Most of the characters were middle-aged diplomats. And while working on it, I had two realisations.

The first was that the Great War would have had a seismic impact on their lives, and I knew precious little about it. That sent me down a rabbit hole. The outbreak of the war, its aftermath, and how it reshaped philosophy, morality, religion, economics — all of it became an obsession. It even sparked another story idea, one I suspect I’m still years away from properly tackling.

The second realisation was simpler, but just as important.

Most of these characters would have had a Christian upbringing. They would have been familiar with the Bible. Not necessarily devout, but shaped by it.

Now, I had done my A-level oral exam on the Bible (and nailed it), but I realised I didn’t actually know it well enough to understand my characters.

So I started reading it. Not all of it, but enough to begin recognising its patterns: sin, guilt, sacrifice, redemption.

And that opened a door.

Because once I started, I didn’t stop there. I picked up Meditations, The Art of War, The Prince and, more recently, started reading Parallel Lives.

Not out of academic interest.

But because I realised: if I wanted to understand my characters, I had to understand what had shaped them.

Modern Minds in Period Costumes

There’s a trap we fall into as writers, and it usually comes from a good place.

We rely on empathy.

We imagine how we would feel in that situation. What we would think. How we would react if we were there.

And that gets us part of the way. But only part.

Because sooner or later, we start writing characters who look historical… but think like us. Modern minds in period costumes.

Their beliefs are softer. Their moral frameworks more individual, less inherited. Their relationship to religion, death, duty, even guilt filtered through a 21st-century lens.

Historians warn us about this all the time. Don’t judge the past by modern standards. Try to understand people as they understood themselves.

The same applies to writing.

A good example of this tension is The Last Kingdom. It’s a fantastic show — gripping, well-acted, full of life. But its protagonist, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, often feels like a modern man dropped into the early medieval world.

He’s sceptical in a way that feels contemporary. Cynical in a way that feels familiar. His distance from religion, his individualism, his almost casual relationship to belief, all of it reads closer to a 21st-century mindset than a 9th-century one.

Again, it works. It makes him accessible, charismatic, and easy to root for.

But it’s not entirely true. And that’s the trade-off.

Because the more we flatten those differences, the more we risk losing what makes historical characters distinct. Their strangeness. Their internal logic. The way they make sense of a world that is not ours.

If we want them to feel real, we have to resist the urge to make them comfortable.

We have to understand them on their own terms.

Specificity and Its Origins

There’s a common instinct in writing to keep things broad so they feel universal. To keep characters and situations open enough that anyone can step into them.

In practice, the opposite is true.

Universality comes from specificity. We don’t relate to vagueness. A precise situation, a particular fear, a clearly defined belief — even if we’ve never lived through it ourselves, we recognise the emotion inside it. That’s where connection happens.

The devil lies in the details. And those details are shaped by what a person has absorbed over time. The ideas they’ve encountered. The stories they’ve heard. The frameworks they’ve inherited.

Belief systems, moral codes, ways of interpreting the world, these are learned, not invented in the moment.

So if we want to write characters who feel grounded in their time, we need to understand what shaped them.

One of the simplest ways into that is to look at what they would have read.

The Bible — A Moral Framework

If you’re writing in a European or Western historical context, this is unavoidable.

The Bible was the moral language of entire societies.

Even people who weren’t particularly devout were shaped by it. It informed how they understood guilt, suffering, justice, forgiveness. It gave them a framework for interpreting their own lives.

And it did so through stories.

In the same way our favourite childhood films stay with us, biblical narratives stayed with them. The Gospel of Luke, with its focus on mercy and the humble. Genesis — Abraham’s faith, Joseph’s betrayal and rise. Exodus — liberation, law, a people defined by their journey.

These weren’t abstract teachings but lived reference points.

They shaped how people understood themselves, others, and the world around them.

Homer — Honour and Glory

Before Christianity reshaped the moral landscape, there was Homer.

The Iliad and The Odyssey sat at the foundation of classical education for centuries.

In Homer’s world, what matters is honour. Reputation. Glory that outlives you.

Achilles does not seek a good life in the modern sense. He seeks a remembered one. To be spoken of long after he is gone. To achieve kleos — a kind of immortality through fame.

Anger is not just an emotion, but a status. Insults must be answered. Weakness is dangerous. Mercy exists, but it is secondary to honour.

This is a very different moral instinct from the one shaped by Christianity. Not better or worse — but different.

And if you’re writing characters shaped by that world, or educated in its traditions, that difference matters.

Plutarch — Great Men and Moral Examples

Alongside epic and scripture, many educated people encountered history through biographies.

Parallel Lives presents paired portraits of Greek and Roman figures, not just to record events, but to examine character. Virtue, ambition, restraint, excess. What makes a man admirable, and what brings about his downfall.

A reader didn’t simply learn what happened but measured himself against it. Against Alexander’s boldness, Caesar’s ambition, and Cato’s integrity. Success and failure were read as moral patterns.

That creates a particular way of thinking. Not abstract questions about right and wrong, but comparisons. Judgements. Aspirations.

What kind of man am I becoming?
What would a great man do here?

For a character shaped by this tradition, life is not just lived. It is, in some sense, performed with an eye on how it might be remembered.

Stoicism — The Inner Life

If Plutarch gives us models to emulate, Stoicism teaches us how to endure.

Meditations is not a grand philosophical treatise. It’s a private notebook of a Roman emperor, reminding himself how to think.

Stay calm. Do your duty. Accept what you cannot control.

This is a worldview built for pressure.

Emotions are not denied, but disciplined. Suffering is not questioned, but endured. The focus is always inward: your reactions, your choices, your conduct.

That has a profound effect on character.

A man shaped by this doesn’t collapse under stress, nor does he indulge it. He contains it. He carries on.

Not because he is fearless, but because he believes that fear is beside the point.

What matters is action. Conduct. Duty.

In a world of uncertainty — war, politics, loss — this becomes a way of staying upright when everything else gives way.

Power and Strategy — How Leaders Think

Not all characters are guided by morality or philosophy. Some are guided by outcomes.

Texts like The Art of War, The Prince, and On War don’t ask what is right.
They ask what works.

Deception, timing, positioning, perception.
War as a system. Power is something to be managed, not moralised.

A character shaped by these ideas thinks differently.

He doesn’t necessarily seek to be good, or even admirable. He seeks to be effective. To win. To survive. To maintain control.

And once you understand that framework, his decisions stop feeling cold or arbitrary. They become coherent and logical.

Cultural Imagination — The Stories Beneath It All

Beyond philosophy and strategy, there are the stories people absorb without even realising it. Fairy tales, plays, and familiar narratives passed down and retold.

Collections like Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the works of William Shakespeare entertained as well as shaped instinct.

Justice, revenge, madness, fate. The wicked punished. The innocent tested. The world reveals itself through story.

Take Macbeth. A man on a precarious path, tempted by ambition, nudged toward power, and slowly undone by it. For someone raised on these stories, that arc could function as a warning. A pattern recognised. A path to step away from.

Or, just as easily, something that feels inevitable, a story already set in motion, carried through to its ruin.

That’s the power of these narratives. They were internalised. Their characters, arcs, and archetypes became reference points for understanding one’s own life.

And they shaped language as well as thought.

Shakespeare’s lines slipped into everyday speech:
“Break the ice.”
“Wild-goose chase.”
“Wear my heart upon my sleeve.”
“All that glitters is not gold.”

Used without conscious reference, but carrying the weight of the stories they came from.

The Mental World — And Writing With Depth

Taken together, these aren’t just influences. They form a mental world.

A character shaped by The Bible understands guilt, suffering, and redemption in a particular way. One shaped by The Iliad thinks in terms of honour and reputation. Parallel Lives offers models to emulate. Meditations teaches endurance. The Prince and On War shape how power is understood. And the works of William Shakespeare and Grimm’s Fairy Tales provide the emotional and narrative patterns beneath it all.

Remove these, and something subtle but important disappears. Characters may still act, speak, and move through the plot — but their decisions begin to feel unmoored. Their inner logic weakens.

Include them, and things start to click. Choices feel grounded. Reactions feel earned. The character begins to belong to their world.

If you want your characters to feel real, don’t just imagine their lives.
Understand their world.

A fish does not notice water. It moves through it, breathes it, depends on it — but never pauses to consider it. Only when lifted out does it realise what it had been living in all along.

That is more or less Tom Holland’s central claim in Dominion. We in the modern West swim in Christian waters.

Not in church, nor in belief. But in moral assumptions.

We assume that every human life has inherent dignity.
We assume that the weak deserve protection.
We assume that suffering innocence carries moral authority.
We assume that power must justify itself.

These ideas feel obvious, almost self-evident. But Holland argues that they are not universal, nor inevitable. They are historical. They emerged from a particular moral revolution: the elevation of a crucified man, executed as a criminal, whose weakness became the axis of the world.

The scandal of Christianity was not that it preached strength, but that it sanctified suffering. It did not celebrate the conqueror. It worshipped the victim.

And that inversion — that the last shall be first, that the meek shall inherit the earth, that the defeated may be morally central — reshaped the imagination of the West so thoroughly that we now mistake it for common sense.

The question is not whether we believe the theology.

The question is whether we recognise the water.

Dominion in Brief

In Dominion, Holland traces how that moral revolution spread — slowly, unevenly, and often against the grain of power.

He begins in the ancient world, where strength signalled favour, victory implied righteousness, and hierarchy felt natural. The gods backed the conquerors. Slavery was ordinary. Mercy was admirable, perhaps, but not foundational.

Then Christianity did something extraordinary. It placed at the centre of its faith not a victorious warrior, but a tortured criminal. Not Caesar, but Christ. The symbol of ultimate humiliation became the symbol of ultimate truth.

From that inversion flowed a new moral logic.

The weak were no longer disposable. Power came under suspicion. Suffering demanded explanation. Over centuries, these assumptions seeped into law, philosophy, reform movements, abolitionism, and human rights discourse.

Even when belief receded, the moral grammar remained.

Holland’s point is not that modernity is secretly devout, but that our reflexes — what we instinctively praise, what we instinctively condemn — were shaped in a cruciform shadow. And that shadow still falls across our stories.

Tolkien Through Holland’s Lens

Holland turns to J. R. R. Tolkien as one of the clearest examples of how deeply Christian moral assumptions have seeped into modern storytelling.

Like Augustine of Hippo, Tolkien understood history as marked by fallenness. The struggle between good and evil is not a temporary disturbance but the condition of the world itself. Augustine once wrote that the City of God would be “hemmed in, hard pressed, shut up in the straits of tribulation, yet it will not abandon its warfare.” It is hard not to hear echoes of Helm’s Deep or Minas Tirith in that description — fortresses holding out against overwhelming darkness.

The world Tolkien built feels ancient and pre-Christian: there are no churches, no scripture, no explicit reference to God. And yet the moral architecture is unmistakably Christian. Evil does not create; it corrupts. Sauron cannot make life — he can only twist what already exists.

Again and again, Tolkien places moral weight on the small and overlooked. The hobbits — underestimated, provincial, physically unimpressive — carry the burden of the world. Their resilience echoes a deeply Christian inversion: the weak and the poor possess a dignity that power overlooks.

Even the climax reflects that moral grammar. Sauron fears that his enemies will wield the Ring against him — that they will meet power with greater power. Instead, they destroy it. True strength manifests not in domination but in the willingness to relinquish it. In that sense, the logic of the story mirrors the central paradox of Christianity itself: that victory can come through surrender.

Holland notes another striking detail. The Ring is destroyed on March 25th — a date that medieval Christians believed marked both the Annunciation, when Christ was conceived in Mary’s womb, and the day of the Crucifixion. Tolkien rarely explained such choices, but the symbolism is difficult to miss.

Tolkien aimed to write a story that was true. Not historically, but morally so. A fantasy that would resonate with the deepest assumptions about the world that shaped him.

Before the Cross: The World of Homer

To see how unusual these instincts are, Holland suggests looking further back — to the moral world that existed before Christianity reshaped it. For that, few texts are clearer than The Iliad.

In Homer’s world, glory belongs to the strong. The warrior who conquers earns honour, fame, and the favour of the gods. Achilles does not seek humility or mercy; he seeks immortality through victory. Strength proves virtue. Defeat signals disgrace. The conquered may be pitied, but they are not morally central.

When Achilles kills Hector and drags his body behind a chariot, the act is brutal, but it does not overturn the moral logic of the poem. Achilles remains the greatest of the Greeks. His rage is terrible, yet it is still framed within the heroic code of honour and reputation.

What matters most in this world is kleos — glory that outlives the body.

That moral universe feels distant to us. We instinctively recoil from Achilles’ triumph and sympathise with Hector’s broken body. Our moral gaze drifts toward the defeated, toward the victim. But that reflex isn’t inherent, but deeply Christian.

The Suffering Innocent

If Homer shows us a world where glory crowns the conqueror, Schindler’s List shows us the opposite moral instinct. The film centres vulnerability, not power.

Spielberg’s camera lingers not on generals or victors, but on civilians: families forced from their homes, workers stripped of their names, children trying to disappear into crowds. The moral gravity of the story lies with those who suffer, not with those who command.

One image in particular has become iconic — the girl in the red coat moving through the chaos of the ghetto. She is small, anonymous, powerless. Yet the entire moral weight of the film gathers around figures like her. Their suffering is not incidental to the story; it is the accusation at its heart.

And at the centre of the narrative stands Oskar Schindler, whose transformation gives the story its moral arc. Schindler begins as a charming opportunist — a businessman eager to profit from war, comfortable among Nazi officials, motivated by money and status. Gradually, however, he becomes a man who uses his position to save others. His trajectory echoes an old Gospel pattern. Like Matthew the Apostle — a tax collector despised for serving imperial power — Schindler moves from self-interest toward costly compassion.

This instinct — that the victim exposes the injustice of the system — would have felt strange in the heroic world of Homer. There, defeat signals divine disfavour. Here, it signals wrongdoing. The powerless become the measure of the powerful.

That reflex, Holland argues, is not simply modern compassion. It is the aftershock of a moral revolution that placed the suffering innocent at the centre of history.

Fallenness in Gotham

A similar moral logic appears in The Dark Knight, though in a very different setting.

The Joker’s project is not simply chaos. It is exposure. He believes that beneath the thin surface of civilisation, everyone is corruptible. All it takes is the right pressure.

Harvey Dent begins the story as Gotham’s “White Knight,” the incorruptible symbol of justice. By the end, he has become Two-Face — not because he was secretly evil, but because grief and rage break him. The fall is sudden, but it feels painfully believable.

This is an old idea. Augustine of Hippo argued that evil is not a rival force to good; it is the corruption of what was once good. Humans are not perfectible. They are fallen.

Christopher Nolan’s Gotham runs on that assumption.

Yet the story’s resolution is not cynicism. Batman chooses to absorb the blame for Dent’s crimes, protecting the fragile hope Dent represented. It is an act of moral substitution — one man bearing the cost so that others might keep believing.

Power is not what saves the city. Sacrifice is.

The Water, Again

If Holland is right, then none of these examples is accidental.

Tolkien’s mercy, Spielberg’s focus on the powerless, Nolan’s belief in fallenness and sacrificial responsibility — these stories were not written as Christian sermons. Their creators were not trying to preach theology. Yet the moral patterns they draw on feel familiar because they belong to the cultural water we swim in.

For centuries, Western imagination has been shaped by a story in which the weak matter, the suffering innocent exposes injustice, and power is judged rather than celebrated. That inheritance lingers even when belief fades. It lives on in the instincts of our storytellers and in the reactions of audiences who may never have opened a Bible.

Recognising that inheritance does not require faith. It simply requires historical honesty. The moral grammar of our culture came from somewhere.

Next time, I want to look at that idea from a writer’s perspective: why studying the Holy Books matters — even if you don’t believe them. Because whether you realise it or not, your characters almost certainly did.

Last time, we stood in Middle-earth.

There, we are one step removed from reality. The moral stakes are clear, the symbols luminous. Dragons and dark lords carry the weight of evil so that goodness can shine against them. The world is mythic — and because it is mythic, it allows us a certain distance.

With Band of Brothers, that distance disappears.

This is not an allegory. It is history. When the series first aired in 2001, many of the men whose story it told were still alive. The faces we see on screen correspond to real names, real bodies, real graves. The courage portrayed is not archetypal. It happened.

And yet, remarkably, the tone echoes Tolkien’s in one crucial way: it is utterly sincere.

The series manages something incredibly difficult. It contains clear anti-war elements — the fear, the exhaustion, the cold of Bastogne, the horror of discovering the concentration camp. It does not romanticise suffering. But neither does it reduce everything to futility. It allows for glory without bathing in it. It honours bravery without inflating it into propaganda.

There is no insistence that we are witnessing national myth-making. No heavy-handed flag-waving. But neither is there the modern reflex to undercut every act of heroism with irony.

Instead, it walks a narrow line: war is terrible, and courage within it is real. Sacrifice is costly, and sometimes it is necessary. The show never tips into pathos, never turns into pro-American spectacle. It simply presents men doing what they believe must be done.

Precision Instead of Performance

The series does not glorify what it shows, and that’s precisely why it carries weight.

No slow-motion shots linger on noble profiles. No swelling score instructing us when to feel awe. Unlike the operatic framing of heroism in something like Captain America, the camera never holds just a second too long, so we can bask in it.

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Take the assault on Brecourt Manor. Easy Company assaults the German artillery positions — a clean, tactical, brutally efficient operation. The scene is staged as action, with men moving through hedgerows under fire, improvising, adapting. The geography isn’t simplified for us. At times, we feel slightly lost, unsure of who is where, which trench connects to which field. The men speak in military shorthand, in clipped urgency.

