Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of the 50s, 7/25/26. He Gets on Base.

Epigraphs:

So you wanna get out?
Let me draw a map

–Superchunk

Good sex it never makes you feel hollow
Good sex it never makes you clean

–Kevin Drew

I watched your face die backwards
Little baby in my memory
You told me victory’s sweet
Even deep in the cheap seats

–Conor Obrest

I. Morning

I slept better than I have in a long time. As best as I can recall, I went to bed around 12:40 AM. and woke up around 6:40 AM. Six hours is not necessarily a full night’s sleep, but lately it has felt like a luxury. I woke up clear-headed, made coffee in my room, and headed down to the Lawson around the corner for another one. I picked up some potato chips while I was there, wandered back to the hotel, and settled into the morning.

The first order of business was practical. I checked my messages, replied to my son Hugh, and told him I’d be happy to swing by home on Monday as long as he let me know what time he expected to be home. “Love, Papa,” as always. I checked in on Elliott as well. Nothing had changed. As of this writing, we’re still meeting at 6:30 this evening at a beer bar in southern Osaka, and I am looking forward to it.

Once these logistics were out of the way, my mind drifted, as it sometimes does, toward movies and television.

I started thinking about The Sopranos. I’ve watched this show all the way through twice, and I’ve revisited a number of episodes over the years. I think James Gandolfini and Michael Imperioli both give remarkable performances, and there are many individual scenes I genuinely love. Even so, I’ve gradually realised that David Chase’s aesthetic simply isn’t mine. Whether the repetition is intentional or not—and I suspect it is—I find both the storytelling and the character arcs to be cyclical.

The performances remain compelling, but the show continually circles back over the same emotional territory. I understand why so many people consider it one of the greatest television dramas ever made. I don’t. I like it and I’m glad I watched it, but I don’t imagine I’ll ever watch the series again.

Thinking about The Sopranos naturally led me to the dialogue that has stayed with me over the years. Not necessarily the greatest lines ever written, but the ones I find myself returning to.

Roger Wade, in The Long Goodbye, pours two glasses of anisette and says to Philip Marlowe, “Take that goddamn J. C. Penney tie off.”

Marlowe calmly replies, “I’m happy to drink with you, but I’m not taking my tie off.”

I don’t know why I love that exchange so much, but I always have.

Another favorite comes from Godfather II. Michael Corleone’s sister comes to him with her new boyfriend Merle to ask Michael for money.

“Connie, I don’t know this Merle. I don’t know what he does. I don’t know what he lives on. Tell him you’re never going to see him again, and come and live with me in Tahoe.” She does of course. It’s funny, oddly romantic, a little menacing, and super funny.

Then there’s The Wire. Bodie has always been my favourite character, and one of my favourite exchanges comes in Seasons 3 shortly after Cutty gets out of prison.

“I’m surprised Avon lets y’all get your heads up.”

Bodie shrugs.

“Sometimes you got to.”

Four words. An entire philosophy.

Seinfeld contributes one as well. Kramer proudly shows Jerry his silk boxer shorts and encourages him to buy a pair. Jerry politely declines.

“No thank you. They’re just a little too delectable for me.”

Perfect.

Finally, there’s Michael Clayton. Arthur Edens has come apart at the seams strips off in the deposition room. Michael flies to Wisconsin to rescue him, and after a brief argument simply says,

“Let’s get out of Milwaukee and we’ll talk about it.”

Sometimes a single sentence can contain an entire friendship.

As I thought about these great quotes, I realized something that hadn’t quite crystallized before. I don’t dislike slow films. I dislike static ones. I love Tarkovsky, but I don’t love all of Tarkovsky equally. Mirror and Stalker feel alive to me. Nostalghia does not. Likewise, I don’t need constant action, but I do need movement—emotional, philosophical, psychological, narrative. I want to feel that a story is becoming something different from where it began.

That, I think, is the aesthetic I’m really chasing. After that my thoughts wandered to Craig Finn, the singer-songwriter who heads the Hold Steady.

The first Hold Steady song I ever heard was “Sequestered in Memphis.” At the time I misunderstood the entire premise. I thought the narrator was giving an interview to a journalist rather than being questioned by the police. Looking back, it seems obvious, but it never occurred to me then.

