Author’s note: This review contains spoilers.

What makes a story a timeless classic? According to John Steinbeck, “A great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last.”1 For a story’s theme to be universal, it must be built with highly abstract, broadly applicable concepts, clearly embodied in vivid characters and dramatic action.

This is what Steinbeck aimed for in East of Eden, which, though it was published late in his life, he called “the first book”—one he had been practicing to write for thirty-five years.2 Its theme is the most universal and morally fundamental of all: the choice between good and evil. The recently released Netflix adaptation, unfortunately, only conveys that theme partially.

A core leitmotif of the story is the pattern drawn from the myth of Cain and Abel; one young man thinking his father loves him less than his brother and lashing out at his brother in response. This sense of rejection, or a lack of love, as a motivation for evil is an important subtheme. In the Cain and Abel parable, God prefers Abel’s offering, so Cain feels rejected and is angry. God tells Cain he can do better and to try again. But the precise wording is important, and it is discussed at length by some of the main characters. One of them, Lee (played by Hoon Lee), studies the original Hebrew and reports back to the others:

The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin [“do thou”], and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in “thou shalt,” meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—“Thou mayest”—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if “Thou mayest”—it is also true that “Thou mayest not.” . . . Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth, and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.3

This conversation appears in the Netflix series, too, albeit in a shortened form.

More important for conveying the theme, the series faithfully traces several choices that characters face—times when they feel trapped but something or someone reminds them that they always have a choice. One of the main characters, Adam (Christopher Abott), is a particularly strong example. For instance, Adam barely interacts with his twin sons for the first ten years of their lives, leaving the family’s servant (Lee) to raise them. But a chance visit makes him wonder whether the four of them ought to be living on their own on a ranch—and he makes the first significant decision to advance their welfare, which is to move into town where the boys would have better schooling. Later, Adam realizes that he’s been making a version of the same mistake his father made with him by expecting his now-teenage sons to be a certain way rather than looking at who they are—and he tries to correct it. He is bound neither by his past errors nor by his parent’s errors; he can choose to be better, even if he does so imperfectly. The Netflix version of Adam shows this: a man who strives, errs, falls into a slump, and dusts himself off and tries again. Adam, despite his faults, chooses to work toward the good.

However, an important character complicates this idea in the novel and obliterates it in the series: Cathy Ames (Florence Pugh). She is introduced to us in the novel as a “monster” and lives up to it: She kills her parents, shoots her husband, poisons her employer, and generally ruthlessly manipulates anyone in her path, becoming the madam of a whorehouse who is feared by her girls and blackmails her clientele. For the first half of the show, Cathy is shown to be exactly this. Pugh flawlessly portrays the deceitful woman, able to seem charming and innocent one minute and coldly brutal the next. However, in the final two episodes, the audience is given reason to sympathize with her.

The show creates sympathy in two ways that the novel does not. First, it suggests that she is capable of actual love. Evil people cannot truly love because they lack the ability to admire the good in another—on some level, they recognize the good as a challenge or rebuke to themselves. In both the novel and the show, she pacifies Adam’s brother Charles (Mike Faist), who hates her, by sleeping with him. Adam and Cathy then move across the country, and Cathy never sees Charles again. But in the show, Cathy muses that she could have loved Charles, and in her final days she has visions of him acting as a lover, speaking to her softly, advising her, allowing her to caress his cheek. He speaks the words generated by her own paranoia as though he were trying to protect her. In the novel, this paranoia is more clearly shown to be a consequence of her own actions as she fears that one of her crimes will come to light.

The second method of creating sympathy is through the implication that she feels remorse. In the show, she is bothered by memories of her past crimes, seeing them flash before her and becoming upset. Then, there is her response when her son Aron (Joe Anders) sees her at the whorehouse after believing throughout his childhood that she was dead. He turns away from her, clearly upset, and leaves. She cries, whether out of hurt by his rejection or shame inspired by his condemnation. The scene is only described briefly in the novel, but in that scene she does not cry—she laughs.

That Cathy is less evil and more able to feel in this adaptation was not accidental. Screenwriter and executive producer Zoe Kazan said in an interview that she approached the character by asking, “What if we think of her not as the embodiment of evil but as a person who does really bad things? [laughs] And I think we learn more about ourselves if we don’t think about, like, ‘evil people’ as being that different from us.”4 (How similar evil people are to us depends on our own moral stature; the implication that we can learn about ourselves by considering evil people as being like us is not incisive commentary but a shocking confession.) The problem with Kazan’s interpretation is that Cathy is not the embodiment of evil in the literal sense, in the way that Sauron is in The Lord of the Rings (an entity who at times doesn’t even have a body; he is simply pure evil). She is evil through her own choices—which brings us back to the core theme of the novel: choice. Everyone has choices; Cathy had a plethora of them. And time and again she chose badly.

This is not to say that exploring a villain’s motivations always whitewashes them. But Steinbeck spends little time on Cathy’s motivations for a reason: They aren’t important to judging her or understanding her. He offers only one brief explanation for her actions: She felt that others “had something she lacked, and she didn’t know what it was.”5 This does not diminish her evil but ties it into his subtheme of rejection (real or imagined) as motivation for immoral acts; if Cathy lacks something everyone else seems to have, she anticipates rejection from them on those grounds. She then copes with that threat or imagined rejection by closing off certain parts of herself and seeking limited (usually financial) gain at everyone else’s expense. Redemption is possible, in this story as in life—but repeatedly, Cathy chooses to manipulate or hurt others. She becomes suspicious of every possible show of love or honesty, disbelieving, for example, that Adam really could have loved her.

The challenge of the ambitious author, one who desires to write a story of great scope and universal importance, is to embody his abstractions in characters who are larger than life yet seem real. As philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand put it in her treatise on aesthetics, a character “has to be an abstraction, yet look like a concrete; it has to have the universality of an abstraction and, simultaneously, the unrepeatable uniqueness of a person.”6 Steinbeck achieved this with Cathy, developing a woman who is shocking, compelling, and a paradigmatic case of evil. Kazan’s interpretation does not respect this achievement, and Pugh’s stellar acting makes the problem worse, not better, by perfectly portraying the muddled moral sense of Kazan’s creation rather than the extreme evil of the original.

What makes Steinbeck’s story universal is that it grapples with good and evil and comes out with the profound truth that we each get to choose between them again and again. Neither a deity nor our ancestors nor even our own pasts will save us or doom us, because timshel—thou mayest. It is a clarion call to strive toward virtue every moment of our lives, and it is a shame that the Netflix adaptation failed to portray this stark truth through the most intense character in its source material.

Directed by Georgia Oakley
Written by Diana Reid
Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles
Distributed by Focus Features
Running time: 131 minutes
Rated PG for thematic elements, partial nudity, and brief violence

Few adaptations of Jane Austen’s works have been as universally beloved by Janeites as Ang Lee’s 1995 Sense and Sensibility. The performances of Emma Thompson (who also wrote the screenplay) and Alan Rickman, the warm color palette, and delightful score add to a faithful adaptation many fans doubted could be matched. But the new adaptation of this work, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles, is a strong contender.

Sense and Sensibility focuses on the Dashwood sisters, raised in the household of their recently deceased father, a landowning gentleman. The ladies inherited only a small amount of money upon his death, which, along with the machinations of an unscrupulous half brother and his wife, means that they’re left with a much-diminished lifestyle. This is where the action starts; soon, the ladies move to a countryside cottage owned by distant relatives (a cousin named Mrs. Jennings and her son-in-law). The main drama of the story revolves around the titular sense of Elinor—who represents the rationalism that had been dominant in the Enlightenment of Austen’s youth—and sensibility (or sentimentality) of Marianne—who represents the then-new Romantic movement and its emotionalism. Both women are faced with complex romantic prospects, which they approach differently. The sisters learn from one another the proper relationship between reason and emotion and the balance between sharing and discretion.

This rendition’s greatest technical strength—and an important means by which it stays faithful to the source material—is the acting. Each actor’s line delivery matches his or her character brilliantly, such that even characters who have only a few minutes of screen time still leave a distinct impression of who they are. Among the supporting characters, the most memorable performance is that of Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Jennings. From the first moment we see her to the last, she flawlessly portrays the matron’s jovial, expressive, and at times oblivious yet always well-meaning demeanor. She adopts a chortling laugh that will forever echo in my mind when I think of Mrs. Jennings or any character who resembles her.

Also admirable are the performances of those playing the primary Dashwood family—both individually and as a group. Elinor’s steadfast resolve and prudence (Edgar-Jones), Marianne’s passionate abandon (Creed-Miles), Mrs. Dashwood’s fanciful hopefulness (Caitríona Balfe), and Margaret’s earnest, adolescent spunk (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) all come through wonderfully and at times comically, often eliciting laughter from those in the cinema I attended. The love and care between the sisters are noticeable and touching throughout. The costuming also highlights their distinctive characters; in a few scenes, Marianne is dressed in floaty purplish dresses and wearing loose (arguably overly messy) hair, whereas Elinor is sometimes seen in a crisp white dress with a navy vest, her hair carefully pinned back.

The superb acting and solid screenplay do much to tell the story; they are supported by a varied score that helps to give voice to the characters’ emotions. In one scene, stoic Elinor has received devastating news but says nothing, and her face moves little while others continue chatting. The camera tightens in on her face while the strings in the background overwhelm the voices of her companions, showing us wordlessly her internal state—agitated, hurt, and unable to attend to the world around her.

Janeites who prefer a textually (as opposed to spiritually) faithful adaptation will doubtless be troubled by notable changes to two of the central romantic relationships. At the risk of being accused of blasphemy, I argue that one is for the better in the sense of narrative impact. Elinor’s love interest, Edward Ferrars (George MacKay), has long been engaged secretly to a penniless, maneuvering woman named Lucy Steele (Ceara Coveney). In the novel, Edward formed this engagement himself when he was young and is unwilling to call it off because he has given his word, despite knowing how adamantly his mother would disapprove of the match. His steadfastness, however misguided, is part of what Elinor admires about him. In the new movie, Edward formed the engagement under his mother’s guidance when Lucy had plenty of money, but then her family unfortunately loses it all. Edward doesn’t want to cause her further hardship and thus maintains the relationship against his mother’s wishes. In other words, the filmmakers have taken young Edward from being misguided and foolish to being more consistently a man of his word, regardless of and even in opposition to his mother’s ambition—doubling down on the characteristic Elinor most likes about him. In so doing, the film increases the drama of her inner conflict: The reason she loves him is the reason she can’t have him.

The other significant change concerns Marianne’s relationship with the quiet Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum). At first, she dismisses his suitorship because she believes him to be without passion for art, nature, or romance. But toward the end of the novel, she falls gravely ill, and his steady care and attention to her and her family—along with her newfound integration of reason with her passion—leads her to give him a chance. Austen’s treatment of the ending has long been decried by critics as more resigned than romantic (such critics are arguably wrong on this point). The movie attempts to correct this by having Colonel Brandon act in a fit of passion to defend Marianne’s honor. Although this gives her a more obviously happy ending, it somewhat softens the lesson Marianne must learn about others: that unrestrained passion, regardless of its grounds, is not necessarily the measure of either a person’s character or of his enjoyment of life.

The vibrant acting, the warmth among the Dashwoods, the humor of Mrs. Jennings, the intensified resolve of Edward, and the courage of Colonel Brandon combine to create a film that’s bursting with life and memorable characters. This effect is slightly hampered by a tendency to use filters that give the film a grayish color palette more often than makes sense given the plot. Nevertheless, the characters’ intense emotions and deep commitment to what they regard as the right way to live outshines this minor defect.

This adaptation may not win over Janeites who prefer a movie that deviates little from the original—but those who love her characters may well be able to enjoy the vividness with which they are portrayed here. Moreover, any moviegoer who appreciates a story with warm family relationships, character growth, and a thought-provoking exploration of the proper approach to romantic relationships will get a lot out of this delightful film.

William Grant Still (1895–1978) was a pioneering composer who sought to create a distinct style of American classical music grounded in his own artistic vision. He produced nearly two hundred works during his career, spanning symphonies, suites, operas, and ballets. As he grew more prolific, his artistic perspective put him at odds with prevailing attitudes of the time, creating tension between him and his contemporaries.

Still remains one of America’s underrated composers because he worked during a time when it was popular to view music through the lens of racial identity—which Still rejected. Although Still recognized the complex history of race in America and incorporated the music of various ethnic groups into his compositions, he also strived to transcend the confines of race-based thinking. He was an individualist striving for what he described as a “universal idiom” in music. An Arkansas native, he composed during the early- to mid-20th century, an era when collectivism was especially in vogue among working artists of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement centered around reshaping, through creative works, what they considered to be black identity. As a black man, Still was often expected to support the movement. But he was his own man, and he documented his individualistic artistic stances in his writings, such as this incisive entry:

I have always felt, when people have asked me to bow to their will, that I may indeed be wrong—but if I am wrong, let it be my own mistake, not one I have been led into. It may be that I am mistaken in having tried to establish my own mode of musician expression. But it more nearly expresses my true self than any mode I might have borrowed!1

Still’s writings and musical works reveal a creator with an active mind—one who once found allies within movements such as the Harlem Renaissance before becoming the opposition.

Because of a number of factors—Still’s individualist views, his political stances, his appreciation of American culture, and how others reacted to these in light of his background—his legacy is obscure. But it is also important. His symphonies—such as his tribute to America’s bountiful resources, Western Hemisphere—and his mindset toward his work—evidenced by his remark, “It is what I would like to write, not what others have insisted that I write”—reveal a cerebral and stubborn composer who thought about artistic principle as much as the artwork itself.2 “Still was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” wrote music director Leon Botstein.3 Still’s belief in individualism and in the merit of a unified America “made him something of a pariah,” Botstein stated.4 He also noted that Still “defied expectations and set his own path.”5 And it is one worth exploring.

Musician and writer J. Edward Britton described Still as a “famed yet underappreciated composer.”6 Still’s unique artistic repertoire and his inspiring philosophical contemplation show us that though he remains an underrated founding father of American-style classical music, his visionary compositions and thought-out ideas are worthy of appreciation and study.

A Dream Realized

When Still was a teenager, he set out on an ambitious path. He had long been inspired by the Red Seal phonograph records featuring various classical composers that his stepfather brought home. One day, while listening to those records, he decided to become a professional musician. “I knew then that I would be happy only if someday I could compose operatic music,” he wrote while also sharing that the symphony orchestra was something that “deeply interested me from the very start of my musical life.”7 His mother, a teacher, was another key influence: “She constantly urged me to make something of myself, and not to follow the path of least resistance.”8

Still realized his childhood dream in 1931, when he was thirty-six years old, with the premiere of his breakthrough work, Afro-American Symphony. The work was not only a nod to his teenage classical roots, but also to his early work with W. C. Handy, known as “The Father of the Blues,” during the 1920s. Within the symphony he sought to integrate uniquely American and historically African American genres, such as the blues, with European classical music. The symphony features four movements—“Longing,” “Sorrow,” “Humor,” and “Aspiration”—that elevate the blues to a new standard within the classical framework. And the orchestra plays an uplifting story; each movement is set to a selection by Revolutionary-era poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The accompaniment for the final section, “Aspiration,” reads,

Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul,
Thy name is writ on Glory’s scroll
In characters of fire.
High ‘mid the clouds of Fame’s bright sky,
Thy banner’s blazoned folds now fly,
And truth shall lift them higher.

The Afro-American Symphony includes race-centric elements—its title, certain poetry excerpts, the genre selection for the work—but Still’s overall goal was to position genres such as the blues as key players among the Western musical landscape. In his words, he wanted historically black genres in the country to become “another American voice.”9 “That was the reason I decided to create a musical theme in the Blues idiom and develop it into the highest of musical forms—the Symphony,” he stated.10

Early on, Still established a leitmotif that would recur throughout his catalog—a fearless exploration and fusion of genres and styles, something he felt compelled to do as he developed “an individual form of expression.”11 Although Afro-American Symphony received positive critical praise, it also set him against prevailing winds of the decade. Many of his colleagues at the time regarded the arts as divided into black and white. But Still was interested in elevating his individual voice and connecting with audiences, regardless of skin color. Commenting on the widening racial divide of the arts at the time, he said, “For me, there is no White or Black music, there is only music by individual men that is important if it attempts to dignify all men, not just a particular race.”12

A Quest for Beauty in Music

The 1930s proved to be a productive decade for Still as he shifted from what he called the “blues idiom” to the “universal idiom,” which focused on connecting with audiences through works that unify rather than divide. He was an in-demand arranger, orchestrator, and composer, and he was commissioned for the arrangement of various compositions for organizations such as the League of Composers, Cleveland Orchestra, the New York World’s Fair, and the United States Military Academy band. He briefly worked for Columbia Pictures before conducting orchestras such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He also received an honorary master’s degree from Wilberforce University in 1936 and went on to receive eight more from higher education institutions over his career.

