Time and memory are not nearly as linear or logical as we perceive. There are fleeting moments in waking life or dreams when the past can be touched, tasted and felt. This film feels a hell of a lot closer to that truth than most.

Before the film, we walked the audience through the roles Keaton played in the years around Annie Hall — The Godfather, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Interiors, Reds — to show the range that makes her Annie Hall performance land the way it does.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar came out the same year as Annie Hall and is basically a darker, female Saturday Night Fever.

Interiors is Woody Allen’s quietest film, deeply influenced by Bergman, where the ripping of tape sounds like the explosion of the Death Star.

Reds — my favorite Keaton performance, full stop — is one of the great American films of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Keaton’s work is critical given the context of her contemporaries: Faye Dunaway in Network, Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. Actresses who broke from the theatrical style of the generation before them and brought a naturalism that changed what women were allowed to do on screen.

Aleksy Fradlis and Victoria Brodsky — returning for their third CFS performance — followed with a set of jazz standards from the era. Then we screened the film. Nearly fifty years old, full house, and the whole room was laughing.

Watching Annie Hall on the big screen with sixty-some people, nearly fifty years after it was made — it still works.

La-di-da.

Starsky and Hutch, Swedish edition! In all seriousness this is a pretty great neo-noir that has a ton of French Connection and New Hollywood touches. Love realist, gritty vibe of this whole thing, down to the disgusting “native” fast food the main detectives dine on.

The main plot is fairly convoluted and the political points are pretty ham handed - but who cares? It’s got great car chases and great performances throughout.

Another amazing find from Radiance.

It’s said that prophecy comes in dreams. Dream logic pervades this incredible exploration of religion, humanism, sin and blessings. It’s easy to see how this discomfited the religious powers that be — now and then.  

Like all great works of prophecy it can appear heretical, or satirical or mean spirited. But this is a work as infused with spirituality as one can find in cinema. What more do we want from prophecy?

An unexpected find for the Passover/Easter break, and one of the greatest last screams in movie history.

I wouldn't play a video game based on this movie.

Benny Sadfie! What are you doing here?!?!

Luis Bunuel and I both share a deep and abiding fear of being stuck at a terrible party. This has a lot to say about class and politics and inhumanity - but it’s mostly fun as a claustrophobic horror film. Think Rules of the Game in the Twilight Zone. 

Does not go quite as hard as Virdania (although it goes pretty far!) but yeah - the Bourgeoise remains paralyzed by inaction and weakness.

These old school anarchist/surrealist filmmakers would’ve loved the 2020s

A smoldering burn that becomes a raging inferno. The feudal history of Japan went right over my head, but I’d rather watch this than 14 hours of Shogun any day.

Incredible fight choreography and swordsmanship. Makes you want to play every Samurai video game.

Must check out the better known remake, but this was a massive treat.

It wasn’t until I visited the Foundation Prada in Milan that I truly understood Wes Anderson’s commitment to the modern artists who tried to reconcile the 20th century with the beauty and charm and romance of the 19th.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is his strongest statement on and most explicit commitment to that sensibility. But the Fantastic Mr. Fox might be one his works that lives it most successfully.

I hope he makes these layered, inte films forever.

Trying to find redemption or salvation in other people is a foolish and dangerous delusion. Sometimes people are just terrible, and your own goodness does not rest on their behavior.

Brilliantly deep satire. Not at all what I was expecting.

Always a sucker for heist gone wrong. The Cat is way better than it should be throughout. Unhinged triggermen, a cool but dangerous mastermind, hostages, a femme fatale! 

What more does one want from the movies?

Gordie and Vern and Chris and Teddy are eternally on the cusp of manhood. They dodge trains and smoke cigarettes and tell stories just as they always have. It was good to spend time with old friends.

Movies and literature are the only forms of time travel we have available.

Seeing this tonight on the big screen, with my own children felt like opening an old and faded photo album. It's a great film that stands on its own -- performances, script, set pieces, barf-o-rama. 40 years-on, this film that so expertly captures youthful nostalgia, now feels like a memory of my own.