The attack plays as work. Dangerous, disciplined work.

Only at the end of the episode does a title card inform us that the assault is still taught at West Point as a textbook example of small-unit tactics.

That’s where the glory lands.

Not in spectacle, but in context. Not in self-congratulation, but in history.

This tonal restraint was something HBO handled with unusual maturity at the time — you see a similar realism in The Wire. Systems are shown as they are. People act within them. Meaning emerges without manipulation.

It isn’t framed as legend in the making. It’s shown as men doing their job, which is how the members of Easy Company would have understood it themselves.

Humility as the Core Virtue

If there is a single word that defines Band of Brothers, it’s humility.

On the 20th anniversary podcast, many of the actors spoke about the military boot camp they went through before filming. Living together. Training together. Ego stripped away. They’ve said it changed them — made them less self-centred, more aware of the group. One actor’s mother even remarked that her son became a better person after working on the show.

But what affected them most was spending time with the real men of Easy Company.

Again and again, they tell the same story: the veterans would never speak of their own heroics. They downplayed their actions. If they told a brave story, it was about someone else. Always someone else.

That spirit is perfectly captured in the final moments of the series. Winters reads from a letter written by a fellow Easy Company man, recalling a conversation he once had with his young grandson. The boy had asked him a simple question:

“Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?”
“No… but I served in a company of heroes.”

That line is the thesis.

Heroism here is not self-assertion. It’s recognition. It’s the instinct to point outward instead of inward.

The show embodies that same posture. It does not elevate a single mythic figure. It honours a unit. It honours the company.

And in doing so, it honours the way those men saw themselves.

Why It Still Resonates

Band of Brothers endures because it believes in something and doesn’t flinch from it.

It honours sacrifice without glorifying war. It acknowledges fear without collapsing into cynicism. It treats loyalty, duty, and restraint as real forces, not sentimental props.

And perhaps most importantly, it refuses to centre the lone genius. The hero is plural.

In a culture obsessed with personal branding and individual triumph, that feels radical.

There is no grandstanding here. No self-mythologising. Just men bound together by circumstance, carrying one another through it. That sincerity — disciplined, communal, unperformed — still cuts through.

From Middle-earth to Normandy

In Tolkien, we encounter courage through myth. In Band of Brothers, we encounter it through memory.

Different settings. Same moral gravity.

Loyalty, mercy, restraint, endurance; these aren’t abstract virtues in either world. They cost something. They demand something.

What makes Band of Brothers so powerful is that it presents goodness without irony and lets it stand. And in doing so, it suggests that seriousness about virtue is not naïve.

The men of Easy Company didn’t think of themselves as heroes. The actors who portrayed them say they came away changed — steadier, less self-centred, more community-focused. Exposure to that standard did something to them.

Perhaps that’s the final echo between Middle-earth and Normandy.

Sincerity, when it is lived rather than performed, has the power to reshape those who encounter it.

Currahee!

“Earnest” has become a slightly embarrassing word. It’s often used as shorthand for naïveté, for stories that don’t know better, for a kind of moral simplicity we’re meant to outgrow. But that’s not what earnestness actually means. At its core, it means taking something seriously because it matters. And few writers took goodness, courage, and mercy more seriously than J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tolkien was a deeply Christian man, and his faith shaped how he saw the world and, crucially, how he saw human nature. He believed that goodness was real, that mercy had power, and that courage mattered, not as spectacle or bravado, but as the willingness to act rightly even when it was costly. These moral commitments were tested and hardened by his experience of the Great War.

Tolkien fought in the First World War and saw its industrialised horror up close. He lost friends, endured the trenches, and witnessed what happens when modernity divorces power from morality. Tolkien knew exactly how dark the world could be. His commitment to goodness wasn’t ignorance. It was defiance.

That’s where the earnestness comes from. Tolkien didn’t write about courage and mercy because he thought the world was simple. He wrote about them because he knew it wasn’t. In his stories, these values aren’t ironic, provisional, or undercut by a wink to the audience. They are treated with gravity because he believed they deserved it.

This is why Tolkien’s work feels so strange — and so refreshing — to modern sensibilities. He refuses to apologise for meaning. He doesn’t mock virtue to appear clever. He doesn’t hedge his moral vision behind cynicism. He writes as someone who believes that what we choose to value shapes the world we build.

Earnestness, in Tolkien’s hands, is disciplined. It’s the result of a writer who had every reason to give up on hope and chose, consciously, not to.

Kindness, Cleverness, and the Moral Shape of The Hobbit

If The Hobbit feels cosy, it’s because its moral universe is stubbornly humane. Problems are not solved by domination, but by judgment. By restraint. By knowing when not to strike.

The most famous example, of course, is Bilbo’s decision to spare Gollum. It’s an act that looks small in the moment and turns out to be enormous in consequence. Bilbo doesn’t spare him because he’s morally superior, or because he has a plan. He spares him because he feels pity — because he recognises suffering and chooses not to add to it. Tolkien treats this choice with total seriousness. There’s no undercutting, no ironic distance. Mercy matters, and the story later proves that it does.

But that same moral logic runs through the book in cleverer ways, too.

Think of the encounter with the trolls. They are physically overwhelming, loud, brutal — the very definition of brute force. The obvious response would be to fight them or flee. Instead, Gandalf throws his voice, mimicking the trolls, prolonging their argument until dawn breaks and the sunlight turns them to stone.

It’s a perfect Tolkien solution. No flashy display of power. No spell of annihilation. Gandalf doesn’t defeat the trolls so much as outwait them, using patience, wit, and the natural order of the world itself. The sun does the work. Gandalf simply understands when to step aside and let it.

There’s humility in that. Not self-effacement, but a refusal to dominate when domination isn’t necessary. Power is exercised lightly, in alignment with something greater than the self. Tolkien consistently presents this as wisdom, not weakness.

This is why The Hobbit feels wholesome. The story doesn’t deny danger or evil — the trolls are real, and they are lethal — but it insists that cleverness, mercy, and restraint are not only morally preferable, but they are often more effective. Violence is not glamorous here. It’s clumsy, risky, and usually a last resort.

In Tolkien’s world, the most meaningful victories are ethical before they are physical. And that moral clarity — presented without irony, without apology — is what gives The Hobbit its enduring warmth.

Earnestness at Epic Scale: The Lord of the Rings

If The Hobbit shows Tolkien’s moral instincts in miniature, The Lord of the Rings proves that sincerity can survive complexity; even scale up to something vast, grim, and mythic without curdling into bombast.

What’s striking is how deliberately unglamorous the central task is. The Ring isn’t an object of cool power; it’s an object of corrosion. It doesn’t promise adventure so much as competence — the ability to fix things, to impose order, to end the mess once and for all. That’s a profoundly adult temptation. And Tolkien treats it with gravity. Power is dangerous because it feels reasonable.

At the centre of it all is Frodo Baggins, a hero defined less by prowess than by endurance. Frodo isn’t chosen because he’s exceptional; he’s chosen because he’s unassuming, because he lacks the appetite for domination that would make the Ring sing to him. His journey isn’t about becoming stronger — it’s about bearing something that should never be borne. And Tolkien never pretends that this is noble in a romantic sense. It’s grinding. It costs him. By the end, Frodo doesn’t return healed or triumphant. He returns changed, diminished, unable to fully rejoin the world he saved.

If there is a moral centre to the story, it’s Samwise Gamgee. Sam isn’t cleverer than the Ring, or purer than it. He’s simply loyal. He believes in Frodo when Frodo can’t believe in himself, and in doing so, he anchors the entire epic in something profoundly ordinary: friendship. Not destiny. Not bloodline. Not prophecy. Just love, stubbornly applied.

What’s remarkable is that Tolkien allows this to be enough. The fate of the world turns not on spectacle or supremacy, but on mercy shown earlier, loyalty maintained later, and power refused again and again. Evil is defeated not by matching it, but by outlasting it.

This is earnestness without innocence. Tolkien knows that goodness doesn’t always win cleanly, that victory often comes with loss, and that healing isn’t guaranteed. And yet he refuses to sneer at hope. He treats courage, mercy, and friendship as serious forces — not because they’re comforting, but because he believes they’re real.

That’s why The Lord of the Rings still resonates. It doesn’t flatter the audience by pretending virtue is easy, or by mocking it to appear wise. It asks something harder: to take goodness seriously, even when the cost is high.

Why This Feels Radical Now

What makes Tolkien feel so striking today isn’t the fantasy, it’s the lack of embarrassment. In an age trained to distrust sentiment, his work refuses to apologise for meaning. Goodness isn’t undercut by irony. Courage isn’t framed as naïveté. Hope isn’t treated as a guilty pleasure.

So much modern storytelling keeps emotion at arm’s length, cushioning every sincere moment with a joke or a knowing glance. Tolkien does the opposite. He commits. He asks the reader to take moral choices seriously, without offering the safety net of cynicism.

And audiences still respond to that — maybe now more than ever. Not because Tolkien offers escape, but because he offers permission: permission to believe that mercy matters, that restraint is strength, that goodness isn’t something we need to outgrow. In a culture fluent in irony but starved of conviction, Tolkien’s earnestness feels subversive.

Beyond Middle-Earth

To read Tolkien well is to remember that sincerity is not the absence of intelligence, but the result of conviction. His stories don’t endure because they’re comforting, but because they’re clear about what they value — and unafraid to stand by it. In a noisy culture that often treats meaning as something to be softened, hedged, or joked away, Tolkien’s work remains stubbornly whole.

Next time, I want to step out of Middle-earth and look at sincerity where the stakes are unmistakably real. In Band of Brothers, courage, duty, and loyalty aren’t ideals discussed at a distance; they’re lived, paid for, and sometimes lost. It’s a very different setting, but the same question sits at the centre: what happens when a story takes goodness seriously, and refuses to look away?

How I became a Grinch is a story for another day. Right now, I’m more interested in how I un-Grinchified myself.

I’ll admit, the groundwork was already there. I once had a genuinely great Christmas with my roommates; all of us stuck together because of COVID lockdowns. No big expectations, no forced cheer, just shared meals and a strange sense of intimacy born out of circumstance. It softened something in me. But even then, I was still firmly against Christmas as a concept.

The music annoyed me.
The shoppers exhausted me.
The endless, meaningless consumerism made my skin crawl.

Which was unfortunate, because the café I work in sits inside a shopping centre, with a street-facing window and a Christmas market planted right in front of it. There was no escape. From November onward, Christmas wasn’t something I could ignore. It was something I had to endure.

Then, in November 2022, I had a small but decisive lightbulb moment.

I realised that whether I liked it or not, this was going to happen. The decorations, the music, the crowds — the whole thing. Resisting it just made me miserable. So I asked myself a simple question: what if I decided to like it instead of not liking it?

I made a Christmas playlist. Not the usual suspects, but obscure songs, old recordings, strange versions of tunes we all know but never hear anymore. I bought a Christmas jumper. Over the years, I slowly started adding decorations to the house.

Nothing radical. Just small choices.

I picked a few things I genuinely liked about Christmas and focused on those. And once I did that, it became easier to expand the palette — to tolerate, then enjoy, things I’d written off entirely.

Instead of suffering the inevitable, I leaned into it. And somewhere along the way, Christmas stopped feeling like an assault and started feeling like a season again.

Turns out, choosing what you pay attention to makes all the difference.

Marty DiBergi

I’m sure most of you have heard about the sad passing of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle.

Reiner was one of my favourite filmmakers. He didn’t do flashy. No Spielbergian long takes, no Fincher-level camera choreography, no Kubrickian precision or NASA-borrowed lenses to shoot by candlelight alone. That was never the point.

Reiner focused on storytelling. Plain and simple.
Warmth without schmaltz.
And above all, sincerity.

Many of his films feel distinctly modernist in their approach — the kind of filmmaking where the audience is meant to forget they’re watching a movie. And we did. We were inside them. We were in the cabin with Annie Wilkes, feeling the terror of Misery. We were in the courtroom with Colonel Jessup, and we could not handle the truth. We were the fifth kid walking the railway tracks, searching for The Body.

We weren’t watching these stories. We were part of them. And in return, they became part of us.

Perhaps nowhere more so than The Princess Bride. Utterly charming, it gives us everything we want from a fairy tale — romance, adventure, true love, sword fights — while gently poking fun at every fairy-tale trope along the way. And somehow, impossibly, it works on both levels. It never collapses into parody, never retreats into irony. I can’t think of anyone else who could have struck that balance so perfectly other than Rob Reiner.

I’m deeply grateful for the warmth, humour, and humanity his films gave us — for stories that weren’t embarrassed to mean something.

May he rest in peace.

My Writing Year

When I first set out to become a screenwriter, I gave myself five years. That felt fair — roughly the length of a bachelor’s plus a master’s degree. I worked full-time throughout, wrote whenever I could, and treated those five years as a contract with myself.

That time ran out this May. And I did reach the goal I’d set. I queried a couple dozen production companies with my teleplays.

Naturally, I got no replies.

That doesn’t bother me. It’s all in the game, yo.

I’m confident those scripts represent the best of my abilities at this point, and that’s all you can really ask for. Around the same time, I started this Substack — originally for a very practical reason. If any of those producers Googled my name, I wanted there to be something there. Some sign of life.

What I didn’t expect was how much I’d enjoy writing these newsletters.

And when one of the posts went viral, and I suddenly found myself with what feels — to me — like a massive following, it changed things. Not in a stressful way, but in a meaningful one. It started to feel like a commitment. Like I owed you something. And I mean that in the best possible sense — it’s a duty I genuinely cherish.

Going from a couple of writer friends reading my screenplays to dozens, then hundreds of people reading my thoughts on culture is… kind of wild. It’s also deeply gratifying. I hope you enjoy reading these pieces as much as I enjoy writing them.

And honestly, making new friends along the way has been the best part of all.

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Diplomatic Deadlock

There’s a reason I became so obsessed with metamodernism this year. It turned out to be the key that unlocked one of my stories.

Back in 2022, I wrote my first finished feature film script — my second script overall. It started with a very serious intention, inspired by a historian’s article about how the Allies used Hungarian diplomatic attempts at neutrality during the Second World War to their own advantage.

But as I wrote it, something strange happened. The story became increasingly funny. Not comedy-funny — more Coen Brothers funny. Dark, absurd, slightly off-kilter.

I didn’t know what to do with it, so it went into a drawer for a few years.

Last year, I reread it and realised it was actually pretty great. But I still had no idea how to chisel it out of the marble block. That changed this year. I watched Weapons — easily one of my favourite films of the year — and then went down a deep metamodernism rabbit hole, thanks largely to Thomas Flight’s video essay Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now?

And suddenly, it clicked. I finally understood how this story wanted to be told.

It’s about diplomats secluded in a haunted hotel high up in the Swiss Alps, in the middle of the Second World War. There are ghosts, Nazis, flamboyant liars, honest do-gooders, murders, rituals — and cake. Everything you could possibly want.

The outline is finished. I’m still deciding whether to write the screenplay first or begin with the novel, but either way, this will be my first novel. I’m planning to release it on Substack — maybe in chapters, maybe in smaller bite-sized pieces — sometime throughout 2026.

And don’t worry, I’ll still be writing my fortnightly newsletter, sharing my thoughts on culture, cinema, and storytelling along the way.

For now, though, I’m entering Christmas hibernation: endless Hungarian dishes and cakes, Christmas movies, and time with loved ones.

Merry Christmas — and a Happy New Year.

Long before symmetry became an aesthetic, it was a prayer. The medieval architects of Europe believed that geometry was a divine language — that proportion, order, and light could reveal the mind of God. Their cathedrals were sermons in stone.

At Chartres Cathedral, geometry isn’t symbolic; it’s structural. The nave’s height, the width of each bay, the spacing of its columns — all derived from a shared ratio, like verses in a psalm. The great rose window above the entrance is not just ornamentation but a mathematical expression of faith: the circle of heaven superimposed on the square of earth. Every petal, every arch, every column obeys a proportional order that distributes real physical weight.

The flying buttress, that most elegant of Gothic inventions, is geometry made visible. By channelling thrust outward through a precise curve, it allowed walls to thin and rise, to dissolve into colored glass. Structure became light. Mathematics became miracle.

You could say sacred geometry worked — not just spiritually, but physically. It made possible buildings that had never before stood upright. The divine ratios weren’t superstition; they were engineering. In Chartres, faith and physics were one and the same.

Sainte-Chapelle pushes this logic to its extreme. The walls are almost gone; reduced to ribs and glass, geometry reduced to pure illumination. The pointed arch and buttress carry the weight so precisely that the structure seems to float. When sunlight strikes the stained glass, what you see is not ornament but architecture made luminous: the world held together by invisible order.

In later centuries, that same faith in pattern migrated into science. The rediscovery of Greek mathematics and proportion gave birth to natural law — the idea that the universe itself could be read, measured, and understood. For Spinoza and Newton, God was not outside the system but within it. To study gravity, motion, and light — these were acts of devotion.

The square came to represent the finite, the measurable, the human. The circle stood for the infinite and divine. You can measure a square with whole numbers. But to measure a circle, you must invoke π, the endless, irrational constant that carries on forever.
The architects knew what that meant: even within perfect design, there will always be something immeasurable — a remainder of mystery.

Fractals of Faith

If the Gothic cathedrals sought to build heaven in stone, Islamic architecture sought to reveal infinity in pattern.

A fractal is a form that repeats itself at different scales — a leaf that resembles the branch, the branch the tree, the tree the forest. The structure of nature itself is fractal: clouds, coastlines, rivers, lightning, the branching of lungs and veins. Each part mirrors the whole.