As his accolades grew, he spread his wings artistically, covering new subjects in his repertoire. His 1936 suite, III Visions, featuring the fan-favorite middle movement, “Summerland,” chronicles his view of the journey of a soul. He wrote the piano suite for his wife and musical collaborator, Verna Arvey, who played the piece during its public debut in Los Angeles. The suite highlighted an overarching goal that would set Still apart from many of his modernist contemporaries moving forward: “Experimentation for the sake of experimentation can only produce a poor substitute for music, and we are now in need of real music, not contrived sounds. We need a new contemporary goal. I suggest that this goal be beauty, and I maintain that there is no substitute for inspiration.”13

In 1945, Still wrote his penultimate symphony, his fourth, titled Western Hemisphere. In it, the listener finds the composer expressing reverence for the beauty and resources of America’s natural landscape. The piece opens with the portrayal of “The vigorous, life-sustaining forces of the Hemisphere.”14 The listener is then taken through a series of movements chronicling “the natural beauties of the hemisphere” and its benevolent essence.15 “[It] portrays—in a sense—the spirit of the American people,” Still wrote, noting that his vision for the work celebrates “the rich human and natural resources of all of the Americas.”16

His focus on individual expression, his quest for beauty in music, and his celebration of America’s abundance put him at odds with musical circles that were embracing communist ideals more and more. “He is an independent thinker, not a musical faddist. He has always spoken for himself,” stated writer Robert Bartlett Haas.17 After a busy three decades from the 1920s through the 1940s, the 1950s would be different for the inspired composer. And this made him directly confront the pushback he had been quietly facing.

“Lean Years”

Back in 1936, Still had begun work with Langston Hughes to complete the opera Troubled Island, about the Haitian Revolution of 1791. But creative differences and Hughes’s lack of availability put a strain on their professional partnership. By 1939, though the opera had been completed, their relationship had been all but dissolved. On top of that, Hughes was a popular figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that became increasingly sympathetic to communism as the years passed, putting Still and his anti-communist views in direct opposition.

Sometime between 1931 and 1935, modernist musicians had formed a new organization in New York: the Composers’ Collective. It was an affiliation of the Workers’ Music League, which was part of the American Communist Party, and these affiliations held influence within the American musical landscape. Author Catherine Parsons Smith noted that through 1936, despite some negative press, Still “regularly attracted critical admiration.”18 But subsequent years were a different story. In a 1946 review of Still’s work, New York Times music critic Olin Downes, who aligned himself with leftist “progressive” causes, referred to the composer’s style and the push for universal qualities within his works as “diluted” and deprived of its “racial essence.” He described Still as a “smoothed out” composer, which, he concluded, “is unfortunate.”19

Still began speaking out about the ostracization he faced as a composer with anti-communist views. In 1949, he prepared a speech with Arvey’s help for Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles, wherein he addressed the issue:

I turn now to one tremendous problem that confronts only those composers in our country who are loyal Americans. It is a problem created by the opposition of communists to all who do not subscribe to their beliefs. . . . Through underhanded maneuvering they have placed their emissaries in . . . important positions where they very effectively . . . prevent loyal American composers from being heard whenever and wherever possible.20

He then used a personal example to highlight the suppression he believed he was facing: “From a person [employed in the Victor Record Co.,] . . . a person in a position to know what goes on, I learned that a small group of communists dictate what music shall and shall not be recorded by that company.”21 His daughter, Judith Anne, later recalled a privately arranged meeting, allegedly by Hughes, in which Still was asked to become a member of the Communist Party in America. “The result seemed to create suspicion rather than interest on Still’s part,” wrote musicologist Catherine Parsons Smith.22 (Hughes would go on to publicly deny being an official member of the party.)

Still struggled to find commissions and consistent work in the 1950s. “His devotion to an individualistic musical voice led to some lean years,” wrote Paul J. Horsley for the Philadelphia Orchestra.23 Judith Anne, who began stewarding Still’s musical legacy in the early 1980s, once remarked that her father made an important decision early in his career as he faced financial difficulties while caring for his family and trying to make music that paid the bills. One evening, while lying in bed in his family home in Harlem, he made a vow. “He determined that he would write the kind of music that he wanted to write, regardless of hardship,” she recalled.24

During the later years of his professional career, that vow was tested—but never broken.

Choosing Between Principles and Peers

The 1960s and 1970s brought increasingly avant-garde and abstract compositions to the mainstream fold, and Still’s Romantic style of composing fell largely by the wayside. He continued to compose privately, but his public output significantly decreased before his passing in 1978. Despite his lackluster final years, his professional longevity through the early- and mid-20th century and his unparalleled catalog set him apart as one of America’s few distinguished composers. Music writers and historians often point out Still’s “firsts” in an effort to show his influence: the first African American to have a symphony performed by a major US orchestra, the first African American to conduct a major US symphony orchestra, the first African American to have an opera produced by a major US company—among others. But through each recognition, Still stuck to his individualist principles. The story goes, when referred to by the nickname given to him by others, “The Dean of Afro-American Composers,” he shot back, “Why wasn’t Copland the dean of white composers?”25

During a time of encouraged separatism in the arts, Still integrated; during a time of abstract musical works, he strove to create works filled with beauty and meaning. Whatever Still was expected to be, whether from the perspective of a narrow-minded white critic or narrow-minded black activist, he wasn’t, which often caused him to have to choose between his principles and his peers. “Still did not behave in a way that those who discriminated against him wished him to act; neither did he conform to the wishes of those who looked to him to join in a common cause,” wrote Botstein.26 He was too modern for traditionalists and too traditional for modernists. His music and his writing show that he chose his principles, during prolific years and lean ones.

Still risked his reputation and career for his integrity and his belief in the right to individual expression and paid for it. But today, his legacy as a skilled, visionary composer stands strong. “In the same way a sociology student must study Tocqueville to understand American society, or a philosophy student must study Edmund Burke to discover the theoretical underpinnings of American politics, there is no greater composer for the study of American music than William Grant Still,” Britton wrote.27

In a 1994 essay, author and writer Gayle Murchison shared how she hoped Still would be represented in years to come. “Perhaps the years following the 1995 centennial of Still’s birth will bring about a renaissance of Still studies and result in a deeper understanding of Still as a man of letters and a man of music,” she wrote, adding, “Perhaps he will be seen, more properly, as ‘Still, American Composer of American Music.’”28

Written and directed by Curry Barker
Starring Cooper Tomlinson and Inde Navarette
Distributed by Focus Features (United States)
Running time: 109 minutes
Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, sexual content, pervasive language, and brief graphic nudity.

Obsession (2025) follows Bear Bailey (Michael Johnston), an introverted, hopeless romantic who faces severe anxiety trying to confess his love to his good friend, Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarette).

In the opening shots, the cold palette and absence of characters close to Bear emphasize his unhappiness in his isolation. Characters in the background are blurry but still perceptible, suggesting that human connection is constantly in the back of Bear’s mind but always out of reach. This loneliness is underscored when his cat, Sandy, dies; she had been the only other occupant of the one-bedroom home he inherited from his grandmother.

His infatuation with Nikki seems sweet on the surface. But during his speech to his best friend, Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), in which he practices what he will say to her as he confesses his feelings, it’s clear that he loves what Nikki provides for him rather than Nikki herself.

Pretending to talk to Nikki, he says, “You were the only person who was nice to me when I moved here.” This suggests that Bear has experienced social ostracization and exclusion before, and this line explains in part his intense nervousness and anxiety about talking to Nikki, who is supposed to be his friend. It also suggests that Bear views himself as an outsider. Instead of this being a singular experience that he has grown or learned from, it is now a facet of his personality, and he views Nikki’s acceptance of him as an outsider as a reason to believe that they could be happy together romantically.

After a phone call with Nikki during which she complains about losing her crystal necklace, he goes to a crystal shop to buy her another. This will be his in; by replacing something she cherished, he will be able to say the thing he cannot with words—that he loves and cares for her.

But when he gets to the crystal shop, he is instead enchanted by a small children’s toy called the One Wish Willow, which grants the user one wish if he breaks the stick in half. It is unclear why Bear decides to pick this toy over the necklace. It has no significance for Nikki other than that it would be a present from her friend Bear. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the intimacy of replacing a necklace was too explicit a confession for Bear, so he went for a less obvious option in case Nikki said no. This choice reveals something about Bear’s character: He abandons his logic for his emotion. His fear of rejection is understandable, but he makes an incomprehensible choice. Giving Nikki the necklace would surely communicate his feelings better than giving her the One Wish Willow, which says absolutely nothing on its face. He has more of a chance of being rejected by giving her the One Wish Willow because it is not personal to Nikki and therefore does not convey the message that he understands her and cares for her.

This abandonment of logic for the sake of emotional security is a consistent feature of this story, which not only diverts Bear away from a path of clarity and reason but is also the driving mechanism through which Nikki is subjected to torture.

After several excruciating tries to draw Nikki away from their friends for a personal talk at trivia night, Bear settles for driving her home. In the car, their conversation suggests closeness but is stilted by silences that should be filled with Bear’s confessions. Instead, he keeps quiet, pushing himself to talk but always doing so to change the topic, much to his own frustration.

After Nikki eventually gets out of the car and walks toward her door, Bear realizes that he forgot to give her the One Wish Willow. Knowing that even if he had, he wouldn’t have said what he really feels, he instead breaks the stick and says the words to himself, “I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone else in the world.”

What follows is completely unexpected. The wish has a horrific effect on Nikki’s life. Her body is taken over by an extremely violent and obsessive entity. She lies that her dad has cancer to invoke sympathy from Bear, so he stays with her all the time. She digs up his dead cat and makes a shrine to her on Bear’s kitchen floor to show her devotion to him. She brutally kills her best friend, with whom she suspects Bear is having an affair, by smashing her face into her steering wheel. The real Nikki is buried in her own body, and we see fleeting glimpses of her when she suddenly recoils from Bear’s touch, screaming in agony and disorientation.

As audience members, we must admit that Bear had no way to know that his wish would cause this. For the first quarter of the film, he suspects that his wish has worked, but he resists accepting that because of the impossibility. But we get periodic glimpses that the real Nikki is trapped inside her own mind—and Bear sees them. Even if he could not accept that his wish had worked, Nikki’s actions are in line with someone experiencing a psychotic break. After digging up the cat, Nikki makes Bear lunch for work. When he bites into the strange, discolored meat, he realizes that she has cut up his cat and fed it to him. A picture of the two of them is taped to the inside of the lunchbox lid; Bear is circled with the words “you,” and Nikki is circled with the words “not me.” So why does he spend so much of the film trying to find ways to contain this new Nikki so they could have the relationship he has always dreamed of?

We can sympathize with Bear for rejecting a conclusion that seems inconceivable. His entire worldview must change to accept that Nikki’s body has been hijacked due to his wish. Previously, he believed that he lived in a world governed by reason, but he now knows that he lives in a world where dark magic can affect the lives of innocent, unassuming citizens. This is also hard to accept because it means that Nikki is powerless to stop it. Bear has forced Nikki into a state of waking torture in which she has become a prisoner inside her own body with absolutely no hope of breaking out.

In a state of intense bewilderment, Bear goes back to the crystal shop for answers, where he is told, rather candidly, that the only way to free Nikki from this agony is to kill himself. If he dies, the wish will die with him, and Nikki will be free; otherwise, Nikki will live like this forever, in an endless state of powerless servitude.

The film has presented us with an unwinnable ultimatum, which can reasonably evoke sympathy from the audience. Only one solution exists, which requires the biggest loss any human being can suffer. However, it is made clear through the consistent presentations of Nikki’s agony that this is a necessary action. In the final scenes, as Bear debates whether to overdose on pills to end his torment, the film is faster paced, manic, evoking the feeling that Bear is running out of time before something even worse happens, and we cannot help but hope for his death to prevent it. His life taken to save Nikki’s is not a sacrifice, because a life in which he has wreaked such havoc on an undeserving Nikki is not a life worth living. Forcing someone into servitude is a catastrophic violation of individual rights, and morally it must be met with forfeiture of the criminal’s own rights, even if the full effects were unintended. What removes or diminishes our sympathy for Bear is how long it takes him to recognize the fact that he has done something wrong and therefore, should be punished. Even if Bear didn’t know what his wish would entail when he first made it, his decision to accept someone else’s enslavement as long as it serves his desires is evil.

One of the most basic virtues we can exercise is choosing to think rationally and to evaluate the world around us. Therefore, wilfully inducing inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment is a source of evil. Bear spends much of the film ignoring that which he knows is true: Nikki is behaving significantly out of character in a way that puts her life and the lives of others in danger. He lies to his friends and himself, trying to convince them that Nikki is fine, that they love each other so she seems different. When no one believes him, he regurgitates her lie about her dad dying to explain her drastic change, even though he knows it is untrue and makes no sense considering their distant relationship. He isolates her further by telling Ian that nothing is wrong with her, even when Ian identifies her behavior as beyond abnormal and suggests that Bear might be taking advantage of her in her time of crisis.

In the dead of night, the real Nikki manages to break through to talk to Bear, saying that the entity inside of her is sleeping. She begs Bear to kill her, emphasizing that this experience is agonizing and terrifying. Instead of empathizing with her and recognizing his own mistakes, he demands to know what’s so bad about being with him that she would rather be dead. She tries to reply that she has never been with him, but he cuts her off by storming out of the room.

Although Bear, to some degree, is a victim of circumstance, his callousness and complete disregard for Nikki’s experience is truly evil. He had no way to know that his wish would induce such a horrific experience for everyone involved. But when he identified his wish as directly responsible, he should have taken the necessary steps to remedy it. He should not have continued to puppet her around, treating her more like an object than a person. One of the most horrifying and graphic scenes is when he has sex with her; the camera zooms in on her blank expression, absent and disassociated from her own body, as Nikki makes placid sounds of enjoyment.

Even if it is unintended, subjecting someone to involuntary servitude is one of the most heinous acts a person can commit, and there is properly a legal requirement to take away some of the criminal’s own rights in response. But Bear being arrested and thrown in prison would not have freed Nikki. The only way Bear could free Nikki was to take his own life or to take hers. But taking hers would have been immoral to the highest degree because she did nothing wrong.

We can feel sympathy for Bear that he is left without options, but logic and reality demand recognition. His decision to ignore Nikki’s predicament is evil; by doing so, Bear willingly ignores his ability to think by pretending he doesn’t understand the circumstances, which only serves to prolong Nikki’s servitude to him.

Bear’s death is a catharsis for the audience. The audience and Bear are the only ones who know that Nikki is trapped inside of her own body because of the wish. We see Nikki, charismatic and confident before Bear subjects her to this torture. Then we see her in the final scene, screaming yet paralyzed by shock, and we know Bear had to die—anything else would not have delivered the retribution Nikki deserved. Obsession horrifically shows the evils of this action, dealt with justly through the ending.

We can feel sorry for Bear that he had to take his own life while recognizing it is the only thing a sane person could do—because he’d doomed Nikki to a fate worse than death.

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a live talk and has been lightly edited. It retains the cadence and idiosyncrasies of an oral presentation.

Imagine that you have a crush on somebody and you have reason to believe that this person likes you back. Then you’re at a bar or a dance and you see him or her dancing with somebody else. What would you do? Or if you’ve been in this situation, what did you do?

Believe it or not, this is a situation that Jane Austen wrote about. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg; we all have to deal with many kinds of complex situations within relationships. At different times in our lives, we all have to make decisions about romantic relationships: Do we start a romantic relationship? Do we end one? We’ve all found ourselves in tricky conflicts with friends and had to resolve arguments. At times, we’ve had to negotiate better ways to communicate with our parents and siblings, and so on.

In order to equip ourselves for these inevitable and often painful situations, there are a few key things we can do. We can look to philosophy, which explores the fundamental nature of human beings, how we know what we know, and how we should act. We can look to psychology and learn about patterns of behavior, thought, and emotions and how we can influence them. But what people don’t often think about is that we can also look to great fiction—which dramatizes both. Or as Austen put it, novels can contain “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties.”1

All good fiction includes conflict, which is fundamentally a clash of values. Two or more parties want things they’re willing to strive for—and they cannot both have them. (Occasionally, one character has an internal clash, or one “party” is actually a challenge posed by nature, but two or more parties is more common.) Great fiction also contains vivid characters, and many of these are archetypes: a particular kind of person who serves a certain plot function but whom you’ve probably also encountered in real life. Austen was especially good at showing archetypes in a subtle way, depicting how they fared and what they did in different situations and different kinds of relationships. But she also went deeper than that, and that’s why we’re going to talk about her work today.

Before we go any further, I want to say that fiction is something that is enjoyable in and of itself. We read a great novel and love it because it’s fun. Additionally, the digging a little deeper we’re going to do here is part of the enjoyment of fiction. The learning that we can do by thinking about characters, understanding them, and evaluating them adds to the enjoyment. This is because fiction can help us grasp essential truths on a fundamental level by connecting them to our emotions—by giving us a reason to care.

To contextualize Austen’s work, it helps to have a bit of background. She was born in 1775 and died mysteriously in 1817. She was the daughter of a preacher and part of a large family. She began writing from an early age, about twelve, beginning with humorous short stories and vignettes. When she initially began to publish novels, she did so anonymously. They were published as “by a lady.” That being said, there’s a lot we don’t know about her life. She didn’t keep a diary, or if she did, we don’t have it. There were no biographies of her written during her life. And the first biography wasn’t written for over half a century after her death by a nephew who didn’t know her that well.2 Nor do all of her letters survive; we have some, but her sister burned some. So, there’s a lot we don’t know. What we do know is what’s in her published works, particularly her main six novels. These are the four that she published during her lifetime (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma) and the two that her family published shortly after her death (Persuasion and Northanger Abbey).

