The Running Man (1987) is weird comfort food. I find myself craving every now and then, like a favorite meal. I first saw it when I was twelve, and nostalgia tends to tint objectivity, but I think this movie only improves with age. They don’t make them like this anymore, with that distinctly 1980s blend of bleak social commentary, schlocky spectacle, and self-aware humor that remembers, first and foremost, to entertain.

Over the years, it’s become my ur-text for a sleazy future of trashcan fires, black markets, station hijacking, and vicious game show hosts. And if you squint at it a certain way, it’s a genuinely frightening portrait of America’s appetite for violence. Thanks to one of the most inspired casting decisions ever made, The Family Feud’s Richard Dawson plays the ringmaster of televised bloodsport with terrifying charisma. But the real villain is the crowd. They just want to watch people die.

The entire film hinges on a small moment after Schwarzennager refuses to bash in the head of a large man dressed like a Lite-Brite who sings Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro while he electrocutes his victims. (That was such an enjoyable sentence to write.) The crowd begins to boo, tentative at first—then they gather steam. And Dawson looks at the bloodlust on the faces of these old ladies and nebbish accountants, and he looks scared. Because these people want to watch a murder, they don’t care who. And when Schwarzenegger starts righteously slaughtering the baddies with razor wire, a chainsaw, explosives, and a belt-fed weapon while delivering clunky one-liners, we’re cheering too. We’ve become the crowd.

And somewhere in my brain, my sense of The Running Man is soundtracked by this song by Bremen, which captures the nervy end-of-days energy of midnight sirens and searchlights sweeping the sky.

Bremen – Entering Phase Two

Second Launch | Blackest Ever Black, 2011 | Bandcamp

Last night I watched Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a film I hadn’t seen since my days in college. I remember it filling me with a particular and nameless kind of dread, and this mood has been on my mind lately: the overlapping of global calamity with the tragedies of our private lives. Released in 1959, Alain Resnais’s film is ground zero for French New Wave and perhaps the wellspring for most arthouse tropes. The camera lingers in dark rooms. Lovers speak in monologue and monotone. They thrash and sulk in shadows. They repeat themselves while gazing into the middle distance of the emotionally detached.

Much of the film is about recreating and relitigating the recent past. A French actress comes to Hiroshima to play a nurse in a movie about the atrocity of August 6, 1945—which occurred only fourteen years before. (Try to imagine, say, a film called 9/11, My Love released in 2015.) Her lover is a Japanese architect, and they discuss their private lives while surrounded by actors caked in makeup that resembles the burns from a nuclear blast. Tea rooms and cocktail lounges evoke bygone eras and far-flung locales, culminating in a tropical speakeasy called “Casablanca”. Along the way, the lovers move across tatami mats and stern Modernist lobbies, history collapsing as their desire to rekindle the first blush of youthful romance melds with the fallout from the bomb.

The French actress tries to attach herself to apocalyptic destruction, hoping to stave off indifference towards a new atomic age by narrating its horrors over a montage of destroyed bodies and post-blast footage. “You saw nothing in Hiroshima,” her Japanese lover repeatedly reminds her.  

Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a profoundly fucked-up film that may not withstand the lights of 2022. But I can’t think of many movies that go after such big game by conflating the historical with the personal, the horrific with the romantic. It plumbs emotions unique to cinema, the ones beyond language or conscious thought—such as the dark urge to give our lives meaning by attaching ourselves to tragedy and violence, hoping to make an impression when we tell people we could have been the next victim, that we were just a few blocks away from the shooting or the blast site.

Max Headroom holds up far too well thirty-five years later. Every few years, I think about the 1987 signal hijacking at a Chicago television station when an unknown man wearing a Max Headroom mask took over the airwaves to mutter nonsense. (The Wikipedia entry includes this delightful sentence: “The video ended with a pair of exposed buttocks being spanked with a flyswatter before normal programming resumed.”)

Max Headroom occupies an odd space in cultural memory: a tacky 1980s face on a t-shirt that hawked New Coke and music videos, as well as a glitchy Neuromancing vision of artificial intelligence that satirized a culture increasingly devoted to sitting alone in front of a screen.

Last night I rewatched the original British pilot from 1985, and it’s remarkably durable. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Vicious advertising tactics are killing people. And wireframe graphics, joystick controls, and VHS tapes fuse with the retrofitted future aesthetics of Blade Runner and Brazil: harsh lights shining through makeshift ventilation systems, piles of televisions flickering on street corners. Strange how stacks of junked televisions became a dystopian trope even though the logistics make no sense.

But the most chilling feature in this future is that off-switches are illegal.

I woke up with Melancholia on my mind. Six days after watching it, I cannot shake the airless world of this film that lives between calamity and silence. The Earth is about to collide with a mammoth planet hiding behind the sun, yet the volume is turned down to a whisper. There are no news reports here, no fighter jets or people yelling in the streets. Instead, we listen to the murmuring of two sisters as they wander the immaculate lawn of a plush country home. When Melancholia was released in 2011, I dismissed it as one of Lars von Trier’s exercises in hype and masochism. But that was when the world still felt relatively stable.

