STC’s Best of 2023

2023 was the first full year of my adult life in which I did not suffer from depression and anxiety. That’s pretty much the story of my year, full stop. I spent 365 days feeling happy. That’s unreal to me. I literally didn’t think it was possible for me. Yay!

My depression/anxiety had become quite debilitating in retrospect, and before I took a new med (ask your doctor if Rexulti is right for you!) starting in June last year, one of the biggest problems it caused for me was an inability to feel safe and comfortable experiencing new art. I’m a TV critic, and I’m determined to keep a roof over my family’s head, so I gutted through quite a bit, but this is the first year in a long time where I feel like my heart is open again.

So first I’d like to show off my favorite music of the year: ABSOLUTE BEST OF DAVID BOWIE: STARDUST EDITION, a 110-song playlist I made as an exercise. It covers every era and album, plus the major singles and collaborations, with an emphasis (of course) on the things I like best. I’ve listened to it nonstop since I made it. David Bowie is my favorite musician and the most life-changing artist I’ve ever encountered. I adore him so much but spent years away from his music. It felt like coming home.

(Just note that the original 1965 versio of “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving,” the all-in-one medley version of “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise),” and the Tin Machine song “You Belong in Rock n’ Roll,” which are on the playlist as it exists on my computer, aren’t available on Apple Music and they’re hard to find anywhere else. He’s really purged Tin Machine II for some reason!)

2023 is also notable for being the first (and second, and third) time I watched Cabaret. This film hit me like a freight train, from out of nowhere, like Nightbreed did in my teens and Velvet Goldmine in my 20s. I have never, never, never seen a musical theater performance like Liza Minnelli in that film. She makes even the other greats look like Clapton coming on stage after Hendrix. They’re not even playing the same instrument. I know that I’m corny and sentimental and lachrymose and prone to hyperbole, but watching her sing that final song is like looking at the face of god to me. Utterly poleaxed by this. Can’t get over it.

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Since I started watching new/new-to-me movies seriously again late last year, I’ve been keeping a running list. Not Letterboxd, that feels like homework to me and I need at least SOME of my media consumption to be a pastime, but it helps me keep track of what I’ve seen and what I’d like to see. My favorite movies of 2023 are:

  1. The Zone of Interest
  2. Skinamarink
  3. May December
  4. Godzilla Minus One
  5. Killers of the Flower Moon
  6. Oppenheimer
  7. Barbie
  8. M3GAN
  9. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
  10. probably The Outwaters (very mixed on this one but that ending is like nothing I’ve ever seen)

Still haven’t seen Poor Things though, which really seems up my alley.

Which brings us to the thing I’m qualified to talk about: television! Here’s my top 10 for the year. I’m very proud of how little it looks like any other critic’s (none of the big consensus faves are on mine bc i either don’t like or don’t watch them lol), but in general there was a ton of variety this year on critics’ best-of lists, which I think can only be good for TV and criticism. Everybody loves dramedies but me though.

  1. Dead Ringers (Prime)
  2. The Idol (HBO/Max)
  3. Copenhagen Cowboy (Netflix)
  4. Foundation (Apple TV+)
  5. Billions (Showtime/Paramount+)
  6. Fargo (FX/Hulu – reserving the right to raise this if the ending kills)
  7. The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix)
  8. The Wheel of Time (Prime)
  9. Perry Mason (HBO/Max)
  10. Silo (Apple TV+)

I have a piece coming out in the Los Angeles Review of Books about the lurid tone I like in a lot these shows, so that will be exciting.

I also watch AEW wrestling all the time. I don’t really care about its ups and downs, I always have a ball.

Finally, in terms of my own work, here’s what I’m proudest of:

My Los Angeles Review of Books debut, which is also the first time my wife Julia Gfrörer and I have collaborated on a prose piece together. It’s about one of our favorite genres: the sad sex movie, or to use Julia’s term, the Erotic Bummer.

Got my first film-related pitch into the Times, with this piece on Killers of the Flower Moon and Scorsese protagonists.

I got a pretty consistent essay-writing gig at Decider — here I am on OppenheimerBarbie, Hostel, and Angus Cloud.

Also for Decider I did a list of ten great recent horror TV shows to check out. I love making up the canon as I go.

