Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Nina Van Pallandt: Muse, Witness, Residual Character, and Her Own Woman

Note: Nina Van Pallandt moves through this piece as a kind of drifting hinge figure between art and biography, cinema and scandal, half-real and half-mythologised: from her striking, uncanny presence in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye—where she plays the abused, luminous spouse of Roger Wade and becomes, briefly, a kind of muse/anima figure for Philip Marlowe—to her earlier life in the Danish pop duo The Baronets, through her entanglement with Clifford Irving and the great Howard Hughes hoax that later reverberates through Orson Welles’ F for Fake, and onward into the quieter aftermath of fame, reinvention, and partial retreat. The essay follows her not as a stable “character” but as a site where male-authored narratives—Hollywood noir, literary fraud, journalistic myth-making—keep trying (and failing) to fix her meaning, while she keeps slipping free in ways that are at once accidental and oddly deliberate. In the end she becomes something like a case study in cinematic and cultural afterlives: a woman repeatedly written by others, occasionally complicit, sometimes resistant, and finally legible only as a residue of performance, gossip, and unfinished stories that refuse to settle.

I first became aware of Nina Van Pallandt the way most people probably do: not through biography, but through atmosphere—specifically Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973, The Long Goodbye), a film that feels less like a narrative than a slow collapse of narrative reliability itself. It is a film in which people drift through scenes as if they have forgotten whether they are supposed to be characters or witnesses, and Nina arrives inside it already slightly misfiled, already too composed for the emotional weather she is asked to endure.

She plays Roger Wade’s wife, but “plays” is almost the wrong verb. Altman’s casting logic is not psychological realism in the classical sense; it is something closer to behavioral residue. People are dropped into the frame and asked not to perform identity but to inhabit proximity—to money, to violence, to desire, to failure. Nina’s presence has that peculiar Altman quality: she does not dominate the scene, but she stabilizes it just enough to make everything else look unstable.

Roger Wade (the blocked writer, the alcoholic genius-in-decline) is already collapsing before the plot admits it. Nina is the counterweight that never quite becomes balance. She is care without resolution, intimacy without clarity, the kind of emotional presence that suggests there is a story somewhere but refuses to confirm what it is. And then there is Marlowe, Elliott Gould’s version of Marlowe—half-stoned, half-wandering, permanently a few seconds behind the moral implications of what he is witnessing.

The film keeps staging small ruptures in epistemology. One of the most famous arrives early and feels almost accidental in its perfection: Terry Lennox appearing at 4 AM, asking for a ride to Tijuana. There is a moment—“Tijuana now?”—where Gould’s Marlowe is briefly jolted out of his procedural fog into genuine surprise, as if even he cannot believe how far the plot is willing to drift from explanation. That tonal instability is the world Nina inhabits as well, except she does not get Marlowe’s ironic distance. She gets consequence.

There is a domestic sequence—one of the film’s most disarming—that feels almost out of register with the noir frame: Nina cooking, the soft logic of food and attention, a candlelit dinner shared with Marlowe, where violence and absence are temporarily suspended by something as ordinary as butter and chicken. It is precisely the kind of scene that should resolve emotional ambiguity, but in Altman it does the opposite: it deepens it. Intimacy here is not revelation; it is another form of deferral.

What the film keeps doing, quietly and persistently, is refusing to assign stable moral weight to anyone. Roger Wade is both victim and self-destroyer. Marlowe is both agent and sleepwalker. Nina is both witness and participant, but never allowed the comfort of explanation. Even her suffering—when it arrives—is not narratively sanctified; it is simply another event in a world where events do not accumulate into meaning.

And this is where Nina becomes interesting beyond the film itself. Because she does not resolve into a character arc, she persists as something else: a figure who has been “used” by multiple narrative systems without ever fully belonging to them. In a conventional noir, she would be femme fatale or redemption object or tragic spouse. In Altman, she is none of these cleanly. She is what remains when genre stops enforcing coherence.

What begins to emerge, if one steps back slightly from her, is that she belongs to a broader category of women who are not simply “in” cultural narratives but are written into them by proximity to men who are doing the narrating. The pattern is subtle but persistent: women become legible to the public through the structural gravity of male projects—films, scandals, bands, memoirs—while simultaneously attempting, with varying degrees of success, to assert an interior life that resists that formatting.