This essay was originally published for Passover 2025, when Cognitive Frames was still finding its audience. In the year since, many of you have found our publication — and with Passover approaching again, the conversation between DeMille, Kieślowski, and Eisenberg feels no less urgent.

If anything, a year of escalating uncertainty has made the essay's central question — where do we find divine presence when God isn't parting seas? — more pressing.

We hope you’ll take a chance to read or re-read one of our early favorites.

Passover is approaching this week, with an ancient promise of renewal and liberation. It's always been my favorite religious holiday — and it's clearly the most cinematic.

Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) rests easily as one of my favorite films. And despite the fact that it's aired annually on ABC, homaged by everyone from Mel Brooks to Eddie Murphy to James Cameron - I think it's actually underrated.

But if you're looking for an example of a man who gives up worldly power (Egypt and Anne Baxter’s Nefertiri!) in search of a deeper moral truth and liberation for his people — then Charlton Heston's Moses is one of the best Hollywood has ever produced.

The power of the film is its simplicity amidst its grandeur. Heston's Moses is a square-jawed American. He is liberating the downtrodden from tyrants. The miracles he calls forth to humble Pharaoh are epic and beyond belief.

Aside from the Creation and the Flood, "The Exodus" is a story where God's presence is strongest. An active force in the universe that acts for justice.

But what about when God's presence feels faint?

When markets are collapsing and society is polarized?

How do we tell the story of the Exodus when the times lack Technicolor?

Alongside my annual rewatch of The Ten Commandments (1956), I've found myself drawn to two films that seemingly have little in common with DeMille's epic – yet they illuminate Passover's meaning in our fractured age with surprising clarity: Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog (1989) and Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain (2024).

While DeMille sets his film in the deserts of Egypt, Kieślowski and Eisenberg set their cameras in Poland – another land of Jewish exile and mysticism, where trauma preceded return. One film crafted by a Polish Catholic during Communism's final days, the other by an American Jew wrestling with Holocaust memory. Forty years separate them, yet they explore the same spiritual terrain.

The Polish train stations that appear in both works become more than mere backdrops; they transform into theological spaces where divine absence takes architectural form. These are settings where human connections are missed, abandoned, or – occasionally, miraculously – forged against all odds.

For viewers moved by Eisenberg's Oscar-winning film but unfamiliar with Kieślowski's masterwork, there's a cross-generational dialogue happening that feels almost providential. These films speak to each other across decades, revealing how our smallest human connections participate in creation's daily renewal.

Concrete Cinema, Concrete Commandments

The Dekalog was created during Poland's transition from Communist rule (1988-89). Kieślowski's ten-hour television masterwork corresponds to the Ten Commandments, though never explicitly stating which episode matches which decree.

This ambiguity is deliberate—a cinematic acknowledgment that moral principles cannot be reduced to rule-following but must be discovered within the texture of daily existence.

Set primarily in a single Warsaw housing complex—concrete apartments whose architectural uniformity suggests both Communist collectivism and spiritual barrenness—the films explore moral quandaries through everyday encounters. The housing complex itself becomes a cinematic Mount Sinai where commandments are not handed down but worked through in painful human interaction.

Within this brutalist architecture, Kieślowski creates a surprisingly intimate visual language. His camera frequently finds characters reflected in windows, televisions, and mirrors—visual fragmentations that suggest spiritual disintegration.

When moments of genuine connection occur, his framing shifts from division to unity, from obscured to direct vision—a visual grammar of divine presence emerging through aesthetic choices.

Green Screens and False Idols

Without revealing the specific narrative journeys that make Dekalog (1989) such a profound viewing experience, we can identify how Kieślowski's visual language creates a theological framework that resonates with Eisenberg's contemporary explorations.

In Dekalog I (1989), Kieślowski examines our relationship to technology and certainty through a father's faith in calculation. The eerie green glow of computer screens creates a visual metaphor for false illumination—technology as modern idol.

When certainty fails, Kieślowski's camera discovers warmer light sources—visual transitions from false to authentic illumination that suggest spiritual awakening without didacticism.

Dekalog II (1989) presents a doctor confronting impossible ethical choices through consequential acts of deception. Kieślowski establishes this theological dimension through composition—placing the doctor physically above others during consultation scenes, shooting from low angles to suggest illegitimate authority.

