Of all the remarkable aspects of Twin Peaks: The Return, perhaps the strangest is not something that is present, but something that’s absent: the utter lack of any recognizable psychology. Characters simply aren’t motivated by the familiar psychological archetypes and cliches that underpin almost all narrative entertainment, especially series-based television. It’s not so much that the plot is inscrutable or resistant to interpretation, but that characters react to what’s happening around them in ways that look and feel familiar, but which betray little if anything of what’s going on in their heads. As opposed to shows like House of Cards […]

“Baby, there’s no storm outside.” —from Take Shelter In his now classic book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Siegfried Kracauer looked for cinematic hints, clues and warnings about the rise of Naziism and Hitler in pre-War Germany. Published by Princeton University Press in 1947 — just two years after the end of the war — his book was among the first to interrogate the deep architecture of film as a psychological state, one that does not directly mirror but rather reflects in a distorted way the “secret history” of mass psychology that, in his […]

Although the Netflix series Stranger Things has received more mainstream attention, the Syfy series Channel Zero is arguably more unsettling and less predictable, and executed with a more determined vision. With six episodes this season (“Candle Cove”) and six in production for 2017 (“The No-End House”), the series has more in common with the French horror series Beyond the Walls (Shudder) in terms of its willingness to allow for slowness and its non-clichéd approach to characters. Both shows suggest the increasing prominence of, for lack of a better term, “weird fiction” — stories that treat horror as a kind of […]

We are approaching the 50th anniversary of the publication of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage (was it a printing error, or a pun?), the book that put the phrase on the map, and whose ideas McLuhan had first advanced in his 1964 book Understanding Media. There he argued that “the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” And, later: “Nobody is interested in TV until there are TV […]

The path that finally led to the making of The Removals — a feature-length paranoid lo-fi thriller and love story produced by Two Dollar Radio — was a very, very long and twisty one. As it probably is for many films. I spent five weeks in the summer of 2015 with an amazing crew and actors making a film that I had been dreaming about and plotting out in fits and starts since I was about 20-years old. And I’m 50 now. I basically had to unlearn everything I thought I knew about the creative process. Here are a few […]