January 19, 2025, started off warm in New Hampshire. The thaw from the previous day continued and the morning suggested that the lifeforce beneath the snow was benevolent. Thankfully, by the time that I entered the movie theater in the afternoon, the clouds were already darkening. I was not used to going to the movie theater on a Sunday afternoon and so had completely failed to account for rush hour style traffic around the Daniel Webster mall. Agitated at arriving well after the 1:20 start time, I rushed into the dark theater with my transition glasses still in their sunglass mode. Ultimately, all my haste got me was a collision with a banister in the middle of the aisle. Had I been a younger man, but being a creature of habit nearing forty, I was instead glad to see that this matinee was not empty. In the hour since I had bought a ticket, two groups of “young people” had decided to see a vampire movie.
 
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a great movie, but also unsatisfactory. Running at almost 2 hours and 30 minutes, is very full: romances are challenged, friendships fray and break, a new hero is discovered in the form of von Franz (Willem Dafoe) in the second half of the film. Given the sparse plots in his previous Eggers movies, I could easily imagine, for example, an entire film about the sailors transporting the vampire’s coffin. I suspect that this fullness is related to how the Witch, the Lighthouse or the Northman, are the results of Eggers’ creating his own scripts from non-film stories, while Nosferatu is instead a retelling of one of the most famous movie monsters.
 
Nosferatu is a retelling, but also an intervention. Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that, given his decaying flesh, whitened eyes and general stiffness. He is also completely, irredeemably, evil. His obvious inhumanity distinguishes him from the vampires of Twilight and many other TV shows and movies of the 1990s and 2000s.
 
Robert Eggers gives amazing images and sequences, in large part because of his attention to lighting and mis-en-scene reward close viewing. I particularly enjoyed, for example, how when Fredrich ordered Ellen to get out of his house, all the house plants in the background were dead. This vegetative extinction both mirrored the mass death of the plague quickly working its way through the population of Wisborg outside and alludes to Ellen’s dismay at Thomas’ offering of lilacs at the beginning of the film.
 
But these flowers are a small thing, not representative of the film, which includes grand mountain passes, eerie mountain trails, and most importantly of all, a truly nightmarish journey by Thomas Hutten (Nicholas Hault) to Orlok’s cliffside castle. While Eggers does make this trip new in some ways – Hutten’s stay with the Travelers, disparagingly called “gypsies” by a Romanian landlord, was unexpected and rewarding – mostly this journey shows how Eggers can find new ways of evoking fears as old as walking in the woods alone at night.
 
It is in the second half of the film, in which Orlok confront Ellen (Lily Rose-Depp), that the script diverges from the 1922 Nosferatu the most. The idea guiding this difference is Egger’s goal to make Ellen the powerful character, the one who will rescue the bewildered Thomas. I’m not sure that this new idea quite works.
 
When I left the theater it was snowing, the clouds low to the hills, the world appearing temporarily imprisoned in a stereotypical way that evokes HP Lovecraft and Stephen King. Tomorrow, Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated for the second time. Horrors repeat themselves and but we still have to find new paths.  

Hanno, AKA Lucius Verus Aurelius, (Paul Mescal) comments frequently through Gladiator II about need for bravery. Watching the film, I felt a distinct lack of bravery in myself, knowing that if I were a brave man, I would have been like my theater neighbor, who left halfway through the film, or the old woman in Row G, who had fallen asleep by the end of the movie.
 
I entered the movie theater contemplating two anecdotes that I heard about Ridley Scott from interviews about previous movies. In doing the promotional rounds for Napoleon, in response to reporters asking him about the basic historical inaccuracies in the film, he apparently answered, “Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the f*** up then.”
 