Within these novels we see some pretty consistent characteristics. Austen is often noted for her wit; she liked to look at what’s absurd in the archetypes she employed, in their relationships, and in the social norms of her time and poke a bit of fun at them. For example, she absolutely detested people with authority who neglected the responsibilities that came with that authority, or even worse, abused it. We can see this is in the clergymen in her novels. The less important clergymen are lazy or hypocritical, but the important ones are always absurd. And they’re absurd in the same way: They’re pompous, self-important, and arrogant. They’re written for laughs, so we get to giggle at the fact that the person is this way, rather than being infuriated with them.

But Austen’s appeal goes deeper than that. In all of her novels, there are moral lessons. There is the development of timeless virtues, and this is why it’s still worth talking about them two hundred years after they were written, when a lot of the social norms she was criticizing are gone or significantly faded. We’ll get into these lessons in more depth, but a lot of them are around things such as justice and honesty. In order for her heroines to learn these lessons, they need to gain some kind of knowledge. Usually this is both internal knowledge about themselves and external knowledge about other people and the world around them. One of the fun things about Austen is that she actually gives us most of this information if we are attentive enough to pick up on it before the heroines do. It’s subtle.

However, possibly my favorite thing about Austen is that she creates a benevolent universe. All of her heroines get happy endings, but it’s not automatic, and it’s not guaranteed; they don’t know they will get them. They have to earn them. They have to develop their characters. These earned happy endings provide us with motivation along with an exploration of what the relevant virtues and principles look like when applied. We’re going to look at this from a few different angles.

Ideas Shape Choices

First, we must recognize that ideas shape choices. By ideas, I mean your core beliefs about human nature, what constitutes a good life, and what you expect from other people. It was common in Austen’s time for writers to think about their moral ideas and how they could explicitly promote those principles in their novels, or even to write novels in order to propagandize. Marilyn Butler, a preeminent Austen scholar, argues that what makes Austen stand out from her contemporaries, and one of the reasons that she is more influential than they, is that she showed us her characters’ ideas rather than telling us. Many of her contemporaries had their characters declare their philosophies in speeches or in letters. Occasionally in Austen we get a conversation, a snippet, or a sentence or two of this, but mostly we see who they are. They show us in their actions, their words, their topics of conversation, and how they speak about those topics. Austen was praised for her development of a variety of idiolects; each of her characters sounds different for a reason.3

She shows her characters’ ideas in a lot of ways, but I want to take one example. For this, we need to start with her intellectual context. As I mentioned, Austen was born in the late 18th century and started writing in the early 19th century. At this time, rationalism was giving way to romanticism in philosophy. The entirety of these philosophies goes beyond the scope of this discussion, but here are some relevant points. Rationalism emphasizes the use of reason over and detached from experience and emotion. It is often associated with sciences and things that are constructed by human beings. Romanticism is the opposite; it emphasizes the importance of emotion over reason, and it’s associated with nature and with the arts.

Austen examined these two schools in Sense and Sensibility. This title may sound a bit odd to a modern ear, but “sensibility” in her time meant something more like sentimentality or emotionalism. This is the only novel in which Austen had two heroines, sisters, one of whom represents sense and rationalism and the other sensibility and romanticism. Throughout this novel, she puts them in similar situations so we can see how they respond differently and what the results of those behaviors are. Along the way, they both go through different arcs.

Recall the imagined scenario in which your crush is talking to somebody else with evident interest. Austen puts both of the sisters in this situation, and we’ll see how they respond differently—according to their ideas about what is important and what constitutes a good life.

Marianne is our romantic; she’s not merely somebody who feels things strongly, but somebody who indulges her emotions as a matter of principle. She believes that to be a good person is to be emotional. She judges people by how passionate they are. When she goes to a ball and sees the gentleman she’s interested in, and who she thought was interested in her, with another lady, Austen tells us, “Her face was crimsoned over, and she exclaimed, in a voice of the greatest emotion, ‘Good God! Willoughby, what is the meaning of this? Have you not received my letters? Will you not shake hands with me?’”4 For Marianne, wearing her heart on her sleeve is a badge of honor. It would never occur to her to not say what she’s thinking or feeling, no matter how public the context or serious the consequences.

By contrast, we have her sister Elinor. Elinor wants to be rational, she wants to do the practical thing, she wants to do what she thinks is right—at the cost of ignoring her own emotions entirely. She shoves them down, suppresses them, trying to never make them somebody else’s problem but also not dealing with them herself. She finds herself in a similar situation to Marianne’s. She’s at home when the gentleman in whom she is interested comes to visit, as does another lady who is attached to him. Elinor thinks she ought to leave them alone;

she soon afterwards felt herself so heroically disposed as to determine, under pretence of fetching Marianne, to leave the others by themselves; and she really did it, and that in the handsomest manner, for she loitered away several minutes on the landing-place, with the most high-minded fortitude, before she went to her sister.5

Elinor is martyring herself because she refuses to acknowledge the reality and validity of her emotions.

Consider yourself in this scenario. What would you do in their places? Would you be more like Marianne and express your emotions clearly and vocally, regardless of who’s around? Would you be more like Elinor and shove them down and try to pretend they’re not there? Or something else? And why? What is it about your view of life and human nature that pushes you in that direction?

The “why” question is important because this kind of self-knowledge is essential to how we grow, which Marianne learns. She finds herself in a dire situation, and she realizes through reflection that it’s not only her actions that led her there but the beliefs that drove her actions. The most relevant idea is that being passionate and expressing her emotions is always right, without questioning them or thinking about the context of the situation and whether it was appropriate to express her emotions in that way.

She realizes that she’s able to correct her ideas and then her behavior. It’s an interesting kind of climax, a realization, but it’s one we see over and over again in Austen. As Butler put it, “her plots are a movement from ignorance to knowledge, culminating in a moment of intelligent discernment.”6 But the obstacles to that intelligent discernment, that knowledge, vary dramatically from novel to novel.

Self-Deception

Pride and Prejudice centers around self-deception, particularly in a heroine who believes herself a very good judge of character. In fact, the working title for the novel was First Impressions. The protagonist is Lizzy Bennet, who misjudges two key characters in the novel.

First, we have Mr. Wickham—a walking red flag. From the very beginning, he flirts with Lizzy, charms her, talks to her family kindly, and opens up. He talks to her about his past and how he’s been wronged by the other character. He’s open and amiable, so she overlooks the facts that he’s shared far more than is appropriate given their relationship and that he doesn’t do the things he said he was going to do. She also overlooks the fact that she doesn’t have the evidence to judge the claim that the other character had, in fact, wronged him.

The other character, Mr. Darcy, is quite offensive on their first meeting. He says something negative about Lizzy’s looks within her hearing. He’s generally standoffish and arrogant to everyone. Later, he starts to be more polite and behave like a gentleman, even correcting others’ rudeness toward her. But he’s still distant and reserved. He waves away any potential inadequacy on his part by saying he’s not good at making conversation with people.

There comes a situation in which Lizzy makes clear to him her disapproval—that she thinks that Mr. Darcy is a bad person because of what he supposedly did to Mr. Wickham as well as another reason. Mr. Darcy initially is angry, but he decides to explain himself, unintentionally creating a test for her. Mr. Darcy writes Lizzy a letter in which he sets forth his side of the story.

At first, she doesn’t want to believe it. She had thought herself a good judge of character; how could she be so wrong about two people? But she’s honest. She stops and thinks. She goes through the letter a couple of times. She asks herself whether what she’s reading makes sense with what she knows of each of the two men. She asks whether Darcy would have given her the kind of information that he gave her if it were not true. Over a couple of pages, Austen spells out the process of introspection and the realizations Lizzy has. Here is one sentence of it: “Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned.”7

Through Lizzy’s realization, she’s identifying her emotions, past and present, and how she deceived herself through them. Note how active this language is: “courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away.” This isn’t something that simply happened. Lizzy actively chose to ignore evidence, to ignore her sister’s warning, to ignore the red flags in Mr. Wickham and the positive things she was seeing about Mr. Darcy. She “drove reason away”—it was an active thing that she chose. The good news is that she can now choose differently. She can choose to look for more evidence, to act more civilly toward Mr. Darcy, and to reassess herself.

She thinks, “Till this moment I never knew myself.”8 She had not realized that her emotions could lead her astray in that way, but now she does. We already know that when we face tough decisions, we are shaping ourselves through what we decide. But we can also learn about ourselves if we choose to turn the spotlight inward and ask, How did we come to these conclusions? Why are we thinking what we’re thinking? Why do we want this? Why do we feel this way? If we ask those questions, we start to understand ourselves on a much deeper level.

We also are able to understand others better because we can see where our own emotions, misconceptions, hasty judgments, and insufficiently evidenced evaluations could be leading us astray. This is a pattern we see throughout Austen’s work: All her novels involve the characters gaining some kind of knowledge about themselves and about each other, and through this they come to better understand one another.

Better Understanding Others

We can learn from the processes, challenges, and triumphs of her characters and apply these lessons to our own lives to better understand the people around us. How? The following strategies are all things that we see Austen’s characters doing, that we can do as we read fiction, and that we can do with people in our own lives.

The first strategy is to think of yourself like a detective. In recent years, publishers have released several novels based on Austen’s works in which the author turns the heroine into a detective solving a murder or other mystery. The reason this works so well is because Austen depicted her female characters as detectives, trying to figure out the moral stature of the people around them so they can make the most important decision in the life of a woman in Regency England, which is whom to marry. A heroine has to put together different clues, and she can go wrong if, like Lizzy, she ignores some things that she really ought not to ignore.

In detective stories, very often the detective comes to a wrong conclusion initially. He has some evidence, but he puts it together wrongly. He thinks that he knows more than he does and creates a narrative that sounds compelling but is, in fact, incorrect. We see this throughout Austen’s novels, such as with Lizzy in regard to Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham.

If we’re actively reading fiction, we’re doing the same thing all the time. We want to figure out who the villain is, what’s behind the secret plot, or who the murderer is before the detective or hero does. We can also do this with people in our own lives. When we’re getting to know somebody or considering a relationship, we can look at the clues we have. We can ask ourselves what we know about his character, what we’ve seen from him, what makes sense as an explanation for his behavior, and whether we even know enough to come to a conclusion yet.

The next strategy is projection. I’m sure your parents have told you at some point to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. This is something that we do very naturally when we read fiction. In fact, the parts of our brains that we use when we’re imagining ourselves in the future are active when we’re reading fiction.9 But we can do this more deliberately. We can imagine we’re Marianne in Sense and Sensibility and ask ourselves what we would do in her situation, how we would feel. Austen’s characters encourage each other to do this, too. Lizzy’s friend encourages her to put herself in the shoes of her sister’s suitor to understand how he must be feeling at this moment so she can better advise her sister.

But sometimes it’s really hard to relate to people. Sometimes we cannot understand their thinking, and we cannot feel as they would feel. They’re simply too different from us; we wouldn’t behave in that way. Or maybe it’s even worse—maybe we’ve judged that this person is immoral, so we don’t want to feel like they would feel. We don’t want to imagine ourselves as a bad person.

In that case, we can employ “strategic empathy.” This is a strategy used by military analysts, because when you’re trying to figure out what to do in a war, it’s dangerous to feel as the enemy feels. But you still have to know how to handle them; you’ve got to figure out how to adapt your strategies for the situation. This is a whole field, but there are two important questions to consider: How does this person or group see themselves? And how do they see the situation? You don’t need to feel as they feel—only to understand where they’re coming from.

We see this, too, in Austen’s fiction. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor, the rationalist, is confronted with a malicious character. She could never feel as this lady feels. She would never treat somebody the way this woman is treating other people. But by understanding how the other woman sees herself and how she sees the situation, Elinor knows how to handle her. She knows what to tell her and what not to tell her, how to frame things, and therefore how to get through the situation better.

The last point is not so much a strategy as a pitfall to avoid: assumed similarity, also known as excessive self-reference. We all have the most experience with ourselves; we spend more time with ourselves than we do with any other human being. The result is that we tend to assume that other people are like us. But other people are not like us in many ways. We can go wrong if we assume that their motivations, thinking, and emotions are like our own when we don’t have evidence for that.

In Emma, a mentor warns Emma against this. She says, “do not pretend, with your sweet temper, to understand a bad one, or to lay down rules for it: you must let it go its own way.”10 There are many characters in Austen’s fiction, mostly minor characters who are written for laughs, who do this frequently, such as Mr. Woodhouse in Emma and Lady Catherine De Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. These people assume that others will think as they do, but in such a dramatic way that it’s funny.

But we also see it from the main characters. Part of the reason Marianne from Sense and Sensibility is so shocked and hurt at the ball is because she would never do what Willoughby has done. She values authenticity and the genuineness of emotion so much that to profess a feeling she didn’t fully feel and couldn’t fully commit to is unthinkable to her.

The above are merely a few examples that give us a step on the right path to figuring out how to apply the lessons Austen is offering us. But why should we?

First, Austen argues for moral growth. All of her characters develop some aspect of virtue throughout their respective stories; they all go through a character arc, and more specifically, a growth arc. A growth arc is when a character faces challenges and has to transform herself—to undergo realizations and change in some fundamental way—in order to meet a challenge. By thinking about these challenges and how the characters transform and meet them in fiction, we can more profitably ask ourselves: Where could I have, or have I had, a growth arc in my life?

If you look back at your own achievements and understand what you’ve overcome, that can add to your self-confidence—and it’s also a way of continually improving in the future. Maybe you’re facing challenges right now; maybe you will in the next year. How can you become a better person in order to meet that challenge or through meeting that challenge? Lizzy, for instance, becomes more honest and more just through better understanding herself and how she’s misjudged Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham. She develops those specific virtues. Austen, like Aristotle, does not conceive of virtue as a thing you achieve once and then you’re done. It’s not a finish line. Virtue is an active condition. It’s something we have to continually maintain; it’s the working state of the soul. Accordingly, in Austen’s fiction, we often see that, after her realization, the heroine has to put it to work multiple times. Lizzy has to encounter and talk to Mr. Darcy multiple times before the end of the story.

The reason it’s believable that her characters have these growth arcs and come to these conclusions and develop these virtues is because they are fundamentally truth seekers. This is an aspect of honesty. If it really, deeply matters to you what is true about a situation, what is true about a person’s character, or what was said or done in a given situation, the act of searching for the truth already puts you in a better place. What we see in Austen’s stories is that the characters who go through these growth arcs and develop these virtues are looking for the truth, and they end up with better relationships. They end up with good romantic relationships, and many of them also end up with better friendships and better family relationships, both in the sense of getting rid of some that are not good for them and in the sense of improving the ones they have. This is the happy ending I referred to earlier.

This makes sense. If we’re constantly working to better understand ourselves, better understand other people, be more honest, be more just, and grasp the truth, we’re going to have better relationships.

Flatterers versus Challengers

We see this clearly in Emma. Its protagonist, Emma Woodhouse, is spoiled, high status, privileged, and accountable to no one. Emma is often considered Austen’s most tightly plotted novel, and there’s a lot going on in it, so I will narrow down this discussion to two basic choices: choice of romantic partner and choice of friend.

Early on, Emma is drawn to people I call flatterers. These are the people who tell Emma only what she wants to hear—things that superficially feel good in the moment and puff up her ego. One flatterer, Frank Churchill, flirts with her. Another is Harriet Smith, who is lower status than Emma, poorer than Emma, younger than Emma, and less independent and strong-minded than Emma. She looks up to Emma for advice on virtually everything from buying ribbons to whom she should marry. Emma doesn’t think badly of these people; she wants the best for them. She takes on Harriet as a pet project to try to help her along in life. She doesn’t question why Frank would be flirting with her; she merely enjoys the attention and flirts back. But this leads her to disastrously misjudge the people around her because she’s not questioning her thinking. Both characters encourage her in whatever whim, fantasy, or misunderstanding she comes up with.

By contrast, there are the challengers—people who tell you what you need to hear, not always what you want to hear. The gentleman she ends up married to is described early in the novel as being “one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them.”11

Not all challengers are confrontational or blunt, however. You can also challenge the people around you simply through how you act, which is what we see with Jane Fairfax, the woman Emma ends up becoming friends with. Jane is on a similar social level to Emma, but she’s significantly more accomplished in the kinds of skills that ladies were expected to have in that era—things such as drawing and playing the piano. Emma is smart, but she has no patience and she is the opposite of diligent, so she never really develops these skills. From early in the novel, Emma has a vague dislike for Jane and doesn’t understand why, and she doesn’t stop to ask why either. One character comments that it’s because Emma “saw in [Jane] the really accomplished young woman, which she wanted to be thought herself.”12 By the time Emma starts to better understand her own emotions and realize what evidence she’s overlooked, which includes how she feels about all of these characters, she realizes that Jane is somebody who’s going to inspire her to be her best.