Islamic artists grasped this centuries before mathematics had the term. In the Blue Mosque of Istanbul, the geometry expands like a living organism. Look up, and the vast dome blooms from smaller domes, each echoing the same curve, each distributing weight down through semi-domes and pendentives into the ground. The pattern repeats, stabilising the whole.

On the walls, the tiled mosaics follow girih patterns — pentagons and decagons interlocked, star polygons woven through a hidden lattice. Each shape is precise, but together they form an infinite rhythm. You can trace a single line of blue or gold and see it unfold into self-similarity, as if the wall itself were breathing.

Here again, beauty follows function. Those geometric tiles don’t just please the eye — they stabilise the plaster, distribute tension, and allow for easy repair. The pattern sustains the structure, just as faith sustains the believer.

In the Blue Mosque, as in Chartres, geometry isn’t symbolic. It’s structural, philosophical, and spiritual all at once — a pattern that holds weight, light, and meaning in perfect balance.

And that’s the bridge we’ll soon cross into storytelling:
structure as faith made visible, the invisible design that lets a work of art — or a cathedral, or a story — stand upright.

The Seasons of Story

A season lasts three months: a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Order → Chaos → Resolution.
It makes perfect sense that the classic three-act structure mirrors this rhythm. It’s how we naturally experience time.
However, if we impose that same logic onto the whole year — spring, summer, autumn, winter — suddenly we have four distinct movements:

Act I — Spring (Setup)
Act II — Summer (Complication)
Act II/B — Autumn (Confrontation)
Act III — Winter (Resolution)

This is the “Act 2A / Act 2B” model.
And let’s be honest: that’s not three acts anymore.
It’s four.

A perfectly reasonable, perfectly symmetrical shape.
Nothing wrong with it.
Four is the number of stability:
Four corners of the square, four Gospels, four classical elements, four cardinal directions.
A shape that stands upright.

And yet…
despite its symmetry, its stability, its logic…
The second act still collapses for most writers.

Act II is where scripts go to die — the infamous swamp, the endless summer, the place where characters wander without direction and writers lose the thread.
John Yorke calls it the woods, and he’s right: even with a tidy four-act division, the middle feels vast and disorienting. There’s too much room to get lost.

Something essential is missing —
a pattern that clarifies, rather than obscures;
a structure that doesn’t just divide time, but reveals its meaning.

The Geometry Behind the Structure

John Yorke argues that the five-act structure isn’t a screenwriting gimmick — it’s the oldest, most durable storytelling shape humans ever used. Shakespeare used it. Modern TV uses it. Epic myth, tragedy, comedy — all gravitate toward five movements.

So why five?

Because the geometry of five sits at a strange, powerful crossroads between the human, the divine, and the dramatic.

The Pentagon Born from the Circle

If you take a circle — symbol of unity, perfection, the divine — and divide its circumference into five equal parts, you get a perfect pentagon.
Connect the points again, and you get a pentagram, which contains another pentagon inside it, which contains another pentagram…

Circle → Pentagon → Pentagram → Pentagon → Pentagram → ∞

This endlessly unfolding shape was seen as a geometry of living order, not static form — a symbol of:

• eternity

• regeneration

• the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm

• humanity mirroring the cosmos

It was a pattern that breathed.

The Golden Ratio Inside the Pentagon

The pentagon is the most golden-ratio-rich polygon in existence.
The lengths inside it relate to one another through φ, the proportion that governs:

• spirals of galaxies

• branching of trees

• growth of living organisms

In sacred geometry, the pentagon is the point where divine unity (circle) becomes life, growth, embodiment.

The Human Body as Fivefold Symmetry

Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man isn’t just enclosed in a circle — he can be drawn inside a pentagram.
Five points:

• head

• two arms

• two legs

The human body becomes the circle expressed through five,
the spirit embodied in matter.
In Hermetic and Neoplatonic traditions, the pentagram symbolised consciousness.

And the internal angles of a pentagon measure 108°, a sacred number in Hinduism and Buddhism associated with cosmology, wholeness, and the structure of the universe.

Architecture Knows This Shape Works

Again and again in sacred buildings, the pattern appears:

• Hagia Sophia: circular dome resolving into five-part symmetries

• Islamic architecture: 5-point star tiling derived from circumscribed pentagons

• Gothic rose windows: pentagonal star patterns embedded inside circular frames

The circle represents the heavenly; the pentagon the human.
Architecture uses geometry to stage the descent of the divine into the earthly world.

And Yet, Even If You Don’t Care About Any of This…

There is a completely practical, rational reason to use five acts.

Yorke writes:

“Writers who struggle with the Hollywood paradigm often find the five-act shape gives them the control over their middle section they otherwise find hard to deliver. Used wisely, it imposes a much stronger structure, creates regular gripping turning points that increase narrative tension and in turn eliminates one of the most common problems new screenwriters are heir to: the ‘sagging’, disjointed, confused and often hard-to-follow second act.”

Five acts simply give you one more turning point.

Suddenly:

• The Inciting Incident becomes Act I’s break, not a beat buried somewhere in the first twenty minutes

• The Crisis becomes Act IV’s break, the clearest possible spotlight on the moment of maximum despair

This is why the Inciting Incident and the Crisis feel like mirror-images of each other. But why are these two points bound in symmetry?
Because the crisis is the worst possible outcome of the inciting incident. Two ends of one beam, holding the structure in balance.

They form perfect symmetry because each one sits at an equal distance from the midpoint — the inciting incident mirrored on one side, the crisis on the other — and each stands in balanced relation to the opening and closing images of the story.

Star Wars
Inciting Incident: Luke meets Obi-Wan and is called to adventure.
Crisis: Obi-Wan dies — the mentor removed, the guidance severed.
It’s the worst emotional consequence of accepting the call.

But back to the bigger picture for a moment.
Yorke’s five acts:

1. Inciting Incident – the challenge

2. Complication – the problem intensifies

3. Midpoint – revelation, reversal, or false victory

4. Crisis – catastrophe, the nadir

5. Resolution – integration, return, new order

This is the narrative equivalent of the pentagon: a structure that unfolds from itself, where each point holds weight, meaning, and purpose.

And now, with the architecture in place, we can turn to the next question:

How does this structure replicate at every scale — acts, sequences, scenes, even beats?
That’s where the fractals begin.

Fractals of Story: Acts Inside Scenes

If five acts are the architecture, then fractals are the way that architecture repeats at every scale.

The same pattern that shapes the whole story also shapes the acts, the sequences, and right down at ground level, the scenes. A scene isn’t just people talking until they stop. A good scene has its own:

• Inciting Incident (the spark)

• Complication (the problem grows)

• Midpoint (a shift, a reveal, a false hope)

• Crisis (the worst-case outcome of the spark)

• Resolution (a new state emerges)

Once you start to see that, it’s hard to unsee it.

Star Wars – The Cantina Scene

• Setup:
  Luke and Obi-Wan arrive. Their goal is simple and clear: find a pilot. The tone is dangerous but manageable. That’s our Act I in miniature.

• Complication:
  They enter the bar, full of hostile, alien energy. “You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Luke doesn’t belong here. He’s jostled, stared at, and threatened. The world pushes back. That’s Act II: the gap between desire and reality opens.

• Midpoint:

  Luke keeps his head down, tries to pretend he can navigate this adult space, and orders a drink. For a moment, it seems like the tension will dissolve, that he’ll manage, and things won’t get out of hand.

• Crisis / Turning Point:
  A thug picks a fight with Luke (“I don’t like you either”), and suddenly, lightsabers are out, limbs are cut off. The scene tips from low-level tension into open violence. This is the mini-crisis – the worst logical outcome of Luke walking naïvely into a place he doesn’t understand.

• Resolution / New State:
  Obi-Wan restores order; they connect with Han and Chewie. The immediate danger is over, but the world of the story has enlarged: we’ve met their future pilot, glimpsed the lawlessness of the galaxy, and seen Obi-Wan’s power. The scene “ends,” but the story doesn’t reset – it moves into a new phase.

Jurassic Park – The T-Rex Attack

This is one of the cleanest five-act scenes Spielberg ever crafted, and it unfolds with cathedral-like precision.

• Setup:
  The cars have stopped outside the T-Rex paddock. It’s raining. The power’s gone out. We know something is wrong, but nothing has moved yet. The kids are in the first car, Grant in the second. This is the calm geometry of Act I.

• Complication:
  The water in the cup starts to ripple. The goat is gone. Chains hang loose. The children sit helplessly behind glass. All the elements of danger gather, but nothing has broken yet. It’s the coiling of the spring.

• Midpoint:
  The T-Rex steps into view. Not charging, not roaring — just appearing.
  A revelation: the abstract fear made flesh.
  The midpoint is always the moment where the illusion shatters, and here it’s the illusion of control. Hammond’s dream collapses in a single frame.

• Crisis:
  The attack itself. The fence is breached, the car is flipped, the lawyer is eaten off the toilet, and the kids are trapped under the glass. For this scene, the crisis is the point where it looks like the children will die. It’s the worst imaginable outcome of Hammond’s original decision to resurrect dinosaurs for fun.

• Resolution / New State:
  Grant rescues the kids, they limp away, and in the aftermath, we get the new reality: no one is safe, the park is broken, the fantasy of control is gone. The scene ends, but like a good act break, it has permanently altered the story. We can’t go back to wonder; we’ve crossed into genuine survival horror.

Friends – Ross and the Leather Pants

• Inciting Incident:
  Ross decides to wear leather pants on a date. The intention is pure: he wants to reinvent himself, seem confident, modern, desirable. That choice is the spark.

• Complication:
  He overheats. The pants cling. He escapes to the bathroom to cool down, but things get awkward fast.
  The glamour of “new Ross” starts to peel away — literally.

• Midpoint:
  Desperate, Ross calls Joey. And for a moment, the scene offers hope: lotion.
  A quick fix. A lifeline. This is the midpoint turning point — a promising but disastrously misguided attempt to restore order.

• Crisis:
  The lotion mixes with powder and becomes a gluey paste.
  Now Ross’s legs are effectively cemented inside the leather.
  It’s humiliation, absurdity, and social death wrapped into one.
  The worst possible extension of Ross’s original desire to impress someone.

• Resolution:
  Ross returns to the group, defeated, voice cracking, dignity gone.
  The scene ends not just in a joke, but in a new emotional truth: Ross’s bravado collapses, and his vulnerability shines through. A tiny transformation. A shift.
  Humiliation as character development.

It’s ridiculous, but the geometry is the same: five movements, one arc.

Geometry Gives Freedom

In the end, structure isn’t a cage but a scaffolding.
The same way sacred geometry allowed architects to raise cathedrals that seemed to defy gravity, story geometry gives writers something solid to build on.
A frame. A rhythm. A set of forces that keep the narrative standing even when the emotions get wild.

You don’t look at Sainte-Chapelle and think about the math holding it upright.
You see colour, light, transcendence — the ecstasy built on top of the engineering.
Story works the same way.
When the foundation is sound, the decoration can go anywhere.
Characters can be strange, jokes chaotic, emotions operatic.
The architecture will catch them.

Structure doesn’t restrict creativity; it enables it.
It’s what lets a story hold a shape big enough for meaning, chaos, comedy, heartbreak.
Order below, ecstasy above.

That’s the gift of sacred geometry, whether in stone or in story:
a pattern that frees you to build something that can actually stand.

Once upon a time, heroes were explorers. Odysseus, Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones — all cut from the same archetypal cloth: rational, brave, curious, and certain that the world could be understood if only they looked hard enough.

It might seem strange to call Odysseus a modern hero, but he perfectly fits the mould. When the ideals of modernity took shape during the Enlightenment — reason, progress, civilisation — The Odyssey became newly relevant. Odysseus wasn’t just a wanderer anymore; he was a symbol of the human spirit mastering chaos through intellect and perseverance.

By the time Luke Skywalker looked out at the twin suns of Tatooine, that spirit had already been mythologised into film. Luke’s journey is pure modernism: the belief that courage and faith in one’s purpose can restore balance to a fractured world. The stars may have changed, but the compass stayed the same.

The modern hero is the child of the Enlightenment; guided by reason, driven by discovery, and convinced that the world can be made better through knowledge and courage. He explores, he learns, and he brings order to the chaos he encounters. The universe, to him, isn’t indifferent or unknowable; it’s a mystery waiting to be solved — a place that rewards faith in progress.

The modern hero didn’t question the myth. They fulfilled it.

The Age of Irony

Then came the collapse. After two world wars, the atomic age, and the long hangover of Vietnam and Watergate, faith in progress curdled into doubt. The modern hero’s confidence began to look naïve; his optimism a luxury the real world no longer afforded.

The postmodern hero was born out of that exhaustion. No longer an explorer, but an observer — clever, cynical, painfully self-aware. Rick Sanchez is his purest form: the man who knows everything and believes in nothing. He mocks love, mocks heroism, mocks meaning itself. And yet, the show keeps trying to make him care. To reconnect him with his daughter, to give him some spark of sincerity. But it never quite means it. The gestures toward emotion feel hollow, like a wink that refuses to close its eye. Rick and Morty wants the redemption arc, but it can’t risk sincerity long enough to earn it.

Tyler Durden goes one step further. He knows the system is corrupt — that consumerism, conformity, and modern masculinity are hollow myths — but all he offers in their place is destruction. A prophet of collapse with no new scripture to replace it. His revolution is just another performance, his philosophy pure entropy. Like postmodernism itself, he can diagnose the disease but can’t imagine the cure.

The postmodern hero understands the myth is fake, and would rather burn the world than believe in it again.

The Turn Toward Belief

Eventually, the irony began to eat itself. After decades of deconstruction, there was nothing left to pull apart — no centre to hold, no myth to mock. The audience that once laughed at sincerity started to crave it again. We’d learned to see through everything, and in doing so, we’d lost the ability to feel anything.

That’s when something new began to stir. A movement born not from confidence, but from fatigue. Metamodernism. It doesn’t reject irony or pretend the past didn’t happen; it carries irony like a Purple Heart. But it dares to hope anyway.

The metamodern hero is self-aware but still earnest. They’ve seen the trick, know it’s a trick, and choose to believe regardless. Their courage isn’t in the certainty of truth, but in the act of reaching for it again.

It’s the wink that still means it — the return of wonder after the world stopped believing.

The Three Faces of Faith

Phil Connors, Groundhog Day — learning to care the hard way
At first, Phil is the perfect postmodern cynic: a man too clever for his own life, trapped in irony and disdain. The time loop forces him into an experiment in meaning. He tries every shallow solution — hedonism, manipulation, suicide — and finds only emptiness. What changes him isn’t knowledge but attention. He notices the town. He learns the names, rhythms, small disasters, and tiny miracles of a single day. His arc is metamodern because he doesn’t forget his cynicism; he outgrows it by practising care. Through repetition, empathy becomes skill, and skill becomes love. He can’t fix the universe, but he can tune a piano, catch a kid, change a tyre, save a stranger. Progress returns as tenderness, one act at a time.

Joel Miller, The Last of Us — love after the end of the world
Joel begins where hope goes to die: grief-hardened, pragmatic, allergic to feeling. The apocalypse gives him every excuse to stay numb, and then Ellie arrives. Their bond isn’t a sudden conversion; it’s an oscillation — protect, retreat, deny, relent — until love becomes undeniable. Joel’s final choice is ethically explosive because it’s metamodern: he knows the grand narrative of “saving humanity,” and he rejects it in favour of a single, imperfect, fiercely human love. It isn’t noble in the modernist sense, nor nihilistic in the postmodern sense. It’s faith narrowed to a person. The cost is terrible; the feeling is true. Joel believes again, not in institutions or destiny, but in the fragile holiness of one life.

Evelyn Wang; Everything, Everywhere, All At Once — kindness as a cosmic technology
Evelyn starts in maximum noise: taxes, laundry, a failing marriage, a disappointed daughter — a life so fragmented it slides into absurdity. The multiverse makes that chaos literal, tempting her with irony (“nothing matters”) and with spectacle (infinite versions of herself). Her breakthrough is metamodern to the bone: she keeps the self-awareness, keeps the joke, and chooses kindness anyway. Not naïve kindness, but a practised stance — attention, gentleness, forgiveness deployed like martial arts. In the bagel’s gravity well of meaninglessness, she plants a stubborn little flag: be kind, especially when you can’t justify it. Evelyn doesn’t conquer the multiverse; she harmonises it, turning contradiction into compassion and absurdity into grace.

Together, Phil, Joel, and Evelyn sketch the new horizon. They don’t restore the old myths, and they don’t burn them for sport. They stand in the wreckage with open eyes and decide to care.

The New Horizon

Modernism believed we could build paradise if we only thought hard enough. Postmodernism proved how easy it is to tear paradise apart. Metamodernism stands somewhere between the two — not rebuilding blindly, not standing smugly in the ashes, but learning how to build while knowing it will never be perfect.

That’s what these new heroes teach us. Phil doesn’t escape the loop until he learns to live inside it. Joel doesn’t save the world; he saves one life and bears the weight of that choice. Evelyn doesn’t defeat meaninglessness; she makes peace with it and chooses kindness anyway. Their victories are small, human, and aware — progress without perfection, faith without certainty.

Maybe that’s the best we can hope for now: to keep moving forward, eyes open, irony in one hand and hope in the other. The ship is flawed, the map incomplete, but we’re sailing again.

Because after all the collapse, all the doubt, all the knowing, we still want to believe — and maybe that wanting is enough.

So when the show came out in 2016, I was instantly hooked — by the music, the small town, the government conspiracy, and those charming little dudes who play early teens with such sincerity. It transported me straight back to my own childhood, even though it wasn’t my decade.