It is difficult not to think here of Marianne Faithfull, who occupies a parallel register in the British version of the same phenomenon. Marianne Faithfull is initially rendered publicly intelligible through association—romantic, cultural, chemical—with the Rolling Stones orbit, and specifically through a media ecosystem eager to translate her into a kind of emblem: muse, fallen angel, tragic accessory to male genius. But what is striking about her trajectory is not the initial inscription but the long, stubborn insistence on rewriting it from within.

In both cases—Faithfull and Van Pallandt—the question is not simply “agency” in the abstract liberal sense, but something more structurally constrained: how does a person reassert authorship of self once they have already been written as a function in someone else’s story? Faithfull does this through survival, reinvention, and the eventual authority of her own voice as an artist. Nina does it more quietly, less performatively, by simply not continuing to cooperate with the demand that her life be endlessly narrativized into legible arcs.

And this is where Nina stops being just a cinematic presence and becomes entangled with a second, more volatile narrative system: the world of Clifford Irving and manufactured truth. I remain, in a slightly persistent way, puzzled by Clifford Irving—not in the sense that his actions are obscure, but in the sense that the scale of the gamble still feels oddly disproportionate to the era in which it occurred. Clifford Irving occupies that 1970s threshold where narrative fraud still had room to breathe: before the internet, before instantaneous archival correction, before every claim arrived already cross-checked by a thousand invisible clerks. The rope, in other words, was longer. Not infinitely elastic—but long enough that someone could plausibly believe they might walk it all the way across.

What he did, of course, was fabricate the authorized autobiography of Howard Hughes and briefly convince a publishing system that this fiction was fact. And one cannot quite shake the sense that this sits in a parallel register to Orson Welles’ late-career meditation on forgery and authorship, F for Fake, where the art forger is not simply a criminal but a kind of metaphysical irritant—someone who reveals how fragile the category of “authenticity” already is, even before it is attacked. In Welles’ world, the faker is almost honest about the fact that everyone is faking something. In Irving’s world, the system briefly forgets to notice.

The irony, of course, is that Irving’s fraud depended on a very pre-digital faith in paper trails, intermediaries, and the general slowness of institutional verification. Today it feels almost quaintly physical: forged documents, publishing contracts, phone calls that had to be believed in real time. One can imagine the same scheme now collapsing within hours, not because people are more moral, but because the feedback loops are instantaneous.

And then there is prison. Irving did time—real time, not narrative time—and emerged into a world that had already moved on to other, faster deceptions. Yeah, I mean what did you expect, dude. The arc compresses there in a way that feels almost unsatisfying: scandal, exposure, incarceration, partial reinvention. One wants something more operatic, but what you get is the bureaucratic version of consequence.

The interesting part is not that he was punished, but that for a brief historical window the system was even buildable enough that his plan could function as a kind of temporary reality. That is the shared atmosphere he has with Nina Van Pallandt: not guilt, not innocence, but proximity to narrative systems that were still slow enough to be fooled by their own assumptions.

In later life, Nina becomes harder to place in any of the familiar compartments that earlier decades tried to assign her. The cinematic afterglow fades into cult memory, and the Irving episode recedes into archival texture. What remains is a quietness that feels deliberate rather than accidental—not disappearance, but refusal of continued amplification. She does not convert notoriety into permanent self-mythology in the way later media ecosystems would almost require. Instead, she settles into a lower frequency of visibility: remembered, cited, intermittently revived, but no longer authored by the same pressures that once pulled her forward.

And here the comparison widens again, because what she resembles is not a “sidekick” at all—that word is too structurally comic, too dependent on hierarchy—but something closer to an attendant presence: a figure whose job, in other people’s stories, is to make emotional or moral instability legible without ever fully resolving it.

There is a related category, more neutral and slightly more precise: the faithful interlocutor. Not in the devotional sense, but in the structural one—the person who remains close enough to the main character’s instability to render it speakable, without ever becoming fully absorbed into its explanatory system. Nina performs this function in The Long Goodbyewithout being granted interpretive authority over it.

And there is another: the witness who does not testify cleanly. Not unreliable, but resistant to conversion into stable narrative fact.