The doctor's apartment overlooks the hospital, his gaze from the window a visual echo of divine surveillance that creates tension between power and responsibility.

By Dekalog VI (1989), Kieślowski explores how mediated experience creates spiritual alienation through the story of Tomek, who observes a woman through his telescope. The director creates a visual system of frames within frames—windows, telescopes, binoculars—that fragment reality.

When unmediated encounter finally arrives, Kieślowski shoots their interaction in sustained takes with minimal cutting, creating visual immediacy that mirrors spiritual presence.

These episodes—along with the complete ten-part cycle—offer viewers who connected with A Real Pain a deeper exploration of the theological questions Eisenberg raises. Kieślowski's work provides not answers but a visual language for contemplating divine presence through its apparent absence—a language that resonates powerfully with Eisenberg's Holocaust pilgrimage forty years later.

Rooftops and Reverberations

Eisenberg's Oscar-winning A Real Pain (2024) continues this theological exploration through two Jewish-American cousins embarking on a Holocaust heritage tour through Poland. David (played by Eisenberg himself) embodies anxious pragmatism – a family man whose routine has calcified into emotional distance. Benji (Kieran Culkin, in an Academy Award-winning performance) represents charismatic chaos – brilliant but wounded, perceptive yet self-destructive. Their contrasting relationships to inherited trauma create the film's central theological tension.

Their journey – funded by their late grandmother who survived the Holocaust – takes them through Warsaw and Lublin before culminating at the Majdanek concentration camp. Polish cinematographer Michał Dymek's camera places us not as detached observers but as fellow travelers, eavesdropping on tour group dynamics that shift between banality and profound revelation.

Eisenberg's visual language is architectural. Throughout the film, physical structures – doorways, windows, monument barriers – frequently separate the cousins within the frame, visualizing their emotional distance from each other and from history itself.

The film's approach to Holocaust sites achieves a delicate balance – neither exploitative nor sentimental. This restraint is particularly evident in the Majdanek sequences, which Eisenberg insisted on filming at the actual location. As he explained in interviews, his goal was "to depict Majdanek as it is now as a tourist site" rather than recreating it as a historical set. In this way, eavesdropping transforms into witnessing.

For Benji and David, there is no dramatic reconciliation, only small moments of connection that briefly overcome their alienation. The most powerful occurs not in any memorial space but on a Warsaw hotel rooftop, where the cousins smoke weed under the night sky.

Elevated above the weight of history below, they find a temporary space for authentic revelation. As they pass a joint back and forth, their conversation moves through reminiscence and regret until reaching a raw emotional truth – David finally admitting that after Benji's suicide attempt, he simply couldn't bear the thought of losing this brilliant, difficult pseudo-brother.

It's a recognition that sometimes absence stems from an excess of care we cannot express.

Psalms for the Fractured

These films resonate deeply with my own experience of the divine.

I’ve always had an ambivalence to the “rules to run the minutiae of your life”, pedantic form of Judaic observance.

I've settled on daily prayer as a means of deliberate mindfulness. I find it deeply comforting to take time each day to consider, praise and petition the god of Jacob. A god who's been with me since childhood - not some abstract concept, but a presence I've felt in moments of both joy and despair. I can't define this presence with theological precision, but I know it when I encounter it.

And while my personal experience may be ambiguous, the daily prayers of Psalms 146 and 147 are bracingly clear. They speak of a God who "executes justice for the oppressed" and "heals the brokenhearted" - not through miraculous intervention but through the actions of those who carry these words in their hearts.

They exhort us to:

"Put not your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no salvation. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish." - Psalm 146:3-4

These ancient words resonate across all three films, and are at the core of their portrayal of alienation and bondage.

Characters repeatedly place faith in human systems—science, law, property, surveillance—only to confront their fundamental insufficiency.

The warning of Psalm 146 becomes a central cinematic theme across both works, visualized through institutional failures and collapsing certainties.

DeMille shows us the glory of Egypt — its buildings, its treasure, its seductive luxury, but also the corruption and cruelty that lead Moses back to his people. The Pharaoh's gleaming architectural monuments and golden idols ultimately cannot protect him from divine judgment. His trust in princely power proves devastatingly ephemeral when confronted with authentic liberation.