The big question: if Ridley Scott has such disdain for history, why can’t he have fun breaking the “rules” of history? For example, look at Quentin Tarantino, who got us laughing at Hitler getting burned alive (possibly alongside of us watching through the fourth wall) in Inglorious Basterds or chuckling at the thwarting of Charles Manson’s diabolic schemes by a super cool Brad Pitt. In contrast, Scott’s Gladiator II apparently takes an even bigger swing at so-called history, but ultimately pulls its punches. This guy Hanno, who isn’t really Hanno, overthrows the Roman empire in order to restart the Roman republic. Okay, but why stop there? Why not have Hanno team up with Marcinius (Denzel Washington) to create on a shared antislavery Republic that also has female suffrage? I can see it now: Hanno dreaming of his dead wife (Yuval Gonan), who instead mumbling about seeing him on the other side, leans down to whispers to him, “votes for women!” In short, the problem with ignoring the historians is that it becomes too easy for artists to just fill their work with the ambient ideological expectations of their own era. Such non-thinking goo, unless handled mischievously or extravagantly, is never as interesting as what “really happened”, for the simple reason that what really happened was the result of complex people making difficult choices. For example, the emperor that Marcinius kills, Caracalla, was not an effete fan of simians, but rather a man whom people complained was more of a general than an emperor, who nonetheless passed a decree in 202 granting citizenship to all free people in Rome. In case you don’t think that’s a big deal, consider how Mary Beard ended SPQR, her history of Rome that begins prior to the establishment of the Republic, with that decree.
 
However, it wasn’t even the historians who were even bigger losers than all the dead gladiators: that title goes to all the art historians and archaeologists who have spent the last several decades patiently explaining polychromatism to anyone and everyone who would listen. Scott and his team did not listen. All the statues in Gladiator II are as blank and unadorned as Johann Winkelmann theorized in the 1700s.
 
The other anecdote about Ridley Scott as moved my coat into the empty seat next to me was the what the director had to say about death. The man has made clear that he loves working and has no intention of stopping directing until he is physically unable to do so. The problem for Scott is the one identified by the Roman philosopher Seneca: even when working, we are still “dying everyday” (Epistle 1).

I greatly enjoyed Dune 2 more than Dune 1, though much that comes down to the viewing experience. I watched Dune 1 on my home screen with my headphones jacked into the TV so that the sound could be as loud as necessary without waking up sleeping children or disturbing my working spouse. For Dune 2, I had the ideal view experience: a moderately full theater on a Saturday night, a bag of Reese’s Pieces and a seat next to a large Black man who during the previews wondered aloud why anyone in the monastery featured in Immaculate would think that Sydney Sweeney is pregnant with Jesus rather than the antichrist and who at the end of the movie patiently but thoroughly explained that to his partner that he didn’t like Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) because she supported a “totally unnecessary [sic] genocide”. He was quiet during the movie.
To say that I enjoyed Dune 2 more than Dune 1 is slightly misleading. The two are pieces of a whole that would be incomprehensible alone. The question of whether they were comprehensible to people who have not read the book or who have not seen any of the other adaptions is beyond my ability to answer. What I can say is that I enjoyed the film, an experience that attribute entirely to Villeneuve.
At two hours and forty-five minutes in length, it is totally reasonable to be afraid that the film would be a slog. See, for example, any of the recent offerings from the DC universe. Instead, the time flies by: Villeneuve is a master of action, and with his credit as one of the film’s screenwriters, he has reduced the dialogue to a manageable level so that the action can take center stage. And by action I don’t just mean battles: all of the depictions of worm-riding and rituals are filmed with a precision and with a sense of the exaggerated scale that is at the heart of the Dune books.
There are of course battles and fights, ranging from gladiatorial combat on Giedi Prime (shown a washed black and white with the explanation that system has a black sun), to the assault on the Emperor’s (Christopher Walken) camp on Arrakis. For that particular battle, Villeneuve threads a tricky needle. On the one hand, it is the complete works, as it combines worm riders and atomic weaponry in the midst of a gigantic sandstorm. On the other hand, the film makes clear that it is the negotiation with the Emperor that is the true climax of the story. That is the negotiating table (albeit one mixed with one-on-one combat, because, well, why not?) that is the climax is clear because Chani (Zendaya) leaves her beloved Paul, having become convinced that he has sold his soul in the process of becoming the master of the universe.
Chani’s disavowal highlights what I consider a weakness of the film: I didn’t find the romance between Chani and Paul particularly convincing and nor did I really follow Paul’s decision-making process about his destiny. As a result of the former, the stakes of the later are much lower. Villeneuve clearly knows that Paul feels about his (Beni Gesserit created) destiny as the Lisan al Gaib, but the mixture of factors – his desire for revenge for his father, his hatred of the Harkonnens, his fear of unleashing the Holy War, his love of Chani and the fremen), appeared to me more as confusing ambiguity rather than dramatic ambivalence.
And while I certainly trust Villeneuve with action, I don’t with landscapes. Perhaps here I simply hold the Canadian to too high a bar. But the fact of the matter is that deserts have been the subject of many great directors, whether David Lean or John Ford. As a result of their work, images of lone camel riders positioned perfectly in the middle of a bright blue sky appear in my mind whenever I am asked to think of a desert. I can’t say the same of either of the Dune movies.
David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is important for Villeneuve for other reasons, as in that film, the eponymous Lawrence feels that his leadership is a failure. In the novels, Paul’s destiny is not so much failure as, my seatmate put it, “unnecessary genocide”. Dune is unlike the DC movies in that it requires a critical distance from its audience, something that David Lynch’s adaptation failed to cultivate. Villeneuve, very importantly, is cultivating that distance. I wonder how many people will show up to his promised Dune 3 knowing that the title of the adapted novel Dune Messiah is ironic?  
 