What always stayed with me, though, was a single line:

In barlight she looked alright. In daylight she looked desperate.

I’ve know exactly what Craig means here. I’ve been there too.

By then the morning had slipped away from me. As of this writing, I’m still working on my essay, Am I Bisexual? It should probably have been published two days ago. It’s one of the more complicated pieces I’ve written in a while, and I’d rather finish the edit properly than rush it out simply to keep the daily streak alive.

The plan from here is straightforward. I’m going upstairs to keep editing for another hour or two. I’ll get organised, probably grab a short nap later this afternoon, and then head down to southern Osaka in plenty of time to meet Elliott at 6:30.

Everything else can wait.

II. Afternoon

By nine I’d finally stopped putzing about I was about to start. I rearranged the room one more time, put on Neil Halstead instead of Ryan Adams, then Ryan Adams instead of Neil Halstead, opened three browser tabs, closed two of them, looked at hotel dates, thought about escorts for exactly as long as I had promised myself I wouldn’t, and somehow convinced myself this counted as preparation.

It did, in a way. Every writer has their rituals. Mine mostly involve avoiding the sentence I’m about to write.

I remembered a much loved Superchunk lyric:

“So you wanna get out / well I’ll draw you a map.”

This turned out to be the whole morning. Dude if this place sucks so bad just jet. I’ll buy you and Amtrak ticket. Seriously bro. Hit the brinks.^

The next few days existed only as pencil marks: maybe Osaka until Monday, maybe longer, maybe Pattaya, maybe Litz, maybe Hugh, maybe Mio. None of it fixed. Just possible roads branching away from the same hotel room.

The night before, Litz had mentioned how much she loved the ending of piece I wrote about her. I had already mostly forgotten this part, so I took another look. It went like this:

The challenges in our relationship are the product of two imperfect people, each bringing old habits, old fears, old hopes, and old wounds into something new. This is not failure. It is simply the complicated business of being human.

I made it halfway through before I started crying. Not dramatic crying. Just enough that I had to stop reading. Sometimes a paragraph waits until you’re ready to understand what you wrote.

III. Early Evening:

Around 6:30 this evening, after working for about an hour and a half on the edit of yesterday’s journal, I walked a few minutes from my new hotel to a nearby convenience store to get something to drink.

Several hours earlier, I had texted my friend Elliott to ask whether he wanted to grab a drink tomorrow night. As I walked to the store, he replied that he was up for it and suggested a beer bar in southern Osaka. I told him I would meet him there.

Thinking about Elliott, I reflected on how much I admire his intelligence. I am a high school teacher, and Elliott used to be one of my colleagues. He left the school years ago and now tutors economics online and manages various investments. He also used to teach mathematics.

I am a social studies teacher. Over the years, I have taught a wide variety of classes, and I feel that I could adequately instruct students in almost any area of social studies. Elliott’s mathematical intelligence, however, has always struck me as remarkable.

In fact, I sometimes envy the mathematics teachers I have known, because mathematics is simply not one of my strengths. I was a decent math student for a time, but I hit the wall with calculus during my junior year of high school and never took another math class. Today, I almost never use mathematics except for the calculator on my phone and a little basic financial housekeeping.

This does not mean that Elliott is smarter than I am. I consider myself highly intelligent. Nonetheless, several times over the years, I have wondered whether he might indeed be smarter than me.

Thinking about it today, I realized that this is probably because his intelligence expresses itself very differently from mine. If I absolutely had to, I could probably relearn enough mathematics to teach middle school. That would be about my limit. Elliott is whip-smart and could probably teach most of the social studies classes I have taught without too much difficulty.

I often reflect on how strongly my intelligence expresses itself in certain areas of life, while in others I am essentially incompetent. I have a solid understanding of subjects such as history, politics, philosophy, psychology, religion, and metaphysics. However, I could not change a tire to save my life.

Although I am not exactly made of money, I almost always call a professional to handle household tasks such as fixing a faucet or clearing a drain. I find these jobs to be a tremendous hassle. In fact, they piss me off. I am happy to pay someone a few dollars to come and sort them out.