And of course, there was Winona Ryder. It’s easy to forget now, after so many actors broke out from Stranger Things and the characters became cultural icons, that in that first season, Joyce Byers was the beating heart of the story. A movie star doing a Netflix series was still a big deal in 2016, and Ryder carried the emotional weight of the show. Later seasons would shift toward Eleven, but in that first one, Joyce was the real protagonist: a mother who refuses to stop believing, even when the whole town calls her crazy.

The Light in the Wall

When Will Byers disappears, the adults of Hawkins do what adults in small towns always do. They search, they organise, they accept the worst. To them, Will is gone. Another tragedy in a quiet place that prefers its mysteries buried.

But not Joyce. She refuses the script of grief. While everyone else prepares for a funeral, she listens. To the static of the phone, to the flicker of lightbulbs, to the impossible idea that her son might still be reaching out. She covers the walls with Christmas lights, turning her house into a shrine of faith.

It’s easy to laugh at her — the hysterical mother, the town eccentric — but Joyce is the only one in Hawkins who’s right. Her madness is devotion. Every blink of light becomes a word, every spark a heartbeat. In a story built on portals and monsters, she performs the truest miracle of all: she believes before she has proof.

Faith isn’t seeing the miracle. It’s stringing the lights anyway.

The Cop Who Lost His Religion

Sheriff Jim Hopper begins the story as the man who stopped believing. He drinks too much, drifts through his days, and treats tragedy like weather — something that happens, something you can’t change. The kind of cynic only grief can produce. His daughter’s death hollowed him out, left him allergic to hope.

But the search for Will drags him, inch by inch, back toward wonder. The deeper he digs, the more the rational world he clings to begins to unravel. Strange phone calls, government men in hazmat suits, lights that seem to think. What begins as police work turns into something closer to pilgrimage.

Hopper’s arc mirrors the town’s not in its enlightenment, but in its denial. Hawkins, like him, doesn’t want to know what’s underneath. The difference is that Hopper finally looks. By the time he steps through the portal into the Upside Down, flashlight trembling in his hand, he’s crossed from doubt into faith.

He’ll never preach about it, never confess what he’s seen — but belief doesn’t need witnesses. In Hawkins, every sceptic becomes a disciple of something they can’t explain.

The Children Who Dream the World

While the adults search with flashlights and reason, the kids turn to imagination. Their world has always been half-real anyway — shaped by comic books, Star Wars, and long nights of Dungeons & Dragons. So when the impossible begins to seep into Hawkins, they already have a language for it.

They call the creature the Demogorgon, the forest Mirkwood, and the world beyond the Upside Down. It’s their campaign setting. What begins as play becomes prophecy — a fantasy that turns out to be truer than the adults’ realism. And then there’s Eleven, the girl who makes their stories real.

A wizard. A weapon. A wounded child. She blurs the boundary between myth and life. Through her, belief stops being pretend. When Mike tells her she’s not a monster, he’s not just comforting her. He’s rewriting the rules of their world. His faith in her becomes a spell, and it works.

The kids’ friendship becomes the purest form of belief in the show. Where the adults need evidence, the children only need each other. Their make-believe saves them because they never stop believing that it might.

The Rift Between Science and Faith

If Joyce’s living room is a chapel, then Hawkins Lab is a cathedral of a different kind. Sterile, humming, devoted to control. It’s the shadow side of belief: the conviction that if you can measure something, you can master it.

Dr Brenner and his team treat the supernatural like an equation, prying open the veil between worlds not to understand it, but to use it. Their pursuit of knowledge mirrors Joyce’s search for her son, yet where her faith is driven by love, theirs is driven by power. Both reach across the same divide — only one reaches out, the other reaches in.

The rift itself becomes the perfect image of that division. A wound torn open by human arrogance, it blurs the border between miracle and monstrosity. In Hawkins, science and faith are not enemies but reflections — two ways of staring into the dark and demanding it make sense.

The Shared Vision

Everyone in Stranger Things sees the supernatural through their own lens. Joyce feels it — the emotional frequency of a mother tuned to her child. Hopper uncovers it — through investigation, deduction, and the slow surrender of disbelief. The kids imagine it — turning terror into narrative, chaos into a story they can play their way through.

Each of them believes differently, but all are reaching for the same truth: that the unseen world is real, and that connection is the only thing that crosses between them. Their visions don’t contradict; they complete one another.

Joyce’s intuition needs Hopper’s courage. Hopper’s logic needs the kids’ wonder. The small town becomes a constellation of half-truths that, when joined, form something whole; a kind of collective sight.

The Shape of Hope

By the end of that first season, none of them — not Joyce, not Hopper, not the kids — can fully explain what happened. The town returns to its routines, pretending the impossible never touched it. But for those who looked into the dark, something has shifted.

Joyce found proof that love can reach across worlds. Hopper learned to believe again, even if he’ll never admit it out loud. The kids saw their imagination come to life, and understood that stories can save you.

What unites them isn’t knowledge, but faith born from loss. Belief is never comfortable; it’s desperate, improvised, a hand reaching through static and smoke. And yet it works. The light flickers, the wall breathes back, and somewhere in the dark, a boy answers.

That’s the promise at the heart of every small town — that no one is ever truly lost.

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The Nostalgic Resurrection

While recent stories like True Detective or Midnight Mass portray the small town as a place of rot and abandonment — a dying organism devouring itself — Stranger Things takes another path. It doesn’t show us the corpse of the myth, but its ghost.

The Duffers set their story in the 1980s, the last decade when the small town still felt safe: when porch lights meant comfort, when parents still trusted the night, when kids could vanish into the woods and be home by dinner. But that vision was already slipping away, even then. This choice isn’t just aesthetic; it’s philosophical. The show doesn’t merely look backwards — it believes backwards, resurrecting the past through collective memory, through the flicker of a CRT screen and the hum of synths.

It’s nostalgia as ritual — a séance held through screens. We watch it not to remember our childhoods, but to remember believing in a world where childhood itself felt sacred.

And yet Stranger Things isn’t just sentimental. Beneath the VHS haze, it knows what it’s doing. It’s not parodying the small-town myth, nor naïvely worshipping it. It’s balancing between irony and faith — aware of its artifice, but still reaching for something real.

Between Irony and Faith

Stranger Things moves in that liminal space between awareness and awe, the realm of the metamodern. It borrows the language of postmodernism — self-awareness, homage, pastiche — but uses it sincerely. The show knows it’s built from other stories; it doesn’t hide its seams. But instead of mocking its influences, it believes in them again, as if faith can be found in the act of imitation.

That’s the essence of metamodern storytelling: to know that myths are constructs and still treat them as sacred. It’s the wink that still means it.

The Duffers build Hawkins out of borrowed images — Spielberg’s warm light, King’s haunted innocence, Carpenter’s synthetic dread — but what they create isn’t parody. It’s resurrection. The show doesn’t say, “Remember this?” It says, “Feel this again.”

We’ve grown used to stories that keep their distance, that signal their cleverness to protect themselves from sincerity. Stranger Things doesn’t flinch that way. It looks directly at the thing we lost — wonder, community, belief — and dares to miss it out loud.

From Modern to Postmodern to Meta

To understand metamodernism, it helps to look back at the pendulum that swung before it. Modernism believed in progress, in art as revelation, and in cinema as a window to truth. Think of Casablanca, The Magnificent Seven, Lawrence of Arabia — films that searched for meaning with absolute conviction.

Postmodernism shattered that certainty. It laughed at structure, toyed with genre, exposed the trick. Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the self-referential horror of Scream, the media mazes of The Truman Show — all reminders that stories were just stories, and truth was relative.

Metamodernism lives in the aftermath. It knows the trick, sees the wires, and still chooses to care. It oscillates — irony on one swing, sincerity on the other. As Thomas Flight put it in his video essay “Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now?”, it’s a return to earnest emotion through self-awareness — the rediscovery of feeling after irony burned everything down.

The Meta-Town of Hawkins

Hawkins, Indiana is a collage of cinematic memory, stitched together from the films that raised a generation. The kids’ bikes racing down empty streets echo E.T.; the Christmas lights glow with the haunted warmth of Poltergeist; the boys’ quest through the woods could have come straight from Stand by Me. Even the title sequence, the red neon typography and the synth hum feel like relics summoned from a VHS tape.

But none of it plays as parody. The Duffers don’t use these echoes to wink at the audience; they use them to believe again. Every reference feels like a prayer to the stories that once made us feel safe, scared, and seen all at once.

Stranger Things treats nostalgia as resurrection. It exhumes the pop culture of the ’80s not to mock its simplicity, but to remind us why it mattered — why we ever believed a flashlight beam in the dark could hold back the monsters.

Irony Without Cynicism

What sets Stranger Things apart is its refusal to hide behind irony. It knows the tropes: the monster, the government lab, the psychic child; but it plays them straight. The show isn’t winking at us; it’s inviting us to feel what those stories once promised.

That sincerity is rare. Most nostalgia-driven media keep a safe distance, apologising for wanting to move us. Stranger Things never apologises. It lets the sentimentality stand, unshielded. That’s why Season 1 worked so powerfully: it remembered that wonder only lands if you mean it.

The Sincerity of Season One

Season One walks a fragile line between homage and heart, and never loses its balance. The references serve the story, not the other way around. When Mike reaches out to Eleven, or Joyce whispers to the lights, the show isn’t trying to impress us. The nostalgia becomes emotional, not decorative.

But later seasons start to fracture that sincerity. The references get louder, the stakes bigger, the tone more performative — Ghostbusters costumes, Back to the Future screenings, winks to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The world becomes self-aware, almost proud of its own mythology. By Season 3, Hawkins feels more like a theme park than a town.

It isn’t until Season 4, with its grief-stricken undercurrent and the return of real vulnerability — Max’s headphones, Eddie’s guitar, the letters written to the dead — that the show finds its heart again. Stranger Things was never about monsters or pop culture; it was about the sincerity that makes those things matter.

The Return of Wonder

In the end, Stranger Things isn’t just a story about monsters or missing children — it’s a story about the hunger to believe. The same yearning that drives Joyce to talk to the lights drives the Duffers to talk to the past. Both are reaching through a wall, hoping something still answers back.

That’s the metamodern magic of it: to know the trick, to see the wires, and still let yourself feel the wonder. Season One captures that perfectly, and it understands that nostalgia is just another form of faith. We know Hawkins isn’t real, that the world it shows us never truly existed, but we still ache for it. Because it reminds us of a time when believing felt possible.

Across this little series of essays — from Jaws, First Blood, and Twin Peaks to True Detective, and Midnight Mass — we’ve watched the American small town evolve from myth to memory, from community to ghost story. Stranger Things closes the loop by resurrecting the myth one last time, not as truth, but as hope.

Because maybe that’s what keeps these places alive. Not their perfection, but our refusal to let them die.

Happy Halloween. 🎃

The golden age of the small-town myth was the 1980s and ’90s — when these places still looked alive. Main Streets bustled, parades rolled through summer afternoons, and Sunday sermons filled the pews. Even when stories like Jaws or First Blood exposed the cracks, they began with the illusion intact: clean lawns, a strong handshake, the smell of barbecue and optimism.

By the time Midnight Mass arrives in 2021, that dream has rusted. Crockett Island is post-industrial, post-prosperity, post-hope. The fishing industry collapsed, poisoned by an oil spill and strangled by environmental bureaucracy. Half the population moved away, and those who stayed are ageing, bitter, and broke.

Faith, too, has withered. The church is half-empty, its hymnals fading like the wallpaper. But the few who remain — Riley’s mother, praying for her wayward son; Leeza, praying for a miracle — believe more fiercely than anyone. Their faith is the last living thing on the island. The old priest is gone, his absence another reminder that everything — the church, the town, the American dream itself — is decaying.

Isolation and Renewal

Crockett Island isn’t just isolated, it’s cut off from time itself. A ferry ride away from the mainland, surrounded by fog and gulls, it’s the American small town at the end of the world. There’s no tourism, no new blood, no escape. The same families, the same grudges, the same hymns. The town has become a closed ecosystem of decay.

That’s what makes Father Paul’s arrival feel so electric. He’s young, eloquent, full of conviction — everything the town has forgotten how to be. His sermons stir something long dormant in the townsfolk: the idea that life could still matter, that their suffering might still have meaning.

And for a moment, it works. The island begins to glow again. Leeza walks. Riley smiles. The pews fill. The fog feels thinner. Even the ageing houses seem to hold themselves a little straighter. It’s not faith returning — it’s life itself.

But Crockett Island is too small to contain miracles. The same intimacy that makes the town close-knit also makes it combustible. Every shared belief spreads fast; every doubt multiplies. But faith doesn’t heal the community. It accelerates its decay.

Bev Keane, The Rot of Righteousness

Every small town has a Bev Keane. The woman who knows what’s best for everyone else. Who quotes scripture like a weapon and smiles while she twists the knife. She organises charity drives, hands out hymn books, and keeps a running ledger of everyone’s sins.

Bev isn’t evil in the way horror villains usually are. She’s worse. She’s certain. Her faith is absolute, and that’s what makes her terrifying. She doesn’t serve God; she manages Him. Every miracle on Crockett Island becomes a tool to tighten her control. When Leeza walks again, Bev doesn’t thank heaven — she drafts new rules for who’s worthy of divine love.

What makes her so potent and recognisable is that she’s not a caricature. Every small community has its moral gatekeeper, the one who confuses purity with power. But Bev is that archetype turned up to eleven. She’s the living embodiment of what happens when belonging becomes a hierarchy — when faith stops being about grace and becomes about being better.

By the time blood starts to flow on Crockett Island, Bev doesn’t see horror but judgment. To her, the apocalypse isn’t the end of the world; it’s a sorting mechanism. She’s ready for paradise because she’s certain she deserves it. And in that certainty lies her damnation.

Faith as Hunger

When miracles return to Crockett Island, they’re seductive, glowing with beauty and grace. The sick are healed. The old feel young. The dead rise. But Midnight Mass isn’t about faith as nourishment. It’s about faith as hunger.

Every major character hungers for something holy, and every one of them mistakes craving for faith.
Father Paul tells himself he serves God, but what he truly wants is time — time to love Mildred again, to live the life he never had. His resurrection isn’t divine; it’s selfish. He mistakes desire for devotion, and he brings ruin dressed as salvation.

Bev Keane’s hunger is for God’s approval. She doesn’t want grace; she wants favour. She wants to be first in line for paradise. Her belief curdles into ego, until she’s worshipping herself in the shape of righteousness.

And Riley — maybe the most human of them all — carries a heavier hunger. Guilt. Forgiveness. Connection. He wants to believe in something again, but the damage he’s done keeps him at war with the very idea of redemption. When he finally meets grace, it’s through acceptance, not craving.

Faith becomes hunger when the self replaces the divine. Everyone on the island feeds on something: love, guilt, power, youth, blood. The miracle doesn’t create monsters. It just reveals what was already starving inside them.

The Self Over the Whole

Jesus said, “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” The message was simple: to move closer to God, you must step beyond inherited words and empty traditions. True faith isn’t obedience, it’s surrender.

But on Crockett Island, people do the opposite. They don’t leave behind the world for God; they choose themselves over both God and the world. The gravest sins in Midnight Mass come not from disbelief, but from selfish devotion.

Father Paul’s miracle isn’t born from grace; it’s born from longing. He doesn’t want to serve God — he wants to relive the life he lost, to be young again, to love Mildred openly, to raise his daughter. His faith becomes an excuse to rewrite the past.

The mayor, after seeing his daughter healed, turns away from his duty to the town. His faith becomes a transaction. A favour owed, not a gift received.

And Bev Keane, always eager to be God’s favourite, twists every verse into proof of her own holiness. She hoards God’s love like it’s a limited resource, leaving none for others.

The blood-drinking is a metaphor for this self-devouring faith. Every act of supposed devotion is selfishness dressed in scripture. And the few who remain pure — Riley, his parents, Mildred — are those who truly surrender. They stop feeding, stop striving, stop trying to own grace.

The island’s tragedy isn’t that faith failed. It’s that everyone mistook their own desire for divine will.

The One and the Many

Throughout Midnight Mass, both Father Paul and Riley wrestle with the same idea: how everything — matter, soul, faith — might be part of one great whole. It’s a notion that drifts between science and spirituality. Riley talks about neurons firing, energy dispersing, and matter returning to the universe. Father Paul calls it God’s eternal design. Two languages, one longing: to believe that nothing truly dies.

But what happens on Crockett Island is the corruption of that truth. Instead of unity, people choose division. Instead of “we,” they cling to “I.” Every sin, every act of violence, comes from forgetting that they belong to something greater than themselves.

The beauty of the ending — and the heartbreak — is that the ones who remember this truth are the ones who die at peace. Riley’s parents face the sunrise hand in hand, refusing to take another life. Mildred and Father Paul finally let go of the illusion of youth and return to what is real. Even as the town burns, they find grace in togetherness.

Because that’s what faith — and community — are supposed to be. Not control. Not hunger. Not self-preservation. But surrender to the truth that we rise and fall together.

Revelation

If True Detective exposed faith as hypocrisy, then Midnight Mass shows what happens when faith burns too bright. On Crockett Island, belief doesn’t just bind the town together; it consumes it.

This isn’t a story about religion being good or evil. It’s about how the same flame that warms can also destroy. Faith can heal, forgive, and bring people closer. Or it can twist into ego, hunger, and blood.

What makes Midnight Mass such a powerful small-town story is how personal its apocalypse feels. It isn’t meteors or monsters that end the world, but people turning inward, forgetting they were ever one body.

The next story arrives on Halloween night. That’s all I’ll say — but it’s been haunting me for a while.

The first time I watched True Detective, I was floored. The Southern decay, the swamps and rusting factories, the sheer strangeness of it all; it felt like another world. Coming from a rural-industrial background myself, I knew the texture of rust and decline, but this was something darker, heavier.

