Star Wars: The Last Jedi mind-tricked its audience. As if in homage to the galaxy in which the film is set—divided as it is between the Dark Side and the Light—Rian Johnson’s 2017 installment in the saga sparked the most preposterously binary set of responses to a franchise film in recent memory. Read about this continuation of the Disney-owned sequel trilogy (begun and soon to be ended by J.J. Abrams) and you’ll quickly feel the pull of two opposing Forces, demanding allegiance. Broadly speaking: Is it a heartbreaking work of staggering genius that redeems the Star Wars concept by having the courage to toss it aside, or is it a million childhoods suddenly crying out in terror and then suddenly silenced…by incipient white genocide?

I say it’s neither, and man am I tired of having to say it, but before I see Solo I’ll give it one last shot. The Last Jedi is my least favorite Star Wars movie by far, but not for any of the reasons most of its detractors cite, nor for those against which its champions array their defenses. The misogynistic bigots whose response to the film is essentially “Why isn’t there a White History Month” will have to settle for running all three branches of government; they won’t get me to agree that a story driven by vivid and charismatic characters played by natural-born movie stars Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and Domnhall Gleeson—the best things either TLJ or its immediate predecessor The Force Awakens have going for them—represent the collapse of the West. Nor am I going to agree to their terms of debate the way so many proponents of the film have, acting as though hidebound nostalgia at best and bald-faced reactionary fury at worst are the only reasons to take issue with this movie. The Last Jedi has its moments, but its faults are many—and too often obscured by the Sith vs. Jedi nature of the debate surrounding it.

Right up front, let’s forget the idea that TLJ represents some bold act of iconoclasm—a creatively courageous attempt to unmoor the franchise from nostalgia. There’s a substratum of angry nerds who think believe this and hate it, and a separate group of critics and critic-adjacent people online who believe this and love it. I really don’t know how either group comes to this conclusion about what is, after all, the ninth Star Wars movie. It’s got dark lords and chosen ones, lightsabers and Star Destroyers, cute aliens and cute droids, you name it. Rey’s parentage may have been rendered a non-issue (in a desultory rip-off of the mirror sequence from The Never-ending Story, but whatever), but Kylo Ren is still the biological descendent of the main characters from both of the previous trilogies. And this is the guy—the bad guy, might I add—who utters the “let the past die” mantra so many critics and detractors alike seem to have taken to heart as the film’s mission statement. Again, this is the ninth Star Wars movie. If you want to let the past die, go watch or make a film that doesn’t co-star characters who debuted 40 years earlier.

To the extent that writer-director Rian Johnson did wipe the slate clean, the effect was not a healthy one. Dispensing with the pattern established by all the other movies, Johnson resumes the action right where The Force Awakens leaves off. Leia, Poe, Finn, C-3PO, BB-8, and the rest of the Resistance core are still on their home base from the previous film; so little time has elapsed that they’re still waiting for the First Order to show up and chase them out of there when the movie begins. Elsewhere, Rey and Luke’s storyline resumes mid-conversation. Because of this, our first images of our heroes take place in places we’ve already seen, rather than dropping us head-first into new ones—not even the familiar desert/forest/ice archetypes of The Force Awakens, which were at least different planets than the ones from the original trilogy, if not different types of planets.

The bulk of the story takes place on Luke’s island, a couple of spaceships, and finally a single patch of a desert planet that simply substitutes salt for sand and adds a little red dust for flair. The plot concerns Rey trying and failing to convince Luke to get up off his ass and Kylo Ren and General Hux picking off Resistance ships one by one, Battlestar Galactica–style (to put the resemblance kindly, though if you called it a knockoff I wouldn’t object). Mysteries aren’t so much solved as canceled: Rey’s parents are nobodies (a theoretically interesting idea delivered in perfunctory fashion) and the mysterious Supreme Leader Snoke gets jobbed out before displaying a single interesting characteristic except being unusually tall and having cool red wallpaper. The film ends with the characters hiding in an abandoned garage some guy’s trying to break into, pretty much.