As I entered the convenience store, my thoughts turned to the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin is one of the greatest television and film writers of all time. I love The West Wing and The Social Network, and I have enjoyed much of his other work. For reasons of his own, however, Sorkin insists on directing some of his films.

He wrote and directed Molly’s Game. Molly’s Game sucks ass. The script is incomprehensible and all over the place. It is, without question, the worst piece of writing he has ever produced. The direction is equally terrible. The characterization is weak, the emotional beats are overdone, and the entire film is syrupy and sappy. I cannot stand it.

A second film of interest here is The Trial of the Chicago 7, which Sorkin also wrote and directed. The script is actually quite good, and the acting is strong. Once again, however, Sorkin’s direction is awful.

The film concerns the protests surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I was not alive at the time, but my understanding is that thousands of protesters gathered in the city, largely in opposition to the Vietnam War and to the Democratic Party’s handling of it. The police responded with tear gas, clubs, arrests, and widespread violence. Some protesters fought back, and things became extremely ugly.

There are only a few major action sequences in the movie. Sorkin’s handling of them is pure trash. He has no idea how to direct physical chaos. The cameras are always in the wrong place. It is difficult to tell where anyone is or what is happening. The entire thing feels out of control, and not in an intentional way.

Molly’s Game is a bad movie, and I do not care. The Trial of the Chicago 7 could have been a good movie with competent direction. Sorkin was simply not the man for the job.

As I walked back to my hotel, I began thinking about how strange it is that otherwise intelligent people, for reasons of ego, ambition, or simple misjudgment, sometimes insist on doing things at which they are obviously bad.

Then I thought: Well, I have probably done this too.

There have certainly been times when I believed I could handle something and ended up over my skis. I suspect this is true of everyone. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and intelligence manifests itself in different ways.

Over time, I have tried to learn how to pick my spots and stay in my lane. I do not always succeed. However, I hope I do a better job of it than Aaron Sorkin.

IV: Evening Back at My Hotel

As I walked to the train station to go meet Elliot I called Annie. Annie has always been completely outta control, and she absolutely loves it. Within five minutes she’d decided to crash her ex-husband’s wedding in a tent, seduce one of the guests, reminisced about working at Spokane’s Mars Casino, told me stories involving cocaine, dresses, gambling, and an older gay man who’d taught her “everything about sex,” invited me to her hypothetical future wedding, and, after I jokingly suggested we skip straight to sex ourselves, said she’d think about it. Talking to Annie has always been like standing beside a fire hose. The stories don’t really have beginnings or endings. They simply arrive.

The morning passed quietly. I answered a message from my brother Hugh, who was planning to stop by the house in Kyoto sometime during the coming week, and sent a few encouraging replies to several women I’d been chatting with online. One woman in the Philippines was hoping to find work overseas in Singapore or Malaysia. Another, somewhere in Thailand, simply wanted to know how my morning was going. Others had drifted into that peculiar limbo occupied by most dating-app conversations: friendly enough to continue, but unlikely ever to become anything more.

After a while I found myself scrolling through far more conversations than I probably should have. Dating apps create the illusion that your social world is constantly expanding, when in reality most interactions simply fade away after a few messages. Every now and then somebody surprises you, but most conversations end not with an argument or rejection, but with simple inertia. Nobody does anything wrong. Life just moves on.

Perhaps that’s why I no longer find the process frustrating. Years ago I probably would have chased every lead, replied to every message immediately, and wondered why nothing seemed to develop. These days I treat it more like browsing a bookstore than shopping for groceries. If something genuinely interesting appears, wonderful. If not, I’ll probably enjoy my coffee just as much.

My musical companion for the morning was Craig Finn. I first discovered him through “Sequestered in Memphis,” and, like many first-time listeners, completely misunderstood the song. I thought the narrator was speaking to a journalist after a reckless night in Memphis. Only later did I realize he was being questioned by the police. Somehow that misunderstanding didn’t lessen the song; if anything, it made me appreciate Finn’s writing even more. His characters are so vividly drawn that they feel real even when you’ve misunderstood the plot.

One line has always stayed with me: “In bar light she looked alright. In daylight she looked desperate.” Finn is ostensibly describing someone else, but the brilliance of the lyric is that it cuts both ways. By dawn, they’re both desperate. We’ve all had moments where the previous night’s confidence evaporates with the morning light. Finn simply found the perfect sentence to describe it.