Add to that McConaughey and Harrelson at the height of their powers, and the murder mystery gripped me completely.

But I also knew there was more going on. That I’d need to come back to it.

Which I did, years later, during heartbreak. And that was the perfect mental space for Rust Cohle. His bleak philosophy, his pessimistic clarity, his constant sense that nothing really mattered. It dragged me into the show’s lore, the layers of symbolism, and its philosophy. And oddly enough, while it crushed me, it also helped me. Because that’s what great art does: it shows you something of yourself.

In the first Myth of the Small Town series, we explored capitalism (Jaws) and authority (First Blood). With True Detective, we move into something older and more primal. Faith, religion, the occult. The promises they hold, and the damage they do.

The Small Town Myth, Southern Gothic Edition

If the Northern small town myth is white picket fences and Norman Rockwell paintings, the Southern small town myth has always been a little darker. True Detective taps into that perfectly.

This isn’t the tidy Main Street of It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s the collapsing churches of Cajun country. The rusting factories of Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor. The swamps and sugarcane fields pressing right up against the highway.

Faith is everywhere — Catholic crosses, evangelical sermons, voodoo shrines — but it doesn’t promise salvation. It promises mystery. It promises dread.

Faith is already cracked. The cross on the wall doesn’t protect anyone; it’s used to pacify and control. Preachers lead congregations that hide abusers. Religious leaders give cover to institutions that protect predators. The very thing that should bind people together is instead used to exploit them.

What makes the show so potent is that it doesn’t stop at the hypocrisy of religion. It shows the rot of the environment itself — the crumbling factories, the swamps swallowing towns whole, the sense that progress moved on without them. It’s not just Southern Gothic atmosphere for atmosphere’s sake. It’s showing us how the town’s mythology — faith, family, community — no longer holds.

Instead, those myths curdle into something oppressive.

Faith and Hypocrisy

In True Detective, faith isn’t a shield for the community; it’s a mask that hides the rot. Churches, schools, and even family rituals are steeped in religion, but instead of offering protection, they provide cover for abuse and silence.

Marty embodies this hypocrisy. He’s the image of a church-going family man, yet he drinks, cheats, and lies. What he believes in isn’t the substance of faith, but its appearance, the illusion of order and decency.

Rust is his opposite. A Nietzschean atheist, he sees through the facade and recognises how faith is being weaponised to protect predators and keep victims quiet. But his rejection of all belief doesn’t make him whole; it makes him brittle, unmoored, a wreck. He’s not a saviour — he’s haunted by his own emptiness.

Even the institutions of faith are hollow. The revival tent congregation Rust and Marty investigate turns out to be a dead end — but it’s telling that the imagery of salvation is being used as misdirection. The real rot runs deeper: the Tuttle family and their allies in the church and state quietly cover up the ritual crimes. In this world, faith doesn’t bring salvation. It’s another mask, one more layer of camouflage for sin.

The Pagan Underside

Christianity is only the surface layer. Beneath the hymns and sermons are spirals carved into skin, twig figures left in abandoned churches, ritual murders staged like offerings. The South may be draped in crosses, but the land itself feels older, haunted by symbols that don’t belong to the pulpit.

This is repression at work. What can’t be voiced in daylight — violence, desire, transgression — doesn’t disappear. It finds a hidden outlet. The spiral is more than a killer’s mark; it’s a map of something buried, coiled, waiting.

The genius of the show is how it blurs the line. Is the horror rooted in Christian hypocrisy, where men of faith protect predators? Or in pagan ritual, passed down in secret through families and communities? Or is it both, feeding off one another? The unsettling answer is that the system itself makes space for both to thrive, side by side — one as cover, the other as expression.

The Detectives as Outsiders

Rust and Marty are both outsiders in their own way, though for very different reasons. Marty is an insider by position — a local cop, family man, churchgoer — but his double life makes him alien to himself. He clings to institutions and rituals, yet can’t live up to them. His hypocrisy isn’t just personal weakness; it blinds him. He can’t see the rot in his own town because he’s invested in the myth of small-town decency. To admit the truth about the community would mean admitting the truth about himself.

Rust, by contrast, rejects the myth entirely. He’s a transplant, a loner, and a nihilist who refuses to play along with the rituals of faith or family. That distance gives him clarity — he notices patterns others dismiss, he recognises how religion is used as a mask. But his philosophy, stripped of hope, corrodes him from the inside. He’s not liberated by his atheism; he’s trapped by it, brittle and joyless.

Together, they form two incomplete halves of perception: the insider who can’t bear to question, and the outsider who refuses to believe. It’s why they need each other. Rust’s scepticism cuts through the lies; Marty’s rootedness, however flawed, anchors them. Neither man can hold the full truth alone. The case can only be cracked when their extremes collide.

The Light’s Winning

True Detective isn’t just about catching a killer. It’s about how religion and repression can keep a town looking peaceful, even as the truth is eating the town alive. When faith becomes performance — something worn on Sundays and wielded by institutions — it stops being a source of truth and becomes a shield for lies.

In the Louisiana bayous, that mask slips. What’s revealed isn’t peace or safety, but something older and darker: spirals in the trees, twig figures in the fields, ritual violence stitched into the community’s fabric. Small-town faith and small-town horror don’t cancel each other out. They grow together, side by side.

Next time, we’ll turn to Midnight Mass, another story of faith in a small town. But unlike True Detective, it doesn’t just show faith as a mask. It dares to show both its power to heal and its power to destroy.

Back when I spent a lot of time in my friend’s recording studio, listening to the young indie bands he was producing, I kept complaining that they all sounded like Arctic Monkeys. Nothing new, nothing fresh. He finally stopped me and said: “You know their album AM? The one everyone copies? That’s basically them doing Dr. Dre’s 2001.”

That clicked. The best influence isn’t copying your neighbour in the same genre. It’s looking outside your lane — sometimes even outside your medium. That’s where you can find engines to steal. Don’t take the car, take the motor that makes it run, and build your own machine around it.

The idea for this post came when I was picking apart …And Justice for All by Metallica. There’s going to be a bit of music analysis here, so bear with me. You don’t need to know music theory to get it.

Take the intro: those acoustic guitars. On the surface, the melody in each bar rises — it sounds triumphant, almost hopeful. But the full chord progression is descending. The whole thing is falling. So even while it feels positive on the surface, it’s actually dark underneath. Within the first few seconds, the arrangement is already telling the story: something meant to be great for humanity is rotting from the inside.

And then the drums. At 1:10, they lock into this tom groove. It’s off-kilter.

Two beats, then the toms. One beat, then the toms.

Uneven. Unbalanced. Like the scales of Lady Justice herself, but here, tipped, weighted with money. Rhythm and arrangement carrying the theme, long before the first lyric even comes in.

So how does this help you as a writer? First, analysing any art form — whether or not it’s your own — teaches you how meaning gets expressed. Second, it’s all rhythm, ratio, melody. Those tools are alive in prose and screenwriting too: the staccato rhythm of a character fumbling for words, the long monologue of a domineering figure versus the single-syllable retorts of someone overpowered, the playful cadence of a silly pet name. These are all your tools.

And James Hetfield’s been doing this kind of cross-pollination for decades. For Whom the Bell Tolls takes Hemingway’s novel and turns it into a four-minute doom anthem, full of inevitability and death. One adapts Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, its machine-gun kick drums pounding like the relentless battlefield that stole the protagonist’s body. Literature becomes music, and in turn, the music becomes cinematic — if you close your eyes, you can see it.

As I said before, don’t steal the car. Steal the engine.

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Let’s talk about Arctic Monkeys and their 2013 album AM. On the surface, it’s indie rock. Guitars, swagger, Alex Turner crooning about late-night mistakes. But listen closer, and you’ll hear something else pulsing under the hood: Dr. Dre.

Turner has admitted that AM took inspiration from Dre’s 2001. You can hear it in songs like One for the Road and Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?. The beats are stripped-down, hypnotic, looping with the kind of patience you’d expect from hip-hop production. The guitars don’t crash in all at once; they drip in like samples. The bassline works like a groove, not a riff.

And here’s the genius: AM is not a hip-hop album. Not even close. You wouldn’t describe it as “indie with hip-hop vibes” either. What it has are hip-hop production techniques. The structure, the arrangements, the skeleton of the thing comes from Dre. That’s why it sounded so fresh. It wasn’t about mashing genres — it was about stealing the engine of one genre and running it through the body of another.

That’s how you avoid imitation. Arctic Monkeys didn’t just rewrite their favourite indie band. They looked outside their lane and asked: How can we build this music differently? That’s what made AM a global hit, not just another guitar record.

Christopher Nolan is one of the best examples of borrowing from outside his genre to make something new. The Dark Knight is a superhero movie, yes — but its DNA is pure Michael Mann. Nolan has openly said he studied Heat while developing Batman’s second outing, and once you know it, you can’t unsee it.

Take the structure: Heat is about the duel between a master thief (Robert De Niro) and a relentless cop (Al Pacino). Their cat-and-mouse game escalates until the midpoint, where they sit across from each other in a diner. It’s one of the great scenes in crime cinema — two professionals acknowledging each other, respect and threat wrapped together in one conversation.

Now compare that to The Dark Knight. Joker and Batman meet not in a diner, but in an interrogation room. The parallels are uncanny: the criminal and the lawman, two sides of the same coin, finally forced into a face-to-face reckoning. The Joker even tells Batman they’re destined to do this forever, echoing the eternal chase of Mann’s film.

Nolan didn’t just imitate a few shots — though you’ll find echoes of Mann’s LA cityscapes in Gotham’s streets. He borrowed the engine of Heat: the duel between two forces of equal and opposite will, whose collision defines the story. He transposed it into the comic book world, and suddenly, a superhero film had the weight of a serious crime drama.

And it works beyond homage. By building Batman’s story on the bones of Heat, Nolan gave it credibility, realism, and tension. He elevated the genre not by ignoring other genres, but by building on them.

Dunkirk is another masterclass in cross-pollination, this time not from film but from music theory. Nolan and Hans Zimmer built the whole film around the Shepard Tone — an auditory illusion where a scale seems to rise forever but never actually does. You hear it in the score, but you also feel it in the structure. The storylines — land, sea, and air — are woven like three ascending notes. Each one resets, but together they create the sensation of endless tension.

That’s how Nolan keeps you on edge for two hours with a story that could’ve run out of gas. It’s not just clever sound design; it’s rhythm, pace, and structure borrowed from another medium and applied to narrative. Writers can learn a lot from this. How can you take a technique from music, painting, architecture — something outside your field — and let it shape the way your story feels? Not just in content, but in form.

Sometimes the best examples don’t need much commentary. Cinema has always been in dialogue with painting, and some of the most iconic film shots are direct echoes of famous works of art. From framing to light to composition, directors borrow centuries of visual language and make it move. Here are a few of my favourite pairings — they speak louder than anything I could say.

Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight reads like three books at once: a travel diary through Italy, a modernist love story, and a psychoanalytic case study. On the surface, Mihály is honeymooning; in truth, he’s drifting—haunted by adolescent obsessions, Catholic guilt, and the seductive pull of death. Szerb borrows the form of travel writing (city-to-city waypoints, cafés, churches, stray conversations) and uses it as an engine for an inner journey. The guidebook rhythm keeps us moving, but every stop is really a descent: memory as destination, longing as itinerary. It’s cross-pollination in action—the techniques of a genre built for exteriors repurposed to map a psyche.

Umberto Eco flips the trick in the other direction. The Name of the Rose is a monastery murder mystery on a Sherlock Holmes chassis (William of Baskerville… it’s not subtle), but the superstructure is medieval theology, semiotics, and philosophy. Eco imports the apparatus of scholarship—Latin phrases, debates on laughter and heresy, even the feel of footnotes—and lets that texture power the suspense. The library is a literal labyrinth; the clues are intertexts. The “MacGuffin” is essentially Aristotle on comedy. In craft terms: he steals the procedural engine (investigation → question → inference → test) and runs it on intellectual fuel, so the plot accelerates because the ideas do.

Both books are great reminders for writers: you don’t have to copy a genre’s aesthetic to borrow its method. Take travel writing’s momentum to move a character inward. Take detective fiction’s logic chain to structure an essay or a literary novel. Form is portable. Use it.

Cross-pollination isn’t new. T.S. Eliot was already doing it in 1922, when he published The Waste Land. The poem is a collage of voices, myths, fragments of scripture, snatches of nursery rhymes, lines from opera, even multiple languages woven into a single text.

It’s the literary equivalent of sampling and remixing. Instead of following one melody, The Waste Land builds meaning through contrast—ancient myths bumping against modern despair, sacred texts against trivial ditties. The fragments don’t dilute each other; they sharpen each other.

Writers today sometimes feel guilty about influence, as though borrowing makes the work less original. Eliot proves the opposite. Influence can be the very foundation of originality. The Waste Land didn’t hide its sources—it flaunted them, showing that the way you assemble and transform the materials is what makes the art new.

The point of all this isn’t to suggest you should become an expert in Metallica, or Dre, or Eco. It’s to notice how they worked: looking sideways, borrowing methods, lifting engines. You don’t need to stay inside your lane to find fuel for your work. In fact, staying inside your lane is the surest way to stall.

So: read a novel outside your genre. Watch a documentary if you only watch dramas. Go to a gallery if you’ve been staring at Final Draft too long. Ask how that rhythm, structure, or texture could power your own project. Because what feels alien at first often turns out to be the spark you needed.

That’s what influence really is—not parroting, not pastiche, but transformation. Steal the engine, not the car. And maybe build something no one’s ever seen on the road before.

My process is heavily influenced by Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, John Yorke’s Into the Woods, and Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. So you’ll see a mix of terminology here — familiar to most screenwriters, maybe less so for fiction writers.

I usually start with the big pillars: the Inciting Incident, the Midpoint, the Crisis, and the Final Battle. Then I fill in the gaps with smaller beats, and eventually every scene, all neatly laid out on index cards in Final Draft’s Beat Board.

But for today, I want to focus on beats themselves. When I say “beat,” I mean one of the major turning points that carry the story forward — those moments where the narrative shifts, the character is tested, or the stakes change.

I’ve chosen eight, some because they’re absolutely essential for story structure, others because they’re especially helpful to keep a writer from getting lost.

Inciting Incident – The spark that disrupts the normal world and sets the story in motion.
Refusal of the Call – When the hero hesitates, resists, or outright rejects the adventure ahead.
Crossing the First Threshold – The leap into Act Two, when the hero leaves the ordinary world and enters the special one.
Midpoint – A game-changing event at the heart of the story, often a false victory or crushing defeat.
Bad Guys Close In – Pressure mounts, antagonistic forces tighten their grip, and the hero starts to lose ground.
Crisis – The moment where everything seems lost, the lowest point before revelation.
Dark Night of the Soul – The emotional reckoning. The hero confronts fear, failure, or grief, and finds the resolve to continue.
Final Battle – The climactic confrontation where the story’s central conflict is resolved and the hero’s arc is tested.

For each of the eight beats I’ve chosen, we’ll look at a movie scene that embodies it. Sometimes the example will be the most straightforward, textbook version of the beat; other times it will be a clever subversion that still hits the emotional or structural goal.

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Inciting Incident — Raiders of the Lost Ark

The inciting incident is the spark that disrupts the “normal world” of your story. It forces the protagonist to respond. It’s not yet the full commitment to the adventure, but it’s the nudge that sets everything in motion.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, this moment comes when government agents approach Indiana Jones with a mission: recover the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do. Indy’s normal world of teaching archaeology is shattered by the promise of an artefact with immense historical (and supernatural) power. The scene does more than launch the plot. It frames the stakes. This isn’t just another relic for Indy’s collection; it’s an object tied to faith, history, and global war.

What makes this such a great example is how cleanly it introduces the dramatic question: Will Indy find the Ark before the Nazis? That single question propels everything that follows, proving how essential a sharp inciting incident is to hook both character and audience.

Refusal of the Call — Star Wars: A New Hope

In classical structure, the Refusal of the Call is the moment when the hero hesitates. They’ve been offered a path forward, but fear, duty, or disbelief holds them back. It’s essential for grounding the character in their world and showing us what’s at stake if they don’t change.

In Star Wars: A New Hope, Luke Skywalker has just been invited by Obi-Wan Kenobi to leave Tatooine and join him on a mission to Alderaan. It’s the chance he’s been daydreaming about — adventure, the galaxy, a way out of his stagnant life. But when the offer is real, he baulks. “I can’t get involved. I’ve got work to do. It’s not that I like the Empire. I hate it! But there’s nothing I can do about it right now.”

This refusal tells us two crucial things. First, Luke is still tethered to his old life — his uncle and aunt, his responsibilities, his fear of the unknown. Second, it sets up the emotional punch when those ties are brutally severed. Without this hesitation, his later decision to go with Obi-Wan wouldn’t feel like growth; it would feel inevitable.

The refusal isn’t the story stalling. It’s the story winding the spring, building tension so that when the hero finally steps forward, it lands with real weight.

Crossing the First Threshold — Shrek

The First Threshold is where the hero finally commits to the journey. They leave the safety of the ordinary world and step into the unknown, where the real story begins.

For Shrek, leaving the swamp doesn’t quite cut it. At that point, he’s still trying to avoid conflict, hoping Lord Farquaad will solve his problem for him. Even standing in Farquaad’s court is just another attempt to find the easiest way out.

The true threshold is when Shrek accepts the quest to rescue Princess Fiona — and sets out with Donkey at his side. From here, there’s no going back. The path to Fiona’s tower is the beginning of the adventure, full of dragons, castles, and surprises he never could have imagined back in his swamp. This is where Shrek’s story really begins.