The film's most shattering moment comes after the defeat of Pharoah’s army, and the death of Egypt's firstborn, and Yul Brynner's Rameses whispers in defeat, "His God... is God." It's a concession that echoes Psalm 146's warning about the impermanence of human power with devastating cinematic force.

Kieślowski creates images of institutional insufficiency—hospitals where healing is bureaucratic, courts where justice is procedural, schools where knowledge is rote. His camera finds the cracks in these systems—the moments where human need exceeds institutional capacity.

When legal proceedings fail to contain emotional realities, when technological certainty crumbles against human complexity, Kieślowski's visual language creates space for contemplating divine absence.

"The LORD builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds." - Psalm 147:2-3

When genuine connection does occur—those rare moments of grace in both works—they mirror the Psalm's promise of healing and gathering. Characters experience momentary alignment with divine presence not through religious ritual but through authentic human encounter.

These moments aren't sentimental but hard-won—emerging from conflict, misunderstanding, and failure rather than easy resolution.

Similarly, Eisenberg's visualization of healing occurs not in the expected spaces of memorial or monument but in profane locations—a hotel rooftop, a nightclub, a train station bench. His camera discovers moments of grace in these ordinary spaces, suggesting that divine presence emerges not in designated sacred zones but through authentic human encounter in seemingly mundane settings.

The Mechanics of Divine Presence

What elevates these works beyond moral tales into profound theological statements is their recognition that divine presence manifests through cinematic form itself. The medium becomes the message—each formal choice creating a visual grammar of divine revelation or hiddenness.

DeMille's approach is the most direct—divine presence appears through spectacular intervention. The burning bush speaks, the sea parts, the finger of God writes upon tablets of stone. Yet even in these moments of ostensible directness, DeMille's camera maintains a reverent distance. We never see God directly; we witness only the effects of divine action. The burning bush appears, but the voice emanates from off-screen (and it is Heston’s own) — present yet unseeable, a careful formal balance between revelation and mystery.

Kieślowski's silent witness figure—a man who appears briefly in each episode, observing critical moments without intervention—embodies a different paradox of divine presence. Initially appearing in the first episode as a man warming himself by a fire as events unfold nearby, he returns throughout the series, always watching, never speaking. His consistent presence across different stories suggests omniscience without omnipotence—divine attention without intervention.

Eisenberg, meanwhile, finds divine presence in the spaces between people—in the frame when two estranged cousins finally connect, in the momentary touch of hands, in the shared silence at Majdanek. His camera captures the moments when human connection briefly transcends historical trauma and personal alienation.

This visual approach creates a cinema that doesn't merely represent theological concepts but generates them through form. Each director's gaze becomes analogous to a different mode of divine attention—DeMille's as spectacular intervention, Kieślowski's as present but non-intervening witness, Eisenberg's as the connective tissue between isolated individuals

An Obligation of Ritual

Since 2013, we've kept a tradition of inscribing the names of everyone who joins us in the back of our Haggadah. As our family gathers around the seder table this year, these names have become a living record of presence and absence – each entry a testament to connection across time.

My father, who truly loved The Ten Commandments always led our seders. His presence, missed the past four years, appears prominently across the rest of the entries.

Running my fingers over his name, I feel his absence and the ongoing power of his presence. Memory itself becomes a form of renewal, a way of transcending time's linear experience.

The ritual itself – the telling of an ancient story of liberation – becomes not just commemoration but participation in ongoing creation. We don't simply remember Exodus; we reenact it, renew it, make it present again.

This is the lesson these films teach, and what Passover itself embodies: that divine presence manifests not just through spectacular intervention but through our continued gathering, our persistent telling, our refusal to surrender to whatever man made affliction binds us.

As we reflect on Exodus this Passover – its liberation and its commandments – these films have helped deepen my connection to its ancient story.

DeMille gives us the spectacle, the grandeur of divine liberation in Technicolor certainty. Kieślowski offers us the commandments not as tablets from on high but as principles worked out in everyday human struggle. Eisenberg shows us what inherited memory looks like when we've forgotten why it matters.

