo) and “Tripartite Soul Theory.” If you have an hour or so, another great entry-point is Tim’s talk on Star Wars for Emmaus Classical Academy.

Reading Klimo’s essay and then the explication essays that came out of Tim’s undergraduate thesis changed the way I view Star Wars. In particular, Tim’s focus on the morally-formative intentions of Lucas’s saga rekindled my childhood love for the franchise while also maturing it. My hope is that this blog will do the same for many more once-or-future fans—not just so that more people can appreciate more of Star Wars, but so that Star Wars helps them seek the good life of a balanced soul.

Plato's Republic and Nolan's Gotham, Part IV

For the past few weeks I’ve been writing posts on ways that I see Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy interacting with Plato’s Republic. I’m sure that next time I watch the films I will see even more connections, but for now I’m ready to move on to other topics. To cap off this series, here are three closing thoughts—or rather, as it turned out, three more posts combined together. 

First, although earlier I had written about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, oddly enough I didn’t think much at all about the literal caves Bruce falls into, first in Batman Begins (the cave that becomes the Bat-Cave) and then in The Dark Knight Rises (the prison pit into which he is cast by Bane). Yet these also fit the allegory. 

The scene where young Bruce falls into the well on his family’s estate, and his father descends by a rope to pull him out, supports my suggestion that Thomas Wayne is the closest thing Gotham City has to a philosopher-king. In pulling his son out of the well, he resembles how the prisoner-turned-philosopher returns to the cave to free others of their ignorance. After all, he tells Bruce in that moment, “Don’t be afraid,” and fear is the result of ignorance. To quote Ducard again, “Men fear most what they cannot see.” 

Speaking of Ducard, this scene of Thomas and Bruce in the cave underlines the fundamental differences between Thomas and Ducard, his foil. Ducard, with his corrupted understanding of justice, cannot really lead anyone out of the cave, and while Thomas dispels fear, Ducard instead preys upon it. When Bruce is in the prison pit in The Dark Knight Rises, he learns that Ducard once descended into that cave to exact vengeance on those who killed his wife. Just as when he attacked Gotham in Batman Begins, he did not descend into the cave to liberate captives but to slaughter them. If Thomas represents the aristocratic soul, Ducard represents the tyrannical one.

As Timothy Lawrence and I discussed in a FilmFisher dialogue some years ago, the tension between Bruce and his alter-ego Batman corresponds to how Bruce is caught between these two mentors. The choice he faces is whether to become more like his father or more like Ducard. I see now that this conflict can be rephrased in Platonic terms: Will Bruce, having a timocratic soul driven by a love of honor, evolve into a wisdom-lover or devolve into someone who is ruled by his appetites? 

I think Bruce does become more like his father, and more like a philosopher, in the end. In Rises, he defies his fear in order to climb out of the prison pit; he liberates Gotham from the League of Shadows (again, “Shadows” suggests the shadows of the Plato’s cave); and finally, he passes the mantle of Gotham’s protector to Blake. Significantly, as I pointed out in that FilmFisher dialogue, well before I ever read Plato, “The first scene of the first film has Bruce falling into the cave, and the last shot of the last film has Blake rising on a platform in the cave.” If Thomas descended into the cave to lift out Bruce, Bruce descends into the cave to lift out Blake. Republic envisions a process by which the philosopher-kings would raise up and train their successors, and that succession is reflected in the beginning and end of the trilogy.

Second, for all the similarities between the films and Plato’s Republic, Nolan seems to refute the idea of using myths and useful falsehoods to govern the kallipolis. 

As Plato’s Socrates lays out a theoretical blueprint for the ideal republic, on two occasions Socrates devises a myth that would be used to convince the next generation to abide by the republic’s laws and prefer justice to injustice: The Myth of the Metals in Book III, and the Myth of Er in Book X. The Dark Knight ends and The Dark Knight Rises opens with a myth or useful falsehood invented by Batman. He convinces Jim Gordon to lie about the fate of Harvey Dent, in order to keep the city from being demoralized by Dent’s corruption. The lie does motivate the city to stamp out organized crime, but once the truth is revealed, the results are reversed, and the city is plunged into a worse chaos than before.