Midpoint — Jurassic Park

The midpoint is often the story’s great pivot, where the game changes. In Jurassic Park, that pivot is more than just a shift in stakes: it’s a full-blown genre shift. The first half of the film plays like an awe-struck adventure: wide eyes, swelling music, dinosaurs walking the earth again. This is the dream fulfilled, the park tour with its promise of wonder.

But when the power fails and the T. rex breaks free, the fantasy collapses. The adventure morphs into horror. What began as the triumph of science and imagination becomes a primal fight for survival. Spielberg subverts expectations perfectly: we wanted dinosaurs. And we got them. But not the way we thought. What once inspired awe now inspires terror.

That’s why this midpoint is so instructive. It doesn’t just raise the stakes; it reframes the entire story. The question is no longer “Can man bring back dinosaurs?” It’s “Can man survive them?” The midpoint teaches us that the story’s heart isn’t in the spectacle of creation, but in the consequences of it.

Bad Guys Close In — Jaws

After the midpoint, the pressure has to mount. Every solution fails, every option narrows, until the hero is cornered. And there’s no better example than Quint’s monologue about the USS Indianapolis in Jaws.

In just a few minutes, the bravado of shark hunting turns to dread. Quint reveals his past: delivering the atomic bomb, only to watch his shipmates torn apart by sharks after the sinking. It’s a ghost that haunts him, his motivation laid bare.

It’s also a warning: no matter how powerful you think you are, the ocean can instantly turn you from predator to prey.

The timing is perfect. As soon as Quint finishes his tale, the shark itself attacks, battering the Orca and forcing the men into survival mode. The past collapses into the present. The dread Quint conjures with words becomes flesh and teeth. It’s the pure essence of Bad Guys Close In: the hunters tightening their grip, only to realise the danger has been circling them all along.

Crisis — The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

The crisis is when hope crumbles. When the hero — or in this case, the Fellowship — seems utterly broken. In The Fellowship of the Ring, that moment comes with Gandalf’s fall in Moria.

It’s not just the loss of a powerful wizard. Gandalf was the Fellowship’s anchor, the guide who knew the way forward, the glue holding nine very different companions together. Without him, they are adrift. Aragorn must step up, but even he knows that Gandalf’s absence has fundamentally weakened them. The image of the Fellowship stumbling out of Moria, stunned and grieving, captures the despair perfectly.

This is why Gandalf’s death is more than spectacle. It’s the story’s true crisis. The Ring still needs to be destroyed. Mordor is still ahead. But now the very structure of the Fellowship is fractured. The question is no longer “Can they complete the quest?” but “Can they even stay together?” It’s a devastating pivot, and one that reshapes the rest of the trilogy.

Dark Night of the Soul — Die Hard

This beat is where the hero faces their deepest truth, not the want, but the need. For John McClane, it comes in one of the quietest, most human moments of Die Hard.

Bleeding, exhausted, and convinced he won’t survive, McClane radios Sgt. Powell and asks him to deliver a message to Holly: an apology. He admits what he couldn’t say to her directly — that his pride, his stubbornness, his need to control drove her away. It’s raw, vulnerable, and utterly sincere. The action pauses so the heart can take centre stage.

And here’s what makes it brilliant: he doesn’t say it to Holly. That would be corny, on-the-nose. Instead, he says it to Powell. This transforms it into a moment of friendship — two men baring their wounds in the dark. So the most important beat in McClane’s marriage is hidden inside a moment of deep male camaraderie. That layering makes the scene both intimate and powerful.

McClane has finally admitted his need. And with that truth in place, he’s ready to finish the fight.

Final Battle — Home Alone

The final battle is where everything collides: the spectacle, the stakes, and the hero’s growth. Home Alone might look like slapstick comedy, but its climax is the perfect example of this beat. The proof that Kevin has learned what he needed to learn.

Kevin’s journey is twofold: he needs to understand the value of family and connection, and he needs to believe he can stand on his own. The first lesson comes earlier, in the church, when he encourages Old Man Marley to reconnect with his estranged son. It’s a moment of empathy that shows Kevin has moved past his initial selfishness.

The second lesson is proved in the climax. Kevin, once the helpless kid afraid of the basement, now takes full control of his home. The booby-trapped house isn’t just fun and inventive — it’s the culmination of his arc. He’s resourceful, brave, and in charge. Every paint can and hot doorknob is Kevin proving to himself (and us) that he’s not powerless.

And the best part: the traps aren’t random. They’re a child‘s-eye view of war, clever improvisations using the tools he has. It’s both hilarious spectacle and deeply meaningful. Kevin has grown into someone who can defend his home — and himself.

Sometimes beats are clear-cut, like the inciting incident in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the refusal of the call in Star Wars. Sometimes they come in two steps, like in Shrek, where he leaves his swamp, but the real adventure begins only once he makes his deal with Farquaad. And sometimes they’re subverted, like Quint’s monologue in Jaws. Beats come in many different flavours.

The point isn’t to force your story into a rigid template — it’s to understand how tension, character, and structure work together. These turning points are tools. Use them to build momentum, to deepen your characters, and to keep your audience hooked. Learn the rules, learn how others have bent them, and then figure out how you want to play with them in your own work.

What are your favourite story beats from a film? Let me know in the comments.

Each of these movies is here for a specific reason. Sure, most of them excel in multiple areas, but I suggest watching (or rewatching) with one focus in mind. You’ve probably seen some of these a dozen times. But maybe you didn’t notice how Titanic weaves its exposition, or how Die Hard builds conflict before the villain even shows up.

And this isn’t just for screenwriters. Novelists, short story writers, even nonfiction writers can pick up lessons here.

Conflict. Pacing. Theme. These are storytelling tools that cross media.

So here are my picks. Films to study as much as to enjoy.

Casablanca – Want vs. Need

Every great protagonist has both a want and a need. The want is on the surface. It’s the text, the thing they think will make them whole.

Captain Miller wants to save Private Ryan. Lightning McQueen wants to win the Piston Cup. Rick Blaine wants to get Ilsa back.

But the need is underneath. It’s subtext, the ache that actually has to be fulfilled for the character to be whole.

Miller needs to hold onto his moral compass so he can look his wife in the eye after the war. Lightning needs to learn to be part of a team. And Rick? Rick needs to let go of cynicism and learn to care about something bigger than himself again.

Sometimes, characters get both. Sometimes they lose both. But often the most powerful stories are the ones where the hero sacrifices their want to fulfil their need.

That’s Casablanca. Rick doesn’t get the girl. He doesn’t walk away with his old life restored. Instead, he chooses the harder path: one of selflessness, of sacrifice. In doing so, he becomes a better version of himself. “We’ll always have Paris,” yes. But more importantly, he’ll always have his soul.

Casablanca is a masterclass in how to dramatise that tension between want and need. But how do you keep us hooked before the main story even starts?

Die Hard – Conflict Before the Conflict

Stories don’t start with explosions. At least, the best ones don’t. They start with characters in their normal world, and with problems that make us care about them before the main plot kicks in. If your hero is just waiting around until the inciting incident, we’re already bored.

Die Hard is the perfect example of how to give your character something to care about before the bullets start flying. John McClane doesn’t board that plane to L.A. because of terrorists. He goes because his marriage is on the line.

His want is clear: win back his wife. But he wants to do it on his own terms: without compromise, without meeting her halfway. It’s the kind of human-scale drama that could carry a movie on its own.

And then Hans Gruber shows up. Suddenly, the personal conflict collides with the external one. The terrorists force McClane to face the truth: if he wants to save his wife — and their marriage — he has to stop being selfish. He has to sacrifice. The arc is baked in from the first scene, long before a single shot is fired.

That’s the magic. The “small” conflict at the start isn’t filler. It’s the DNA of the whole story. Even the machine guns and skyscraper stunts are really about one thing: a man learning to put someone else before himself. And honestly, could you want more from a Christmas movie?

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Once you’ve got us caring about your character, it’s time to think about pacing. And no film moves with sharper precision than:

The Dark Knight – Cutting the Fat Without Cutting the Tension

One of the oldest pieces of screenwriting advice is the same rule you’d use at a party: arrive late, leave early. Don’t waste time on hellos and goodbyes. Don’t linger in the doorway. Get in at the moment of drama, and get out before the energy dies.

No blockbuster embodies this better than The Dark Knight. The film moves like a shark, relentless forward momentum, never stopping to breathe.

The opening heist throws us straight into the Joker’s world without preamble. Scenes end the second their tension peaks, often cutting mid-movement into the next beat. Even quiet character exchanges are stripped to the bone: the words we hear are only the ones we need to.

It’s the kind of pacing that gives the movie its muscular feel — nearly three hours long but never dragging. And it’s not just the directing or editing. Crack open the screenplay and you’ll see it on the page. The action lines are lean and propulsive, shoving you forward. The dialogue trims the fat. Every entry and exit point is calibrated for maximum impact.

That’s the lesson here: keep it tight. Arrive at the moment of conflict, leave the second it’s resolved (or better yet, just before). Your story will feel alive, urgent, impossible to put down.

Of course, even the tightest pacing falls apart if you overload us with clunky information. James Cameron shows how to deliver exposition so it sings.

Titanic — Exposition Done Right

Titanic has an insane amount of exposition to get across: ship mechanics, safety flaws, social hierarchy, the historical timeline, and the inevitable iceberg. But it never feels like we’re in a classroom. Why?

Because Cameron delivers it in layers across different forms. A scientist explains things with diagrams on a computer. Rose narrates in voiceover. Dialogue reveals class divisions.

And then exposition doubles as urgency — the ship’s builder explaining the watertight compartments while rushing through the flooding decks. We learn how the ship works at the exact moment it matters most, when the knowledge raises stakes instead of dragging pace.

But the real masterstroke comes earlier. When Jack talks Rose down from suicide, he doesn’t deliver a dry fact about freezing water. He frames it as subtext: “Once you’re in the water, it’s like a thousand knives stabbing you all over your body.”

He’s not teaching her about hypothermia; he’s reaching her through fear. The exposition is planted in a scene about despair and intimacy. So when Rose and Jack later plunge into the Atlantic, we feel the truth of those words without the movie needing to stop and explain.

For Titanic, it’s especially important to read the screenplay, because on the page you can see just how meticulously Cameron plants exposition in different places, each piece doing double duty without ever feeling like a lecture.

But beneath all the pacing and exposition lies something deeper: The Titanic. Theme.

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Jurassic Park — Life Finds a Way

If you ever want to understand the power of theme, look no further than Jurassic Park. On the surface, it’s a monster movie, a rollercoaster of action, adventure, and horror. But the reason it holds up after countless rewatches isn’t just the T-Rex roar or the raptors in the kitchen. It’s the theme: life finds a way.

That idea is baked into every conflict and every character. Grant doesn’t want kids, but is forced to become a protector. Ellie wants creation and renewal, while Hammond wants control. Malcolm, with his chaos theory, literally says the line: Life finds a way. And of course, the dinosaurs themselves embody it — breaking fences, multiplying without permission, refusing to stay where they’re put.

What makes it masterful is how the theme is delivered at every level. It’s in the dialogue, it’s in the character arcs, and it’s in the spectacle. The whole film is a debate about whether humans can control nature, and every time, nature wins.

You can strip away the CGI, the set pieces, even the John Williams score, and the story would still hold, because its meaning is so strong. But, you know… don’t. That’s where all the fun is.

Theme gives your story meaning, but tone gives it truth. The next movie shows us how to tell a serious story with realism and restraint.

Spotlight — How to Portray a Serious Topic with Realism

This is a film about journalists uncovering systemic abuse in the Catholic Church, a story so heavy it demands honesty, detail, and patience.

Conversations here don’t always jump straight to the point. People actually say “hi” and “how are you?” Sometimes they stumble, hesitate, circle back. The rhythm of real speech. And it works, because the realism builds trust. It convinces us we’re watching truth unfold, not a screenplay straining for effect.

Remember the rule of arriving late and leaving early? Forget it. Rules are only useful if they help your story. In Spotlight, lingering matters. A pause before a source opens up, a quiet beat after an interview ends, the silence of a newsroom at night.

That space carries weight. It reminds us that behind every fact and every headline, there are lives, traumas, and communities on the line.

This is how you portray a serious topic without sensationalizing it: you respect it. You slow down when it asks you to. You find the story’s organic pacing — and you let that pacing do the storytelling.

And then sometimes, restraint isn’t the answer at all. Sometimes, the best way to tackle a serious subject is to laugh.

The Big Short — How to Balance a Serious Topic with Comedy

On paper, The Big Short shouldn’t work. A two-hour breakdown of subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, and the collapse of the global economy?

That’s the kind of thing you’d expect in a dry documentary, not a hit Hollywood film. Most people don’t want to sit through a lecture on the 2008 Financial Crisis. Even if they should.

But Adam McKay makes it work by pairing information with comedy. He knows the subject is overwhelming, so instead of weighing the audience down, he throws them a lifeline: humour.

Margot Robbie explains mortgage bonds from a bathtub. Anthony Bourdain compares them to day-old halibut in a stew. Ryan Gosling breaks the fourth wall with slick, sarcastic confidence. Each gag delivers a chunk of exposition and keeps us laughing while we learn.

The comedy doesn’t undercut the seriousness. If anything, it sharpens it. We laugh, we get it, and then the punch lands harder when we realise this absurd system wrecked millions of lives. The film’s tonal whiplash is intentional. It mirrors the insanity of the real events, where greed and jargon disguised devastation.

That’s the lesson here: when you’re writing about a heavy subject, don’t just think about what you’re saying — think about how your audience can actually hear it. Comedy becomes the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.

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And finally, a film that manages to be both sincere and ridiculous, heartfelt and hilarious.

The Princess Bride — A Fairy Tale and the Parody of a Fairy Tale

Despite William Goldman insisting he meant to write a straight-up fairy tale, The Princess Bride is so much more. It’s the fairy tale you grew up with — and at the same time, the parody of that very tale.

It gives you every cliché in the book: the dashing hero, the beautiful maiden, the evil prince, the sword fight at the cliff’s edge. And yet, somehow, it plays them both ways, heartfelt and absurd all at once.

Take the “true love” romance between Westley and Buttercup. It’s as cheesy as it comes — “As you wish” — and yet it’s genuinely touching. Or the duel between Westley and Inigo Montoya. On the surface, it’s swashbuckling fun. But then you layer in Inigo’s quips, Westley’s smug wit, and the fact that both men are too honourable to cheat, and suddenly it’s a wink at the entire genre.

Compare this to Shrek. DreamWorks’ ogre pulls off a fairy tale parody by flipping everything upside down. The princess farts, the noble steed is a donkey, and the villain is a short king with anger issues. The Princess Bride takes a different approach: it gives you the beats straight, but plays them with such knowing charm that you can’t help laughing while you swoon.

And that’s the real magic here. The Princess Bride is deeply sincere and deeply ridiculous in the same breath. It’s like Goldman and Rob Reiner cracked some tonal code the rest of us are still trying to figure out. I’ll be honest: after watching the film, reading the screenplay, Goldman’s essay about it, and Cary Elwes’ As You Wish, I still don’t quite understand how they pulled it off.

But maybe that’s the point. It’s a miracle of tone, the kind of once-in-a-lifetime alchemy that can’t be reverse-engineered. And if you’re a fan of the film (and really, who isn’t?), Elwes’ As You Wish is worth picking up. It’s a love letter to the movie and to the joy of making something that feels timeless.

I hope you find these picks useful — every one of them is worth watching, rewatching, or reading in script form if you can get your hands on it. And if you’ve got your own take or a lesson you’ve learned from any of these films, I’d love to hear it. Drop it in the comments and let’s keep the conversation going.

It’s the voice.

The way they tell stories. The energy, the humour, the enthusiasm, and the curiosity they bring to the mic.

That’s what keeps people coming back, not the niche.

A lot of Substack “growth” gurus will tell you to find your niche. They’re not wrong. Having a clear topic with a clear audience is a marketing superpower.

But here’s the thing: marketing comes after creating. If your niche is killing your creativity, it’s the wrong niche. Let go of the idea of building for a market and just write what you can write well. Your enthusiasm will keep people hooked longer than any search-optimised topic ever will.

The film industry has gone through this same shift. The old advice for screenwriters was: “Learn to write a genre.” If you became a solid horror or action writer, producers would call you for that genre. And that’s still decent advice. But in the last five years, the bigger advice is: write so your voice comes through. Your unique voice and perspective are your real unique selling point.

Niche-chasing can backfire. You pick something because it’s trending, or because you think it’ll sell, but you don’t actually care about it. The writing feels flat. You burn out. And the audience you were chasing can tell you’re faking it.

My own Substack started as a pure screenwriting craft blog. Then it shifted. Now it’s film history, mythology, cultural essays, and yes, still screenwriting craft when it fits. And it will probably keep shifting. I’m not finding my voice — I developed that in five years of screenwriting. I’m finding the subjects I can write about well.

Niches matter, especially when you’re ready to market. But if you build your niche on a dull, underdeveloped voice, it’s useless. People will click, but they won’t stay.

Build the voice first. Write in a way only you can write. People will follow you from topic to topic because the niche is you.

Your niche is your voice.

The first time I encountered Twin Peaks, I was nine years old. My sister was watching it on VHS. I don’t remember which episode it was, but I do remember how it made me feel.

Cherry pie. Cosy interiors. Quirky townsfolk. A wholesome FBI agent who spoke like he stepped out of a children’s book. I loved it.

Then came the other part: eerie music. Brutal murders. A girl wrapped in plastic. Strange camera angles and dark woods. I was terrified.