In short, this is the first Star Wars movie in which the world feels smaller at the end of the movie than it did at the beginning. It’s an attritional film, one that whittles away until only a tiny fragment remains. The manic thrill of discovery and creation that made the original trilogy so culture-changingly compelling—and which makes the much-maligned prequel trilogy, which you can read persuasive defenses of here and here, a gloriously weird work of art on the Speed Racer level if nothing else—is almost entirely absent. (Almost: the trip made by Finn and his new ally Rose to that casino planet has that wild and woolly feeling to it, which paradoxically may be why people dislike it; Leia’s Force-enabled spacewalk is a poor substitute for getting to see her with a lightsaber in her hand but it’s still good audience-rousing fun; the Porgs, of course, are perfection. But that’s thin gruel to spread across two and a half hours of running time.)

This is the first half of my lengthy essay for Decider on why I don’t like The Last Jedi. I just got so sick of seeing the debate, both pro and con sides, framed entirely in terms set by bigots or “my childhood!!!” types, and wanted to open up other lines of criticism and inquiry. Click here to read the rest.

Starship Troopers and Rambo

Come one, you apes! You wanna live forever? We sure hope not, because when you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing. And so is listening to Sean and Stefan discus two of the most violent — and morally complex — action movies of the modern era, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo. Made in 1997 and 2008 respectively, these films use satire (in the former case) and spectacle (in the latter) to probe the gaping wounds of fascism, war, war movies, and the act of killing. If, like us, you’re an admirer of how A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones use epic-battle tropes to interrogate the horrors of war, this discussion of two strange films that do the same is for you. Enjoy…?

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John Rambo spent the 1980s knifing, booby-trapping, and exploding his way into the American consciousness. But to resurrect this killer of a character for the 2000s, Sylvester Stallone dug deep into the heart of his hero… and dear God, that heart was dark.

Released in early 2008 to solid box-office success and minimal critical favor, Rambo promised a back-to-basics approach to Stallone’s hit action franchise, just as 2006’s acclaimed, heartwarming Rocky Balboa had done for The Italian Stallion. Stallone even planned to title the movie John Rambo to make the comparison even more direct, and wound up using that title for the film’s longer, more character-driven extended cut. But while the fourth and final film in the Rambo franchise gave Sly’s troubled Vietnam veteran a happy ending at last — its closing shot shows the 60-year-old killing machine returning to his family farm in Arizona for the first time in decades — it also gives us a character to fear, not root for. This evolution of Rambo as a character and mainstream action franchise, in turn, reveals uncomfortable, disturbing truths about the United States, and after a recent revisit, suggests that our own violent history should be treated with far more nuance than unquestioned cheerleading.

Set in the killing fields of Burma, Rambo is a brutal and bracing revisionist take on a hero whose name is synonymous with mindless action-movie excess, from the man who helped craft that excess in the first place. Yet it’s precisely because of its unprecedented savagery that the film feels truer to John Rambo’s roots than either of the sequels that preceded it: the movie, this time directed by Stallone, takes the philosophical tensions and fear of warfare present in the franchise since its politically fraught initial installment, loads them into a machine gun, and fires them directly at our collective face. Using all the tools at an old Hollywood hand’s disposal, it reflects the national mood by depicting its angry American as both suffering and inflicting trauma, in as traumatizing a manner as big-budget action movies have ever attempted.

Three thousand words on Rambo for Thrillist? Don’t mind as I do. I’m proud of this piece on one of the most viscerally disturbing and structurally odd mainstream action movies ever made.

Best: “Streets of Philadelphia” (‘Philadelphia,’ 1993)

Like “Shaft” shaking up the saccharine sounds of the 1970s, Bruce Springsteen’s sad, sparse contribution to the soundtrack of Jonathan Demme’s AIDS-crisis drama Philadelphia is a bracing break from the Best Song norm of its era. The lyrics are one the Boss’s most haunting portrayals of loneliness and abandonment (“I was bruised and battered, I couldn’t tell what I felt / I was unrecognizable to myself”); he recorded the song alone in his home studio with a synthesizer and a drum machine, and you can hear the isolation in every note. (The only down side to the song’s victory: Neil Young’s even more devastating contribution to Demme’s movie, titled “Philadelphia,” had to lose.)

Worst: “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” (‘The Lion King,’ 1994)

It didn’t have to be this way. When Disney’s big animated comeback The Little Mermaid upended the Eighties’ string of Top 40 Best Song winners in 1989, it did so not with a ballad (although “Part of Your World” is one of the studio’s best) but with the calypso jam “Under the Sea.” Beginning with 1991’s Oscar for “Beauty and the Beast,” though, the category became a cartoon-ballad free-for-all, with live-action winners mostly following suit. The result is one of the dreariest, schmaltziest runs in the award’s history, and they don’t come much goopier than Elton John and Tim Rice’s love song for lions. Pro tip: “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” is twice as long but about 40 times as awesome.