These films, in their different ways, remind us that Exodus isn't an ancient event but today's challenge. Liberation demands both the spectacular and the intimate – Moses' outstretched arms at the sea and two cousins sharing a joint on a Warsaw rooftop.

Divine presence arrives not only in thunder and flame, but in the moments we truly see each other.

Where to Watch

The Ten Commandments (1956)

• PHYSICAL MEDIA: Available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD from Paramount Pictures

• BROADCAST: Traditionally airs annually on ABC during the Passover/Easter season

Dekalog (1989)

• PHYSICAL MEDIA: Complete Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD set (includes both feature film versions of episodes 5 and 6)

• SPECIALTY STREAMING: Available on Eastern European Movies with English subtitles

• INTERNATIONAL OPTION: Available on MUBI in select countries

A Real Pain (2024)

• STREAMING: Available with subscription on Hulu and Disney+ (with Hulu bundle)

All that for a few diamonds? Suzuki’s imagery rocks (as always) and I love the strength and moxie of Akiko. The convoluted plot and half baked villains, keep this from elevating into something more
than a really fun b-movie.

Diane Keaton is so luminous in this film, that you can almost forget her steely resolve as Kay in the Godfather, or her wounded school teacher in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, or the determination of Louise May in Reds. Her range was so great, her filmography so stacked with all-time classics - that it almost feels trite to discuss her career.

But we were extremely lucky to have her, for as long as we had her. And much like Alvy Singer learns at the end of this film -- we can be happy and melancholy and sad and inspired by her all at the same time.

*Screened by the Cognitive Film Society at the Hewlett Woodmere Public Library.

We are all here for Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. A three-act meditation on obsession, love and death.

The Room

Five hours. No intermission until you’ve already surrendered an hour and a half of your life to Act I. The woman next to me has smuggled a sandwich in her purse. There are people dressed in hoodies and sparkly ball gowns and blue jeans and tuxedos. Aside from the kids, the line is very similar in composition and conversation to the one my son and I stood in five days later at Citi Field’s Opening Day.

“Can you believe how packed it is?”

“Did you take the train to get here?”

“Back in the 1980s I saw the greatest!”

At Citi Field, much of the crowd is there to see Juan Soto — one of the premier power bats in all of baseball. At the Met, the crowd is here to see Lise Davidsen, a voice so enormous it has its own gravitational field.

I suspect many of the same people drinking prosecco on the Met balcony also queued up next to me at Shake Shack in center field. New York crowds aren’t so siloed in their interests.

I have been coming to the Met Opera House regularly now for a little over a year. I had just finished Jan Swafford’s excellent Beethoven biography, and had to take the opportunity to see Fidelio performed live. The idea of knowing the name of a specific soprano in the cast, let alone a favorite one, would’ve seemed insane.

And yet, I absolutely took note that it was Lise Davidsen singing the role of Leonore. Her voice rang out Ludwig Van’s clarion call to liberty and I sat up straight. By no small measure — I owe my love for opera to that performance.

She is just that good.

After leaving the stage for a year to have children, she is now considered by many (definitely my choice) to be the soprano of her generation. Davidsen wields her voice with near-unprecedented power and control. And for a year I’ve known she would make her return to the stage in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

The Meister

Richard Wagner? The Nazis’ favorite composer? Music mocked and celebrated by Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny? The subject of one of the great Annie Hall jokes? I did not know much about Richard Wagner — but I needed to see Lise Davidsen sing live again, and to have some context for this name who was claimed as inspiration for both incredible feats of artistic genius and human avarice.

Richard Wagner is not only uncancellable — what was once called “Wagnerism” is the aesthetic driving our cultural moment, with all its terrifying and wonderful implications.

Yuval Sharon’s production of Tristan und Isolde is one of the more wonderful results of the current moment. There is no question that having a Jewish interpreter of Wagner feels both morally correct and transgressive in a way the Meister himself might appreciate1. It certainly made it easier for me to accept the idea that his work was not as foreign as I had feared.

But it is unquestionably dangerous.