We all make mistakes; that much is banal. The more interesting question is what kind of cultural weather those mistakes occur in, and how much agency is genuinely available inside it. Nina Van Pallandt seems, in retrospect, to have lived inside a period when men were still doing a great deal of the writing—of scripts, scandals, explanations—and women were often expected to appear inside those scripts as if they had authored them themselves. Her resistance to that framing is not always loud or declarative. Sometimes it is simply a matter of stepping out of the demand to be continuously interpretable.

And in that sense, what she ultimately carved out is not a grand public myth but something more modest and, arguably, more durable: a minor legacy, lightly held, slightly resistant to over-definition. Not central, not erased, not simplified—just there, in a way that feels unexpectedly intact.

I really like Nina Van Pallandt. In The Long Goodbye, and in the shadow of the Clifford Irving story, it is impossible not to root for her—not because she is resolved, but because she is never fully reducible. She drifts through systems built by men who are busy writing meaning onto the world, and she does not quite consent to being finalized inside any of them. We all make mistakes. She was written into a few. She was also, quietly, a drifter inside Hollywood’s narrative machinery, and what she ultimately leaves behind is a minor but distinct and instinctively cool legacy: not the center of anyone’s story, but one of the few figures who never fully became owned by it.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Film “My Dinner with Andre” Part I: Wally in New York

Note: Opening a multi-part early series from my first blog Classical Sympathies back in 2009, this piece takes up the beginning of Wallace Shawn’s walk through New York en route to his meeting with André Gregory in My Dinner with Andre, using Wally’s voice-over as a lens on artistic precarity, everyday survival, and the comic disproportion between existential weight and mundane errands. The note situates the film’s opening movement as both narrative setup and philosophical framing: a winter city of post offices, xerox shops, and unanswered calls becomes the psychological prelude to a conversation that will later expand into memory, performance, and self-mythology. This installment follows Wally up to his arrival at the restaurant for the pre-dinner drink, where the film’s central encounter is still suspended in anticipation, and meaning is generated less by action than by the act of getting there.

My Dinner with Andre is the famous, or infamous, 1981 film of a dinner conversation between Wallace Shawn, the actor and playwright, and Andre Gregory, the theater director. If I were to make a twofold claim for the film: i) that it is one of the most action packed films ever made, and ii) that it effectively encapsulates the thematics of the entire 20th century, I do not think this would be overstatement. My intent here, however, is not to establish either of these postulates, but rather to simply “blog” the script in the hopes that what needs to be said works its way to the surface. Fair warning: the undertaking will require several posts.

Money crops up on two of the first three pages of the script, and because money, and the lack of it, is a theme that runs beneath the entire script: Andre has money, has the freedom to travel and to spend several years trying to “find himself”; Wally does not. Still, “having money” is, as ever, a relative concept. At the opening of the film, Wally is seen walking through the streets of New York, heading for the restaurant where he is to meet Andre. It appears to be winter, maybe February. In the opening voice-over, Wally ruminates on the life of the artist: The life of a playwright is tough. It’s not easy, as some people seem to think. You work hard writing plays, and nobody puts them on. You take up other lines of work to try to make a living–acting, in my case–and people don’t hire you. So you spend your days crossing the city back and forth doing the errands of your trade. Today wasn’t any easier than any other day. I’d had to be up by ten to make some important phone calls, then I’d gone to the stationary store to buy envelopes, and then to the xerox shop. There were dozens of things to do. By five o’clock I’d finally made it to the post office and mailed off several copies of my plays, meanwhile checking constantly with my answering service to see if my agent had called with any acting work. In the morning, the mailbox had been stuffed with bills. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to pay them? After all, I was doing my best (17).

One of the marvelous things about the film is the tongue-in-cheek humor that is rarely, if ever, directly alluded to. A deeply serious film, Andre is also a comedy, a fact which we can recognize because we see that the writers are having fun with the characters who are in turn themselves. That is, Wally and Andre are playing versions of themselves–we assume that most of the experiences that Andre recounts in the film are based on real experiences, and that Wally’s account of his home life is more or less true to life–but exaggerated versions. As Shawn says in the preface to the script, “I knew immediately that {…} I’d have to distort us both slightly–our conflicts would have to become sharpened–we’d have to become–well–characters {…} It would be an enormously elaborate piece of construction” (14). In this initial passage, the humor lies in Wally’s conception of a difficult life: “I’d had to be up by ten to make some important phone calls.”