These are the kinds of friends and partners who are valuable and whom we should cherish—even though sometimes it’s more difficult in the moment because they may tell us that they think we’re wrong. As Butler puts it, “Emma makes mistakes in the first instance because, like all other human beings, she is fallible. She also makes more than she need, because for much of the novel she underrates the need for objective self-criticism.”13

Austen reportedly wrote in a letter that Emma is a heroine who nobody but herself would much like.14 But many of us do like Emma because we relate to the kinds of errors that she makes and how she learns to correct them. What do we learn from Emma? Similar to Lizzy Bennet, we learn the importance of understanding your emotions and how they’re influencing your judgment, including emotions you didn’t know you had or you didn’t know the reason for. For example, it’s not nice to dislike somebody who has done nothing wrong to you, as Emma dislikes Jane. So, most of us wouldn’t want to spend too much time thinking about that, and Emma doesn’t. But when she does, she can be much more just to Jane, and she gets a good friend out of the bargain.

Emma, like Lizzy Bennet, also misunderstands her own strengths. Lizzy thinks she’s a much better judge of character than she is. Emma thinks that she would be a great matchmaker. (Spoiler alert: She is not.) Understanding your own strengths and weaknesses enables you to better address many things in your life. Studies have been done on self-esteem showing that people who have high self-esteem are pretty accurate in their assessment of their abilities; they don’t think themselves better than they are.15 They know where their strengths and weaknesses are, which Emma eventually learns.

Emma also learns to avoid the assumed similarity problem; other people’s motivations may not be what yours would be. Part of why she misguides Harriet, despite genuinely wanting the best for her, is because she doesn’t understand what Harriet wants or respect her agency. Emma doesn’t understand why Frank would flirt with her if he wasn’t actually interested in her. She doesn’t understand why other people act as they do because she assumes that their motivations would be the same as hers.

She also doesn’t think about the fact that good intentions aren’t always enough. She genuinely wants what’s best for Harriet. But without taking into account what Harriet wants, Harriet’s context, and the fact that Harriet needs to make her own decisions, she’s going to make Harriet’s life worse—as, initially, she does.

The Pattern

We see a clear pattern across Austen’s novels. We start with a setup; we learn the financial and family situation of the heroine and a bit about her personality. Then something changes; usually the heroine moves or other people move to where she lives. In this new context, she has to judge people, usually at least two people. She judges wrongly, usually in at least two cases. She makes some kind of mistake that leads her to behave unjustly and in a way that’s not good for her in the long run or the people around her.

Then she has that moment of intelligent discernment, the realization. In each case, she has to make the choice to take that seriously, as we saw with Lizzy’s letter. And she does. She has a moment of reflection and realizes what’s gone wrong and then adjusts her behavior. This often takes a couple of tries. In most of Austen’s novels, the heroine is put in a situation in which she has to put her new knowledge to work at least two or three times. Austen did not believe (with Socrates) that knowing what is right is enough. You still have to put it into action.

It’s helpful to look at our own lives through this lens. We all know our own situations; we know who we are and what our lives are like. We all have faced changes and complexity in our lives. We all have made errors of judgment. What have been the triggers through which you realized that you were wrong? What kind of reflections did you go through in those moments? Or perhaps you’re now facing complexity or the prospect of change in your life. You can be on the lookout for these kinds of errors. You can start to understand what kind of reflection is going to turn them into a moment of growth for you rather than letting it only be pain or challenge or complexity. Hopefully, that will lead you to a happier ending.

Key Takeaways

Ideas shape choices—what we believe about ourselves, other people, and what a good life is will affect how we behave. The more explicitly we understand that, the easier it’s going to be to correct errors and to correct our course if we’ve gone wrong, as we saw with Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.

To do this, introspection is essential. Without it, we risk leading ourselves astray, misunderstanding our emotions, and losing sight of how they are affecting our thinking. If we want to be more just and honest, like Lizzy and Emma, we have to understand why we don’t want to pay attention to some kinds of evidence—why we don’t want to look at that feeling or think about that person. We have to ask ourselves those difficult questions. If we do, then we continue to develop the active condition of virtue. We keep moving in the right direction. And if we do that, we’ll see improvements in our relationships. Sometimes that means that some relationships end, but others can shift and develop a new dynamic that is healthier and better for both people.

We see with Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility that, as both of them learn from each other, they end up treating each other better. Austen’s fiction, in general, offers us this benevolence—this world in which hard work, serious introspection, and challenging oneself always lead to a good outcome. And that’s the reassurance we sometimes need when we’re in moments of difficulty. Her novels offer an exploration of different aspects of virtue that we may not have considered. We know that we should treat people as they deserve to be treated. But what does that look like? In real life, it’s complicated and messy, so examining it from different perspectives can be valuable.

Austen was a keen observer of how people think, interact, and talk. By reading her novels, we get clear explorations and examinations of both a person’s internal world and the external world, as well as how those things mesh. Art is an end in itself. We can simply enjoy reading Austen’s fiction because it’s funny, because her characters are vivid, or because we love the happy endings. But the more thoughtfully we engage with it, even only the aspects I’ve elaborated, the more it enriches us.

I hope I’ve convinced you to go read or reread Austen. But if I haven’t, or if you’ve tried and really didn’t enjoy it, here are some books, different in genre, era, and scope, that I would recommend if your goal is to better understand yourself and human nature and thereby improve your relationships. All of these books, to different extents, involve characters who learn to deal with and understand people who have different motives, different backgrounds, and different goals from themselves.

In Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, that is the main character’s whole arc. He wants to understand the principle behind a certain kind of person who thinks differently from him. In doing so, he’s able to improve his career and his relationships.

A related lesson is that of learning to work with those who are deeply different from yourself—not just understand them, but form alliances and build something together. We see this in Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, a dystopian sci-fi trilogy in which the character has to bring together people from entirely different planets in order to effectively rebel against tyranny.

The costs of misunderstanding others can be deep. It can cause not only a lot of guilt and shame for ourselves, but also serious consequences for others if we misunderstand them and don’t realize that we didn’t have enough evidence for the evaluations we drew. We see that in books such as Atonement by Ian McEwan and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.

Thoughtful authors, such as Jane Austen, draw on observation and project principles that can help us thrive. Equipped with this knowledge, go forth, read more, and learn about yourself and other people.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

By Daniel Kraus
New York: Atria Books, 2026
294 pp., $10.99 (Kindle)

Angel Down won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for fiction—and yet the book is poison to its readers’ lives and minds. The Pulitzer Prizes—long considered some of the most prestigious awards in the United States—are supposed to celebrate “excellence in the arts and letters,” and in the past they did. But to call this year’s selection an example of excellence is to make a mockery of the term.

This year’s celebrated work of fiction follows Bagger, a preacher’s son who was drafted from a life of petty crime into the infantry in World War I. He manipulates others to avoid any risk to himself until his desire to protect Arno, a young brother-in-arms, leads him on a dangerous mission into no-man’s-land, where they find a beautiful, silent woman trapped in barbed wire. As they carry her across the hazardous terrain, she silently helps them in myriad impossible ways, and they start to realize that she isn’t an ordinary woman. Bagger concludes that she must be something supernatural: an angel, shot down by the monstrous weapons of the Great War.

Although this story premise is interesting, it would be a mistake to imagine that reading the book is like being taken on a fascinating journey accompanied by vividly drawn characters whose exploits are detailed in delightful language. Instead, what the Pulitzer website describes as “a breathless novel of World War I, a stylistic tour-de-force” is, in fact, a work written without any periods.1 It’s supposed to be a single sentence, though the author uses commas and other punctuation marks (including question marks and exclamation points within dialogue), as well as paragraph and chapter breaks, liberally—and often wrongly. The reader is sometimes able to guess where a sentence ought to end or what a rambling block of nonsense might be meant to convey, but it is not the reader’s job to guess what the writer might have meant or should have written.

A person can only hold so many items in his conscious mind at any one time. The divisions of sentences, paragraphs, sections, and chapters in a well-structured piece of writing enable him to integrate the units it contains into something comprehensible and relatable to some aspect of his knowledge and experience. Kraus’s refusal to group his concepts into sentences that each convey a single idea not only obfuscates what precisely his ideas are, but it represents a rejection of clarity and meaning as such.

An artist must select which elements of reality he wishes to re-create in his work, and groundbreaking art often requires the creation of original techniques for doing so. But if the “techniques” disregard the way the human mind works, such art cannot be said to be good for human life—which means that it is not good, full stop. As philosopher Leonard Peikoff put it, such art “is addressed to man as he does not perceive and cannot think.”2

Fiction may be fantastical and stretch the bounds of our imagination, but it is not strangeness for its own sake—it is an entertaining way to explore or portray something that matters deeply to its creator (and hopefully, to its audience). It conveys its values in ways that reflect and reinforce their significance to human beings. Ignoring a basic rule of grammar, whose purpose is to enhance and expand the functioning of its readers’ minds, is the opposite of the function of fiction. To deliberately hinder the conveyance of clarity and meaning, as Kraus does through his style, is to reject them wholesale.

The author attempts to frame this as a legitimate stylistic choice in the following passage:

Bagger, already weighed down in mud and blood, further heavies in the dreary certainty that the shriek won’t ever end, just like the war won’t ever end, like the carnage won’t ever end, it’s a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that, sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave (6)

Obviously, Kraus wished the experience of reading the book to parallel one aspect of being in a war. As a brief section contrasting with the rest of an otherwise clear, well-written work, this could be effective. However, that is not the case here; Kraus wrote the book entirely in this formless manner that undermines meaning by rejecting clarity.

Grammar, properly understood, is not a set of arbitrary dictates handed down through the centuries but a set of principles that facilitate the clear conveyance of ideas, even complex ones. As education expert Michael S. Rose put it,

What [the self-styled grammar] revolutionaries fail to understand is that grammar is not a constraint upon expression but its very possibility. The irony that shadows their rebellion is that in casting off the supposed chains of grammatical structure, they have not liberated thought but confined it to a smaller, meaner province, where clarity is impossible and precision unknown.3

Good writing, which employs grammar properly, enables us to integrate a great many concepts and thus expand the scope of our thinking drastically. Good fiction writing sometimes includes breaking grammatical principles if doing so serves a purpose within the story that can’t be served by adhering to them, such as (in some cases) indicating a character’s fragmented or tortured state of mind. But this is not what Angel Down does; its author placed the desire to convey an emotional impression over the use of reason (as though the two must necessarily be opposed)—and the result is not brilliant insight but dreary muddiness.

Through Angel Down, Kraus rejects the conceptual nature of literature—the fact that the medium depends on the ability of its audience to retain and categorize vast quantities of information through concepts stored and used via words. He is, in effect, attempting to construct a shrine to his moral ideas (if one takes him to believe what he writes) or to earn prestige (if one is being cynical) using materials that he either does not understand or holds in contempt.

The book’s style contradicts the requirements of human communication, and it hazily conveys a moral ideal that contradicts the requirements of human life. After rescuing the seemingly wounded woman from the battlefield, Bagger and his fellow soldiers start to recognize her power. As they do, three of them try to forcibly claim her to serve their own desires: One wants sex; another, vengeful destruction; the last, fame and fortune. All consider her a means to their ends, not a being with her own agency—and as a result, she brings all three of them to untimely deaths. Through the angel’s supernatural retribution, the book condemns acting as though others exist to serve you.

The book attempts to contrast this attitude with Bagger’s disposition toward the angel. “‘Each of the others wanted something particular from the person they imagined me to be,’” she observes (253). “‘But what do you want?,’ and Bagger doesn’t have to think, ‘All I wanted was to protect you,’ he gasps through sobs, ‘like [my father] protected me’” (254). Bagger’s father, a preacher, had taught him that the moral ideal is to serve others selflessly. As such, Bagger works to grasp what the angel wants from him and to act accordingly. He submits to her authority, not based on evidence that she’s earned any, but because of his emotional connection to her as both a manifestation of the religion he never quite rejected and as the supposed embodiment of the purity and innocence toward which he feels an obligation. He follows her even as he is filled with revulsion and horror at the idea of a divine conscience (God) that could allow such a gruesome war to continue. He concludes that she wants him to become a pacifistic automaton who abjectly accepts the guilt of other men’s sins and “serves” others by immolating himself:

what men have represented till now, the slavering instinct to conquer, a momentum unstoppable unless some hero jams the hardest detritus he can find into the machine he helped create, break the cogs and overheat the engine, and accept being burned alive in the resulting explosion, thereby inspiring everyone else toward heroism, too, the same self-sacrifice of Mr. and Mrs. Bagger, which might graduate into blanket nonviolence, an impossible dream (263)

This, according to the book, is our choice: force others to serve our own ends, which is obviously evil; or blindly serve others, following the dictates of a supposed authority even when it doesn’t make sense to you. “The angel tried to get Bagger to save anything other than himself, to make it a habit, and do so without throwing more gas into the furnace,” the narrator ham-fistedly concludes (264). And this is how Bagger acts in the dramatic final scenes of the book—not out of moral clarity but out of a desire to do what the angel wants him to do.

Bagger’s “arc” is to move from one side of a false dichotomy to another. He begins as a con man and coward who wants others to serve him at the cost of their own well-being and ends up serving others at the cost of his. Both options require sacrifice; the only difference is whose. This ancient false dichotomy is destructive to individuals and to relationships. There is one difference between the book and real life: The angel has unlimited power. She can create miracles. Only the existence of a supernatural element makes Bagger’s choices possible. If he were to choose to be a pacifist in the midst of a real war, he would face real consequences. If he were to blindly follow edicts that didn’t make sense to him, he would ruin relationships and risk injury, even death. However, because a supernatural power guides him in the book, he escapes the consequences of his own actions in a way that could never happen in reality.

The supposedly humanity-loving moral ideal he comes to accept is revealed to be exactly the opposite when one considers the implications of Bagger’s character and the angel’s: Both deny the significance of the individual. Bagger comes to hold that morality can only be achieved by rejecting the judgment of his mind—the faculty by which each person makes the choices that form his character, identity, and life. Bagger submits himself instead to the authority of the angel, who never even receives a name. She is not supposed to be an individual but a “concentration of virtue.” Yet she has the characteristics of an individual—the ability to make choices, to reason, to feel—because this is the only way a being with agency—let alone virtue—can exist. We interact, we collaborate, we find others to be incalculably valuable to our well-being—but we are fundamentally separate and distinct from one another.

Only by recognizing this fact can we come to respect each other’s rights and agency, and only through doing that can we form mutually beneficial relationships. Such relationships are ubiquitous in real life. An employer who treats his employee well and an employee who does his work well have a mutually beneficial relationship. A marriage in which both partners contribute meaningfully to the physical and spiritual needs of each other is a mutually beneficial relationship. A friendship in which both people enjoy camaraderie, encouragement, and the discussion of shared interests is a mutually beneficial relationship.

In Angel Down, we see examples of relationships that are emphatically not mutually beneficial, such as those between the angel and the soldiers who attempt to exploit her, and the one in which Bagger disregards his own mind and life to follow the angel’s judgment. Only one relationship seems on the surface to be mutually beneficial: that between the angel and the youngest soldier, Arno. “Arno’s an orphan, a sad little pauper straight out of Dickens, and though the kid’s never explicitly said he fibbed his way into the Army to procure a family, it doesn’t take a genius to see it” (59). The angel appears to each of the men as whomever he most wants to see, and “from the moment the angel reached the trench, Arno was snuggling into her like the mother he always wanted” (188). Arno tries to protect the angel because she offers him a real, spiritual benefit. If she were a real woman, this might have been mutually beneficial: She gets protection; he gets nurturing and comfort. But the angel is manipulating Arno because she cannot die; therefore, she does not need his protection.4

In a novel of any literary merit, characters like Arno generally are meant to serve a specific purpose: They are morally innocent victims of systems or philosophies they don’t understand but likely would resist if they did, and thus they evoke our pity. In Angel Down, however, Arno is an innocent victim of the author’s lack of moral clarity. He is robbed of agency; his fate depends on the decisions of others (whose fates at least have some connection to their actions). Clearly, the author doesn’t know what mutually beneficial relationships are or how to portray them but found Arno too useful to omit; he is not a person but the object of pity who first softens Bagger’s hardened heart.

In Angel Down, form and content are united in their disregard of human nature. A book that relies on supernatural elements to enforce its moral false dichotomy presented through a style that flouts the requirements of the human mind cannot be regarded as “excellent” by any rational standard. Art that subtly conveys its meaning can be deeply satisfying to a thoughtful reader; nonsense masquerading as creative form should not be mistaken for art.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Running time: 173 minutes
Rated R for graphic violence, language, and brief nudity

There have been a great many translations of The Odyssey spanning hundreds of years, although the same half dozen or so tend to top the list of those most highly regarded by credible critics and literary scholars. Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation—not one of them—served as director Christopher Nolan’s primary inspiration for the film (he also wrote the screenplay).1 In a glowing review of Wilson’s translation, Annalisa Quinn of NPR wrote:

Wilson’s project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup—the Christianizing (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms—to reveal something fresh and clean. . . . Though it’s silly to ascribe too much to her gender rather than her skill, Wilson does have a certain double sensibility that often translates male grandeur with a female half-smile.2

As if this weren’t a clear enough signal of the cancerous identity politics in Nolan’s film, the opening shot is a close-up of a black man presented—with unflinching seriousness—as a 12th-century BC Greek speaking to a room full of other 12th-century BC “Greeks” who are, in fact, primarily Asians, Indians, and other Africans.3

Here we go again.