I interviewed several showrunners of my favorite shows: Billions’ Brian Koppelman & David Levien, The Wheel of Time‘s Rafe Judkins, and Foundation‘s David S. Goyer.

I wrote about Godzilla a lot, for some reason, in Blood Knife, Welcome to Hell World, and Decider.

I got into Defector with this piece on queer and trans wrestlers dealing with regional anti-LGBTQ+ legislation as practitioners of a traveling business

I helped organize the Freelance Solidarity Project strike support campaign for the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes

Finally, one day I read a New York Times piece on trans kids at school, thought of my own kid at school, got real fucking mad, and sent a DM to the great organizer Eric Thurm. As a result, NYTLetter.com happened and humiliated the most important newspaper in the English-speaking world into (not completely but largely) knocking it the fuck off, no matter what the suits fucking say about it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Happy new year everyone!

“Monarch” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “Birthright”

Some of the best, sweetest, sexiest, most convincing romantic storytelling being done on TV this year is happening on — get this — Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I know! I didn’t see it coming either! But first with May and Kentaro, then with Kei and Lee, and now with Kei and Billy, this show has given the blossoming of romance the kind of casual intimacy and heat that makes you crave the stuff in the first place. That this week’s expert demonstration of yearning and desire involves the younger version of a crackpot character played by John Goodman and eaten by a monster in a film called Kong: Skull Island is part of the fun.

I reviewed this week’s Monarch for Decider.

Sean T. Collins’s Top 10 TV Shows of 2023

9. The Idol (HBO/Max)

Fuck what you heard. The Idol, 2023’s most hated show, is far and away the TV I’ve thought, and argued, about the most this year. Hype and backlash cycles notwithstanding, Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye created a sleazy, lurid, funny, fucked-up, incredibly straightforward satire of the starlet factory à la Paul Verhoeven. Unlike, say, Succession, which spoofs the ultra-wealthy without simultaneously trying to feel like Dallas or EmpireThe Idol sends up the sex-and-drugs world of pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp in the year’s most underappreciated performance) and her grifter svengali Tedros Tedros (Tesfaye in the year’s second most underappreciated performance) while also embodying it. 

The two leads act out their intense and at times humiliating material without a net, but they’re buoyed by a Greek chorus of comedic performances by the likes of Hank Azaria, Rachel Sennott, Eli Roth, Jane Adams, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who turns on a dime to deliver genuinely affecting material whenever called for). All of these terrific actors perform in front of a backdrop of lush retro synths and strings courtesy of Tesfaye, Levinson, and composer and super-producer Mike Dean, appearing as himself. In a sane world this would have just been Pop Starship Troopers — gnarly, nasty, sexy, fun, appreciated by those who get it and basically ignored by everyone else. It couldn’t sustain the discourse around it, and shouldn’t have had to, when its meaning was so plain to see, and enjoy

I wrote about the ten best television shows of 2023 for Decider. I’m enormously proud of this list. The variety I’ve seen across TV critics’ best-of lists this year can be nothing but good for both TV and criticism, and I’m glad to have contributed in my own way. Anyway, I believe in all these shows and think they’re worth your time.

“Fargo” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Seven: “Linda”

Social justice separatism is having a moment. On Yellowjackets, purple-clad adherents to the self-help group founded by plane crash survivor Lottie help the addicted and outcast find peace on their compound. On Mrs. Davis, a convent of fun-loving nuns holes up in an abandoned motel in the Nevada desert. On Foundation, a commune of psychically powered “mentallics” live a life free from persecution by the galaxy’s normies in their home on a distant planet. On The Changeling, a group of women forced to kill the demonic creatures that took the place of their children take refuge on an island off Manhattan accessible only via magic. And now, on Fargo, a community of abuse survivors perform cathartic puppet shows and take on the name of their founder: Roy Tillman’s first wife, and Nadine Tillman/Dorothy Lyon’s groomer, Linda.

Only…not really. Camp Utopia and its gang of Lindas are a figment of Dot’s exhausted, traumatized imagination. Their welcoming community in the woods, full of friendly, grinning women; their therapeutic punch-and-judy shows, in which newcomers tell their horrible stories using puppets they themselves design and build; and most importantly, Linda herself (Kari Matchett), the woman who “fed” Dorothy to Roy in order to escape herself, the woman who atoned for the sin of abandoning Dorothy and the then-salvageable Gator to Roy by helping untold numbers of other women, the woman who offers an apology (though not an explanation) that Dorothy finds she can accept…none of these things, none of these people, actually exist.