V: On the Way to See Elliot

After finally giving up on the day’s editing, I showered, threw on a clean shirt, and hurried toward Taishō, where I was meeting Elliott at a craft beer pub called TNT. I was running a few minutes behind schedule—as usual—but Elliott has never struck me as the sort of person who minds waiting over a pint. I figured I’d make up the time somewhere between the hotel and the station, although experience suggested otherwise.

The train ride became one of those familiar periods of suspended possibility. While checking directions and changing lines, I also found myself checking dating apps, replying to messages, and idly wondering what the rest of the evening might bring. If everything went perfectly, I’d spend a few hours drinking good beer with Elliott, head back toward my hotel, and perhaps finish the night with a date. It wasn’t exactly a plan so much as several loosely connected possibilities competing for my attention.

Somewhere between stations my thoughts drifted to Tomoyo, one of my former students whom I’d seen again at the book launch. We’d nearly gone out together once before, years after she’d graduated, but circumstances had gotten in the way. Twenty years have now passed since I first taught her, which removes any ethical hesitation I might once have felt. I found myself wondering whether I should simply ask her out the next time I am in Tokyo. Sometimes life becomes unnecessarily complicated because we spend too much time calculating the odds instead of asking straightforward questions.

That seemed to be the theme of the journey. I checked my bank balance, priced a few possibilities for later that evening, briefly reconsidered future trips to Thailand and even South Korea, nearly walked the wrong way through a station, and at one point came within a few feet of being clipped by a taxi while jaywalking. None of it mattered very much. My mind was simply ricocheting from one possibility to another while my body steadily carried me toward a beer with a friend.

By the time I emerged from Taishō Station, the mental static had largely disappeared. Elliott was waiting, the pub was less than a minute away, and for the next few hours the only decision I intended to make was which beer to order first.

=====

The Osaka Loop Line has a hypnotic quality after a while. Every minute or two another calm recorded voice announces the next station, another transfer, another reminder to mind the gap. After ten or fifteen minutes the words stop meaning anything. They become part of the rhythm of the journey, almost musical, drifting in and out beneath whatever happens to be occupying your thoughts.

Mine, for reasons I still can’t explain, wandered toward negative igloos.

I have absolutely no idea what a negative igloo is. I have never knowingly encountered one before or since. It arrived fully formed, demanded my attention for perhaps fifteen seconds, and then disappeared forever, leaving me no wiser than before. If someone were to ask me today what a negative igloo might actually be, I honestly couldn’t begin to answer. Nonetheless, somewhere between Kitahama and Taishō, negative igloos briefly became the most important concept in my universe.

The rest of my brain was scarcely more coherent. Ryan Adams was singing Drank Like a River, and I found myself thinking about the tiny crack in his voice—that moment where it sounds less like he’s performing a song than remembering something he’d rather forget. Some singers sound polished. Ryan often sounds wounded. There’s a difference, and it’s one of the reasons I keep returning to his records.

Then, just as suddenly, I realized I had absolutely no idea where I was.

I’d somehow missed my stop, wandered out the wrong exit, and was now standing in a station that looked vaguely familiar while possessing almost no useful geographical knowledge whatsoever. Google Maps insisted I was only two minutes away from Elliott. My instincts insisted otherwise. My instincts, it should be noted, have an unfortunate habit of arguing with Google.

For a few minutes I experienced what I can only describe as a minor travel panic. Not real panic—nothing so dramatic—but that familiar sensation every traveller knows, where every street begins to resemble every other street and every directional arrow seems specifically designed to send you somewhere else. I walked one way, doubled back, checked Google again, ignored Google, trusted Google, ignored it again, and somehow managed to end up exactly where I’d started.

Meanwhile my thoughts continued their usual pinball routine. Was the Sony credit card finally on its way? Should I spend part of August in South Korea instead of Bali? Would Yo still be available later that evening? Why hadn’t Jennifer replied? Why did Meinster have time to send me promotional emails but apparently not royalty statements? None of these questions had anything whatsoever to do with finding a pub in Taishō, but my mind saw no reason to separate one subject from another.