Wally’s sense of pressure is, from the outset, deliberately out of proportion to the scale of his circumstances. The tone is one of genuine complaint, but the complaint itself is almost comically domestic: the architecture of a “hard day” is built out of errands, envelopes, xerox shops, and an answering service that may or may not contain salvation in the form of an acting job. What Shawn achieves here, and what the film quietly sustains, is a recalibration of seriousness—where existential weight is not attached to grand events but to the texture of administrative survival. Wally’s New York is not a place of romance or revelation, but of circulation: between post office, mailbox, and telephone, as though modern artistic life has been reduced to a loop of deferred contact with recognition.

At the same time, the humor is never fully separable from sincerity. Wally is not merely being mocked; he is also articulating a recognisable condition of artistic precarity, one that the film refuses to glamorize. The genius of the opening monologue lies in this double register: we are invited to laugh at the disproportion between emotional tone and material fact, but we are also made to recognise how easily that disproportion becomes a lived reality. The “dozens of things to do” are not nothing; they are just insufficiently legible as crisis, which is precisely what makes them feel like crisis.

By the time Wally finally moves through the city toward the restaurant, the structure of the film has already been quietly established: this is a world in which meaning is not delivered through events but through the way events are narrated to oneself while walking between obligations. New York, in this sense, is not a backdrop but a medium of self-composition—an environment in which thought is constantly being assembled under mild pressure, as though consciousness itself were an errand.

He checks the time again, as he has been doing throughout the afternoon, and adjusts his route slightly, not out of urgency so much as orientation. The meeting with André already exists in his mind as something slightly unreal, a fixed appointment that has not yet been granted substance by arrival. He crosses another block, passes into the thinning evening light, and begins to approach the restaurant where, for the first time that day, the structure of waiting will shift from solitary to shared.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Review of the Film Code 46

Note: We don’t do a lot of film reviews here, but Code 46 earns the exception—partly because Michael Winterbottom is one of my very favorite directors, and still wildly underrated, and partly because this film quietly seeps into you in a way that feels unshakable; set in a world that is clearly not ours but just similar enough to be discomforting—real Shanghai that isn’t quite real, deserts that feel earned, a system of “cover” and genetic law that replaces freedom without ever announcing itself—the film follows William, a kind of intuitive investigator who lives more than feels, and Maria, who works in a bureaucratic “fate factory” and senses, before she knows, that something is already off; their connection unfolds in fragments—interrogation as flirtation, impulse as rebellion, intimacy as violation—until the central truth emerges: in a world where memory can be edited and biology legislated, even love itself can be illegal; the genius of the film is its restraint.

Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton don’t overwhelm you with chemistry, which actually makes the relationship feel more provisional, more real, more doomed—and by the time the system reasserts itself (memory erased, lives restored, Maria exiled with the burden of remembering), you realize the film hasn’t been building to a climax so much as a quiet erasure; it’s less than 90 minutes, barely announces its futurism beyond small details (languages blending, empathy viruses, low-fi surveillance), and yet it lingers in a way much louder films don’t; it also clearly fed into the DNA of the Thin Man—this idea of movement through controlled spaces, of intuition over evidence, of relationships that feel both fated and structurally impossible—and in that sense it’s not just a film I admire, it’s one that got under the skin and stayed there.

Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 is less a conventional sci-fi film than a drifting, half-lucid meditation on love, control, and memory. It runs under 90 minutes, but it feels strangely elongated—like a dream you keep slipping back into.

The hero, William (Tim Robbins), isn’t exactly living—he’s existing. A kind of insurance investigator, a “driver” moving through a world defined by pollution, restriction, and bureaucratic control. This isn’t the neon overload of something like Blade Runner—Shanghai here feels real, but off. The deserts outside the cities are harsh and empty; if people can’t get “cover” to move, there’s a reason. The world is closed, stratified, quietly oppressive.

William is established early as compassionate—at a checkpoint, he shows a kind of human softness that marks him apart. But he’s also slippery. He bluffs and charms his way through situations, his “cunning” explicitly noted as one of his professional tools. He doesn’t rely on evidence so much as intuition: “It’s intuition you’re paying for.”

Maria (Samantha Morton) narrates parts of the film, grounding it in something more intimate and unstable. Her sense of time is fractured—lucid dreaming, recurring visions, a sense that something is about to happen. “Every year I have this dream… is this the night I wake?” There’s a constant feeling that fate is closing in. She works in what is essentially a “fate factory,” issuing the cover documents that determine where people can go and what they can do. In this world, fate substitutes for freedom.