I’m fine with that. As an abuse survivor I bristle at the notion that surviving abuse confers upon you some kind of innate decency or dignity, as if abuse were a sacrament as well as a crime. As such, the Hollywood concept of the commune where the wounded gather together to grow stronger in the broken places or whatever has never held any appeal for me. I think it’s begun to exhaust its appeal in Hollywood as well, judging from how many of the above examples either subvert the trope or treat it as a literal fairy tale or dream.

I reviewed this week’s Fargo for Decider.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “Will the Real May Please Stand Up?”

In short, this is good stuff, written and acted and directed (by Hiromi Kamata) by people who believe this goofy science-fantasy universe can be used to tell human stories that are actually compelling, not just quote-unquote human, and who work with full commitment to this idea. I’m not ready to use the A-word as an overall comparison just yet, but no doubt about it: That’s Andor-coded behavior.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider.

“Fargo” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Six: “The Tender Trap”

Let’s talk about Jennifer Jason Leigh. Underneath the Locust Valley Lockjaw accent and the power suits she’s delivering a tremendous performance, lively and mischievous. She plays Lorraine Lyon as a character who relishes each opportunity to show off, to stunt, to exert power. You can all but see a little flicker of delight in her eyes when one arises. 

But in this episode I noticed a few more things. First, and I apologize that it took me this long to notice, she is insanely sexy in this role, holy moses. Lorraine’s self-confidence alone almost erotic in and of itself, as is the feeling that this is the last person on earth whose room-service breakfast order you’d ever want to take. Like, yes, exactly. I kind of think that her impenetrable exoskeleton of casual cruelty is the armor she needed to generate to make men leave her the fuck alone when she’s this magnetic a person.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

Nature Points Out the Folly of Man

The main characters of Godzilla Minus One are a kamikaze pilot living with the shame of refusing to kill himself to kill others, a survivor of the Tokyo firebombing who found herself caring for the baby of a woman she watched die, a sailor who wishes he’d been old enough to fight and a crew full of navy veterans who tell him he should be “proud,” in their words, to never have fought at all. I cried when the traumatized pilot twice had mental breaks in which he was convinced Godzilla had actually killed him years earlier. I cried when the orphaned little girl asked for her dead mother. The day I was found sobbing in front of the open produce drawer I had cried in the shower earlier over a different song from the score, “Resolution,” which sounds like all of humanity inhaling and exhaling as one. (I hear Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver “Main Theme” in the song just for starters.)

Yamazki’s film is the best and worst of humanity refracted through a radioactive green lens. It’s uranium glass. It makes you feel the colossal weight of the crimes committed by both sides in World War II, embodies them in the form of Godzilla, and unleashes it on people who do not deserve to suffer and die. What more could you possibly ask from a horror movie?

My piece on Godzilla Minus One for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World is now available to read for free, without a subscription!

History Shows Again and Again How Nature Points Out the Folly of Man

Sometime last week my wife returned home from an appointment to find me sitting on the floor in front of our open refrigerator, surrounded by the groceries I hadn’t finished putting away, sobbing into my hands. I was crying, hard, because I was listening to the song “Last” from Naoki Sato’s score for Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, released the weekend prior. I was crying because the song is a sonic last stand, the musical expression of a distant final hope for the survival of some beautiful doomed thing. In Yamazaki’s film the beautiful doomed thing is the population of World War II era Japan — fed into a meat grinder by a government so indifferent to their lives it had an entire program dedicated to killing its own pilots on purpose, subjected to the fires of creation itself by their swaggering conquerors, horrifically traumatized by what they saw on the front and what they survived in the rubble of their homes. An enormous monster that kills everything it sees is on its way to add more misery, destroy more families, rain more pointless death upon an exhausted people. And some of those people will give up their lives — instantly, reflexively, without thinking — to save the lives of others.