I had a grand old time writing about the best and worst Best Song Oscar winners of all time for Rolling Stone. These kinds of pieces are a blast to write, since you get to cover so much territory and study how values change over time.

Moment 16 | Sean vs. Mad Max: Fury Road & The Fifth Element

It’s another surprise Sean solo edition of BLAM! This time, Sean’s tackling two movies he dislikes, at the request of listener Jonathan Mauro: George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road and Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. What’s your illustrious co-host’s beef against these two much-beloved blockbuster sci-fi/action hits? Subscribe for just $2/month and find out!

(Click here to buy this episode’s theme music.)

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Sean. Stefan. Star Wars. ’Nuff said! Discover why Sean rates The Last Jedi as his least favorite Star Wars movie and learn what Stefan thinks it has in its favor as we go in-depth about Rian Johnson’s peculiarly divisive film in our longest episode ever!

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30. Porgs! (Episode VIII: The Last Jedi)

What’s a four-letter word for “cute little calico penguin puffin pug owl cat hamster Ewok Mogwai Tribble Furby Pikachu hybrid thing”? Ask literally any child you know and you’ll get the answer. These preposterously adorable critters, designed by Jake Lunt Davies, are so insanely marketable and merchandisable that Disney may as well have fired them via drone strike under every Christmas tree in the country (for a fee, of course). Even so, it’s hard to begrudge these island dwellers, several of whom take up residence in the Millennium Falcon, since they really are as delightful as advertised. The scene where Chewie can’t bring himself to chow down on roast porg will do more for vegetarianism than a million naked PETA ads.

With Star Wars: The Last Jedi now in theaters, I revisited and revised my list of the greatest Star Wars moments for Vulture, incorporating the new movie and cutting it down to a nice round 50 entries.

Just for fun, here’s how the list breaks down, movie by movie:

20th Century Fox theme for Episodes I-VI 1

The Phantom Menace 3

Attack of the Clones 2

Revenge of the Sith 6

Rogue One 3

A New Hope 10

The Empire Strikes Back 9

Return of the Jedi 10

The Force Awakens 4

The Last Jedi 2

Does the number for The Last Jedi tell you anything about how I felt about the movie? Hmmmmmmm.

Moment 12 | Velvet Goldmine

The Last Unicorn (1982)

One of the most beautiful, melancholy, magical, and genuinely adult animated features in American film history. This adaptation of fantasist Peter S. Beagle’s novel comes to us courtesy of Rankin/Bass Productions and Japanese animation studio Topcraft — the former responsible for the stop-motion Christmas classics Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, the latter eventually evolving into Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. Together, they produced the J.R.R. Tolkien cartoons The Hobbit and The Return of the King, plus this gut-punch of a film, about a unicorn who becomes trapped in the body of a young human woman. With a body-horror subtext worthy of Cronenberg and a ridiculously impressive voice cast (Mia Farrow, Jeff Bridges, Christopher Lee, Angela Lansbury, and Alan Arkin), it’s like a cross between Stranger Things and a story from the Dungeons & Dragons game its characters play.

Paperhouse (1988)

Directed by Bernard Rose — who would later adapt Hellraiser writer-director Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden” into the acclaimed urban-horror film Candyman — this harrowing supernatural/surrealist film centers on an 11-year-old girl who discovers her dreams and drawings are coming to life and consuming her reality. She’s got to figure out how to take charge and reassert control. Paperhouse is what I think of when Stranger Things is at its best.

Let the Right One In (2008)

Recast the relationship between Eleven and Mike Wheeler as a tragedy instead of a heroic fantasy, and you might wind up with this morbid proto-romance between a bullied kid and the young vampire who simultaneously befriends, protects, and uses him. There’s stuff going on here about abuse and loneliness, for characters of all ages, that digs way deeper than anything Stranger Things has done; if Netflix’s series is a 101 entry-level course, this is graduate work.