I came across an interesting misattribution to Thucydides today in the New Yorker: “The Greeks did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke the same language.”
A quick search in Google books points to it originating in 19th century America; the earliest source I could find is in an 1896 edition of Modern Culture. There, the quote is longer and is explicitly attributed to Pericles:
“The Greeks did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke the same language; words received a different meaning in different parts.”
In Thucydides, Pericles doesn’t say anything like this.
However, there is an important line in Book 3.82, in which Thucydides is describing a revolution on the island of Corcyra, he makes this remark about language:

•    καὶ τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐς τὰ ἔργα ἀντήλλαξαν τῇ δικαιώσει.

•    The received value of names imposed for signification of things was changed into arbitrary. trans. Thomas Hobbes

•    Words had to change their ordinary meaning to take that which was now given them. trans. Richard Crawley

•    And they reversed the usual way of using words to evaluate activities. Trans. Paul Woodruff

He then provides some specific examples, such as how recklessness was considered loyalty, prudence was considered cowardice, and moderation considered unmanly. He also notes how the two factions in the revolution describe their actions with moderate sounding slogans, but are nonetheless willing to commit extreme violence.

So what is different about the misattribution from Thucydides comments about Corcyra? First, the misattribution applies it to all the Greeks, rather than just the Corcyrans, thereby implying that Thucydides thought that the Greeks were united prior to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. This ignores Thucydides’ history of the fifty years between the end of the Persian War and the Peloponnesian War, in which he is very aware that the Greeks were not united during this time.
Second, the misattribution implies that Thucydides thought that misunderstanding was at the heart of why the Greeks fought each other. Thucydides famously argues that the truest reason for the Peloponnesian War was in 1.23.6:

•  τὴν μὲν γὰρ ἀληθεστάτην πρόφασιν, ἀφανεστάτην δὲ λόγῳ, καὶ φόβον παρέχοντας τοῖς Λακεδαιμονίοις ἀναγκάσαι ἐσ τὸ πολεμεῖν – αἱ δ᾽ ἐς τὸ φανερὸν λεγόμανι αἰτίαι αἵδ᾽ἦσαν ἑκατέρων , ἀφ᾽ ὧν λύσαντες τὰς σπονδὰς ἐς τὸν πόλεμον κετέστησαν.
•   I believe that the truest reason for the quarrel, though least evident in what was said at the time, was the growth of Athenian power, which put fear into the Lacedaemonians, while the explanations both sides gave in public for breaking the Peace and starting the war are as follows. trans. Woodruff

Notably, there is nothing about misunderstanding here. Thucydides shows that the Athenians were gaining more power. While fear is not an emotion easily compatible with thinking, Thucydides never says that the Spartans were mistaken in their fear of the Athenians. trans. Woodruff
Ι highlighted a part of this passage that also seems relevant to me: how Thucydides argues that the truest causes of the war were least apparent during the moment. This goes against the idea of the misattribution, where misunderstanding would presumably be clear in the moment.