Today this story of cataclysmic extinction feels like prophecy. Nearly every weather-related headline contains words like unprecedented and record-breaking: Floods across America. Reservoirs evaporating in India. Europe in the grip of a heatwave that forced Germany to curb speeds on the Autobahn to prevent the pavement from cracking and buckling. Last week Alaska hit ninety degrees. And fires are burning everywhere.

How does a person face the end of the world? One sister maintains faith in the daily rituals of breakfast, lunch, and bedtime stories; the other withdraws into the fog of depression until her favorite meal tastes like ashes. In Melancholia, the ennui that can wreck any hope of managing a relationship, a career, or a smile becomes a valuable asset when obliteration arrives. Detachment becomes the sturdy voice of reason. This is a film about reckoning with “toxic knowledge,” the environmentalist Richard Heinberg’s term for information that forever colors our perception. “Once you know about overpopulation, overshoot, depletion, climate change, and the dynamics of societal collapse, you can’t unknow it,” he says, “and your every subsequent thought is tinted.”

This tinting leads to the image of a woman lying naked in the grass at midnight, gazing at an alien planet with desire in her eye, daring the apocalypse to come closer. “The Earth is evil,” she says. “We don’t need to grieve for it.” The lines between stoicism, detachment, and nihilism are blurry. At its heart, pessimism is self-congratulatory because it suggests we are too good for this world. And as our world begins to heat up and turn strange, I find myself chilled—and occasionally invigorated—by this centuries-old adage from Leibniz: we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Further reading: Melancholia; notes on “toxic knowledge” and David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth; Gottfried Leibniz on the best of all possible worlds (a stance that Voltaire considered idiotic in light of the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon where tens of thousands were killed while praying on All Saints’ Day. This inspired him to write Candide).

Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is the best film I’ve seen in years. Built from red neon, broken clocks, haunted karaoke, and endless rain, it’s a puzzle that will never be solved—and it perfectly captures the architecture of dreams and the looping logic of regret. I never thought wearing 3D glasses could be so heartbreaking.

The original Blade Runner was a rare gift of pure atmosphere. Since 1982, Ridley Scott’s overheated Los Angeles has been steadily rearranging the furniture when it comes to imagining the future. Today we naturally envision fires in the sky, broken weather, and sprawling fields of scrap. And we can be pretty sure that no matter what the future brings, elaborate advertisements will leer above us while we haggle and jive beneath buildings heavy with memory and rot. And it’s such a beautiful sight. Blade Runner is the cinematic sensation of laying on a bed in a dark motel room while distant traffic speeds down a rainy street: a concoction of nostalgia, dread, and the possibilities in the margins. More than anything, Blade Runner is a story about god, a fever dream about grabbing your creator by the throat and asking, “Why did you make me? And why must I die?”

The new iteration of Blade Runner is one of the few things to reappear three decades later in better-than-expected condition. I won’t discuss the details of the film—not because I worry about spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, but because things like characters and plot are secondary elements used only to generate a mood. Nearly every scene in Denis Villeneuve’s sequel looks like material scraped from a dream, a Surrealist fusion of our synthetic world with ancient myth. At first, I craved the clutter, heat, and fun of the original film’s vision of a scuzzy and polyglot tomorrow; the landscape of 2049 is monotonous and arid. But its bleak architecture and sterile streets are probably a more accurate rendering of the future as our democracies calcify into corporate aristocracy and our cities become homogenized spaces that cater to the individual rather than the crowd. Beyond this resonance, however, most of 2049 stands outside of time like one of the eerie monuments in the front yard of the Bradbury building.

If the first Blade Runner was about confronting god, 2049 tries to calculate the value of the soul. If artificial intelligence can become so self-aware that it can feel lonely, does being human mean anything beyond legal ramifications? This question was first introduced when Roy Batty shed his tears in the rain; the sight of a robot weeping at the impermanence of existence left us wondering if mono no aware is a uniquely human feature—or a bug. (Mono no aware is such a beautiful term for the pathos of things, the recognition that all things must end; see also lacrimae rerum.) 2049 extends this theme by pondering our hardwired desire to feel unique. A humanoid searches for meaning and connection, and he wonders if he might be special. The possibility frightens him. Then it energizes him. The action circles a vague notion of finding purpose through sacrifice for others. But the bigger question of what distinguishes a human from any mechanism capable of brooding hangs in the haze without answers. Morality is garbled by the ways we define us and them.

When Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford race towards a speedy-looking vehicle, 2049 seems destined to careen into the usual Hollywood showdown between good and evil. Instead, Villeneuve unexpectedly downshifts into the register of Bergman or Antonioni, leaving us with an extended meditation on cosmic-grade isolation that favors archetypes over characters and events. Rather than worrying about the bloodied hero crumpled on the floor, the camera is more interested in watching a black dog lope across the screen. Instead of savoring the vanquished foe, our attention is directed to the mindless pounding of the surf. There is no good or evil here, only ghosts in the machine and glitches in the sublime. 2049 is not a perfect film, but it is another rare gift.