I told my sister to shout when the scary bit was over, and ran back to my room.

Twin Peaks gave me two feelings at once. A longing and a fear.

I didn't understand that duality at the time. It's what kept me both fascinated and away from horror stories for nearly a decade.

Then, when I was 20, I decided to face the fear.

It was still before the golden age of TV. I wanted to experience a great show, sure, but also to conquer that strange reaction I'd had as a kid. I watched it alone, in a pitch-black room, night after night. I came out changed.

Ever since, I’ve loved scary stories. I’ve been curious about dreams, symbols, Tibet, trauma, and coffee. Twin Peaks opened up a door in my head and never closed it.

And it gave me the small town I’d been looking for.

The Town as Psyche

In this series, we’ve been unpacking the myth of the American small town — the illusion of peace, purity, and decency. Twin Peaks is the deepest cut yet. It doesn’t show us the cracks in the myth. It shows us what the myth was hiding all along.

This isn’t a town fighting to keep evil out.

It’s a town pretending it wasn’t already there.

The diner, the high school, the log cabins, the police station. They all feel familiar. Americana turned up to eleven. But they also feel slightly… off. Not fake, but symbolic.

Like something from a dream you’re half-remembering.

Like rooms in a subconscious mind.

The log cabins speak to rustic stability, but they’re also sites of isolation, of hiding, of things that happen out of view.

The high school is the illusion of innocence. The pristine surface of youth, all cheerleaders and hallway crushes, school dances and letterman jackets. But beneath the veneer: secrets, addiction, prostitution, and violence.

The sheriff’s station is the ego of Twin Peaks — the part of the mind that tries to keep everything orderly and comprehensible. With its wood-panelled warmth, friendly officers, and endless coffee, it believes in the rules. It believes that with enough filing cabinets and walkie-talkies, you can keep chaos at bay.

But it’s also naïve. It doesn’t understand the forces moving beneath the surface. When dreams and nightmares begin to seep through the seams of the town, the station - like the ego - is powerless to contain them.

Everything is real and unreal. Literal and metaphorical. Nothing is just what it seems.

Twin Peaks isn’t just a town. It’s a psyche.

This is horror through the lens of Freud and Lynch. Not a monster creeping in from the woods, but the monster inside your house, your father, your self.

Where Jaws warns us of denial, and First Blood warns us of control, Twin Peaks warns us of repression.

Laura Palmer and the Lie of Innocence

The story starts with a tragedy. A girl has died.

Washed up on the shore. Wrapped in plastic.

Laura Palmer was the image of the perfect small-town girl. Blonde, popular, homecoming queen. Volunteered at Meals on Wheels, delivering food to the elderly and homebound. A model daughter. A local angel.

But her death doesn’t just leave a hole, it bursts a dam. Because Laura was the pressure valve of this town. She absorbed the secrets.

Her death is the end of an illusion. And the beginning of a reckoning.

Her father descends into fits of grief and confusion, his body language cracking open something primal and wrong.
Her mother sinks into an eerie stupor. Not denial exactly, but a kind of catatonic dissociation.
Her boyfriend starts punching walls, unable to reconcile the Laura he knew with the one being revealed.
Her best friend becomes obsessed, combing through Laura’s diary, trying to piece together someone she clearly never really knew.

Because they all thought they knew Laura. Just not the version everyone else did.

Laura had other lives. Secret lives. Dangerous ones. And so did everyone else.

Split Selves, Hidden Wounds

Twin Peaks is a town of doubles.

The Sheriff keeps law and order, but he’s also having an affair with a widow — a seemingly grieving woman who turns out to be more dangerous than she lets on.

The Log Lady is both comic relief and oracle. Donna, the good girl, becomes a noir detective. Audrey, the flirt, turns spy. Leland, the grieving father, is also… well. Let’s not spoil everything.

Everyone wears a mask. Sometimes two.

Sometimes they don’t know which is the mask.

This is repression turned community-wide. The town prides itself on wholesomeness. That’s the brand. But the cost of that brand is secrecy.

And secrecy feeds shame. Shame leads to repression.

This is the American small town as a pressure cooker.

When one valve fails - when Laura dies - the steam starts leaking everywhere. The sins people kept buried now surface. And that’s when the woods begin to whisper.

Dreams, Symbols, and the Red Room

The deeper Cooper investigates, the further we move from realism. Dreams take over. Prophecies, visions, backwards-talking spirits. The Red Room. The Giant. The Owls.

At first, it might feel like the show is falling off the rails.

But it’s not. It’s revealing its true language.

In Twin Peaks, dreams aren’t breaks from the story. They are the story.

This was unheard of on TV. In 1990, mainstream television didn’t offer cryptic backwards-talking spirits or prophetic dwarfs. It offered case-of-the-week police procedurals. And sitcoms. And game shows.

Twin Peaks dropped something from another world into America’s living rooms.

That said, it didn’t spawn an army of copycats. It wasn’t until The Sopranos and Lost, a decade later, that longform serialised TV caught on — and even those shows never fully embraced Lynch’s symbolic density.

The Woods are Not Safe

Twin Peaks is beautiful.

The snow. The mountains. The evergreens. The waterfalls. The coffee.

But the woods are not safe.

They hold something ancient. Not evil in a cartoonish way, but unknowable. Like the repressed memory of a nation. Or a nightmare passed down through generations.

Lynch never tells us exactly what it is. That makes it worse. And better.

We’re used to stories where the town is safe and the woods are dangerous.

In Twin Peaks, the town is the woods.

This danger doesn’t arrive or invade. It emerges. From inside. From within the town’s homes. From the people they trusted.

The show hints at this: that what we call evil may not be a foreign force at all. That sometimes, what we fear most is already sitting across the table.

Not Just a Murder Story

At the time, viewers were asking: “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

And Twin Peaks answered that question. But it also showed that maybe it was the wrong one. Because the deeper question wasn’t who did it. It was:

What kind of place allowed this to happen?
What did Laura carry for everyone else?
And what are we still refusing to see?

It’s not that Twin Peaks turned murder mysteries into metaphors.

It’s that it peeled back the surface and found something rotten underneath — not just in the killer, but in the community that surrounded her.

The Values That Broke the Town

Across this series, we’ve been lifting the veil on the myth of the American small town.

Jaws showed us how a community’s need to stay "open for business" led to blood in the water. First Blood showed us how law and order, unchecked, could create chaos instead of control.

Twin Peaks goes even deeper.

It shows how the very values that hold these places together — hard work, politeness, decency, trust — can become tools for silence. For self-denial. For repression.

The ideal of the close-knit community, where everyone knows your name, can also become a cage, where you must perform who you are, and bury who you really are.
The desire to maintain peace can lead to a refusal to look, to speak, to confront.
The yearning for beauty and safety can blind people to pain — until it erupts.

In Twin Peaks, no one wants to talk about Laura’s real life. Because that would mean admitting something ugly beneath their picture-perfect world.

The cost of that repression is high. And it doesn’t stay buried.

More to Come

This is the third part of the Myth of the Small Town.

There will be more.

In the autumn, we’ll return with new entries in the series:
Fargo. Stranger Things. Cars. And others still to be chosen.

Because the small town isn’t just a place.
It’s a symbol. A battleground. A mirror.
And there are still more stories to tell.

When I was a kid, I thought First Blood was a war movie. Big guns, helicopters, soldiers — it sat on the same VHS shelf as Commando and Predator.

I watched it expecting carnage. What I got instead was confusion. Why are the cops so mean to him? He didn’t do anything.

More than a decade passed before I returned to it. This time with a friend, expecting a bit of ‘80s macho cheese — something loud and silly and out of touch. But within the first twenty minutes, we weren’t smirking. We were transfixed.

What we saw wasn’t just an action film. It was a brutal portrait of trauma, alienation, and small-town control mechanisms spiralling into violence.

This is why historical context matters. It’s what transformed this film from a guilty pleasure into one of the most psychologically and politically potent American films of the decade.

Let’s talk about that context.

A Country at War With Itself

When First Blood hit cinemas in 1982, the United States was still reeling from the long shadow of the Vietnam War. That war had split the country. There was mass opposition from the public, but support too, especially early on. By the time the final helicopters fled Saigon in 1975, the war was widely seen as a mistake. A loss. A tragedy.

But what do you do with the men who fought it?

The returning soldiers were broken in ways the country wasn’t ready to see. Many came home with PTSD before we even had the term for it. They had been trained to kill, stripped of autonomy, pushed into jungles, and then dropped back into small-town America like ghosts.

Some towns welcomed them back with honour. But some were angry, especially the remnants of the anti-war movement who had, in some cases, turned their frustration toward the troops rather than the people who sent them. “Baby killer” wasn’t just a slur — it was a guilt-ridden projection from a society desperate to distance itself from its complicity.

Rambo is the living embodiment of that contradiction: a man who fought for a country that now wants to forget him.

The Stranger Comes to Town

Hope, Washington. A sleepy, forested town where flags wave cleanly and sidewalks are swept.

John Rambo walks in looking for an old friend — a fellow soldier. He finds out he’s died of cancer, caused by Agent Orange exposure. That’s the last connection he had to someone who understood him.

Then he walks into town.

Sheriff Teasle sees a drifter in a combat jacket and long hair. It’s ambiguous whether he clocks Rambo as a veteran or as an anti-war hippie — at the time, both often wore similar clothing. It doesn’t matter. Either way, Rambo is a threat. A disruption to the image Teasle wants to preserve. He doesn’t see a man. He sees a symbol. A reminder.

Teasle offers Rambo a ride — not into town, but out of it. “You can grab something to eat a couple of miles up the highway.” When Rambo, quietly and politely, turns back toward the town, Teasle arrests him.

He wants to maintain order. But what begins as a small act of control rapidly escalates.

When Order Becomes Oppression

In the jail cell, the abuse begins.

Rambo says almost nothing. He doesn’t threaten, doesn’t resist. But the officers manhandle him, beat him, mock him, and eventually try to shave him with a straight razor. That moment triggers a flashback to his time as a POW, and he snaps.

He escapes, flees into the forest, and becomes what they feared.

But the irony is brutal: they made him this.

Teasle didn’t need to make an arrest. The officers didn’t need to assault him. But once the town’s image of peace and control was challenged, they couldn’t stop themselves from escalating. That’s what First Blood shows us: how control becomes a justification for abuse, and how abuse creates the very chaos it claims to prevent.

And the town that prides itself on law and order becomes a war zone.

The Monster They Built

Rambo was made by the same values that now reject him: duty, discipline, obedience. The town wants safety, order, and protection from threats. But those are the same ideals that made men like Rambo in the first place.

He was trained, broken, and rebuilt by American hands to be a weapon. To destroy villages like this one. To burn them to the ground in the name of safety and democracy.

And now, having created that monster, America wants nothing to do with him.

There’s a brutal symmetry here: the government shipped him off to kill strangers. And now his own country turns him into a stranger.

It’s not just a personal betrayal. It’s national.

Survival, Not Slaughter

Here’s what makes the film more than just a revenge fantasy: Rambo doesn’t kill a single person. The only death comes when a deputy leans out of a helicopter and fires at Rambo, who hurls a rock to defend himself. The chopper shakes, and the deputy falls to his death.

It’s a dark moment. But it’s not murder.

The symbolism is rich here. A soldier with no weapons throws a rock at a machine of war. Primitive against industrial. Nature against technology.

It’s an echo of the Vietnam War itself, where guerrilla fighters on home turf beat the world’s most powerful army.

That’s why First Blood hurts. Because it’s not about vengeance. It’s about a man trying not to fight. Trying to go home. And discovering that home doesn’t exist anymore.

No Way Home

Rambo’s breakdown at the end is one of the most powerful moments in ‘80s cinema.

He’s bloody, cornered, half mad with grief and rage, and he starts to talk. About the war. About losing his friends. About the government abandoning him. About being yelled at in the street. About not knowing how to live anymore.

“I can’t even get a job parking cars!” he shouts.

This is the final myth shattered. Not only is the small town not safe, it’s hostile. And not only has the government failed to protect its citizens, it’s failed to protect the people it sent to fight for it.

Rambo doesn’t want to kill. He wants to disappear. But the town won’t let him.

Because that’s what these myths do: they chew up real people to preserve a fiction.

The Rebrand

What’s more American than rewriting the uncomfortable parts? Rambo was transformed to silence the critique he once embodied.

The quiet, grief-stricken Rambo of First Blood was turned into something else entirely. In the sequels, he becomes an icon: shirtless, greased, bandana tight, firing machine guns from the hip while explosions bloom behind him.

The trauma is gone. The pain is gone. Now he’s a fantasy, the righteous weapon, unleashed in the name of American might.

President Reagan even name-checked him. “Boy, I saw Rambo last night. I know what to do next time this happens,” he joked in response to a hostage crisis.

The irony is astonishing. The man abandoned by his country becomes the poster child for its power. The warning becomes the wish.

America copes, not by confronting its failures, but by mythologising them.

The original First Blood ends with a man breaking down under the weight of everything his country has done to him. Rambo II begins with him sent back to Vietnam to win the war properly this time. A cinematic do-over for a nation that couldn’t face its own shame.

But the original film still stands. A scar the sequels couldn’t cover.

A reminder of what happens when a society silences pain in the name of order — and gets the chaos it deserves.

Next week, we’ll visit Twin Peaks. A murder-mystery soap opera that starts in the key of wholesome but descends into something mythic and subconscious. If Jaws was about ignoring threats, and First Blood was about provoking them, Twin Peaks is about the things we bury. Repression, trauma, and how the rot creeps in from underneath.

See you there.

The diners, the churches, the kids on bikes. The fields and forests. The industrial buildings. The tight-knit communities with secrets under the surface.

I knew these places. I lived in one. And I was fascinated by the stories set in them.

There’s something ancient and tribal about a small town. Even if you live in a metropolis, you rarely relate to the whole thing. You relate to a borough. A block. A neighbourhood. A handful of faces you see often enough to know their rhythms. A small town is a community you can actually hold in your mind. And that makes it the perfect storytelling unit.

We’re all a little American now. Whether you live in Hungary, Wales, or anywhere else on the planet, the rhythms of American life have shaped our own. We listen to Taylor Swift, eat at McDonald’s, and watch the Super Bowl halftime show.

We talk about Black Lives Matter and the legacy of slavery — even in countries with vastly different histories. We grew up with Hollywood in the background, sure, but also with American brands, values, and conflicts becoming part of our everyday language. The American Dream may not be our own, but we all know what it means.

We know the white picket fence. We understand why the teenager rebels against their father, why the sheriff tips his hat, why the mom packs lunches into brown paper bags. We’ve seen these stories.

That’s what makes the American small town such a potent myth.

So over the next few weeks, I’m doing a short series on the American small town as myth. And how that myth is exposed, cracked, and reimagined through story. We’ll look at three: a movie from the '70s, a movie from the '80s, and a TV show from the '90s. You probably know what they are.

But we’ll start with the oldest—and still one of the sharpest.

We’re going back to Amity Island.

The Dream of the Small Town

The small town is America’s version of Eden. A tight-knit community where everyone knows your name. Safe streets, honest work, decent people. It’s the town fair, the high school football game, the Fourth of July parade. It’s the promise that if you work hard, follow the rules, and raise your kids right, things will turn out okay.

In stories, the small town often functions as a character in itself. It’s not just a backdrop—it’s a symbol. Of tradition. Of family. Of the idea that America can still be wholesome and good.

It’s the American Dream on a local scale.

And like any good myth, it needs protecting.

That’s where the trouble starts.

Amity, as you know, means friendship.

Amity Island is the perfect summer town. Blue skies out of an Andrew Wyeth painting. Cheery music. Tourists in bright swimsuits. Kids splashing in the surf. It’s not just small, it’s picturesque.

Then a girl goes missing. Her body washes up, or rather, what’s left of it. Shark attack.

Police Chief Brody wants to close the beaches. But the mayor pushes back. The summer season is just beginning.

A summer town needs summer dollars.

The coroner, who first ruled it a shark attack, suddenly calls it a boating accident.

Brody isn’t from here. He moved from New York, hoping for a quieter life. But in this town, the old boys' network runs deep. The mayor, the medical examiner, and the local elites close ranks.

Their instinct isn’t to protect the community. It’s to protect the illusion.

Then a second attack. A boy named Alex Kintner. Blood in the water, in front of everyone. His mother prints flyers offering a reward for the shark.

Now, denial gets harder. Brody insists on beach closures. Some in the community agree. Others still resist. They’ve built their identity on the safety and wholesomeness of this town. And they’ll keep that story alive, no matter the cost.

Even after more deaths, the beaches reopen for the Fourth of July — the most patriotic, most symbolic day of the year. This town doesn’t just want money. It wants to be seen as the kind of place that has nothing to hide.

But the shark returns, and this time, the attack is witnessed by hundreds. Panic erupts. The illusion is shattered. Only then, finally, does the mayor relent. He agrees to hire Quint, the hardened shark hunter, and the expedition to kill the beast begins.

The Shark Isn’t the Only Monster

Jaws came out in 1975, at a time when Americans were losing faith in their institutions. The country had just pulled out of the Vietnam War. Young men were drafted to fight, and many came home dead—or broken—without a clear reason why they’d been sent in the first place. The government’s case for the war had been built on lies.

Then came Watergate. In 1972, President Nixon’s team broke into the Democratic Party’s headquarters. The administration lied about it, covered it up, and obstructed the investigation. When the truth came out, Nixon resigned in disgrace. Trust in government hit rock bottom.

That’s the world Jaws was born into.

The mayor of Amity, Larry Vaughn, is the face of local power. He cares more about the image of the town than the safety of its people. He suppresses the truth. He pressures the coroner to change his report. He gaslights Brody. He silences the experts. He keeps the beaches open, even as the death toll rises.