Only Odysseus’s quest itself is grander in scope than the catastrophic failure of Nolan’s film. Its redeeming qualities are nearly nonexistent, and it fails not only as an adaptation of one of the greatest stories of all time but also as a film, and these two failure modes often overlap considerably.

The Odyssey is widely regarded as one of the greatest stories of all time, not because it’s old. It has been lauded for thousands of years because it is one of the best known examples of long-form storytelling, and storytelling has one fundamental purpose: to depict the human condition and enrich human lives. The essential task of a storyteller is to convey meaning—that is, to engage deeply with ideas and values that always have been and always will be central to human life. This is what Nolan’s film utterly fails to do and indeed does not even attempt.

This starts to become evident during an early scene depicting Odysseus’s encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant who can speak in the original poem but does not speak in this scene. Nolan’s decision to render Polyphemus mute here is not a minor change—it entirely misses and negates the purpose of the scene. In the original text, the cyclops encounter is the first of Odysseus’s major postwar adventures that he recounts to the Phaeacians (and the reader). This was not an arbitrary choice on Homer’s part. The reason the cyclops encounter is shown first is because its purpose is to convey, in part and in fundamental terms, what sort of man Odysseus is—and he reveals his character through a verbal battle of wits with Polyphemus, who displays near-human intelligence.

In the poem, Odysseus’s men are trapped in Polyphemus’s cave when he blocks the entrance with a humongous boulder. The men move to attack the creature, but Odysseus orders them to stand down—and he reaffirms the order even after Polyphemus brutally kills and eats several of the soldiers. Odysseus’s remaining men question the order but nonetheless follow it, trusting his judgment even though they do not yet understand it. Odysseus engages Polyphemus in conversation and witty banter, amusing the cyclops until he falls asleep. Odysseus then explains to his men that, if they kill the creature, they will be trapped forever in the cave because the stone blocking the entrance is far too heavy for them to move. They cannot fight their way out of the deathtrap—they must think their way out.

Over several days, Odysseus—who cleverly has told Polyphemus that his name is “Nobody”—lulls Polyphemus into complacency with more banter and flattery until the beast drinks too much wine (at Odysseus’s encouragement) and falls into a deep sleep. This allows Odysseus and his men to carry out the preparations for their escape plan—preparations that are loud and would have woken the cyclops had he not been drunk. When they are ready, they sharpen a large wooden stake and drive it into Polyphemus’s eye, blinding and enraging him. The cyclops gropes around for the men, but they are hiding among his sheep. When the giant eventually unseals the cave entrance to let the sheep out to graze, he feels each sheep as it passes by, still searching for the treacherous men who blinded him. Odysseus, having anticipated this, has already told his men to crawl out of the cave under the sheep, maintaining their disguise. As they board their ship, Polyphemus gives chase, shouting to his brethren cyclops and to his father, Poseidon, that “‘Nobody’ has blinded me.” Once Odysseus and his men are safely away from the shore, he cannot resist revealing his true name to Polyphemus, shouting “Tell [Poseidon] Odysseus, raider of cities, took your eye: Laertes’ son, whose home’s on Ithaca!”4 Although Odysseus is remarkably smart, he nonetheless sometimes does stupid things; this is, in part, what makes him an interesting and relatable character. (Revealing one’s identity to the god of the sea after blinding his son is quite foolhardy when one needs to cross the sea to get home; Poseidon then proceeds to severely complicate the remainder of Odysseus’s journey.)

Nolan’s portrayal of this scene conveys none of this meaning. Polyphemus is mute, so there is no dialogue between him and Odysseus at all. Odysseus does point out to his men that slaying the creature will trap them in the cave, but this is framed as an almost accidental realization rather than the reasoned observation of a clever man who has been paying close attention to his surroundings all along. In the poem (and in the well-done, albeit hokey 1997 television miniseries), the tension of this scene comes from the duel of minds between hero and monster, wherein a single intellectual stumble or overstated word of praise could spell doom for the wayward sailors homesick for wives whose embraces they’ve forgotten and sons they’ve never met.

Nolan replaces this crucial dramatic tension with boilerplate slasher film tactics, substituting darkness and loud noises for the battle of wits in a clumsy horror scene that clashes tonally with the rest of the film. As in the poem, Odysseus taunts the beast by revealing his name as the men flee to safety—but because we did not first see his intelligence, his courage, and the depth of his concern for his men, he comes across more like a cocky braggart than a flawed hero. Throughout the rest of the film, Nolan continues to portray Odysseus as alternately rude and stupid while spending comparatively little time on his good qualities—and Matt Damon’s consistently phoned-in performance shows us an Odysseus whose two primary emotions are mild confusion and boredom. (I feel compelled to point out that Damon is a much better actor than this, and he deserved a vastly better script.)

The scene featuring the witch Circe is similarly butchered. Odysseus’s men, nearly mad with hunger, encounter a lone woman while foraging in the wilderness and demand food from her. Although they don’t threaten or harm her, they are unnecessarily aggressive, and she agrees to share her food with them. While they are eating, she gleefully turns them into pigs using her magic.

When Odysseus later confronts Circe, Nolan’s version of her is revealed to be another instance of modern Hollywood’s sexism:

Odysseus: You turned my men into pigs.

Circe: No—they are pigs. I only removed their disguises and showed them for what they are. They came to me with empty bellies and hot blood.5

Odysseus: Did they touch you?

Circe: They would have.

Odysseus never challenges Circe’s presumption about his men and resolves the situation by simply threatening to kill Circe’s sister if she doesn’t remove the curse.

In the original poem, there isn’t so much as a vague hint that Circe is a misandrist hellbent on punishing all men for their supposed inherent wickedness, nor is there any indication that Odysseus’s men treat her poorly; in fact, it is Circe who offers to help them, and they graciously accept her offer. She is portrayed as a mysterious and explicitly nonhuman creature, although she takes a human form and outwardly acts human in some ways. In fact, the sexual aggressor in the original text is not Odysseus nor any of his men but Circe; she uses both magic and seduction to lure unsuspecting men into her trap. Odysseus, aided by Hermes, counters Circe’s magic with mystical herbs, and although he does sleep with her, he does so not out of lust but in acquiescence to her demand and on the condition that she remove the curse she has placed on his men.6

Par for the course for Hollywood in 2026, Nolan’s version of this scene inverts Odysseus from a virtuous, clear-thinking man who is explicitly not ruled by his sexual urges into an apologist for horny thieves. One point of the original scene—which Nolan also misses or ignores—is that appearances can be dangerously deceiving, and that Odysseus is greater than most men in his ability to see the truth behind clever deceptions. Another idea central to the original version of this scene is that courage is virtuous in part because not all threats to our values can be fully understood; Circe’s nature and motives are mysterious to Odysseus, which frightens him greatly, but he nevertheless confronts her because he would rather die in the attempt to free his men than leave them to their fate.

In Nolan’s film, the cyclops scene, the Circe scene, and many others are oddly short but feel much longer because they are not enjoyable or interesting to watch. The 173-minute film feels both frantically rushed and exhaustingly slow at the same time, which also traces back to Nolan’s fundamental misunderstanding of (and disrespect for) the source material. The original poem is only slightly longer than the average novel, but it would be somewhat misleading to say “only” without qualification because the structure of an epic poem is so different from that of a novel. In general, epic poems are primarily descriptive; they summarize long, complex events in a few lines or stanzas with little exposition of motive or mechanism, leaving it to the reader to infer or imagine these elements.7 This is why an epic poem typically covers tremendously more narrative ground than a novel or short story of comparable length; the latter two, by virtue of their different structures, spend much more time on the “why” and “how” of the events shown therein.

In practice, this means that adapting an epic poem to film requires much more screen time than adapting a similar-length novel unless one is willing to massively abridge the original text—at which point the resulting film becomes not an adaptation but a different story that is, at most, loosely based on the original. Nolan’s film feels both rushed and plodding because it merely “checks off” each major scene without seeking to understand what it means or why it should be included at all. As a result, we get something that is less like a coherent, narratively driven film and more like a three-hour museum tour led by an overcaffeinated guide who started the tour an hour late. We don’t understand how Odysseus defeated the cyclops or what (if anything) he learned from the experience; we see five minutes of whispering and a brief skirmish, and then the film moves on. We don’t understand how he survives his encounter with Circe or how he changes as a result of it, if he does; we see five minutes of a bored man halfheartedly arguing with an angry woman who hates men for no clear reason, and then the film moves on. There are so many scenes in the movie, and most of them are so shallow, that the end result is an increasingly familiar one in movies today: a film that manages to say nothing despite speaking for a very long time.

I also must address Nolan’s frankly disgusting willingness to submit to the overt racism and sexism that have infiltrated so many Hollywood productions since the mid-2010s. The opening scene is far from the only one in which the actors’ sex, race, or ethnicity is wielded as a club clearly intended to “deconstruct” “white” or “male-dominated” stories. For example, there is no defensible argument to be made that Lupita Nyong’o was cast as Helen of Troy for either her acting ability or her resemblance to the character; only in the loosest sense of the word “acting” does she do any acting at all during her two or three minutes of screen time, and she couldn’t bear any less resemblance to an ancient Greek woman. The decision to cast a sub-Saharan African woman as Helen of Troy was made for one reason only, and everyone knows that reason, including those who pretend not to know: to “subvert” the “racist” assumptions of “white” audiences. Only slightly less ridiculous are the myriad scenes (at least six) in which Odysseus’s African, Indian, and Asian soldiers loudly proclaim to one another: “We are Greeks.”

Particularly offensive is the casting of Elliot Page as Sinon (a character who is not in The Odyssey at all; he is essentially a disposable extra in Virgil’s Aeneid, written centuries after Homer’s death).8 Page is five foot one and barely one hundred pounds. This alone should disqualify any male actor from playing a Greek soldier in any serious adaptation of The Odyssey—but Page is not a male, and no amount of surgery can make her look like a Greek soldier. The film pointedly ignores these facts, most glaringly when showing a shot of Page immediately after a shot of the (actual) boy who plays a pubescent version of the character in an earlier scene. Nolan extends the farce still further, rewriting Sinon from a remarkably unremarkable side character into “the greatest and bravest man I’ve ever known” (Odysseus’s words). Just as Sinon is blatantly claimed to be something he irrefutably is not, so too is Page—and the prevailing moral code of modern Hollywood dictates that no one is allowed to point out any of this.

Most of the other actors in the film deliver performances just as underwhelming as Page’s. Damon comes across as being there primarily for the paycheck, Tom Holland alternates between overacting and underacting (mostly the latter), and John Leguizamo—who is supposed to be playing a Greek servant—doesn’t even try to mask his extremely New York accent. The only notable exception is Anne Hathaway, who does what she can with the poorly written script and occasionally manages to breathe some life into otherwise yawn-inducing scenes, but she can only do so much. The film is, for the most part, similarly boring to look at; many scenes are underlit nearly to the point of complete obscurity, and most are dominated by dark blue, dark brown, or dark yellow filters. This, too, is typical of Nolan; most of his films are overwhelmingly dark in both color and lighting.

Nolan’s film is deeply flawed in many more ways, but unlike him, I will refrain from trying to cram more onto the page than the format can support. Even in my most charitable interpretation, there is almost nothing positive to say about the film, the final lines of which are possibly the least self-aware lines of dialogue ever written:

Penelope: Why will the stories [of us] always be sung?

Odysseus: Because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.

Perhaps Nolan should try his hand at pop songwriting—because if this is the caliber of narrative writing that he thinks should be memorialized through the ages, then it’s time for him to put away his storytelling pen for good.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

All behavior can be traced back to instincts. When justice is denied, instincts turn to vengeance. —Anonymous

This made-up, sophomoric quote is the first thing that appears on-screen in Citizen Vigilante. Like the movie itself, it might at first appear profound, but it foreshadows one of the movie’s two terminally diseased premises: the alleged moral supremacy of “instinct” (i.e., unthinking emotionalism) over reasoned thought.

We need spend only a few sentences on the movie’s almost total lack of artistic merit. Writer/director Uwe Boll intentionally makes bad movies and has openly admitted that he’s a terrible filmmaker.1 Citizen Vigilante is poorly written, poorly cast, poorly acted, poorly filmed, poorly scored, and poorly edited. None of this should be hard to believe for anyone who has seen any of Boll’s other films—but these criticisms, severe as they are, aren’t important here. Most important is what Citizen Vigilante’s generally positive reception says about the quality of thought, discourse, and art in the modern world.

Citizen Vigilante isn’t merely a bad movie. Boll has made dozens of those; a few are entertaining because of their sheer badness, and most can cause no harm beyond wasting a few hours of your time. Citizen Vigilante is a different, much worse kind of bad movie: the kind that tries and fails to take a moral stand against a severe, real-world problem—and then proceeds to dump jet fuel on the fire from a bucket labeled “water.”

The titular vigilante is Michael Sanders (Armie Hammer), whose name is never spoken aloud and only briefly seen in print once. (Boll’s intent in making the protagonist nearly anonymous seems to be to show him as someone with whom all of us should identify or sympathize; “anonymity as relatability” is a common device in vigilante stories.) Sanders takes it upon himself to fix Europe’s failing justice system—as though “Europe’s failing justice system” were a singular monolith—by torturing and murdering people who deserve it, according to his own blatantly whimsical and emotionalistic judgment. The movie doesn’t even specify the country in which it takes place; Boll only tells us that it’s set in Europe.2

In real life, some parts of Europe have been increasingly plagued by violent attacks similar to those depicted in the movie, and these attacks often are committed by migrants like those against whom Sanders retaliates.3 America has also been rocked by many high-profile cases of senseless violence committed by illegal immigrants in recent years, including those of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray.4

However, Boll’s film opens not by asking serious, carefully formulated questions about what justice requires in such cases but by reveling in the violence itself, which is almost always shown in gory, over-the-top detail. Within the first three minutes, an unnamed and presumably illegal African migrant stabs an innocent woman in front of her son for no discernible reason. Shortly after that, Muslim immigrants gang-rape a teenage girl and try to defend themselves by saying that the act was morally permissible under the teachings of Islam. Similarly graphic scenes comprise much of the rest of the film, and they clearly are intended to anger the viewer into accepting (or further entrenching) the premise that “outsiders are bad”—not to make him think.

Rational, good people are and should be enraged at the individuals who have committed such crimes in real life. Just as important, rational, good people don’t morally judge any individual on the basis of anything other than that individual’s words and actions—and they understand that morally judging others is not always necessary or appropriate. Codes of values, on the other hand, are and must be subject to moral judgment because they are volitional—people choose to create them, choose to accept them, and choose to act on them—and because the ideas and values on which people act have direct impacts on human well-being. Groups of people can be morally judged wholesale only insofar as membership in a particular group is both volitional and necessarily constitutes a moral issue; not all volitional choices are moral issues, but all moral issues are matters of volitional choice. This is why we can—and must—pass moral judgment on all Nazis, all rapists, and all murderers but cannot legitimately judge all men, all white people, or all immigrants.

Citizen Vigilante never attempts to make any of these distinctions. Within the first ten minutes, it becomes clear that the movie either cannot or will not define its terms; the phrase “illegal migrants” (and often just “migrants”) is consistently used as a synonym for “violent criminals,” and the words “rights” and “individual” are never used at all. This refusal (or, more likely, inability) to be precise about whom the film regards as enemies of human well-being not only enables but necessitates all the equivocation, conceptual unclarity, and moral whitewashing that follows.

The first dozen violent migrants we see in the film come across as glaringly exaggerated in their ethnic diversity: two African men, a generic (non-native) Western European woman, an ambiguously Eastern European man, a handful of vaguely Middle Eastern gangsters, one man who might be some kind of Asian, and two whose countries of origin are impossible to guess—Boll’s point clearly being that they’re “not from around here.” Sanders witnesses them all harass, rob, rape, and/or assault innocent locals—and the first instance we see of his “justice” is when he uses a gun to threaten a young man who gets on a bus without buying a ticket.

Some of Citizen Vigilante’s defenders are quick to claim that Sanders is not a racist or xenophobe but a staunch individualist because he punishes only violent criminals irrespective of their race, ethnicity, or migrant status.5 One of several problems with that claim is that it is not what happens in the movie. Sanders does punish some people who are shown to have seriously harmed others without cause—but he also “punishes” hundreds of presumably innocent people, most of whom are shown (or strongly implied) to be migrants.

Boll’s writing is so heavy-handed as to elicit eye rolls, as in a scene in which Sanders tells the manager of a property management company he owns, “Give me the addresses [of everyone who is late on rent], and I’ll have my people sort it out.” Worse than the clumsy dialogue is Sanders’s moral “reasoning”; it quickly becomes clear that by “sort it out” he means “use violence.” Sanders regards all his low-income tenants as criminals at worst or lazy losers at best—he says so explicitly several times throughout this scene—and he is particularly disdainful of those who are both poor and foreign. When the manager protests and points out that the police will intervene, Sanders blithely says, “Our lawyers will have something to say about that,” implying that his lawyers can somehow protect him from legitimate criminal charges of assault and conspiracy—and that the government would be morally wrong to file such charges.