In Sharon’s program notes, “Drowning in the Waves of the Universal Breath,” he quotes T.S. Eliot — “all is always now” — and explains why he took an approach that builds the stage production on two planes. On the lower level, a corporeal world: bodies moving in slow motion, the mundane reality of ships and sails and politics. Above, the metaphysical: a spiral, a vortex, a tunnel of light where both Tristan and Isolde separate and come together.

It makes the disintermediation with the “real world” physical. Emotions, desires, fantasies and fears are elevated.

The entire cast is solid — particularly Ryan Speedo Green, who was also fantastic as Porgy earlier this season, and who brings his extraordinary bass-baritone to King Marke. This is a man who can carry Gershwin’s and Wagner’s explorations of betrayal in the same body, in the same season, and bring the pain to life with resonant voice. Michael Spyres sings Tristan with intensity and commitment — although from Row G in the Family Circle, he occasionally felt muddled.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts by highlighting the hits within the score. He wants you to know that he knows what’s considered important in the music and lets you hear it. There’s not a lot of subtlety, or the lyricism of the historic Böhm 1966 recording from Bayreuth.

But the sold-out crowd is here for Davidsen. And her Isolde is a historic feat.

The Hymn to Oblivion

Davidsen is a powerful force in voice and body. She plays Isolde as a woman used to being in control and raging at that power being taken. Her infatuation with Tristan melds seamlessly with her hatred for him for taking that power. You can see it written into her body from the first scene, the guilt mixed with the want, the betrayal of Morold — the husband Tristan slew. A betrayal of herself.

This is not romantic love as we sentimentalize it, but the model for the “enemies to lovers” archetype that dominates current romance fiction.

When she and Tristan drink the “love potion” this feeling is unleashed and given full voice.

Now the compulsion is something closer to sex, to addiction, to a pull so physical and total that it overrides every rational calculation she might make about consequences. Isolde knows any path she takes leads to annihilation. Her world, the life she believed she would live is over and now she can’t stop herself from giving into the waves of emotion.

You hear it clearly in the Act II duet. Davidsen and Spyres don’t sing at each other — they sing into each other, their voices braiding and pulling apart like two people who can’t decide whether to kiss or fight. When they reach “O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe” the orchestra drops to almost nothing, and you can hear the two voices naked in the house — his tenor pressing forward, hers enveloping it, both of them finding a sustained aching. Around me in the Family Circle, nobody is moving. The woman with the sandwich has clearly forgotten it exists.

All of Tristan is what Alex Ross calls “a hymn to oblivion.” in his excellent book “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music”. It is a feeling that is very familiar in the world of 2026, and present in every note Davidsen sings.

But the potion reveals and expands what already exists, and aren’t we all a bit like Isolde? So many seek a release from the relentless quantification and optimization and maxxing experience of being alive in 2026 — infatuation leading to oblivion feels like the considered choice.

What we call “doomerism”, or committing to “rot” — the aestheticized decline, the hunger for apocalypse, the seductive conviction that rationalism has exhausted itself and something vast must replace it — all of this would’ve easily been identified as Wagnerism during the early 1900s. Alex Ross calls it a cultural condition — what happens when an entire society loses faith in realism and reaches for myth instead. Wagnerism casts its strongest spell on “the artists of silence — novelists, poets, and painters who envied the collective storms of feeling that he could unleash in sound.”

The Gesamtkunstwerk — the total work of art — was Wagner’s term for what he wanted opera to become, but became what the culture wanted from itself: an experience so complete it could substitute for the yawning gap of meaning in people’s lives. The vegetarians2 and the theosophists and the race theorists and the anarchists — all drinking from the same well, all convinced that what was needed was some new total experience that would dissolve the individual into something larger.

The formation was broad enough to hold Theodor Herzl writing The Jewish State while attending Tannhäuser every night and W.E.B. Du Bois at Bayreuth walking past Wagner’s grave twice a day.3 The same hunger that inspired Herzl was the soundtrack for the Nazis flooding the streets of Europe swinging clubs.

Uncomfortable facts, but history nonetheless.

It is a very human hunger to desire rootedness, and myths that inform identity. We instinctively desire a return to something primal and total — To make things Great again. Art, or nation, or race, or spirit, or love, or death — the cause doesn’t seem to matter as much as the hunger itself.