In contrast, The Dark Knight Rises concludes with Gotham receiving a true myth to inspire the citizens to justice. The city watches Batman fly the bomb away from the city. Although the audience knows that Bruce somehow escaped the detonation, this doesn’t drain the action of its meaning or nobility. He really did save the city. Blake thinks it unfair that people don’t know it was Bruce Wayne who saved them, but Gordon is right: “They know who it was; it was the Batman.” Earlier in the film, in two different scenes, Bruce/Batman had told Blake and then Gordon that the point of Batman’s secret identity is that “A hero can be anyone.” That is why a statue of Batman—a symbol of justice that can be embodied by anyone—is dedicated at the end of the film, not a statue of Bruce Wayne. This statue represents a better, truer Myth of the Metals or Myth of Er.

Third, I return to the way Plato treats the state of the just/unjust city as analogous to the state of the just/unjust soul. If Bruce becomes more just in the end, does Gotham? 

As I’ve already touched on above, Bruce can be said to become more just because of how he grows to resemble his father, and as I said in the first post, because of how he persists in pursuing justice even when no one rewards him for it. Indeed, when Bruce fakes his own death, for all Gotham City knows, he died a very unjust man. In the Republic, justice is a combination of moderation, courage, and wisdom, but any citizen would be forgiven for thinking Bruce was immoderate (“Look how he wasted his inheritance on pleasures!”) and cowardly (“Look how he ran for cover when the Joker attacked his home!”) and foolish (“Look how poorly he managed his company!”). In reality, the case could be made that Bruce is (or becomes) moderate, courageous, and wise. Moderate, he is never corrupted by the profligate playboy persona he plays before the public. Courageous, he overcomes his fears and holds to his conviction against killing even when he is sorely tempted to abandon it. Wise, he continues to seek after true justice and will not settle for the false alternatives propounded by Ducard (like Polemarchus, that justice involves doing harm to enemies), Falcone (like Thrasymachus, that justice is whatever benefits the strong), the Joker (embracing the view that Glaucon summarizes, that being just isn’t worth the effort), or Dent (that only chance is just).

But what about the city? In the previous post, I closed with the troubling suggestion that, because of its slide from aristocracy to tyranny over the course of three films, “Gotham City would seem to worse off at the end of the trilogy than at the beginning.” And so I find myself in arriving at the same answer as I did at the end of the dialogue I wrote with Tim: it doesn’t seem like Gotham is capable of becoming a just city. Bruce would seem to have failed to make it more just. Maybe Alfred is right and Bruce went about it all wrong, misdirecting his energies to be a guardian of the city as Batman and not doing enough to be a philosopher-king like his father.

However, this may be the result of asking the wrong question, the result of assessing Bruce by the wrong objective. In his own words, Bruce’s objective was never to make the city more just but to give it a vision of justice. He tells Alfred in Batman Begins, before returning to Gotham, that “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I'm flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol—as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.” And if that was the goal, he would seem to have succeeded in the end. Gotham does not become a just city, but with the example and symbol of Batman as its inspiration, it could become one yet.

New Article: 30 Films for 30 Years

I just posted an article on my 30 favorite films. I posted a similar list of 25 films 5 years ago, and had meant to follow that up with lists of 25 albums and 25 books. Maybe this time around I’ll see the project through.

P.S.: I highly recommend this short article by Tim Lawrence. This is what inspired me to start calling my favorite films “Film Friends.”

New Article: Reading with the Jedi

I have a new article, titled “The Dead Speak!: Reading with the Jedi,” that was published today over at the Mere Orthodoxy blog. It combines several of my favorite things: Star Wars, reading and reading ethics, and quoting from C. S. Lewis and Alan Jacobs. I am grateful to Tim Lawrence for his feedback on the early drafts, and to Jake Meador for publishing the article.

Disney Animation and Expressive Individualism

It is often said that Disney films, at least in the past few decades, espouse expressive individualism. I have thought the same thing, and still think it is largely the case. However, over time I have realized that three among my favorite Disney animated films, all three of them from what to me is the most eclectic and daring period in Disney Animation’s recent history—The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), Treasure Planet (2002), and Brother Bear (2003)—each show the dangers of expressive individualism and suggest that maturity involves submitting to community standards and accountability. So, in fairness to the creators of these films, while the generalization is mostly true, we shouldn’t paint all of Disney’s productions with such a broad brush.