I’m pleased to be making my full-fledged debut at Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World with an essay on Godzilla Minus One, one of the best films of the year, and on Godzilla in general. The piece is for subscribers only, but great news: Luke has been generous enough to donate 7-day free trial coupons for anyone who wants to read it.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “Terrifying Miracles”

Now look here, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: I came here for giant monsters. What gives you the right to spring a Mad Men–style storyline about explosive romantic chemistry in the workplace and the way desire can cause us to lose the things we hold dearest? On top of a bunch of totally awesome shots of Godzilla doing cool shit? At least give me a heads up next time!

I reviewed this week’s terrific episode of Monarch for Decider.

“Fargo,” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Five: “The Tiger”

There’s one more conversation I want to highlight. When Danish exits the house, he’s stopped by a security guard, who demands to see his ID. Never mind the fact that Danish is leaving rather than arriving, that he’s the most instantly recognizable human being in Minnesota, or that he hired the guy: Orders are orders, and the man carrying the gun has been given orders, so Danish must show ID.

Now, Danish manages a “Don’t fucking do that to me again” afterwards that I think will actually take — he is the boss at the end of the day — but it’s a fascinating exchange nonetheless because it shows how power actually works. It’s as simple as Lord Varys’s old parable from Game of Thrones, about the soldier surrounded by a king, a priest, and a rich man, each of whom orders him to kill the others. Who has the power in that situation? Whomever the man with the sword believes has the power. 

Danish is rich. Danish has political clout, both via Lorraine and likely some of his own. But in that moment, the man with the gun does not believe Danish has the power, and thus he does not. Will Roy and Lorraine come to learn similar lessons?

I reviewed this week’s Fargo for Decider.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “The Way Out”

That’s the other thing: The whole concept of people who go into the ruins, collect photos and stuffed animals and other personal effects rather than valuables, and attempt to contact their owners to return them is just one of the artifacts of post-Godzilla life that crop up tantalizingly this episode. There’s the airport signage admonishing travelers to “respect the authority of ALL first responders,” the kind of uptick in low-grade authoritarianism you might expect in the aftermath of a literal monster attack. There are the underground bunkers for rich “tech bros” our heroes see advertised on airport TV. There’s the economy of state violence and military graft that determines who can and can’t trespass in the forbidden zone. There’s the constant drumbeat of denialism, of people who think it’s all a hoax to “burst the real-estate bubble,” as one kid puts it.  It’s all thoughtful, even provocative stuff.

Then there’s my favorite moment of all, one of the scariest split seconds of television in a long time. After an administrator admonishes Cate to take the warnings about the titans seriously and then departs, another woman is briefly seen running down the hall just before we cut away from this flashback. We know why: She’s seen what’s coming, and she’s about to tell a classroom full of children that their death awaits them. The show doesn’t lean on this at all, doesn’t even draw your attention to it. It’s just…there, hidden in the background by director Mairzee Almas. 

It’s a little uncomfortable texture in a world that, based on this episode, benefits from uncomfortable textures greatly. If Monarch can get to the Andor point, where you don’t need to be bombarded with capital-F Franchise stuff to feel what it’s like to live in that Franchise’s world…well, let’s not count our MUTOs before they’re hatched.

I reviewed today’s episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

“Fargo” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Four: “Insolubilia”

Roy’s terrifying speech to Lenore is an episode high for me, one of the two points in my notes where I simply wrote “ooooooh-wheeee.” The other is very different. It comes when Dot/Nadine visits Wayne in his hospital room (dodging Lorraine, Danish, Olmstead, and Farr in the process) after he awakens from his electrocution during the home invasion. While he’s barely coherent or aware of himself and his surroundings, she attempts to coach him into believing a sanitized version of what occurred, to no apparent success or failure. But it’s the way he smiles when he repeats the phrase “my wife,” as if he’s seeing her for the first time and can hardly believe his luck, that gets to him. “Move over, you,” she says finally, tears welling in her eyes, as she scoots him over to lie next to him and cuddle. Tears welled in my eyes too, let me tell you. Not a bad range of emotional experiences for one episode at all, no sir.

I reviewed this week’s terrific episode of Fargo for Decider.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “Parallels and Interiors”

I can’t remember who, but someone once said that a title like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is more than a title, it’s a promise. In that light, I expect a show called Monarch: Legacy of Monsters to do certain things. So I’m really not sure where I come down on “Parallels and Interiors,” the show’s knowingly pretentiously titled fourth episode. On the one hand, you have an effectively sketched-out romance between characters with believable chemistry. On the other hand, there’s only one monster, and it’s not even a new one or a famous one. I’m not sure that’s a trade I’m comfortable making.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider. The inclusion of a strong, sexy, convincing romance storyline marks a turning point for the season, though I didn’t know this at the time I wrote the review. Stay tuned!