As Sanders is leaving the room at the end of this scene, he stares pointedly at his employees—most of whom are of retirement age—and says, “It smells like a nursing home in here. Let’s get some fresh blood.” According to Boll, noble vigilantes don’t stop at threatening and “punishing” presumably innocent people based on race or income—old people are fair game, too.

As if mass assault and age discrimination weren’t bad enough, Sanders later kidnaps a judge who knowingly set violent criminals free—and murders several innocent people solely to demonstrate a meaningless anecdote to the captive judge, whom Sanders is about to kill anyway. While driving, with the judge in the passenger seat, Sanders says, “Human beings are such sheep. When you push them to the limit, they will obey the law, even if their own lives are in danger. Here—I’ll show you.” He then deliberately swerves into oncoming traffic, causing a random car in the opposite lane to run off the road and violently crash at high speed. He casually continues his sermon: “Did you see what happened? That car, when we went into their lane, instead of just crossing the line and breaking the law and going into our lane—they went into a ditch and most likely died.”

According to Boll, to the tens of thousands of people who have rated Citizen Vigilante four or five stars on IMDB or Amazon, and to the thousands more who are singing its praises on social media (including Elon Musk), Sanders is the sort of hero we need.6

Not once does Citizen Vigilante even accidentally imply the only premise that is morally correct with respect to immigration: People (including citizens, immigrants, travelers, and everyone else) who respect individual rights should be welcome in civilized countries, and those who do not should not.7 In fact, one of the most shocking things about the movie is the perfect consistency with which it avoids even a tangential connection to a proper moral stance (i.e., one derived from and consistent with individual rights). Instead, it frames the central conflict as, in part, “us against them,” with “us” being “those who were born in this particular geographic area” and “them” being “those who were born somewhere else.”

This is pure tribalism of the worst and most morally offensive kind. Such an attitude may not constitute racism or xenophobia in every case, but it often does, and it embodies exactly the same underlying premise: Individuals are to be judged not by their actions, character, or chosen beliefs but by some unchosen—therefore, morally irrelevant—characteristic that they happen to possess by sheer accident of birth or circumstance.

Another serious problem with this movie is its utterly unearned confidence in its dismissal of the moral validity of the rule of law. An incompetent Interpol investigator named Henry (Costas Mandylor) halfheartedly chases Sanders and serves as a one-dimensional caricature. “We have the law for a reason,” he says in one scene. “We cannot have vigilantes running around doing their own thing, you know? That’s why I’m here. We don’t want society to collapse.” This is the only reason viewers are ever given as to why Sanders’s actions might not be praiseworthy. Every other law enforcement official in the film is depicted as not merely incompetent but outright stupid to the point of comical absurdity, such as when the generic “European” equivalent of a SWAT team obligingly stand in front of the world’s most obvious trap and allow themselves to be gunned down by the vigilante—and then a second team does the same—and then a third. By the time this happens, yet another of Citizen Vigilante’s many blatant equivocations is on full display: “Some people in the justice system aren’t doing their jobs; therefore, everyone in the justice system is morally complicit and impossibly stupid; therefore, the vigilante is morally free to murder anyone who tries to stop him.”

By this point in the movie, superficially different forms of the same idea have surfaced at least a dozen times, forming a clear and sinister pattern. All immigrants are dangerous because some violent criminals are in the “immigrant” group. All late-paying tenants in the “poor” group are lazy freeloaders. All employees who are in the “old people” group must be underperforming—because they’re old. All police, judges, and politicians deserve death because they belong to the “naive idiots who still believe in the rule of law” group. Any given motorist on the road can be justly murdered on whim—because everyone except Sanders belongs to the “sheep” group.

This is pure collectivism—which has been Citizen Vigilante’s basic moral premise all along. Collectivism is not merely discussing people in terms of groups that share certain characteristics, nor is it equivalent to generalization or even stereotyping.8 Collectivism is the view—whether implicit or explicit—that the group (any group), not the individual, is the unit of moral or political concern. From any form of this view, it necessarily and immediately follows that individual rights either don’t exist or can be freely revoked so long as those individuals belong to some group that some person (or some other group) finds distasteful or inconvenient. Collectivism is the basic moral premise held in common by (to name but a few) the Nazis who murdered eleven million biologically or ethnically “inferior” individuals during World War II; the communists who executed three million individuals under Pol Pot explicitly for the crime of standing out from the group in any way (including simply by wearing glasses); the other communists who tortured, starved, and shot twenty million “dissenting” individuals under Lenin and Stalin; and the other, other communists who starved fifty million individuals to death in the name of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.”

Sanders is no Hitler, Pol Pot, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao in terms of magnitude—but he is precisely their ideological soulmate. Just as these dictators and countless others believed that eliminating entire classes of individuals was merely the price to be paid for what they considered to be the improvement of society, Sanders believes himself justified in killing anyone who stands in the way of his vision of a better world. Sanders views himself as a wolf with unlimited license to prey on any number of sheep, but he is like a wolf in only one way: He acts on animal instinct rather than reasoned thought.

Citizen Vigilante’s basic concept of justice is that it is whatever you feel it is—so long as you are sufficiently outraged by people or things you feel are bad. In one of Sanders’s many tiresome monologues, he tells us explicitly what he (and by extension, Boll) feels justice is when he visits a rape victim in the hospital:

Sanders: The men who did this to you—what do you want to happen to them?

Victim: I want them to go to jail for the rest of their lives.

Sanders: And they might. Of course, we won’t know until the end of a trial, and that could take years. And of course, you’ll have to participate in that trial, telling the story of what those men did to you over and over in a room full of people who are going to call you a liar and try to poke holes in every detail of your story. We’ll also have to get lucky with the judgment; you never know how those things are going to turn out. And during that long, expensive trial, we have to hope and pray that the men who did this to you don’t do the same exact thing to somebody else. Is that the justice that you want?

Victim: No.

Sanders: Do you want justice?

Victim: Yes.

According to Sanders, an objective trial in which all the facts of a case are scrutinized carefully by dozens of people is not justice—nor is a public legal process intended to minimize the chances of imprisoning or executing innocent people—nor is a rigorous standard of epistemic hygiene and logical coherence. Rather, justice requires (or at least allows) the victim to sanction the murder of someone who may or may not be her attacker, at the hands of a stranger whose rationality and objectivity she can’t possibly gauge, at the risk of spending the rest of her life in prison for being a knowing accomplice or accessory to murder—all in the name of blindly emoting about what “feels” just while refusing to do any thinking about what justice requires.

Intelligent, interesting, worthwhile vigilante films point out real problems in the justice system while taking care to separate the clearly guilty, the plausibly guilty, and the presumed innocent. Such films then proceed to pose questions such as: What is justice? How do we know? How do we punish evil without becoming evil ourselves? What’s the cost of getting any of these answers wrong?

Citizen Vigilante is not intelligent, interesting, or worthwhile. Whereas other films such as The Brave One (2007) and Law Abiding Citizen (2009) take the issue of vigilantism seriously by encouraging the viewer to think carefully about it, Citizen Vigilante gestures vaguely in the direction of a real and serious problem, critically botches the diagnosis, and prescribes a catastrophically wrong treatment. This cycle of fundamental misdiagnosis followed by “solutions” that make the problem worse is increasingly common with respect to many real-world issues today; and as certain societal problems grow more severe, more and more people draw collectivistic lines in the sand, refusing to consider any view put forth by anyone not from “their side.” (I’ve provided a few examples throughout this article, but if you’re so inclined, simply search for both positive and negative reviews of the movie and assess the quality of the discourse yourself.)

Citizen Vigilante embodies exactly this kind of deeply ignorant arrogance, smugly asserting its own righteousness while refusing to consider that its basic premises may be wrong. This sort of movie is the last thing we need more of today. What we need—what we desperately need—is more reasoned, careful, good-faith discussion between people who are motivated not by a desire to destroy their ideological enemies at all costs but by a desire to discover and rationally validate objective standards of morality, of justice, and of everything else that human life requires.9 Citizen Vigilante claims to be a movie about righting wrongs, but the only reason to watch it is to look for everything it gets wrong—so that you can get those answers right. To avoid sliding irreversibly into the dystopian nightmare depicted in the film, we must start by taking the factual requirements of human life seriously, by clarifying our own thinking according to a rigorously evidence-based standard of objectivity, by dramatically raising the bars of both art and discourse, and by taking commensurate action in both politics and education—one mind at a time.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Homer’s Odyssey is an epic story with an epic protagonist—Odysseus is not simply a skilled warrior but also a thinker, a trickster, and an “obstinate, cunning and irrepressible intriguer.”1

Although this is a deeply heroic work that pioneered the idea of centering a story on a rational, proactive character, it also depends upon a premise fundamentally opposed to the conditions that make heroism possible. It is set in a universe where the attainment of goals and values doesn’t ultimately depend on one’s choices but upon the decrees and interventions of Olympian deities.

In many respects Odysseus is a prototype of a romantic hero of literature. Romantic narratives are characterized by larger-than-life characters, purposeful action, and value-driven plots, all of which are exemplified in Odysseus’s arduous striving and overcoming of monstrous obstacles to return home to his family. We see his courage, perseverance, and intelligence during his journey’s most memorable moments: when he devises the wooden horse plot that leads to the downfall of Troy; his quick-witted plan to evade the seductive snare of the sirens; and when he outwits the Cyclops Polyphemus—where, assessing that killing the giant outright would trap him and his men in the cave, Odysseus devises a plan to intoxicate their foe, blind him, and lead his men to escape beneath a herd of sheep. Each of these episodes revolves around Odysseus using reason to overcome ordeals and move closer to his main goal—to return home. But the emotional response the reader feels in these moments is somewhat dampened when we are reminded of Homer’s fundamental view of man and of existence.2

The problem with the Homeric universe is not that gods and monsters exist—good art can have fantastical, mythical elements so long as its theme is rational and thereby life-serving. The problem is that the gods limit Odysseus’s efficacy, which undermines his achievements. We repeatedly see Odysseus act to achieve his goals, but whether his actions matter is largely determined by the whims of the gods. His favor with the goddess Athena, in particular, becomes the deciding factor of his fate on multiple occasions. His escape from Calypso’s island after seven years of captivity is due solely to divine command following Athena’s petition to Zeus. His subsequent survival of Poseidon’s storm is made possible only by the interventions of Athena and her fellow goddess Leucothea. Upon finally returning to his homeland of Ithaca, his victory over the parasitic suitors is again made possible thanks to the divine intervention of Athena and Zeus. None of this detracts from Odysseus’s capacity to think, act, and strive in pursuit of his goals (in fact, these attributes somewhat influence his favor with Athena). But instead of directly earning every victory himself, his actions are constantly subsidized by the interference of divine forces. For heroic storytelling to be effective, the hero’s actions need to be the primary driver of the story. From a reader’s perspective, wouldn’t his victories be greater—and more heroic—if they depended solely on his own strength of body and mind?

Difficult obstacles reinforce this storytelling principle, and these could even take the form of intervening gods—provided they remain obstacles, such as the hostile Poseidon in The Odyssey. The problem arises when such intervening gods become the final causal explanation of unfolding events. In romantic storytelling, the hero overcomes adversity through volitional action, but in deterministic storytelling, he overcomes adversity because “destiny” dictates it. The Odyssey, which mixes both styles, is impactful to the extent that it’s romantic and undermined to the extent that it’s deterministic.

None of the above should be viewed as an attack on Homer; he wrote this in an age before formal philosophy—before explicit conceptions of volition, individual rights, and reason as man’s absolute guide. Despite the dominance of mysticism in Archaic Greece, Homer captured the dramatic cogency of human greatness at a time when nobody had formulated its philosophic explanation. One might say that he discovered the hero before the philosophy of heroism.

Despite its flaws, The Odyssey often feels like a story of human efficacy. Homer constantly dramatizes choice, particularly regarding Odysseus’s unique skill in scheming his way out of dangerous situations. It’s these moments that drive the story forward most climactically, and one of the reasons it has endured for millennia. The decisions, the disguises, the scheming, and the action—not the divine meddling—remain the most imperishable factors behind the story’s enduring emotional power.

This heroic spirit eventually would require a different philosophy—one in which the hero’s choices and actions are the primary causes of his own achievements. There would be stormy sailing ahead before mankind found that philosophy, but Homer’s Odyssey gave this heroic spirit its bearings and set the course for it to pursue its destination.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

I write vigilante thrillers.

Because I do, I pay close attention whenever a popular novel or film appears that deals with the subject of vigilante justice. I’m interested as someone who has devoted much of his professional life thinking and writing about crime, justice, and moral responsibility as an investigative journalist, nonfiction author, and thriller novelist.

The disturbing, highly popular new film Citizen Vigilante rests on a terrific story premise: a vigilante who doesn’t merely hold to account predatory criminals but also their ideologically motivated criminal sympathizers—those who excuse and protect them from punishment. That’s a premise begging for serious exploration in our morally bankrupt era, when many institutions have become enablers of evil. (In fact, that’s precisely the premise of my Dylan Hunter vigilante justice series.) In Citizen Vigilante, filmmaker Uwe Boll focuses that same basic storyline on a timely subject: the many terrible unpunished crimes, including those committed by Muslim migrants, that are ravaging Europe—atrocities that fill headlines while governments, courts, and political elites appear unwilling or unable to respond effectively.

Unfortunately, after watching the film, my reaction was not admiration but revulsion. Its protagonist, Michael Sanders, is the polar opposite of the traditional vigilante hero, including my own, Dylan Hunter. Opposite psychologically. Opposite stylistically.

But, above all, opposite morally.

The critical distinction between justice and vengeance—between imposing moral accountability and inflicting indiscriminate, rage-driven slaughter—is what has made the vigilante one of fiction’s most enduring heroic archetypes.

Yet that is precisely the distinction Citizen Vigilante obliterates.

So why bother to review this ugly film at all?

First of all, because it’s become a cult phenomenon. Initially promoted by Elon Musk on X, it soared to the top of the “most-popular” lists on streaming services such as Amazon Prime (where it currently holds a 4.5 out of 5.0 viewer rating). More importantly, because the enthusiastic public reaction to the film—most ominously, from a growing number of self-identified conservatives—exposes something dark going on in people’s souls at this cultural moment. It suggests that many people, exhausted by rising social disorder and the atrophy of our legal and political institutions, are now willing to embrace almost anyone who reacts violently against perceived enemies, regardless of whether the violence is just.

Most importantly, because the public response to Citizen Vigilante reveals that many conservatives are now joining the far left on the road to nihilism.

The Vigilante Archetype

The lone-wolf vigilante is the age-old, symbolic champion of justice.

The typical pattern in vigilante myths and stories is that some terrible injustices either have occurred or are about to be perpetrated against innocent, helpless victims. The lawful authorities are either impotent to do anything about it, or they are active participants in the evil. A tough, independent loner of strong moral character and unusual talents for detection and/or mayhem (“a particular set of skills,” as the hero of the vigilante film Taken puts it) steps in, takes on the powerful forces of corruption, and rescues or avenges the victims, thus restoring a just moral order.

This indelible fictional archetype appears in transcultural myths and fables that go back hundreds of years. The medieval knight-errant evolved into such iconic vigilantes as Robin Hood and Zorro, whose countless descendants include Batman, Robert (The Equalizer) McCall, and Jack Reacher. The list includes most comic-book superheroes and many fictional private detectives.

Novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand particularly enjoyed fictional vigilante heroes. One of the movies she watched during her childhood in Russia was the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks silent-film swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro, about the legendary vigilante who single-handedly puts corrupt governmental officials to the sword. She repeatedly expressed her great admiration of Mickey Spillane’s famous private eye, Mike Hammer—a tough, violent vigilante detective who, eschewing legal rules and niceties, delivered “street justice” to criminals. In her short story “The Simplest Thing in the World,” Rand presents a fictional author, Henry Dorn, fantasizing about creating “a crusading blackmailer”—“a Robin Hood of blackmail.” This vigilante goes after people “that do horrible things, but just manage to remain within the law, so there’s no way of defending yourself against them.” And when a “hypocritical reformer . . . traps the [vigilante] hero and is about to expose him, the hero kills him. Why shouldn’t he?”

In Atlas Shrugged Rand even created a colorful, iconic vigilante of her own: the pirate Ragnar Danneskjold. Ragnar, acting explicitly as a kind of morally clarified Robin Hood, steals from the thieving government and returns the loot to those who had produced it. In one scene, he presents a gold bar to politically victimized industrialist Hank Rearden and explains his motives:

What I actually am, Mr. Rearden, is a policeman. It is a policeman’s duty to protect men from criminals—criminals being those who seize wealth by force. . . . But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law . . . then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.

That statement perfectly summarizes the vigilante hero’s mission. It’s no surprise, then, that the popularity of vigilante characters soars in circumstances and periods of moral chaos. We saw that with the hit films Dirty Harry and Death Wish during the early 1970s, a period of social upheaval and rampant crime. Whenever the law becomes diverted or corrupted from fulfilling its rightful purposes, who then performs government’s essential function of protecting the innocent from predators? Who stands as the sheepdog shielding the flock from the wolves?