When William meets Maria, there’s an immediate sense of déjà vu—she feels she’s met him before. Their early interactions blend interrogation and flirtation. The dynamic is unusual: older man, younger woman, but the aesthetic—her shaved head, the stripped-down environments—blunts the cliché. Their connection feels tentative, exploratory. She tests him; he reads her. There’s attraction, but it’s not fully trusted on either side.

Their relationship develops in fragments: subway encounters, shared meals, small rule-breaking gestures. William knows she’s impulsive—she admits it. The film introduces the idea of engineered “viruses” that alter human ability—perfect pitch, empathy. It’s a strange, understated sci-fi touch that reinforces how mediated everything is, even emotion.

There’s a looseness to their chemistry. Robbins and Morton don’t generate overwhelming heat, but that actually works. The relationship feels uncertain, provisional—two people circling something they don’t fully understand. Their intimacy is uneven, sometimes tentative, sometimes urgent. Maria seems to need William more than he needs her, or at least she feels the stakes more sharply.

The world around them continues to intrude. There are hints of smuggling, of bureaucratic corruption, of quiet desperation. Maria has lived “outside” for ten years—without cover, presumably—which raises questions the film never fully answers. William’s moral stance, when it emerges, feels weak, almost performative.

When he returns home, he tries to reassert control—rejecting Maria, then calling her back. But the narrative destabilizes. A colleague dies; William is sent back to investigate. The technology—video links, surveillance—feels oddly low-fi, as if the future never quite fully arrived.

As William digs deeper, the film’s central taboo emerges. Maria has violated Code 46—a genetic restriction law. Through fragments of dialogue and investigation, William pieces together the truth: they are biologically too similar. A “50% match.” Worse, her mother was a clone—one of many. The implications are quietly devastating.

Maria’s past is altered—an illegal pregnancy erased, along with the associated “memory cluster.” Identity itself becomes unstable. Memory, love, and experience can all be edited, removed, rewritten.

Their attempts to escape—to flee together, to build something outside the system—feel almost doomed from the start. The idea of Jebel Ali, drawn from her father’s stories, becomes a kind of imagined refuge. But the system closes in. A car crash. Memory erasure. Reintegration.

In the end, William is returned home, restored to his life, his wife, his routine. Covered for. Maria, by contrast, is exiled—sent out into the desert with her memories intact. She becomes the one who remembers, who carries the weight of what happened.

The final note is pure loss. Lost love, stripped of even the possibility of reunion. Maria staring out into the distance, holding onto something the world has decided should not exist.

Code 46 is not a perfect film. It’s uneven, sometimes opaque, and emotionally muted in ways that can frustrate. But its ideas linger. It captures something rare: a future where control is soft but absolute, where love is possible but prohibited, and where memory itself becomes the final battleground.

It doesn’t hit you all at once. It seeps in.

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The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea Available Now!

Well everyone, today is the day. My first novel, The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea is now available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

This one took a while—written in fits and starts, in bars and hotel lobbies here in Kyoto—but it finally found its shape. More than anything, today I just want to thank all the readers of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, wherever you hail from; I’ve always thought of this as an ongoing conversation, and a lot of this book grew out of that exchange.

If you do pick it up, I hope you enjoy the ride—and if it lands for you, a quick review on Amazon would mean a great deal. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Matt

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On Why Sicario Is the Greatest Film of the 2010s

Note: This essay reflects on the film Sicario and its place within the cinema of the 2010s. It is written in the spirit of cultural criticism rather than formal film scholarship. My aim is not to produce a definitive ranking of the decade’s films, but to articulate why Sicario stands out as a particularly revealing work about power, violence, and the uneasy moral landscape of contemporary geopolitics.

The film’s depiction of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the covert war against drug cartels resonated strongly with me because it refuses many of the narrative comforts typical of American action cinema. Instead of heroic triumphs or clear moral resolutions, Sicario presents a world in which institutional power often operates through ambiguous methods and morally troubling compromises.

In that sense the film belongs to a small tradition of American cinema willing to look directly at the realities of U.S. involvement in Latin America. An earlier example is Salvador, which similarly attempted to depict American policy in the region without the usual patriotic framing.

