Culture/Movies
Bateman is a satanic figure, filled with disgust and pride, his ultimate desire is the total destruction of the world. He perceives no value in anything, leading to a state that is not merely fatalistic but actively nihilistic.
Culture/Movies
The establishment was horrified by the first film’s success. The *wrong* people identified with the wrong aspects of the character. The audience sympathised with the nihilist rather than rejecting him.
Culture/Movies
Lynch constructs a neo-noir occult psychodrama, an autopsy of the Hollywood soul. The narrative is a Mobius strip, a non-linear loop where time is a flat circle and the characters are trapped in a purgatorial cycle of their own making.
Culture/Movies
Released weeks before the September 11th Attacks, a film about a jet engine falling out of a clear blue sky to crush a suburban home, it captures the psychic atmosphere of a world on the brink of an irrevocable shift.
Culture/Movies
The film ends not with a shootout, but with a dream. Bell, retired and defeated, recounts a dream of his father riding past him in the night, carrying fire in a horn, going ahead to light a fire in the darkness.
Culture/Movies
It establishes the universe of the film as a gnostic prison. The characters are not autonomous beings possessing free will; they are dolls moving through a pre-constructed set, manipulated by unseen hands.
Culture/Movies
These 'elites' operate by an entirely distinct code of ethics, looking at the manipulation of reality and global events as an intricate game or a labyrinth.
Culture/Movies
The answer to the riddle of Charles Foster Kane is incinerated, turning into black smoke. It suggests that the soul of the oligarch is ultimately unknowable, because, in the end, there was nothing there to know.
Culture/Movies
A central theme across all three works is the exploration of humanity versus inhumanity. In a world populated by androids mimicking human beings, the very essence of human sanity and personhood is called into question.
Culture/Movies
The film ultimately suggests that true greatness cannot be achieved through such means, and that the promise of worldly prosperity through perverse actions is a fundamental lie.
Culture/Movies
There is only the lingering scent of napalm and the knowledge that the heart of darkness is not in the jungle, but in the systems we built to conquer it.
Culture/Movies
The system of control in The Matrix is largely invisible, forming the very shape of phenomenological reality. It reveals its violent nature only when questioned.