What should you watch after (or instead of) Stranger Things and its obnoxiously titled second season Stranger Things 2? Whether you like or dislike the show, I think I’ve got you covered with the list of 30 movies I wrote for Vulture.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

“I’ve already gone places. I just wanna stay where I am.” Stanton’s role as tired-looking trailer-park owner Carl Rodd in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks prequel was as cryptic as everything else in the film, lasting just a few short minutes and some spare lines of dialogue. But he packs decades of world-weariness into his brief screen time; nobody could turn “It’s just more shit I gotta do now” into a punchline that doubled as a declaration of existential despair. Stanton reprised and expanded the role in Peaks’ astonishing third season this year, cracking jokes about defying death one minute, bearing witness to unspeakable tragedy like an earthbound angel the next – a moving, bonus grace note in a long, legendary career. STC

I consider it one of the great privileges of my career as a writer to have written about Alien and Twin Peaks for Rolling Stone’s list of 10 Essential Harry Dean Stanton Movies.

3. The Dead Zone (1983)

David Cronenberg is the man who made “body horror” a thing; Stephen King’s tales of terror derive much of their power from down-to-earth Americana. An odd couple, to be sure. But the Canadian auteur brings out the best in the story of a New England schoolteacher (professional weirdo Christopher Walken, pitch-perfect) who awakens from a five-year coma with the ability to see the future of anyone he touches. Co-starring Martin Sheen as a blustery, right-wing politician rising to power via blue-collar populism and ready to trigger World War III – imagine that! It’s cerebral but not chilly, complex but compelling – and as eerily prescient as its psychic protagonist.  STC

I wrote about The Dead Zone for Rolling Stone’s very gutsy ranking of Stephen King movie adaptations. The Top 10 is going to throw you for a loop.

49. Heavenly Creatures (1994) 

Before Peter Jackson took us all to Middle-earth, he brought moviegoers to the mad world of two troubled teenagers – a fictional universe every bit as engrossing as J.R.R. Tolkien’s, but far more romantic and lethal. Based on a true-crime story, the film depicts pre-stardom Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey as Pauline Parker and Juliet Hume, two New Zealand teenagers whose BFF-ship blossoms first into love, then madness and ultimately murder. Jackson’s kinetic camera captures the rapturous swirl of teenage dreams before plunging us into its brutal, bloody endpoint. It’s a beautiful dark twisted fantasy. STC

I wrote about Natural Born Killers, Heavenly Creatures, and The Blair Witch Project for Rolling Stone’s list of The 100 Greatest Movies of the ’90s. My editor David Fear assembled an absolute murderers’ row of writers for this thing — it’s a real treat.

Children of Men (A Patreon Production)

The Boiled Leather Audio Hour goes dystopian this month! By the special request of our Patreon supporter Jason, who earned the right to choose a topic for the podcast by subscribing at the $50 level, Sean & Stefan are taking a deep dive into the world of Children of Men, director Alfonso Cuarón’s gripping 2006 political science-fiction film. Starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore and set in a near future where the world has been rocked by an infertility epidemic that has completely ended all childbirths for 18 years and counting, the movie is striking both for its technical virtuosity, particularly during its white-knuckle action sequences, and its emphasis on very human cruelty and empathy. How does its technical prowess affect its message? Where does the storytelling and imagery succeed, and where does it falter? What does its bleak yet ultimately optimistic vision of the future portend for our own grim present? We’ll do our best to answer those questions. Needless to say, spoilers abound!

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Abraham Riesman’s article on the making of the film for Vulture.

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The Silence of the Lambs (1991) 

Demme’s ticket to horror-movie immortality, and a well-deserved one at that. This iconic thriller about an FBI agent (Jodie Foster, never better) using a serial killer to catch a serial killer made a superstar out of Anthony Hopkins; compare the actor’s work here to his subsequent turns as the charismatic, cannibalistic Dr. Hannibal Lecter and you can see the director’s sense of less-is-more restraint paying dividends. The film also broke a bloody glass ceiling at the Oscars, too, becoming the only horror movie to date to win Best Picture. But it’s the thoughtful way in which Demme shot the world that our heroine Clarice Starling has to navigate – so many male faces, looming huge in the frame and staring right into her (and our) eyes – that remains Silence’s most pointed commentary on predators and patriarchy. STC

I forgot to link to this when it went up, but Rolling Stone put together a lovely tribute to the work of the late director Jonathan Demme, and I was honored to contribute a few words on The Silence of the Lambs, a great film.