Eventually I admitted defeat and messaged Elliott. Dude I am totally lost. His reply arrived almost immediately.

Where are you?

It was the perfect question because I genuinely didn’t know.

Google claimed I was standing practically on top of TNT Craft Beer Pub. My own eyes suggested I was standing outside an Irish bar that definitely wasn’t TNT. For a brief moment I began to wonder whether the pub existed only as a cartographical rumour.

I texted him back and said I was looking at Taisho Station. He said he would be right there. One minute later I saw him across the street and crossed to meet him.

When Elliott finally rescued me from my navigational incompetence, TNT turned out to be exactly where Google had insisted it was all along. The fault, as usual, lay somewhere between the phone and the human operating it.

“You’re hopeless,” he said.

“I prefer ‘geographically imaginative.'”

He laughed. “Come on.”

One minute later we were golden.

VI: TNT Craft Beer with Elliot

The pub was everything I hoped it would be: a long wooden bar, a dozen taps of rotating local craft beers, a cheerful bartender in a baseball cap who somehow managed to keep everybody’s glass full without ever looking hurried. When one of the kegs kicked halfway through pouring my pint, she apologized and handed me the remainder for free.

“Sorry” she said.

“No worries,” I said. “I’ll always take half a beer for free.”

She laughed.

“I like your hat,” I said.

“I get that a lot,” she said.

I turned to Elliot and asked if he wanted to hear a joke.

“A shepherd is in bed with his girlfriend for the first time. She asks him, ‘How experienced are you?’ He closes his eyes…starts counting…and falls asleep.”

The bartender laughed.

Elliott buried his face in his hands.

“Please,” he said, “never change.”

“I make no promises” I said.

By the time the quizmaster welcomed everyone, we’d accumulated enough empty glasses to suggest we were taking the evening seriously while simultaneously possessing almost no confidence in our ability to answer questions about anything.

“What’s are name?” Elliot asked me.

“How about the Glorious Mofos?”

“Of course.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the quizmaster announced, “welcome!”

“He seems enthusiastic,” I whispered.

“He’s paid to be.”

We were spectacularly mediocre.

Spain had won something. Bananas were radioactive. Kobe Bryant was apparently named after Japanese beef. Beyond that we entered a sort of intellectual free fall.

“What do you think?”

“No idea.”

“You?”

“Less than no idea.”

“Write banana.”

“I already did.”

“Excellent.”

Our strategy rapidly evolved into letting Elliott answer the questions that sounded plausible while I concentrated on drinking beer, admiring the bartender, and periodically checking whether Yo had confirmed our appointment.

At one point Elliott looked over my shoulder.

“You’re really going after this?”

“I think so.”

“You ever think about…you know…not?”

I considered that.

“For about three seconds.”

He laughed.

“I thought so.”

That was one of the things I’d always appreciated about Elliott. He never judges. He asked questions. Usually he agrees with me. Other times now. Occasionally he looks at me as though I’ve completely lost my mind. But whatever I do he never tries to become my conscience. Old friendships eventually settle into that rhythm. You stop trying to improve each other and simply learn to enjoy each other’s company.

The conversation drifted from Japan to Canada, from the weather to my girlfriends, from travel plans to parents. I vented a little about my mother bitching about my writing. Elliott listened more than he spoke, occasionally nodding, occasionally smiling in that understated Canadian way that somehow communicated, I don’t entirely agree, but I understand why you’re upset.

By the time the second round ended, I’d glanced at my watch three or four times.

“You’ve got somewhere to be,” Elliott said.

“I might.”

“You definitely do.”

“Indeed I do.”

He grinned.

“Go lose your T-card.”

I laughed so hard I nearly spilled my beer.

“I’ll report back.”

“You’d better.”

We settled the bill, shook hands outside TNT, and headed in opposite directions. Elliott toward another ordinary Saturday night. Me toward Umeda, where Yo-chan was waiting.

VII: On the Way to See Yo Chan

As I entered Taisho Station the JR announcements began their familiar chant once again.

The next stop is…

Somewhere between stations my mind wandered back to negative igloos. I still have absolutely no idea what one is.