“Fargo” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Three: “The Paradox of Intermediate Transactions”

Beyond that, though, Roy’s nipple rings, weed habit, and kinky penchant for having his wife roleplay as women he wants to punish during sex could be seen as the show scoring some cheap points about right-wing hypocrisy. (Not that such shots don’t hit the mark.) But it could just as easily be seen as a depiction of how to men like Roy, this isn’t hypocrisy. Roy is free to do what he wants, and the people of Stark County are also free to do what he wants — the completely consistent conservative definition of freedom in a nutshell.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “Secrets and Lies”

It can be a cheap trick for a popcorn flick or its TV equivalent to mine real-world tragedy for pathos. It’s so easy for the relative tastelessness of that kind of entertainment, much as I love so much of it, to read as defilement of something that should be held sacred. When it goes wrong, it does so in spectacular fashion: Marvel attributing the authorship of Hiroshima to one of its Eternals, say, or Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” playing over the memorial for Emmett Till in Lovecraft Country

These are not accusations you can level at any project in the Godzilla franchise. Godzilla is inextricably linked to the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically, and to the threats of nuclear war and environmental devastation generally. So when the third episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters depicts a Japanese woman trying to physically stop the detonation of a nuclear bomb while screaming in terror and grief, all I can do is respect it. With a paraphrase of “My God, what have I done,” writer Andrew Colville and director Julian Holmes underline what’s really going on here, though they respect you enough to catch it without anyone bringing up Dr. Keiko Miura’s nationality. In this franchise, they shouldn’t have to.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider.

“Fargo” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Two: “Trials and Tribulations”

But the episode we get is a very good one. Once again, writer-director Hawley displays his facility for building tension and dread; the long take that includes the stabbing murder of Gator’s partner by Ole Munch feels endless, drawing out the sense that something terrible is going to happen before delivering on it. Jeff Russo’s score goes full horror movie in this scene as well, which helps immensely. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up my favorite homage in the episode: Jon Hamm getting out of the bath bare assed, à la Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Season 3. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so gander all you want.

I reviewed the second episode of Fargo Season 5 for Decider.

“Fargo” thoughts, Season Five, Episode One: “The Tragedy of the Commons”

Two > > Three > One >> Four. There, that’s the extent to which we need to relitigate Noah Hawley’s Fargo. This love letter not just to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 black-comedy crime classic but to their entire oeuvre is getting to that M*A*S*H point where it’s funny to point out how it’s outlasted its inspiration, but along the way it has aired one truly great season of television, two merely terrific ones, and one that would have gone over a lot better had poor Chris Rock not been miscast as a crime boss. That’s an excellent track record from where I’m sitting, even before you factor in Hawley’s acuity with action sequences, tension and suspense, weird eruptions of uncanny horror, getting gangbusters work out of a slew of fantastic actors both with and without prior Coens experience, you name it. So what if Hawley, on whom I run hot and cold as a rule, is not Joel and Ethan fused into one new guy? Voguish or not, if Fargo is on, I’m watching. 

I reviewed the season premiere of Fargo for Decider. This season’s real good!

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “Departure”

What a difference a dragon makes, huh? There’s a lot I find misjudged and misguided in Apple TV+‘s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters at this early stage, but they got at least this much right: They ended their two-episode series premiere with a huge berserk reptilian creature emerging from the wreck of a sunken World War II battleship that’s now on land for some reason. After all, this is not Monarch: Legacy of America’s Next Top Best Friend. There’s a promise the show makes with its very title, and it knows it has to deliver.

I’m not sure it’s delivering on much else at the moment, unfortunately. Once again written by co-developer and showrunner Chris Black and directed by Matt Shakman, this episode (“Departure”) is not, as I’d hoped, all delivery after the first episode’s setup. It’s basically more of the same.