He’s not just a fictional mayor. He’s Nixon.

He’s the lies around Vietnam. He’s the American institution that says, “Everything’s fine,” when blood is already in the water.

A few years after the film’s release, a journalist named Frank Mankiewicz asked Fidel Castro why he was reading Jaws, an American Commercial Thriller. Castro replied, “No, you’re wrong. This isn’t an American commercial thriller. This is a marvellous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Capitalism vs. Community

The myth of the small town says that in a crisis, people will come together. That they’ll take care of one another. That good, honest values will win out.

But in Jaws, when a deadly threat appears, the town does the opposite.

Instead of hiring the best shark hunter immediately, they cut corners. Instead of listening to Hooper, the scientist, they mock him. Instead of empowering Brody, their own police chief, they sideline him. They kill a tiger shark and claim victory, even though Hooper insists it's the wrong one.

Why? Because it’s easier. It’s easier to protect the summer profits than to face the truth.

If Amity’s values were real—if community really came first—they would have closed the beaches after the first attack. Brought in experts. Solved the problem. Hell, with the right spin, they might’ve turned the shark into a marketing opportunity.

Instead, they gamble with lives to preserve an illusion. They lose tourists. They lose local trust. And people die.

That’s the real shark in this movie. Not the one in the water—the one swimming beneath the surface of the American dream.

The idea that image matters more than truth. That profit matters more than people.

The town’s values collapse under pressure. The myth breaks. The mask slips.

And all that’s left is the blood.

Next week, we’ll look at another small town myth: the good citizen, the honourable veteran, and what happens when the system turns against the man it created.

See you in Hope, Washington.

But cafés haven’t just hosted ideas. They’ve started revolutions.

Constantinople

The world’s first coffee houses opened in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, in what is now Istanbul. They were places of conversation, storytelling, poetry, chess, backgammon, and debate.

Janissary revolts began in coffee houses. Political dissent brewed alongside the beans. So threatening were these spaces that several sultans issued edicts to close them down, not because they served coffee, but because they served ideas.

Clerics issued a fatwa against backgammon, saying if the sound of the dice grew so loud you couldn’t hear the Adhan (call to prayer), then the game had no place. But backgammon remained — alongside chess, more intellectual and revered — in the cafés of Istanbul. These were places to play, yes. But also to plot.

London

By the time coffee reached London in the 17th century, the idea had fully taken root. Each coffee house had its own character. You’d visit a different one depending on whether you were a stockbroker, a playwright, a scientist, or a philosopher. The London Stock Exchange began in a coffeehouse.

Board games were common here too, but so were newspaper clippings pinned to the walls, and self-styled ‘lectures’ from regulars who returned each day to hold court. In these “penny universities,” as they were known, for the price of a single cup of coffee, you could sit and hear a conversation about science, finance, philosophy, or politics. You could meet the people shaping those ideas — or become one of them.

Budapest

By 1900, there were more than 600 coffee houses in Budapest. In literary cafés, waiters (some of them aspiring writers themselves) kept bundles of paper — known as “dog’s tongues” — ready for anyone who wanted to write.

The most famous and the best of Hungary’s fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century poets, Endre Ady, said he couldn’t write anywhere other than a coffee house, ‘with people’s bustle and ideas and emotions all around’.

Head waiters were fonts of gossip and, more importantly, often extended informal lines of credit to regulars. As the Budapest saying went: “Every writer had their own café, and every café had its own writer.”

Frigyes Karinthy, the comic writer and journalist, once ran a very Hungarian experiment: he told a joke he’d made up in a Buda café, then crossed the river to Pest. Within an hour, someone told him the same (very mediocre) joke in another coffee house. That’s how fast information — and subversion — travelled in those spaces.

Which is exactly why future dictatorships, both fascist and communist, worked hard to shut them down. After the war, the Soviets closed most cafés. Of the hundreds once open, fewer than twenty remained. The cafés had been too effective and too dangerous.

And they had a history of that.

In 1848, a group of Hungarian students and poets gathered at the Pilvax Café in Budapest to draft their revolutionary demands. Among them was Sándor Petőfi, Hungary’s national poet and a leading voice for freedom. Together, they wrote the “12 Points” — a list of political demands calling for civil liberties, equality before the law, and an independent Hungarian government. They marched to a local printing press, took it over without resistance, and published the document uncensored. By nightfall, crowds had filled the streets. The Revolution had begun.

These three cities — centuries and cultures apart — all had something in common. Coffee didn’t just keep you awake. It kept your mind awake. Cafés became the physical architecture of thought.

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Even today, I watch students trade insights over laptops and annotated PDFs. I see artists and architects sketching. I hear startup pitches whispered over espresso and book club debates breaking out over flat whites.

Writers draft screenplays and novels at window seats. Marx wrote in the British Museum Reading Room, but Lenin plotted in Swiss cafés. J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book at The Elephant House in Edinburgh. Hemingway wrote in Paris cafés. Tarantino reportedly wrote much of Pulp Fiction in LA diners and cafés. Aaron Sorkin once said he couldn’t write at home — he needed the white noise of a public place to focus.

Maybe it’s the hum of conversation, the clink of mugs. The way solitude feels more comfortable when it’s next to other people. Or maybe it’s the unspoken understanding that you’re allowed to sit there for hours, if you order a drink now and then.

A café offers a kind of third space. Not home. Not work. Not a bar. Somewhere in between, where new thoughts and new friendships can take shape. Some of the best ideas come when your mind is open and you’re just watching people. Sometimes just being around ideas is enough to spark your own.

And it’s worth closing your laptop and taking off your headphones every now and then. Join the conversation. Someone might say something that helps unlock a scene or solve a plot hole. Make friends with the barista — they might just connect you with the exact person you need to meet. It still happens. You just have to be present enough to catch it.

So here’s to the coffee houses. Then and now. May your refills be strong and your ideas even stronger.

What is an open loop? It’s an unanswered question. A piece of unresolved tension. A mystery. It can be big or small, it might span a single scene or an entire story. It’s the feeling of needing to know what happens next.

It’s most obvious in thrillers: who killed who, what’s in the box, will they escape in time? But open loops are everywhere. In comedy. In drama. In nonfiction. In academic writing. They are one of the fundamental tools in the writer’s kit.

You might be wondering, how is this different from setup and payoff? That’s a great question. The open loop is a subcategory. A kind of setup/payoff, one specifically about questions and answers. You set up a question, and then you pay it off with an answer. That’s different from, say, a joke callback, a repeated line with new meaning, or Chekhov’s gun. Those are payoffs, but not necessarily loops. A loop invites curiosity. Curiosity builds tension. And tension makes people pay attention.

The Mechanics of Open Loops

Good stories don’t just create tension. They sustain it.

That’s what open loops do. They make a promise to the audience: keep reading, keep watching, and you’ll get the answer.

There are big loops (Will Frodo destroy the ring? Will Ross and Rachel get together?) and smaller ones (Will they escape the cave? Will he tell her how he feels? Will she find the key?).

The trick is layering them. If you close one, you open another. And you don’t always need to close them right away. You can build to a delayed payoff or even answer one loop by opening another. Like Russian dolls.

The goal isn’t to withhold information. It’s to sequence it. To give the reader or viewer exactly what they need to stay engaged.

Learn by Reading

If you want to understand how open loops work, the best way is to study stories that use them well.

Take The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown is a master of this technique. He even calls them “promises to the reader” — the idea that, by the end, you’ll get answers to the big questions. The book is absolutely packed with loops, layered masterfully across scales. It’s also the most unput-downable book I’ve ever read.

But instead of breaking it down for you, I’ll leave you with some homework:

Reread The Da Vinci Code (or any book that kept you hooked), and analyze it for loops:

• Every time a question is raised, jot it down.

• Note when it’s answered: next scene, next chapter, next act?

• Did the intensity of the answer match the excitement of the question?

• Were any answers delayed too long, or delivered after a stronger scene made them feel flat?

• Were there any expired loops — questions you forgot or stopped caring about before they were resolved?

Once you start looking, you’ll see how expertly the story manipulates your curiosity. And how you can do the same in your own writing.

Case Studies

Friends

Let’s take a closer look at how open loops function in a comedy, specifically Friends, season 4.

The storyline begins in episode 5 when Chandler spots Kathy. Immediately, several questions are raised: Will they have a romantic relationship? Will he ask her out? The answer to the latter comes quickly — yes, he does. Will she say yes? No — she’s dating Joey. So, will Chandler move on and be just friends with her? Or can he get the girl and keep his friendship?

A few scenes later, we see them bonding over a shared interest, staying up all night talking. That answers our question: no, he’s not getting over her. He’s falling harder. New loop: What will Chandler do with these feelings?

Joey, unaware, invites Chandler to hang out with them. Chandler bails. Joey assumes he just doesn’t like Kathy. Now the situation gains a second strand: not just Chandler’s feelings for Kathy, but the pressure of loyalty to Joey. Chandler has a chance to tell the truth, but instead, he lies and says he doesn’t like her.

Will Chandler be able to suppress his feelings or come clean? Not quite. The episode ends with him overhearing them fooling around in Joey’s room. He goes to Monica and asks to sleep on her couch, heartbroken. The original questions remain unresolved — Will Chandler say anything? Can he move on? And a new one arises: What does Kathy feel? We only know Chandler’s side.

In the next episode, we get an answer to the question “Is he over her?” — definitely not. For her birthday, Chandler gets her a rare early edition of her favourite childhood book. Joey gets her a pen. Chandler gives Joey the rare gift to present as his own. A selfless, beautiful moment, and another act of concealment. New question: Will Kathy find out? And if she does, what will she do?

Kathy figures out the book was from Chandler and thanks him for it. She says, “You must really like Joey to go to all that trouble for him.” It’s a brilliant moment of subtext. What she’s really saying is: you must really like me to go to all that trouble. Chandler has a chance to bring that subtext to the surface, to say something real. Instead, he replies, “Yeah, he’s my best friend.” Subtext: I know you know... but nothing can happen between us. Kathy nods, and in that moment, she understands how he feels. And Chandler, at least faintly, senses that the feeling is mutual. Which leads to the next question: will they both suppress their feelings? Will they tell Joey the truth? Or will they cross a line behind his back?

In episode 7, Joey is seeing another woman. Chandler hopes this means a breakup is coming. New question: Will Kathy be free?

Kathy cuts Chandler’s hair. They share an intimate moment. Joey calls to say he’s stuck with the other girl. Chandler and Kathy kiss.

This resolves multiple loops that have been running since episode 5. Chandler won’t come clean — he’ll betray Joey. Kathy returns his feelings. But new questions rush in: will they go public? Will Chandler confess? Or will he back out?

Chandler suggests they pretend nothing happened. Kathy begins to say that what they have is something… special? We’ll never know what she was about to say, because Chandler cuts her off. Another missed moment. A new layer of tension.

Eventually, Chandler confesses to the group what happened, and they push him to tell Joey. He does. Joey tells him Kathy just broke up with him, and he had a feeling there was another guy. Chandler admits it’s him. He also admits to the kiss. Joey is furious. Their friendship is broken. That loop closes with emotional weight: betrayal, fallout, consequences.

In the next episode, the damage lingers. Joey won’t speak to Chandler. He’s moving out. Chandler is now dating Kathy. Joey sees them together, and the tension between the three becomes unbearable. Chandler wants to prove that Joey’s friendship still matters, so he agrees to sit silently inside a large wooden box as penance.

Kathy visits while he’s in the box. She tells him — or rather, tells the box — that she doesn’t want to come between the two of them. She’ll move back to Chicago. Chandler stays silent the entire time. He doesn’t chase after her. He doesn't speak. He chooses friendship. Joey watches this, moved by the sacrifice. He opens the box and gives Chandler his blessing.

Almost every loop we started with has now been resolved. Some played out over scenes, others over episodes. None of these questions were ever asked aloud — not by the characters, anyway — but they were alive in the viewer’s mind, guiding our attention, pulling us forward.

This is the power of open loops. Not just in thrillers or mysteries, but in any good story.

The Silk Roads and Nonfiction

Good nonfiction also uses open loops.

In the preface to The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan argues that our Eurocentric view of history is wrong — that the real drivers of civilisation were the connections between China and the Mediterranean. The big loop: Is the legacy of the Silk Roads more important than Europe’s? (I’m tempted to say yes, but you should really read it and decide for yourself.)

Even at the chapter level, Frankopan knows how to wield a loop. He ends The Road to Heaven with Christians waiting for the mythical Prester John. But the rumble they hear isn’t a Christian army. It isn't salvation.

It’s the Mongols.

What will the Mongols do in China, Central Asia, and the Middle East? We turn the page. And learn the answer to that question in The Road to Hell.

He then raises another: How did they govern such vast lands? Why did people submit to them? The answer comes a few pages later, where he shows how the Mongols invested in infrastructure, earned goodwill, and revitalised cities like Samarkand.

It’s a loop chain, one question leading to another, and another until you’ve read 80 pages without noticing.

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Closing the Loops

We hate unresolved things. But we hate bad resolution even more.

A satisfying loop needs two things:

• Logic — the answer has to make sense based on what came before.

• Intensity — the answer has to hit with as much force as the question.

Logic is pretty straightforward. If Friends ended with Ross marrying Darth Vader after he force-choked Rachel, we’d technically have closure — but not the satisfying kind. The drama would be sky-high, but the logic would be nonexistent.

Intensity matters just as much. Clickbait headlines are great at opening loops. They know how to lure you in — “You won’t believe what happened next!” — but then hit you with something like “she bought the wrong milk.” They set off a starting pistol and deliver a gentle stroll.

You also have to watch the order in which you resolve your questions. Imagine raising a small spark of curiosity, then lighting two Roman candles before circling back to your flickering match. That payoff’s going to fizzle. It’s not just too late, it’s been overshadowed.

And even worse: building a towering bonfire of anticipation and then smothering it with a wet rag. If your story asks for full emotional investment, but pays it off with something forgettable or weak, your audience won’t just feel disappointed — they’ll start to distrust you. It’s like brandishing a sword and then using it to spread jam. Sure, it technically works. But it's not what we came for.

So when you open a loop, follow through. Match the energy. Pay it off with care, timing, and intention. When you light the fuse, don’t deliver a sparkler; deliver the fireworks.

Humans are wired to want answers. Writers are architects of curiosity.

The open loop is one of the most powerful tools you have. Learn how to use it. And how to resolve it.

Next week, we’ll be switching gears a bit and talking about coffee houses as places where ideas are exchanged — and where revolutions begin. From 18th-century Budapest to Enlightenment France to the screenwriting corners of Cardiff, cafés have always been where stories begin.

See you there.

What is episodic TV, you ask? It’s when one episode contains a complete story. House, The X-Files, Psych are all great examples. House cures a patient. Mulder uncovers a paranormal phenomenon. Shawn solves a murder. All in one episode. Then they move on to a completely new case next week.

This format was popular before on-demand services, back when missing an episode meant you just picked up the next week and still understood everything. I’d argue that’s still valuable today. Life gets busy. You skip a show for a few weeks, and with a serialised series, you’ve lost the thread completely.

So what’s a serialised show? It’s where one story stretches across an entire season or even multiple seasons. Yellowstone, Stranger Things, The Wire. Incredible, complex storytelling. And highly bingeable. That’s why they became the dominant mode in the streaming era.

But here’s the question: are we over bingeing?

Maybe not entirely, but we’re past its peak. I used to binge constantly in the 2010s. Then, about five years ago, I just… stopped. Not as a conscious decision. I simply couldn’t commit to so many hours of so many series. The algorithm showed me one thing. My flatmate, brother, best friend, and colleague all recommended different ten-hour epics. It became exhausting.

Instead, I found myself putting on a two-hour film. I’d walk away satisfied. I started something. I finished it. No strings attached. No cliffhangers. No long-term commitment. Just one closed loop.

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And that’s the heart of it: open loops vs. closed loops.

An open loop is any unfinished task. Any unanswered question. It creates tension. It lingers. The email you haven’t replied to. The cake you haven’t baked, despite buying all the ingredients. The appointment you keep forgetting to set up. Our brains hate open loops. They pull at us. They build pressure. Too many, and we burn out.

So what happens when our entertainment becomes another open loop?

Another chore. Another incomplete task sitting in our “Continue Watching” row. Even when we’re not looking at Netflix, that show is there in the back of our minds. Unresolved.

Studies have shown that binge-watching can lead to increased stress and decreased enjoyment. And the streamers have noticed. That’s why we’re seeing more shows return to a weekly episode model.

But the release schedule is only half of it. The structure of the show has to support it. That’s why I’m advocating for more closed-loop entertainment. More episodic TV. So we can enjoy one complete story in one sitting. So we can walk away satisfied, even after just 45 minutes.

And clearly, I’m not the only one. When House was added to streamers, it surged into Netflix’s global Top 10, landing at number seven. It was the most-watched show of its time, but its unexpected streaming comeback hints at something more: a hunger for the comfort and satisfaction of episodic TV. Even Psych, a smaller cult hit, found renewed life and solid viewership on Netflix.

And episodic shows are still bingeable. You can absolutely watch three or four episodes in a row, but each one gives you a little hit of accomplishment. A dopamine bump. You finish something. You close a loop. And that feels good.

Do I want to eliminate serialised storytelling?

Absolutely not.

I love those long-arc shows. I’ve written one myself. I hope one day it gets made. I even plan to release it as a serialised novel, the way many Dickens and Dumas stories first appeared.

Some stories need time. They deserve long arcs. Big scope. Multiple seasons.

But we also deserve more moments of completion. More clean breaks. More small victories.

We deserve more closed loops.