The JR announcer continued serenely informing us that the next stop was Kyobashi, or Osaka Castle Park, or somewhere that probably existed. In my head it became:

“Please enjoy negative igloos. Transfer here for the glorious nonsense line. Please exit on the right.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered. “I got it.”

I did not, in fact, have it.

Somewhere between the craft beer and the heat, I’d managed to convince myself I’d fallen asleep on the train. Maybe I had. Maybe I hadn’t. Either way, I suddenly had absolutely no idea where I was.

Oh, shit.

I checked Google Maps again. Every time I opened it, it confidently gave me a different answer.

“Seventeen minutes.”

I calculated that I would get to the shop about five minutes early. This turned out to be off. The announcer cheerfully reminded us to mind the gap.

“I’m trying to mind all the gaps.”

I got off the train and looked around. Then decided getting off had been exactly the right decision. I checked the train map on the station board. I was also seventeen minutes past Umeda. Oh great. Back we go.

I thought to myself: I need cash. Then a taxi. Then a cigarette. Possibly in that order. First I had to get back to Umeda.

The train came and I rode the short distance back. The instant I stepped onto the street, I lit a cigarette and hailed a cab. I had just a fee drags when a cab pulled up and I had to toss the cig.

The taxi driver nodded when I said, “Umeda.” Progress. Seven minutes, Google claimed. For once, we agreed. As the cab rolled through the humid Osaka evening, I realized I was no longer worried about getting lost. I was worried cause I was a little late.

I’d spent the entire afternoon imagining meeting Yo chan, and now my grand entrance was shaping up to be me arriving slightly sweaty, smelling faintly of cigarettes and carrying too little cash.

Great first impression I thought.

The driver dropped me exactly where Google said he would. Google immediately betrayed me again.

Fourth floor. I found the fourth floor. Everything was locked. No people. No reception. No Yo-chan. No nothing.

Just an eerily quiet hallway that felt like the set of a film where everyone had disappeared moments before I arrived.

I called the shop.

“I’m here.”

A reply came back almost instantly.

“First floor. It’s hard to find.”

No shit.

A guy walked over and picked me up. We walked five minutes to where the shop really was, no where near where Google said it was. Typical. This guy knows nothing. Apparently.

Five minutes later I found the place.

VIII: Yo Chan

The shop staff took me up in the elevator to the 7th and opened the door to room 701. For some reason I found this number to be fitting. There was a shower but no sink. I took my own clothes and began to rinse off. Yo chan soon entered the room. She looked like her picture, but not quite. The agency website said she 24, a fact she confirmed in person. She looked about 28 to me, and I supposed her life was perhaps not the easiest.

I found her attractive, and knew I would be able to cum. She joined me in the shower, soaped up, and began to stroke my dick. In general, I prefer to handle my equipment. It is a sensitive area, and I just know it best. I turned my back to her, and then a minute later I stepped out and toweled off. She followed shortly thereafter.

As we stepped out of the shower, she assessed my naked body. She said, “You look like Boris Johnson.” I laughed away and didn’t reply. I decided then that there were some conversations not worth extending.

We climbed onto to bed. I was already erect, and she was at half mast. She unwrapped a condom and slid it on my dick. I had never sucked anyone’s dick before, and I was both exited and just a little nervous.

We began kissing. I like a bit of tongue during kissing, however, her tongue was a little aggressive. Oh well I thought, kissing, at least tonight, would not the main event. I broke the kiss, and went down on her. She was semi-erect, however I was able to fit her full penis into my mouth. The first thing I noticed was her large foreskin. The second thing was, the act was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and she tasted neither good nor bad. I was eager to make her cum.

After a bit, she motioned for me to come back up to the head of the bed. She climbed back on top of me, and slid my dick into her ass. She had applied lube to her asshole, and hard dick slid in easily. After a short amount of time, I asked her to turn around and entered her from the rear. She began to moan and pant, and I found this very sexy. I was about to cum, and then, as I usually, do, I pulled and finished on a towel while sitting on my knees.

I then collapsed back the bed. She also sat on her knees, and came on the towel. Some of her cum landed on my leg, which I found faintly amusing. After this, I needed a cigarette. There was no smoking in the room so I asked her if I could go downstairs. She said sure, just pick me up a Pocari Sweat and call reception to get back up. I told her I would be back in five minutes, however I knew this was a lie. The fact was I would smoke three of four cigarettes and decompress for a while. This was about an hour into our date, and I had paid for ninety minutes. I did not want to re-engage in sex, so smoking and thinking quietly seemed like a good plan.