7. Rey

Complaints that The Force Awakens‘ desert-dwelling heroine is just too good at everything she does – pilot, mechanic, Force-wielder, lightsaber duelist, escape artist – ignore two important factors. First, her flashbacks indicate that there’s much more to her mysterious past than meets the eye, and we wouldn’t be surprised if long-buried memories of Jedi training were a part of it. Second, breakout star Daisy Ridley is an absolute joy to watch in the role, a magnetic screen presence who nails moments of mirth and melodrama alike. (The same could be said for her franchise warrior-sister Jyn Erso, who feels as if she’s been cut from the same cloth as Rey.) If she’s the Star Wars Universe’s new chosen one, the good folks at Lucasfilm have chosen wisely. STC

I added a few new entries to Rolling Stone’s list of the best Star Wars characters of all time.

Not to get all Beavis and Butt-head about it, but bad shows suck because, well, they suck, not because they are insufficiently episodic in structure. This is why calls from the critical community, leading many of the fan conversations on these shows, to eschew unified, serialized storytelling in favor of tight arcs and standalone episodes feel like a misdiagnosis. For one thing, they fail to consider that noticeably self-contained installments of series like Game of Thrones and Girls are as memorable as they are precisely because those shows don’t usually work that way.

These claims fall into the same trap of cinematically minded showrunners who insist that “it’s not TV” by agreeing with them, setting up a false dichotomy between what constitutes the proper use of the medium and what doesn’t. In its maturity, television has proven capable of countless things: TV dramas alone can be as densely serialized as The Wire Season 4, as memorably episodic as Mad Men Season 5, as sweeping as Fargo Season 2, and as sensation-driven as Empire Season 1. Sometimes they can be several things at once; Black Mirror, like its groundbreaking antecedent The Twilight Zone, tells a different story with a different set of characters every single episode, making it simultaneously one of the most movie-like and most episodic shows on television. Saying any of these series is closer or farther away from The One True Way to Make TV obscures the fact that there’s no such thing.

In fact, this array of options, this wide-open landscape of different structures and tones and techniques, is the truest indicator that “prestige TV” is not a contradiction in terms. Problems with the execution aside — and problems with the execution is all they really are — television can do whatever you want it to do at this point, and declaring one approach or the other superior is a procrustean blunder — like arguing The Godfather is less great a film because you can break it down like a television series, if you’re feeling particularly perverse (ahem). If that means some showrunners get to declare their series a double-digit-hour movie, so be it. The proof will be in the pudding, or the cannoli. You can have it both ways. Why wouldn’t you want to try?

What was your favorite episode of The Godfather? “Khartoum”? “The Thunderbolt”? The pilot, “I Believe in America”? I presented a modest proposal about a cinematic classic in order to talk about where all the “no, your TV show isn’t a 73-hour movie” structuralist reprimanding gets us for Thrillist.

 

While Lynch gets the “Legion”-related headlines, another director named David seems to have left an even deeper mark. That would be David Cronenberg, who made a name for himself with a series of body-horror films that depicted the disturbing interplay between mind and matter, often with a conspiratorial backdrop of sinister secret agencies or killer corporations out to harness psychic power for their own ends.

“Legion” paints in shades of Cronenberg’s “Videodrome,” with its pulsating inanimate objects; “Shivers,” with its parasite imagery; “The Brood,” with its story of a powerful telepath under the care of a manipulative therapist (played by Oliver Reed, who may have lent both his name and his machismo to the guru figure Oliver Bird); and most especially “Scanners,” with its all-out war between rival psychic factions and a protagonist who’s telepathically tormented by the voices in his head. (“Scanners” also features a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from a very familiar-looking deep sea diver suit).

I wrote about David Cronenberg, David Lynch, and Legion’s other major horror influences for the New York Times. I have my beefs with Legion, but it’s porting its horror references into a whole different genre, as opposed to Stranger Things, which is just reheating them in the microwave and trying to pass of leftovers as a fresh-cooked dish.

But the most romantic thing about The Love Witch is the existence of the film itself. To call a work of art “a labor of love” is to imply a sort of jejune passion, an amateur’s enthusiasm, but nothing could be further from the case here. Taking the concept of the auteur to a whole new level, Anna Biller not only wrote, edited, scored, produced, and directed this movie — she also served as the production designer, the set decorator, the art director, and the costume designer. She personally built, knit, sewed, collected, or otherwise provided many of the film’s key props, from the witches’ altar to the characters’ jewelry to a rug that took her months to make. If the lengthy and thoughtful essays and interviews on her blog are any indication, she also served as the movie’s on-set philosopher. Short of starring in the movie herself, there’s no way The Love Witch could be more Anna Biller’s vision.