Readers who disagree with the claim that Sicario is the greatest film of the 2010s are very much invited to do so. Film arguments are part of the pleasure of cinephile culture. The claim here is intentionally bold because bold claims tend to produce interesting conversations.

At the very least, the border extraction sequence alone earns Sicario a place among the most unforgettable cinematic moments of the past decade.

I first watched Sicario on Netflix.

Which is not the way great films are supposed to enter one’s life. Great films are meant to arrive in dark theaters, on enormous screens, in the company of strangers who feel the tension at the same moment you do. Netflix, by contrast, offers films casually, like items on a digital buffet.

But sometimes a movie survives even that.

Sicario does.

Within half an hour it becomes clear that the film is operating at a different frequency from most thrillers. The dialogue is spare. The pacing is deliberate. The camera lingers on landscapes and silences. Something about the atmosphere suggests that the story is heading somewhere morally uncomfortable.

Then comes the border crossing.

The Extraction

The convoy moves slowly toward the border crossing at Juárez. The mission seems straightforward: extract a prisoner from Mexico and return him to the United States. The vehicles move through traffic in tight formation. Nothing dramatic is happening yet.

And yet everything feels wrong. Cars begin to surround the convoy. Drivers stare from their windshields. Traffic slows to a crawl. The camera—guided by the extraordinary eye of Roger Deakins—cuts between glances, mirrors, steering wheels, hands resting near weapons. The tension builds with almost mathematical precision.

What makes the scene so powerful is not the violence itself but the certainty of its arrival. Everyone in the vehicles understands what is about to happen. The operators watch the surrounding cars with an eerie calm, as if they are simply waiting for a timer to run out.

Disaster is not possible. It is inevitable.

When the gunfire finally erupts it is sudden, efficient, and disturbingly professional. The scene ends almost as quickly as it began.

By the time the convoy crosses back into the United States, the viewer understands that the film is not interested in the usual heroics of the crime thriller. It is interested in something darker.

The Line Between Law and Power

Part of what makes Sicario extraordinary is the way it gradually dissolves the moral categories the audience expects.

Emily Blunt’s character, FBI agent Kate Macer, begins the film believing she is participating in a legitimate law enforcement operation. But as the mission unfolds, she begins to realize that the institutions she represents are operating according to rules that have very little to do with the law.

The key figure in this realization is the relaxed, almost cheerful CIA operative called Matt Graver played by Josh Brolin.

Graver is one of the film’s most fascinating characters because he openly blurs the lines between legality and strategy. He treats the war against the cartels not as a legal battle but as a geopolitical game in which certain rules simply no longer apply.

He jokes. He smiles. He reassures Kate that everything is under control. And yet the deeper the operation goes, the clearer it becomes that the “control” he represents has very little to do with justice.

Alejandro

If Matt Graver represents the pragmatic face of American power, Alejandro, played wonderfully by Benicio Del Toro, represents something older and more elemental. Alejandro is not a police officer or a soldier in any conventional sense. He is a weapon deployed inside the machinery of the state.

His presence reveals the film’s central truth: the war on drugs, as depicted here, is not really about drugs. It is about power, revenge, and the maintenance of geopolitical equilibrium through violence.

The final dinner-table scene—quiet, controlled, almost polite—delivers one of the most chilling moments in modern cinema.

Alejandro does not rage. He simply completes the task.

A Film Without Illusions

The reason Sicario stands above most films of the 2010s is that it refuses to decorate its subject with comforting illusions.

American cinema has often struggled to portray U.S. foreign policy in Latin America with any degree of honesty. Films frequently soften the narrative with patriotic framing or moral reassurance. Sicario does the opposite.

In that sense it belongs to a small tradition of films willing to examine American power without the usual gloss. One earlier example is
Salvador.

Like Salvador, Sicario presents U.S. involvement in the politics and violence of the region not as a heroic intervention but as a complicated and morally ambiguous system of influence.

The film does not sermonize about this reality. It simply shows it.

The Craft

What elevates the film from strong political thriller to masterpiece is its extraordinary craftsmanship. Director Denis Villeneuve constructs the story with remarkable restraint. Exposition is minimal. Dialogue is sparse. Much of the narrative unfolds through mood and implication rather than explanation.

Roger Deakins’ cinematography turns the borderlands into a stark visual landscape of highways, deserts, and shadowy tunnels.