When I stepped back onto the street, the wind had gone out of my sails. Not in a bad way. Just…gone. For most of the day I’d been propelled by anticipation. Catch the train. Find Elliott. Don’t get lost. Meet Yo chan. Get the cash. Find the building. Try not to make an idiot of yourself. Then, just like that, there was nothing left to chase.

Osaka was still humming around me, but I’d become a spectator again. I checked the time on my phone. It was 12:30 AM. This immediately made me think of the Katheryn Bigalow film Zero Dark Thirty. I found myself thinking about Zero Dark Thirty. I’d never understood the criticism that it somehow endorsed torture. Showing something ugly isn’t the same as celebrating it. A film can portray violence honestly without recommending it, just as Goodfellas isn’t an argument for joining the Mafia. Sometimes a story simply trusts the audience to tell the difference.

I ducked into a nearby convenience store and bought two Pocaris, two beers, a burrito, and a pack of pack of cigarettes. I smoke another heater and drank one of the beers on the street. Then I called up to reception. There was no security, and I did not see any other customers the whole time I was there, however, at least time, I did what I was told.

Back in bed with Yo, we both undressed again and she fell asleep. I found our legs entwined. He body was very comfortable, and I can honestly say this was the sweetest part of the evening.

She woke up and pointed at the clock. It was time to go. We dressed and walked to the elevator. I leaned to give her a goodnight kiss, and she kissed me back, lightly. This was goodbye.

=====

It was after last train, so I got a taxi back my hotel near Yodoyabashi Station. The taxi rolled silently through the warm Osaka night I leaned my head against the window and watched the city slide by. Tomorrow I’d probably throw myself into another impossible plan, another train, another woman, another glorious and bizarre day. I was, by this point, quite tired.

A few hours earlier I’d been arguing with Google Maps, inventing negative igloos, convincing myself I’d missed stations that probably never existed, and experiencing a full-blown case of what I can only describe as travel boggle. Now all that urgency seemed faintly ridiculous. The date had happened. It had gone OK. I lost my T-card. I’d survived.

Travel does that. What feels catastrophic at eight o’clock becomes a mildly amusing anecdote by twelve-thirty.

But for the moment, there was nowhere I needed to be.

IX: Late Night Hotel and Bed

Back in my room I took off my shirt, washed up, and prepared for bed. For reasons I can’t entirely explain, my thoughts eventually wandered toward football. I’ve always enjoyed the sport, even if basketball remains my first love, and one of my earliest football memories comes from a Washington State game against Stanford. My mother, Claudia—CL to longtime readers—was friendly with Janet Elway, John’s mother, and at one point Janet served as something of a mentor to her. Through that connection, we ended up at the game while John Elway was still Stanford’s quarterback.

Before kickoff, Elway apparently told my mother that if he threw a touchdown, he would point toward us in the stands. Naturally, he did throw one. He was John Elway, after all. And after the score, he looked up and pointed in our direction while we yelled ourselves hoarse. I was still rooting for Washington State, which complicated the moment slightly, but even then I understood that we were watching somebody exceptional.

Elway went on to become one of the defining quarterbacks of his generation, first at Stanford and then during a long NFL career with Denver. What stays with me, though, isn’t the statistics or the championships. It’s the strange intimacy of that afternoon: my mother’s connection to his family, the promise made before the game, and the tiny gesture toward the stands after the touchdown. Sports are full of enormous public moments, but the memories that survive are often the small private ones folded inside them.

I claimed into bed, and indulged in one final reflection for the day. I thought about how funny it was that one minute you are deep in the throes of passion, moaning and panting your partner’s name, and the next you are smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, and thinking about Zero Dark Thirty on the street. Sex, which feels so wonderful and necessary at the time, does tend to recede pretty quickly. However, the power of good sex, as Kevin Drew says in out epigraph, cannot be beat.

Dedication:

For Yo chan. Thank you for taking my T card baby. Godspeed. You rule.

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.