The Tristan Chord, Everywhere

Like so many other fraught and suicidal moments in history — the strains of the Tristan chord once again rise all around us. The demand for myth has infected our culture and our society.

Look at some of the most resonant pieces of art from the past few years.

Ryan Coogler’s Academy Award-winning Sinners (2025) takes the Wagnerian formation and roots it in the American South, in Black music, and a delta blues juke joint. The vampirism that runs through the film is literal Wagnerism — a mythic and Romantic hunger for sensation that crosses over from ecstasy into the demonic.

Much as the “love potion” reveals and enhances the doomed instincts of Tristan and Isolde, so does the vampire’s kiss. Coogler builds his gothic fantasy on the premise that music can crack open reality, that the right song played in the right room summons forces that reason cannot contain.

These calls to myth through music are instinctive Wagnerism. 19th-century operagoers would have recognized the film’s refusal to resolve in anything like a traditional victory for good over evil as obviously “Wagnerian.”

Coogler is a graduate of the MCU, after all — a franchise now promising its own Götterdämmerung in “Avengers: Doomsday.” The Thor teaser trailer could literally be lifted from the Ring.

Is it any surprise that a Wagner masterpiece like Tristan und Isolde has broken out of the opera bubble and into mainstream culture? It’s the original story of “Heated Rivals” who become lovers. A “Love Story” that can only end in death4. These fascinations are the mainstream concerns of the 21st century.

As cinema and culture enter its New Romantic era, we should expect to see more explicit and implicit Wagnerism take hold. Especially the Liebestod, or “Love-Death.” It is the highlight of Tristan und Isolde, and of Lise Davidsen’s performance.

Liebestod

After nearly five hours, Lise Davidsen emerges from/into a tunnel of oblivion to sing a tribute to “eternal bliss” as she gazes upon Tristan’s lifeless corporeal form. Rushing across the sea to be by his side, Isolde joins him in oblivion — singing in literally the most beautiful music you feel you’ve ever heard:

In this production, Isolde dies in childbirth and sings the Liebestod to both her newborn child and her dead lover.

Rebirth that comes from death. It is a hopeful and moving vision. I really love it in this production, and it never feels tacked on or dishonest. But it can also feel like a Hollywood ending.

Wagner’s original is not nearly as optimistic or life-affirming. Isolde gives herself to the “highest desire” because the annihilation of self is the highest virtue. There is no life. No child. Just the “billowy surge”, the “gush of sound” that is “void of all thought”. Endless waves of emotion. Endless waves of beauty. Never resolving.

Could the Sirens' song that Odysseus lashed himself to the mast to hear sound any different?

I’ve wept before from joy or sadness in the theater or at the movies - but never before from the pure overwhelming force of infinite emotion and infinite sound. It is the treasure in Marcellus Wallace’s case. It is the death of Batman’s parents. It is Rosebud. It’s the portal to the Black Lodge.

If you’re in the room, you can feel reality itself cracking open — as we all drown in “The Infinite All”.

It is a fucking moment.

Once you hear the Tristan chord, you hear it everywhere. It can be heard in the all-consuming fandoms for IP and pop stars. It can be heard in the conspiracy theories that drive our discourse. It is in the notifications on your phone. It is the theme of the gambling and event market app. Drowning in the sinking unconscious. Rotting into decadence.

A politics addicted to the Liebestod, with its never-resolving hunger for something total, something annihilating, something that will dissolve the ordinary world and replace it with meaning or destruction or both at once — is populism’s signature promise.

Highest desire!

During the Liebestod, my mind kept returning to images from Bertrand Bonello’s 2016 film Nocturama. The French director’s interrogation of “Terrorism“ is criminally underseen in the United States, as it is one of the defining political films of the 21st century.

The film uses a non-linear, Reservoir Dogs-like structure to tell the story of a group of young populist terrorists who pull off a major attack on Paris. We are given no context, nor any reason to care about their cause or ideology. We can clearly see they are seized by a feeling so enormous that ordinary life cannot contain it.

Late in the film, one of the terrorists escapes the shopping mall where he and his compatriots are waiting out the night. He bums a cigarette from someone on the street, and the conversation turns to the attacks.