The vigilante is that hero. His exploits dramatize the distinction between law and justice—and idealize justice holding law to account.

Such tales owe their cultural universality and longevity to the fact that they provide us much-needed moral and psychological catharsis.

In the real world, we endure many frustrating, systemic injustices about which we have little or no recourse. But in the vigilante story world, we take vicarious satisfaction as the hero rebalances the scales of justice and restores the moral order. We’re also inspired by the spectacle of a lone individual confronting powerful forces of entrenched evil and—through ingenuity, courage, skill, and moral intransigence—achieving victory and vindication of the good and right. This isn’t “escapism”; it’s fuel for the soul. We all need inspiration and encouragement to stand firm against the less dramatic evils and corruption we encounter in our daily lives. During my boyhood, vigilante stories certainly inspired me. Zorro, the Lone Ranger, and Batman played seminal roles in nurturing my budding passion for justice.

To be more than merely another thuggish outlaw, however, the vigilante hero must fight according to a strict, self-imposed code, rooted in the principle of individual moral accountability. He does not regard or treat people collectively, as undifferentiated members of tribes. Instead, he judges individuals as individuals, holding each person responsible only for the consequences of his own actions—and only to the extent of his own involvement.

That vision defines clear moral boundaries between actions that are either just or unjust. A fictional vigilante committed to acting within those ethical guardrails can be admired as a true hero.

But that is neither the vision nor the vigilante inhabiting the story world of Citizen Vigilante.

A Cinematic Atrocity

Before examining the movie’s moral vision, I must say a few words about the filmmaking itself. That’s because the moral chaos in Citizen Vigilante is amplified by chaotic storytelling.

The storyline, if it can be called that, is episodic rather than plotted: There is no story arc at all, only a series of violent vignettes strung together, often out of chronological sequence.

Details about the story’s setting and situation are revealed, not through plotted action or decent dialogue, but by a TV reporter occasionally reciting monologues about what’s happening and by “man-on-the-street” interviews of citizens cheering on the vigilante. And in constant, didactic soliloquies by the protagonist himself, who simply loves to talk.

Some of his political sermons appear on videos he sends to the media. Other monologues seem to be occurring during some sort of police interrogation, as he speaks to unseen people—except we never see him arrested, never see the interrogators, and never see him either released or jailed. These scenes are never explained; they’re simply inserted into the film willy-nilly, perhaps meant to be breathers between excruciating scenes of sex and gore. He delivers still other sternly self-important lectures to the bad guys, informing them why he’s going to kill them. Presenting the film’s message via endless monologues spared writer/director Boll the effort and production costs of conveying it through effective, coherent dramatization.

Then there’s the jaw-dropping illogic of many aspects of what passes for the plot. For instance, this supposedly cunning vigilante suspect, running and hiding from the law, never even wears gloves at the scenes of his crimes, leaving his fingerprints everywhere—such as all over the car of the judge he murders. Nor does he wear any disguises to hide his face from security cameras during his crimes. Perhaps he imagines that pixelating his face on the videos he sends to the media is good enough.

It’s also clear that no one in the production was in charge of editing continuity. For example, in a scene where three young predators, one of them a girl, are beating up a kid in a park, the girl inexplicably vanishes into thin air before the scene ends.

Then there’s the big SWAT team set piece. An Interpol agent, lacking any lawful arrest powers or local jurisdiction, is somehow in charge of a raid by the city’s SWAT team. Long minutes of screen time are wasted showing their vehicles navigating the streets en route to confront the vigilante. Finally, they arrive at his lair, with no explanation of how they discovered his identity and location. It takes that team additional minutes to climb a single flight of stairs; cutaway shots of the protagonist preparing his ambush drag out their approach interminably, killing time before the . . . killing time. The SWAT team behavior during the raid is also ludicrous: They stand in a room, unprotected, facing a metal wall fitted with two mounted automatic rifles, where they agreeably allow themselves to be mowed down. Then the Interpol guy sends in a second team to meet the same fate. Finally, more officers enter, cut open the metal door to the protagonist’s bunker, and then the cover of his (predictably) booby-trapped escape shaft—where they are (predictably) blown up.

It speaks volumes that the movie’s fans are willing to ignore such laughable deficiencies of basic film craft and storytelling in defense of its message.

And what about that message—the film’s thematic content? Here, it might be illuminating to compare Citizen Vigilante Michael Sanders with Dylan Hunter, the protagonist of my own vigilante novels, because both are supposed to be champions of justice. How do they measure up to the vigilante-justice archetype?

Michael Sanders versus Dylan Hunter

True to the vigilante justice tradition, Dylan Hunter—the eponymous hero of my thriller Hunter and its sequels—violently targets predators who have escaped just punishment. But in doing so, Hunter operates by a strict code of proportionate justice, scaling his retaliatory acts against criminals to the level and types of their crimes. More uniquely, he also exposes and then inflicts proportionate (though nonviolent) “poetic justice” upon the ideologues, activists, and institutional enablers who defend and shield those predators from accountability.

But he never kills anyone who has not been involved in murder, either as its perpetrator or coconspirator. He never risks the life of an innocent person to perform a vigilante mission nor would he ever harm a police officer; he would allow himself to be captured and jailed rather than use violence against innocent people or cops.

By contrast, Michael Sanders is a robotic killing machine who cynically and unnecessarily slaughters innocent people. He deliberately designs and builds a complex death trap for his police pursuers—then, after luring in a SWAT team, he proceeds to butcher them by the dozens, using machine guns and a bomb. (Director Boll goes out of his way to showcase the butchery of these innocent officers in a minutes-long, slow-motion gore-fest, featuring close-ups of exploding skulls and spraying blood.) Sanders engineers this carnage even though it’s clear that he could have avoided the confrontation or escaped and eluded capture . . . because that’s exactly what he did afterward. The bloodbath is precisely what he wanted.

Finally, Sanders murders not only a gang of (arguably deserving) teenage rapists but the Muslim family members of one of them—simply because they (like many families of criminals) make excuses for him. For instance, the supposed capital crime committed by the teenage rapist’s sister is her morally obscene social media post blaming the rape victim. But that post is no worse than the odious comments uploaded by millions of thoughtless people every day. Should all of them also be annihilated for their mere ideas?

His premeditated mass murders of non-criminals make Sanders no different than any of the predators and killers he feigns to find morally irredeemable. Here the contrast with Hunter, whom I created to represent the traditional vigilante justice archetype, is not merely tactical—the two characters occupy incompatible moral universes.

And they present profoundly different psychologies, too.

Many, though not all, vigilante tales present a psychologically damaged protagonist. Typically, he bears deep emotional wounds from a violent, traumatic past, which he sometimes self-medicates with drugs or alcohol (e.g., author Mark Dawson’s John Milton character). Then some emotionally triggering event propels him back to violent action, often motivated by revenge (John Wick, or James Reece in The Terminal List).

By my intention, Dylan Hunter is not a “damaged hero.” He grew up in a wealthy, stable, supportive family and was a superior student in school. He later worked for the government in capacities in which he repeatedly risked his life for his country. But he was betrayed and badly injured. He left his job, disappearing into anonymity to rebuild a new life and career.

That might seem consistent with the “damaged hero” profile, but I deliberately rejected that trope. Yes, Hunter is justifiably angry at what happened to him in the past and angry at injustices generally. But he is not mired in cynicism, rage, and emotional darkness. He’s an idealist who has established a new career as a crusading newspaper journalist. He lives and functions well, whether alone or around others (including his beloved pet cat). He enjoys big-band standards from the Great American Songbook and sustains a passionately romantic relationship with his girlfriend. Vigilantism is a course of action he has slipped into circumstantially, by degrees, in response to crimes against people who matter personally to him.

By contrast, Michael Sanders is depicted as emotionally damaged, partly due to an estranged relationship with his late, coldly indifferent father. “Cold” also describes every aspect of his manner and affect, which come across as robotic and repressed. We are told almost nothing about him as a person—only that he’s the wealthy heir to his father’s business as a property owner and manager. Somehow, in the heart of anti-gun Europe, he’s amassed a private arsenal that some smaller nations would envy. We meet him already amid his killing spree, so we have no clue about any personal motive for launching his bloody crusade.

He has no apparent friendships or emotional relationships. In place of the latter, he harbors a brothel in one of his buildings. In one scene, he visits it, selects one of the waiting prostitutes, and engages in graphic, purely transactional sex lasting several minutes—which is interrupted by his pique at noticing mold growing on one of the walls. I guess this was to show the viewer that Sanders has at least some standards, if only regarding building maintenance.

And that’s pretty much it: Sanders remains a cipher to viewers, his personal reasons or triggers for turning to vigilante violence never explained.

However, Sanders displays all the classic characteristics of a psychopath. Nothing about him is admirable. He lacks any hint of empathy. His only apparent satisfaction is wielding power over others—playing God to the point of gratuitously indiscriminate, premeditated, attention-seeking mass murder.

Years ago, during my criminal justice research and writing, I extensively studied psychopaths, serial killers, and mass murderers. I found that every one of those monsters embraced some pseudo-intellectual rationalization for his bloodlust and atrocities.

Those abstract rationalizations—usually imparted from the faculty lounges of university humanities departments or cribbed from psychology tomes—are excuses for what criminal profilers call “righteous slaughter.” It’s either “I couldn’t help it, because . . .” or “I was justified, because . . .” or “They deserved it, because . . .” But beneath the rationalizations, the underlying truth is that the psychopath enjoys wielding the power of life and death. Killing and sadism make a loser and misfit feel socially potent—a somebody. As the hero of his own self-dramatizing narrative, a psychopathic killer typically plans and prepares his slaughters with meticulous care, often dressing, arming, and acting like a soldier on some grandiose military action.

All of which describes Sanders to a “t.” He’s a textbook psychopath, on a cosplay “mission” to rid the world of migrant rapists . . . and their evil families . . . and police officers, who, of course, are part of the evil System . . . and even unsuspecting motorists, because they are worthless dupes of The System.

Sanders’s killing of an innocent driver best captures his psychopathy. He’s driving a judge whom he’s drugged, kidnapped, and planning to murder. During the ride, he delivers one of his tedious lectures—this one about how most people are just sheep who follow whatever rules they’ve been given. Sanders then deliberately runs a car carrying innocent passengers off the road, leading to a fiery fatal crash—solely to illustrate, grotesquely, an incoherent talking point.

Let that sink in. Here his victim isn’t a criminal, a migrant, a Muslim, or a government employee (a cop). Sanders—supposedly dedicated to vigilante justice and enraged by the victimization of innocents by Muslim migrants—casually murders a random motorist on a spur-of-the-moment whim without a hint of hesitation or remorse.

Since Citizen Vigilante’s release, director Boll has claimed that he didn’t intend his protagonist to be a “white knight”; instead, Sanders is supposed to exemplify the kind of antisocial backlash that may be unleashed when migrant crimes go unpunished. So, after the fact, Boll is contending that he meant Sanders’s rampage as a cautionary tale. But a film’s message is only what it presents onscreen, not what the filmmaker claims he meant to convey. And because Sanders’s point of view is the only one Boll presents, the message that viewers logically infer is that his killing spree is a justified reaction to migrant crimes.

A Cultural Harbinger

Justice and morality were the first casualties in this despicable film. Yet lots of self-described Christians and conservatives are cheering its psychopathic protagonist, simply because some of his targets are migrant Muslim rapists.

Visceral conservative sympathy toward Michael Sanders mirrors the sympathy many on the left feel toward Luigi Mangione, charged with assassinating an innocent corporate executive on a New York street. In both cases, premeditated murder is rationalized by ideology and politics. That so many across the political spectrum now applaud psychopaths who conduct ideologically motivated “righteous slaughter” should give us pause. It symptomizes the broader nihilism that’s been eroding the foundations of Western civilization over the past century.

That nihilism, begun as a product of the postmodern left, has generated many forms of social savagery and cultural decadence. Thugs have been enabled, empowered, and encouraged by what I’ve labeled “the Excuse-Making Industry”: progressive intellectuals who portray criminals as society’s “victims”; who manufacture deterministic rationalizations for their criminality; and who weave those rationalizations throughout the fabric of our social, legal, and political institutions. As a consequence, Western society no longer seems willing to defend itself against the barbarians.

Decent people are being pushed to the emotional breaking point by the uncontested rise of savages in our midst. History shows that periods of anarchic degeneration are invariably followed by periods of authoritarian repression as beleaguered citizens seek a strong man who will impose order and reestablish a functioning society. Those backlash periods almost always go to ugly extremes of indiscriminate violence, enforced conformity, even dictatorship.

Citizen Vigilante offers a harbinger of this kind of reaction. It manifests and exploits a worldview of aggrieved victimization and conspiratorialism shared by both the far left and a growing number of conservatives. Its antihero’s soliloquies, warning that we’re all being lied to and controlled, are meant to rationalize his massacre of ordinary police officers. To conspiratorialists, cops aren’t individual human beings—they’re anonymous apparatchiks protecting a corrupt system, so it’s justified to butcher them.

A Citizen Vigilante 2 is supposedly in the works, to be set in America. Perhaps Boll could dramatize the real-life, politically motivated “vigilante” Timothy McVeigh and his 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Like Sanders, McVeigh was motivated by vengeful hatred of an “unjust” government, and he was viewed sympathetically by many conservative tribalists.

The ghastly handiwork of McVeigh and his coconspirators in that office-building bombing included the slaughter of 168 people and the injury and maiming of another 680. Among the dead were six members of the U.S. armed forces, scores of innocent people (including three pregnant women) working in innocuous government agencies, plus nineteen children—fifteen of whom were toddlers and babies as young as three months, peacefully napping in the building’s America’s Kids Day Care Center.

And what was McVeigh’s “moral” rationalization for his nihilistic mass murder of those present in that government building? “Think about the people as if they were storm troopers in Star Wars. They may be individually innocent, but they are guilty because they work for the Evil Empire.”1

The “Citizen Vigilante” felt the same about his own targets.

So, Do I Really Advocate Vigilante Justice?

In a word, no. And Citizen Vigilante shows us why: because there’s a big difference between fiction and reality.

In fiction, an author like me can control all the elements of the narrative, including the behavior and motives of his created characters. I can limit and channel the actions of my vigilante hero so that they conform consistently to a clear moral code.

As a classic fictional vigilante hero, Dylan Hunter would never commit violence against anyone who has not himself initiated violence against innocent victims. He would never risk harm to innocent bystanders. Because he is an outlaw, his path puts him on a collision course with law enforcement; but he knows that he and the police are fighting the same battle for justice—that they are allies, not adversaries—so, he would never use violence against them, not even to avoid capture and prosecution. He accepts that risk as part of his mission. (In fact, much of the suspense in vigilante tales arises from his ingenious efforts to elude discovery and capture.)

But that’s fiction. In real life, even the most rational individual’s context of knowledge about the facts of a crime is necessarily limited—far more so than the abundant facts that can be discovered and proven in a courtroom, through police investigation, and under objective rules of evidence. So, his judgments about a criminal suspect’s innocence or guilt—or his degree of culpability, or any mitigating circumstances—could not be as fully informed.

And in deciding proportionately just punishments, even the most principled individual could not escape his own personal hierarchy of values, which would be his basis for determining the degree of harm inflicted by a criminal. Imagine your highest value; then imagine some criminal harming, desecrating, or destroying it. What would you think is “proportionate punishment”? And what might other vigilantes decide? Would those punishments be the same as those codified in legal standards and imposed by a jury and judge?

Finally, even assuming the possibility of a fully principled vigilante—like a Ragnar or a Hunter—few vigilantes would be as scrupulously principled. Tolerating vigilantism means abandoning objective social control over the use of force and the legal procedures to distinguish the initiation of violence from retaliatory violence. Once those legal constraints are obliterated, the certain outcome would be a relentless, unconstrained escalation of violence . . . rationalized by each perpetrator as being in pursuit of “justice.”

Which is exactly what we see in Citizen Vigilante.

Although a vigilante fantasy serves valid moral, esthetic, psychological, and cultural purposes, vigilante reality is something quite different. So, let’s enjoy the fantasy of vigilante justice. But if we are to foster a civilized society, systemic injustices must be addressed by systemic reforms—not by subjective, unilateral acts of violence.

Citizen Vigilante: A Just Verdict

Citizen Vigilante is an atrocious, incoherent mess. Its script wouldn’t pass a freshman screenwriting course, and its production values are risible. The film is intended as propaganda, as a message delivery system. And even though that message—about the dangers from criminal migrants—is an important one, it’s so crudely, illogically, and repugnantly presented that the point is lost.

Citizen Vigilante is worthless—except as a cautionary snapshot of the ominous moral trajectory of our culture. It glorifies reactionary tribalism and nihilistic violence, growing pathologies across the political spectrum. It obliterates critical ethical distinctions between vengeance and justice—between a Michael Sanders and a Dylan Hunter—between a cold-blooded psychopath and a code-driven protector.

And in these unsettled times, such distinctions matter, because a fictional vigilante hero may be the moral model our world desperately needs.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Written by Bong Joon Ho
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
Starring Robert Pattinson, Seven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo
Distributed by Warner Bros Pictures (United States)
Running time: 137 minutes
Rated R for violent content, language throughout, sexual content and drug misuse

“I really hate dying. Still. Always. Every time.”