I reviewed the second episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “Aftermath”

The MonsterVerse is a mixed bag. As an official welding together of the big screen’s two biggest giant-monster icons, Godzilla and King Kong, it mostly does what it needs to do, i.e. toss giant monsters at each other and get out of the way. But there’s a pretty wide range of quality in terms of the movies surrounding those monster fights. Kong: Skull Island is a charmingly berserk adventure-movie throwback, with a fun cast of memorable little characters. This puts it head and shoulders above the three Godzilla-led entries in the series, in which the characters range from inert to inane. But there are some truly awe-inspiring, almost cosmic monster visuals in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong has the lizard/ape action you crave. 

The biggest disappointment in the series is its opening entry, 2014’s Godzilla, for two reasons. First, it hides its monster effects by staging its fights at night, an annoying maneuver also employed by Pacific Rim. Second, it fails completely to deliver on the horror promised by the Bryan Cranston–heavy trailer (not least by killing off Bryan Cranston after the second reel). One of the reasons the subsequent entry, Kong, feels so strong is because it does just the opposite: It focuses squarely on its best actors, roots itself in horror with genuinely gruesome kills, and shows us its titans clashing in glorious broad daylight.

So there’s a template to be followed for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the new TV show set in the MonsterVerse — a set of Giant Radioactive Do’s and Don’t’s already established by the franchise. What approach will showrunner Chris Black, who developed the show with Matt Fraction, wind up taking?

I’m covering the new Godzilla TV show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider, starting with my review of the first episode. It has its moments.

It’s unlike me, but with Monarch I banked all the reviews I could in advance, so I’ve seen and reviewed the first eight episodes. My initial reviews won’t reflect it, but the show does get much better as it goes. The material centered on romance and on Godzilla himself is very strong by the end. The Russells are as good as you’d expect and Mari Yamamoto is really something.

The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (as Beauty): The Spectacle of Carnage in Game of Thrones and Shin Godzilla

Spectacle is the language through which art communicates when the vocabulary of the everyday fails us. Fantastic fiction, an inherent trafficker in the unreal, says as much through spectacle as any art form this side of musical theater, in which excesses of emotion transcend dialogue and emerge through the eruption of song and dance. That Act Two showstopper speaks to us (or rather sings to us) because we recognize what it is to be so in love; so enraged, so bereft, so drunk on the possibilities or vicissitudes of life that mere spoken words could never capture it. Only an explosion of sound and movement will do.

So it is with genre. The dragon, the android, and the vampire embody fears and dreams either too delicate or too overpowering for realism to express. Ratcheting up the scale and stakes of ideas and imagery like these to the level of spectacle renders them capable of handling even more intense feelings and fantasies. A trip beyond the infinite, a monumental horror-image like a wicker man aflame, a last terrible battle between good and evil: Such spectacles describe our desire and capacity as people to do things so great or terrible—or so great and terrible—that they stagger the mind.

Before they assayed updating a country’s biggest pop-cultural icon and helming the first large-scale battle on what was rapidly becoming television’s biggest show (respectively), Hideaki Anno and Neil Marshall were past masters of this technique. Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion pitted giant robots against increasingly bizarre godlike beings in battles that directly reflected the titanic scale of its protagonists’ adolescent angst. Marshall’s The Descent plumbed the depths of its heroine’s grief in a literal bloodbath.

Importantly, they each recognized the role of beauty in such spectacularly grim visions. From Anno’s awe-inspiring animated angels to the firelit scarlet of Marshall’s subterranean charnel pit, the gorgeousness of it complimented and enhanced the terror rather than canceling it out. Beauty is the sea salt in the caramel of horrific spectacle.

Both filmmakers applied these lessons to the biggest assignments in their careers. In 2012, “Blackwater,” his directorial debut on David Benioff & D.B. Weiss’s blockbuster fantasy series Game of Thrones, Marshall depicted the horror of war with an explosion that beggars anything seen on television before, and most of what has come since. In 2014, Anno and co-director Shinji Haguchi’s satirical but harrowing update Shin Godzilla destroyed Tokyo with an alien dispassion that reignited all the majesty and menace felt by filmgoers when the king of the kaiju first emerged decades earlier. And despite their differences, the techniques used by each to convey the magnitude of these unnatural disasters and the people they befell are strikingly similar.

I wrote about Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, Neil Marshall’s “Blackwater” from Game of Thrones, and the horrible beauty of spectacular violence for Blood Knife.