First, in my debut article for FilmFisher in 2018, I had this to say about Brother Bear:  

Charles Taylor has described secular individualism this way: “People are called upon to be true of themselves and to seek their own self-fulfillment. What this consists of, each must, in the last instance, determine for him- or herself. No one else can or should try to dictate its content.” [The quotation is from Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard UP, 1992, p. 14.]

This statement could describe the hero’s journey of several Disney protagonists. But Brother Bear subverts Disney’s individualistic mythos. To adapt Taylor’s words: Kenai is never told to be true to himself. That would actually be disastrous, because what Kenai learns about himself is ugly and shameful. In biblical terms, he is a sinner at heart, not a saint. Instead, he is told by Tanana to pattern his life after love, something outside himself. In the end, he does not seek his own fulfillment, but another’s good. If Kenai had had his way, he never would have determined that path for himself. At first, he outright rejected it as folly. Others dictated the content of his attainment of mature manhood. The spirits chose his totem, Tanana and his brothers told him to follow his totem, and the spirits set him on a path to reconciliation when he abandoned his totem. If Taylor is right, and my analysis of Brother Bear is on to something, this truly is a counter-cultural message.

Second, when I wrote an article on Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire in 2020, I argued the former may not be as individualistic as it certainly seems to be:

The trouble with making the moral of the film “chart your own course,” in the individualistic sense, is that the film, intentionally or not, presents strong reasons against that kind of philosophy. Captain Flint charted his own course, and died alone. Silver charts his own course, but realizes “you give up a few things, chasing a dream” — in his case, parts of his own body. Worst of all, Jim’s father, for all we can tell, charted his own course, and he abandoned his wife and son. But the moral exemplars of the film — Sarah, Dr. Doppler, and Captain Amelia — are marked by their principles, discipline, and service. They take initiative and responsibility for themselves, but never without regard for others. Jim matures when he honors his mother, submits to Captain Amelia’s leadership, and follows Silver’s instructions. When Jim does start charting his own course, he fights to protect his friends, not to pursue his own interests. When Silver invites Jim to join him for a life of open, endless possibilities, the course he charts instead is toward a life constrained by limitations. He enrolls in the Naval Academy — and militaries, schools, and military schools especially, are not places for expansive, self-determining individualism.

In the next paragraph, I quoted the same Charles Taylor passage I had used in the Brother Bear article, and then continued: 

Up until I was working on this article, I always thought Silver’s speech exemplified this kind of thinking. That may still be the case. After all, Taylor’s description encapsulates the Disney ethos. But as I now consider the speech within the context of the film, it seems to take on a newer and truer meaning. Perhaps, even as Jim is called to be true to himself, he is also called to be true to others. Perhaps those others still need to tell him who he should be, and even better, help him become who he should be. Otherwise, if Jim pushes everyone away, who will be there to catch the light coming off him?

Third, I haven’t written an article on The Emperor’s New Groove—not yet—but here is the short version of my argument it is not in favor of expressive individualism: Is there any character in all of Disney who is more expressively individualistic than Emperor Kuzco, and isn’t he clearly portrayed as a terribly selfish and destructive person who needs to change and start showing concern for others?

All this leads me to two takeaways: 

One, as seen with Treasure Planet, the characters in these films can say one thing (“chart your own course”) while the story can silently undercut those words (the character saying those words is not a moral exemplar). This is why we have to consider every scene in the context of the whole. We have to consider subtext. 

But, two, this presents a difficulty: the target audience for these films is not very good at detecting subtext. When I grew up watching Silver say “Chart your own course,” I took it as the unchallenged viewpoint of the whole film. Similarly, most of the kids who grow up with Frozen likely do not pick up the irony that “Let It Go” is being sung by someone who, swinging the pendulum too far the other way in a response to a restrictive upbringing, is in danger of hurting herself and others. So, those who are reluctant to show these films to children, lest they encourage them to have a me-first mentality, have a point. However, what if these films could be used to help young viewers, when they are ready for it, learn how to recognize subtext? In the context of a discussion with a parent or teacher, these films that seem to espouse expressive individualism could be used to help inoculate against it.