Wake up. Work. Die. Repeat. Mickey 17 is a sci-fi thought experiment: What if we stopped valuing life, and what would that do to unskilled workers? Mickey 17 addresses these questions by exploring the importance of self-interest in such a context and why one might choose to fight for a meaningful life.

Mickey 17, written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, is a comedic, dystopic techno-futurist film based on the novel Mickey7 (2022) by Edward Ashton. Set in 2054, the plot follows a down-on-his-luck young man, Mickey, who joins a private space exploration mission as an “Expendable” to escape the sadistic mafia boss to whom he owes money.

An Expendable is a disposable employee; Mickey is required to complete fatal missions, often as the sole participant in a scientific experiment, for the sake of keeping the rest of the crew safe. His role is entirely subservient, like a canary being sent into the mines. And when he dies, the scientists on the ship simply “reprint” his body, upload his memories and consciousness, and he does the whole thing again the next day.

The film shows starkly how easily people can lose respect for life. The reprinting started with a semblance of care and consideration from the scientists. In the first reprinting scene, we see a kind of conveyer belt on which Mickey can be reborn comfortably, and one of the scientists even takes care to cover his genital area to maintain his privacy. But as the reprinting continues, they begin to treat him with callous indifference, barely acknowledging his humanity through the process. In a later scene, the scientists neglect to provide the conveyor belt, so Mickey falls to the floor haphazardly. Often Mickey’s missions are preceded by torturous experiences: being injected with incredibly painful diseases, eating poisonous food, and being exposed to toxic levels of radiation. And strangely, no one seems to care.

At one point the scientists trick Mickey into going into space to check a faulty cable. But when he gets there, the lead researcher tells him on the intercom that this was a ploy to get him in contact with high levels of radiation. The lead researcher tells Mickey that he needs to explain every awful thing that he’s feeling so that they can note it and stop it from happening to other crew members, whom they deem more important. He asks Mickey to take off his glove so that they can see what’s happening to his skin, and when he tries to, his hand is sliced off by a blade from the ship’s engines. Instead of the scientists’ expected shock and horror, they all laugh in disbelief, more beguiled by seeing something so extreme than the fact Mickey is suffering.

Then one day, everything changes when the scientists wrongly believe that Mickey 17 is dead and print Mickey 18 in his place, meaning that two iterations of Mickey exist at the same time—an illegal scenario and ethical dilemma.

Mickey 18 is everything that Mickey 17 is not. The contrast exposes the failures of the human printing technology. It promised to create an identical copy after death, but all the clones vary slightly in their personalities—its designers had not accounted for the depth and variety of the subconscious.

Mickey 18 is not just a cloning error; he is a significant outlier. He brings a new perspective to his role that seemingly no other Mickey has done before: He assesses his position and concludes that he deserves more. He is appalled by his crewmates’ treatment of his life and becomes angry and vicious, yet he acts decisively and defends his survival. He tries to kill a fellow crew member with whom Mickey 17 had joined the ship and had a long-standing friendship before the mission because Mickey 18 blames him for his subjugation.

The Mickeys debate, physically fighting over who should stay alive because if they are found to exist at the same time, they both will be killed and Mickey’s lives will be completely terminated—Mickey as such will no longer exist. Mickey 17, understanding this, tries to compromise, offering to halve his workload and meager rations with Mickey 18. Mickey 18 laughs in his face—why should he only get half when he is entitled to it all? And more importantly, why should he do this horrible job in which self-sacrifice is constantly required with little gratitude when he could take revenge and be free?

Mickey 18 soon becomes the hero—a person committed to rational thought and uncompromising integrity who lives for his own sake, even in the face of danger or death. Because Mickey 17 is the complete opposite, the stark differences between these two characters who should be identical reveal the film’s paramount question: Why does Mickey 17 accept his fate instead of fighting against it for his own self-interest?

The Abandonment of Personal Values: Collectivism versus Self-Interest

Mickey 17 is a victim of this society’s values as we see them on the ship. Aside from a few friends and his girlfriend, no one is appalled by Mickey’s subjugation. His value, to most others, derives solely from his self-sacrifice, and he does not benefit from any of the supposed collective goods that derive from it. He will not get to enjoy the vaccines, the painkillers, the genetically modified meat because it is not for him; his sacrifice is for the good of the rest of the ship.

Throughout the film we can see the society’s collectivist undertones—people value each crew member based only on how well he fulfills his role. This affects even the highest ranked; for example, when the head scientist realizes that he hasn’t produced edible genetically manufactured meat, he offers to kill himself as punishment, as easily as one might offer to stay later at work after a mishap. The charges thrown against collectivism by philosopher Ayn Rand apply here—it upholds the existence of a mystic and unperceivable social organism while denying the reality of actual individuals.1^[1] This mystic social organism serves as a spiritual replacement for the individual’s life. That is, individuals are made to live their lives for their society instead of for themselves, much in the same way that Abrahamic theologies urge individuals to live their lives for God or in God’s image.

More specifically, Mickey’s belief in sacrifice and suffering as a constructive force for good resembles John Hick’s theory of the value of “soul-making.”2^[2] Hick preached a belief that humans were created as imperfect so they could grow into the “likeness” of God through suffering. This, in turn, he argues, would allow us to develop virtues that are more meaningful than if they had simply been imparted by God.

Although Mickey 17 isn’t explicitly religious, this theology expresses itself in his baseless yet absolute belief that he is bad, and he alone cannot ensure his salvation. So, instead of thinking critically or pursuing his interests to form a better relationship with himself and his past, he uses severe punishment to become “good.”

His belief in an innate badness is irrational, an irrationality that fuels his selflessness. He has accepted without much thought that he was responsible for his mother’s death, even though he wasn’t. As a child, he begged his mom to let him sit in the front seat of her car even though he was too young, and she eventually acquiesced despite significant hesitation. While they were driving, he pressed a red button simply to see what it would do, which sent the car hurtling into a wall, killing his mother instantly but leaving him unharmed. His lack of injury is the source of his guilt, which snowballs so that every other guilty feeling he has compounded into the belief that he deserves to be punished. So, on the ship, he readily accepts his treatment. When he is poisoned by the scientists against his will, he says it’s because he didn’t tell his girlfriend straight away when he found out about Mickey 18. When he is being exposed to unthinkable levels of radiation, he says that in fourth-grade science he “messed with a frog,” so this all must be his punishment.

Mickey 18, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be burdened by the same ideas. He wants to kill anyone who has done the Mickeys wrong. He is infallible when Mickey 17 can be weak and easy to overpower; even when the whole ship seems to be against them, Mickey 18 holds strong, which influences Mickey 17 to see his point of view.

I read once that a drama is when you watch a film and think, “What if?” What if he caught her at the airport in time, what if they managed to jump out of the flaming building, what if she could save her baby? Whereas a tragedy makes you think, “If only!” If only Romeo had known that Juliet was still alive, if only Oedipus had known who his real mother was—and if only Mickey 17 could let go of his unearned guilt, he could have avoided so much suffering.

This film is a warning about the horror of sacrificing oneself. Mickey’s suffering shows that abandoning self-interest is not life-promoting or life-fulfilling. He sacrifices himself for the good of his crewmates, hoping to cleanse his spirit of guilt, but all it does is make his situation worse.

Although this film has many layers and meanings, what stood out most to me was the value of self-love; it is not merely an advantage but a requirement to live a happy life. If you don’t value your life, no one else will.

This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

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America

by George Gordon Byron

THE NAME of Commonwealth is past and gone,
Over three fractions of the groaning globe:—
Venice is crushed, and Holland deigns to own
A sceptre, and endures a purple robe:
If the free Switzer yet bestrides alone
His chainless mountains, ‘t is but for a time;
For tyranny of late has cunning grown,
And, in its own good season, tramples down
The sparkles of our ashes. One great clime,
Whose vigorous offspring by dividing ocean
Are kept apart, and nursed in the devotion
Of Freedom, which their fathers fought for, and
Bequeathed,—a heritage of heart and hand,
And proud distinction from each other land,
Whose sons must bow them at a monarch’s motion,
As if his senseless sceptre were a wand
Full of the magic of exploded science,—
Still one great clime, in full and free defiance,
Yet rears her crest, unconquered and sublime,
Above the far Atlantic! She has taught
Her Esau-brethren that the haughty flag,
The floating fence of Albion’s feebler crag,
May strike to those whose red right hands have bought
Rights cheaply earned with blood. Still, still, forever
Better, though each man’s life-blood were a river
That it should flow and overflow, than creep
Through thousand lazy channels in our veins,
Dammed, like the dull canal, with locks and chains,
And moving, as a sick man in his sleep,
Three paces, and then faltering: better be
Where the extinguished Spartans still are free,
In their proud charnel of Thermopylae—
Than stagnate in our marsh; or o’er the deep
Fly, and one current to the ocean add,
One spirit to the souls our fathers had,
One freeman more, America, to thee!

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), known as Lord Byron, was an English poet.

Liberty Tree

By Thomas Paine

In a chariot of light from the regions of day,
The Goddess of Liberty came;
Ten thousand celestials directed the way
And hither conducted the dame.
A fair budding branch from the gardens above,
Where millions with millions agree,
She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love,
And the plant she named Liberty Tree.

The celestial exotic struck deep in the ground,
Like a native it flourished and bore;
The fame of its fruit drew the nations around,
To seek out this peaceable shore.
Unmindful of names or distinction they came,
For freemen like brothers agree;
With one spirit endued, they one friendship pursued,
And their temple was Liberty Tree.

Beneath this fair tree, like the patriarchs of old,
Their bread in contentment they ate,
Unvexed with the troubles of silver and gold,
The cares of the grand and the great.
With timber and tar they Old England supplied,
And supported her power on the sea;
Her battles they fought, without getting a groat,
For the honor of Liberty Tree.

But hear, O ye swains, ‘tis a tale most profane,
How all the tyrannical powers,
Kings, Commons, and Lords, are uniting amain
To cut down this guardian of ours;
From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms
Through the land let the sound of it flee,
Let the far and the near, all unite with a cheer,
In defence of our Liberty Tree.

Thomas Paine (1736–1809) was an English-born American Founding Father, inventor, political philosopher, and statesman best known for writing the pamphlet “Common Sense.”

The New Colossus

By Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) was an American author, poet, translator, and Jewish activist.

America

By Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,|
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Walter Whitman Jr (1819–1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and novelist.

America for Me

By Henry Van Dyke

‘Tis fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings,—
But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things.

So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.

I like the German fir-woods, in green battalions drilled;
I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing fountains filled;
But, oh, to take your hand, my dear, and ramble for a day
In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her way!

I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack:
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free,—
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.

Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) was an American author, educator, and clergyman, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands.

Betsy’s Battle Flag

By Minna Irving

From dusk till dawn the livelong night
She kept the tallow dips alight,
And fast her nimble fingers flew
To sew the stars upon the blue.
With weary eyes and aching head
She stitched the stripes of white and red,
And when the day came up the stair
Complete across a carven chair
Hung Betsy’s battle flag.

Like shadows in the evening gray
The Continentals filed away,
With broken boots and ragged coats,
But hoarse defiance in their throats;
They bore the marks of want and cold,
And some were lame and some were old,
And some with wounds untended bled,
But floating bravely overhead
Was Betsy’s battle flag.

When fell the battle’s leaden rain,
The soldier hushed his moans of pain
And raised his dying head to see
King George’s troopers turn and flee.
Their charging column reeled and broke,
And vanished in the rolling smoke,
Before the glory of the stars,
The snowy stripes, and scarlet bars
Of Betsy’s battle flag.

The simple stone of Betsy Ross
Is covered now with mold and moss,
But still her deathless banner flies,
And keeps the color of the skies.
A nation thrills, a nation bleeds,
A nation follows where it leads,
And every man is proud to yield
His life upon a crimson field
For Betsy’s battle flag!

Minna Irving (1864–1940) was an American writer and poet.

Liberty Bell at the World’s Fair

By Charles Eugene Banks

Grand old bell, thy earlier mission but to voice on Sabbath morning —
As an angel’s fingers pressed thee,
As an angel’s wings caressed thee,
Softly chiming from the steeple,
“Rest ye, rest ye, O my people!”
In mellifluous tones and tender with an undertone of warning, —
Changed thy speech, as all men know.
On that morning long ago.
When thy stern majestic ring
Bade defiance to a king.

In the streets are gathered thousands waiting for the message grand
That shall loose their bonds and make them freemen in a freeman’s land, —
That shall by a single motion
Send defiance o’er the ocean,
Signal ships are outward pointed,
Signal ships that homeward run,
That a prince by priest anointed
Is but man when all is done.

Brave men breathless stand below thee, pale of cheek but stern of brow,
Praying for th’ proclamation—moments are as hours now.
See! the hand uplifted wavers,
Falls — the bellman straining there,
Sends the song on rhythmic quavers
Out upon the dancing air,
“They have signed it, O my people!”
Cries the bell from out the steeple,
“Independence! Independence! Liberty is newly crowned!”
Chorus all the waiting thousands till the old bell’s voice is drowned.

But that glorious proclamation.
Swiftly everywhere it ran
And demanded of each nation
Equal rights for every man.
How the spirit of Columbia into every heart has grown
Best is told by yon White City — symbolizing all that’s good.
East and West are come together — there is neither pole nor zone,
There is neither slave nor monarch; but where late the willow stood.
Stands the wonder of the ages. Stroke the old bell’s rusty side,
Right has triumphed and before her cowers Tyranny and Pride.

Charles Eugene Banks (1852–1932) was an American journalist, author, poet, historian, and orator.

Free America

ascribed to Dr. Joseph Warren, 1774

That seat of Science, Athens,
And earth’s proud mistress, Rome;
Where now are all their glories?
We scarce can find a tomb.
Then guard your rights, Americans,
Nor stoop to lawless sway;
Oppose, oppose, oppose, oppose,
For North America.

We led fair Freedom hither,
And lo, the desert smiled!
A paradise of pleasure
Was opened in the wild!
Your harvest, bold Americans,
No power shall snatch away!
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

Torn from a world of tyrants,
Beneath this western sky,
We formed a new dominion,
A land of liberty:
The world shall own we’re masters here;
Then hasten on the day:
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

Proud Albion bowed to Cæsar,
And numerous lords before;
To Picts, to Danes, to Normans,
And many masters more:
But we can boast, Americans,
We’ve never fallen a prey;
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

God bless this maiden climate,
And through its vast domain
May hosts of heroes cluster,
Who scorn to wear a chain:
And blast the venal sycophant
That dares our rights betray;
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

Lift up your hands, ye heroes,
And swear with proud disdain,
The wretch that would ensnare you,
Shall lay his snares in vain:
Should Europe empty all her force,
We’ll meet her in array,
And fight and shout, and shout and fight
For North America.

Some future day shall crown us,
The masters of the main,
Our fleets shall speak in thunder
To England, France, and Spain;
And the nations over the ocean spread
Shall tremble and obey
The sons, the sons, the sons, the sons
Of brave America.

Dr. Joseph Warren (1741–1775) was an American physician and one of the most important members of the Boston Patriot movement.

On Independence

By Jonathan Mitchell Sewall

Come all you brave soldiers, both valiant and free,
It’s for Independence we all now agree;
Let us gird on our swords and prepare to defend
Our liberty, property, ourselves and our friends.

In a cause that’s so righteous, come let us agree,
And from hostile invaders set America free,
The cause is so glorious we need not to fear
But from merciless tyrants we’ll set ourselves clear.

Heaven’s blessing attending us, no tyrant shall say
That Americans e’er to such monsters gave way,
But fighting we’ll die in America’s cause
Before we’ll submit to tyrannical laws.

George the Third, of Great Britain, no more shall he reign,
With unlimited sway o’er these free States again;
Lord North, nor old Bute, nor none of their clan,
Shall ever be honor’d by an American.

May Heaven’s blessing descend on our United States,
And grant that the union may never abate;
May love, peace, and harmony ever be found,
For to go hand in hand America round.

Upon our grand Congress may Heaven bestow
Both wisdom and skill our good to pursue;
On Heaven alone dependent we’ll be.
But from all earthly tyrants we mean to be free.

Unto our brave Generals may Heaven give skill
Our armies to guide, and the sword for to wield,
May their hands taught to war, and their fingers to fight,
Be able to put British armies to flight.

And now, brave Americans, since it is so,
That we are independent, we’ll have them to know
That united we are, and united we’ll be,
And from all British tyrants we’ll try to keep free.

May Heaven smile on us in all our endeavors,
Safe guard our seaports, our towns, and our rivers,
Keep us from invaders by land and by sea,
And from all who’d deprive us of our liberty.

Jonathan Mitchell Sewall (1748–1808) was an American lawyer and poet.

America the Beautiful

By Katharine Lee Bates

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood|
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929) was an American author and poet. She wrote three versions of “America. A Poem for July 4” in 1893, 1904, and 1911. It was set to music composed by Samual A. Ward and retitled “America the Beautiful.” The 1911 version is printed above.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

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Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a live talk and has been lightly edited. It retains the cadence and idiosyncrasies of an oral presentation.

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