And the score by Jóhann Jóhannsson provides the film’s subterranean heartbeat—deep, rumbling tones that feel less like music than like distant artillery beneath the earth.

Together these elements create an atmosphere that is almost hypnotic.

The Film of the Decade

Every decade produces films that entertain, and a smaller number that capture the psychological mood of their time. Sicario belongs to the second category.

The 2010s were a decade in which institutions increasingly appeared opaque, power operated through indirect mechanisms, and the line between legality and strategy often seemed disturbingly thin.

Sicario does not attempt to solve these problems. It simply looks at them without flinching.

And that honesty may be precisely why it stands as the greatest film of its decade.

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On Projection

This piece grows out of a pattern I kept noticing across very different areas of life — music, institutions, relationships, even small domestic moments. The common thread was projection: the quiet human habit of deciding who someone is before we actually know them.

Most of the trouble people cause each other doesn’t begin with malice. It begins with projection. A quick glance, a flash of confidence, a moment of competence, and the mind rushes in to fill the rest of the story. We decide who someone is long before we know them, then spend the next several interactions quietly forcing reality to match the role we’ve already written. The strange part is how automatic it feels. Projection moves faster than curiosity. By the time the real person arrives, the character has already been cast.

Artists have always understood this better than psychologists. Warren Zevon could compress the entire phenomenon into a sideways moment — a smirk from a hotel bellboy, a glance that tells you someone has already decided what kind of person you must be. That small misreading carries a particular sting. Not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s casual. A stranger assigning you a part in a play you never auditioned for.

The same mechanism runs everywhere. Romantic life is the most obvious theater. People meet someone who carries a certain kind of presence — confidence, magnetism, calm — and projection fills in the rest. One person sees mystery, another sees danger, another sees salvation. Rarely does anyone pause long enough to discover the ordinary human being standing behind the projection screen.

But romance is only the loudest version of the phenomenon. The quieter version appears in institutions. Walk into any functioning organization and you will see it immediately. Certain people get labeled early: the fixer, the visionary, the difficult one, the safe pair of hands. Once the role has been assigned, the institution stops looking carefully. Evidence that confirms the role is absorbed instantly; evidence that contradicts it tends to drift past unnoticed.

Competence is particularly vulnerable to this kind of projection. Once people notice that you can solve problems, the problems begin moving toward you almost by gravity. It rarely happens maliciously. More often it unfolds through a thousand small assumptions: they’ll handle it, they’re good at this, they don’t seem bothered. Over time the projection becomes structural. You wake up one day and realize the role people see when they look at you has quietly become the architecture of your work.

The same thing happens in subtler ways in personal life. A confident woman becomes a symbol of availability. A calm man becomes the emotional ballast of every room he enters. Someone who listens well becomes the designated interpreter of other people’s feelings. None of these roles are entirely false, but they are rarely complete. The projection flattens the person into a function.

And yet every now and then something rare happens. The projection stops.

Sometimes it happens in a team that has matured enough to recognize its own weight. Work begins moving horizontally instead of downhill. Problems get solved in real time without automatically searching for the usual backstop. The structure starts holding itself.

Sometimes it happens in friendship, where someone listens closely enough to hear the difference between energy and intention.

Sometimes it happens at home, in the quiet choreography of daily life — laundry hung, dinner made, small responsibilities passed back and forth without ceremony. No one performing a role. Just two people moving through the same system with mutual awareness.

Recognition, when it appears, is strangely quiet. It doesn’t arrive with speeches or dramatic declarations. More often it shows up as the absence of pressure — the sudden realization that you no longer have to play the character someone else wrote for you.

That absence can feel almost physical. A lightness in the room. A small shift in gravity.

Most of life still runs on projection. It’s simply too efficient a mental shortcut to disappear entirely. Human beings read surfaces quickly and fill in the rest. We build stories because the world moves too fast to wait for full understanding.

But every once in a while the projection drops and something more accurate takes its place. Someone sees you clearly. Or a system finally distributes its weight the way it should have all along.

Those moments are easy to miss because they are not dramatic. They feel almost ordinary.

But if you pay attention, they carry a quiet form of relief: the sense that for a brief stretch of time, at least, you are no longer acting in someone else’s script.

Dedication

For those rare moments when the projection dissolves and the real person gets to stand in the room.