The result is unmistakably familiar. To watch The Love Witch is to enter the headspace and heartspace of another human being as surely as falling in love.

This becomes crystal clear barely five minutes into the film. After an opening driving sequence that’s a loving homage to similar scenes in Hitchock’s Psycho and The Birds, we enter the Billerverse in earnest — a world where every detail is deliberate and delightful. Tucking her cherry-red cigarette case into her cherry-red purse, Elaine emerges from her cherry-red car in her cherry-red dress, then takes her cherry-red suitcase out of the cherry-red trunk to enter an apartment full of occult artwork so colorful it’d make a Crayola 64-pack blush. Next, we’re off to a sumptuously appointed tea room in which every one of the all-female clientele is clad in cotton-candy pink; the matching floral-patterned tea set, hand selected by Biller herself, looks like something made of marzipan in the sugar-spun home of a fairy-tale cannibal witch.

By the time I hit this point in the movie, I was laughing out loud in sheer joyful admiration. Whether working in true independent form like Biller or blessed with the carte blanche freedom afforded to established and acclaimed names like Scorsese, Anderson, Tarantino, or Coen, few filmmakers have anything close to this level of confidence in their own taste and vision. Pulling this off for a single scene would be reason to celebrate. Constructing an entire film from a single intelligent, idiosyncratic worldview is close to a miracle. And from its first scene to its last, from the font choice in its opening titles to the music over the closing credits, that kind of miracle is exactly what The Love Witch delivers. Watch it with some witch you love.

Love Witch and chill: I wrote about what makes The Love Witch the perfect Valentine’s Day movie for Vulture.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Podcast

Rebellions are built on hope, and this episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour is built on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story! Stefan and Sean continue their exploration of that galaxy far, far away with a look at Gareth Edwards’s stand-alone contribution to the Star Wars cinematic universe. How does it stack up against The Force Awakens? What’s the impact of its countless cameos and Easter eggs on the one hand and its unprecedented-for-the-franchise story structure on the other? How do we feel about Edwards’s handling of action, character, setting, performance, and the all important “toyetic” factor? Hit play and find out!

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And remember, if you like what you hear, subscribe to our Patreon to hear more of it via our subscriber-exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Moment mini-podcast!

Our BLAH episode on the prequel trilogy.

Our BLAH episode on The Force Awakens.

Sean’s article comparing Rogue One to TFA for Rolling Stone.

Sean’s list of the 57 Greatest Star Wars moments for Vulture.

Our Patreon page at patreon.com/boiledleatheraudiohour.

Our PayPal donation page (also accessible via boiledleather.com).

Our iTunes page.

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Sean’s blog.

Stefan’s blog.

There is no artist behind Slender Man, not in the panoptic, memetic form in which Morgan and Anissa encountered him. Slender Man’s “author” is the internet and the army of artists and writers and filmmakers and game designers who inhabit it. Only the accident of history, in which the original posts can be tracked down, enables us to put names to the faceless being at all. A few decades ago Slender Man would just be Bloody Mary or the killer with a hook for a hand who disrupts teenagers necking in their cars. A few centuries ago and he’d be the vampire a town feared enough to dig up graves and behead the corpses inside, or the witch who lures wayward children to their doom. With no artist in play, it becomes clear how fallacious it is to pin the blame on artists for the actions of disturbed individuals who consumed their art at all.

This is not to say art never affects society or inspires terrible things. When Jared Kushner crows about targeting ads for his odious father-in-law Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to viewers of The Walking Dead because of their concerns about immigration, he’s recognizing the fascist ideology that underlies both the show and the current administration. But art with an ideological vector connects the reader or viewer to a cohesive worldview, which, right or wrong, helps explain society and prescribe remedies for its ills. Action and reaction are to be expected.

That’s different from a movie about a pair of abused kids who become mass murderers and media superstars, or music by a glam-influenced Satanist, or creepy internet posts about a demon with no face. These merely provide monsters who embody fears and desires, not a political program. Those monsters will always exist in one form or another, and disturbed kids like Morgan and Anissa will always find them and use them as the mold into which they pour their crumbling sanity or mounting bloodlust. In blaming the art or the artist, we commit the exact same error, looking for a boogeyman to help us explain the inexplicable. We’re finding our own Slender Man to serve.

I wrote about the documentary Beware the Slenderman and when we should and shouldn’t hold artists to account for crimes inspired by their art for the New York Observer.