He says: “It had to happen, no? We could all feel it coming. So it had to happen.” No regard for self, or defense for the cause he purports to support — just “sinking” “unconscious, void of all thought”

Liebestod.

On its tenth anniversary, Nocturama feels like prophecy.

Wagnerism as Warning

I’d love to believe Yuval Sharon’s version of the Tristan myth. Wagner’s fascination with reincarnation and rebirth was core to his study of Schopenhauer and Buddhism, so there is no inherent inconsistency. But Wagner wrote what he wrote — and he was picking up on some eternal themes.

When we throw off reason. When reason becomes impossible, or we feel that our freedom and agency have been taken — like Isolde, then Liebestod becomes very attractive. So attractive that we will risk everything. We will call it love. We will sing arias and throw off all of our traditions and rules and morals. We will call it beautiful.

As we move into an era where “optimization” and “maxxing” and “cognitive offloading” and “financialization of everything” seed themselves into daily life, an unconscious desire for Liebestod will grow ever higher. It will show up in beautiful places like Sinners and terrible places like AI psychosis. The need to escape and drown into the sinking unconscious, deeper into our obsessions is a human reaction to our freedoms being taken from us, bit by bit.

Wagnerism is a warning.

And while I love the music and cannot stop thinking about Lise Davidsen’s performance - I cannot help hearing it in places it should not be. I literally cannot stop thinking about it. It is clear that this imperfect, yet undoubtedly sublime and historic production has met its moment.

It is all we can ask of the world’s greatest opera house, in the world’s greatest city.

I cannot wait to return on April 4th.

Under fascism there is no real loyalty. There is no trust and the pervasive lack of morality affects everyone within its grasp. Weak Spot takes the classic Hitchcock “wrong man” trope and turns it inside out.

This a sweaty, sticky film that underscores the animal desires for power and domination that are the real fuel for a fascist regime. While it has some pacing issues, the constant twists and turns keep the intensity burning.

A real and true “found classic” remastered perfectly on Blu-ray by Radiance.

Ryland Grace can’t seem to relate to any humans and isn’t much interested in saving humanity. The one creature he does care for, is a bizarrely sycophantic alien, who speaks like a chatbot given voice. Rocky reminded me far more of ChatGpt or Claude than E.T. or Spock.

While this is technically very well made, it’s also deeply dull, where literally nothing happens for long stretches of the film, save for conversations with Gosling and his weird friendly Alien Intelligence.

Embrace AI instead of other people is certainly a message I guess.

There are some nice visuals, but they’re extremely derivative of 2001, Interstellar and Star Trek. There’s nothing you haven’t seen yet in far better films, with far better scripts and much more defined characters.

A lot of people love the book, and the movie is clearly resonating with huge audiences. I had to fight dozing off multiple times.

Night Side Songs at Lincoln Center Theater

Shows run until March 29, 2026

“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” - Susan Sontag.

The experience of Night Side Songs is prefaced with this stoic message. It defines the direction and purpose the play is trying to convey.

And, it does this extremely well. The pseudo-thrust stage, the metatheatrical elements, the raw, almost primal music.

The show makes you part of itself, and each show is unique in that way. It all comes together to form an absolutely unforgettable performance.

Opera! No seriously. This is Boorman’s Wagnerian fever dream of English myth, literally set to the score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, The Ring, and Parsifal. The soundstages and set pieces look ripped straight from Bayreuth! 

Obviously none of this mattered to me the zillions of times I watched this film on HBO growing up. And it’s still one of the great 1980s fantasies. The cast is packed with Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson all showing up as hardcore knights. And Helen Mirren would be iconic as Morgana - if she wasn’t subsequently iconic in tons of films for 40 more years and counting.

It’s got magic. It’s got bloody sword fights. It’s got Meeeeerrlin! It looks amazing! And if you grab the Arrow 4K - it’s never ever been higher quality. 

Such fun!

Arrogance is the greatest expression of the evil inclination, and this film is rife with its expression. Using actual human beings as toys or objects - is bound to invite a righteous punishment.

Rare to see the face of an avenging Angel on screen, but Turffaut embues Franca’s final expression with all the power of a Valkyrie.

Redemption - but only for the audience.