Contains: Spoilers, Light Marxism

Unless we are talking metaphorically, the title Uncut Gems is a misnomer, as there is only one uncut gem in the movie. At the beginning of the film we see the supposedly eponymous gem, a black opal, emerge from the earth during a work stoppage in a mine in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian miners halt their work, or spontaneously go on strike, their outrage is not-translated, because of their members has a grievously wounded leg. Two miners slip away from the confrontation between the Ethiopian workers and the Chinese management to return to the mines. They produce the black opal, the uncut gem. The camera zooms in, first to the surface of the gem, and then into the gem. Despite the name, the black opal contains many colors, in fact, a universe of colors, which flow across the screen like the computer-generated images that used to accompany music on iTunes. But when the camera zooms out from this polychromatic cascade, we are no longer in the mine in Ethiopia. Instead, we are in a proctologist’s office in Manhattan. That is, the camera zooms out not from the opal at all, but rather from the live video-stream of the colonoscopy of one Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler). Howard, better known as Howie, lies on the table, doped and serene.

The audience should appreciate Howie’s momentary serenity, as the rest of the movie consists of him in near constant movement, whether walking while talking on the phone, driving while talking, or Ubering while talking. Ostensibly, Howie works in the jewelry district in Manhattan, but as Howie makes deals everywhere he goes, it is more accurate to say that he works everywhere, whether he is at home on Long Island, when he should be spending time with his family, or whether he is in his Upper East side apartment, when he should be spending time with his mistress, Julia (Julia Fox). Howie calls her Jewels.

It would easy to say that he calls her Jewels because he is objectifying her. He certainly loves looking at her, even going so far as to watch her undress while hiding in a closet. But Howie also loves playing with words and names, playing with them because he uses them to tell stories and he uses stories to make deals.

Uncut Gems focuses on one deal, one story, that Howie completes in 2012 during the NBA finals to Kevin Garnett. Kevin Garnett, who like another character, the Weekend, plays himself. Unlike the Weekend, we see enough of Garnett on screen to determine just how unfair life is: not only is Garnett a great basketball player, he is also a great actor. In the film, when he listens to Howie, a combination of intrigue and distrust flicker across his face. Those two emotions are warranted, as Howie is selling Garnett a story that contains whispers of the truth.

But what most intrigues me about this story is how Uncut Gems updates Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism for the 21st century. In chapter 1 of Capital, Marx concludes by arguing that capitalists are in a constant process of deluding themselves when they examine markets. For Marx, like Howie, takes language seriously, and notes that capitalists frequently talk of various commodities like linen, oil or computers as being hot, cool or even passé. Marx argues that such language is not entirely a mistake, that it in fact reflects how capitalists think about commodities as possessing their own power, ignoring how commodities only move because other people pick them up and move them. Marx’s idea might strike you as a bit silly. Surely the people writing in the Business section of the New York Times and the Financial Times understand that oil does not move itself? But what Howie demonstrates, to paraphrase the Marxist Slavoj Žižek, is that commodity fetisishism works even if you understand that you yourself are fetishizing the commodity.

What is Howie’s plan? Basically, it is to fix a bet on the NBA finals. But while in the past people have fixed bets by convincing athletes to lose, Howie will convince an athlete to win. The athlete in question is Kevin Garnett, and Howie’s plan is to make Garnett believe that if he possesses this uncut gem, he will be unbeatable.

What makes Howie’s plan so intriguing is that he enchants Garnett with the stone by talking about its origins. When Garnett comes into Howie’s shop, he has the basketball player lean over a case and look at his phone with a video about the Ethiopian Jews who mine these opals. That is, Howie uses the unusual identity of these workers to build up the power of the stone, as well as justify his current possession of it. (The Jewish nature of this film demands further investigation, as it is possible that it is the greatest Passover film of all time). We quickly see the results of Howie’s enchantment: Garnett is so charmed holding the stone, he crashes through a jewelry case. This accident only furthers to sell Garnett: he asks Howie to loan him the stone as a good luck charm for the upcoming game. Howie agrees after protest. But once Garnett leaves, Howie places a bet on the game, confident that Garnett will play with incredible power now having the stone.

In commenting on the love that commodities have for money, Marx quotes Shakespeare, saying, “The course of true love never did run smooth”. Howie truly loves money, but his road to it winds through New York, Long Island, Philadelphia and perhaps most aptly, a helicopter ride to the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. Along the way, Howie ultimately sells Garnett the uncut gem. But now, rather than receiving it with awe, Garnett immediately starts questioning Howie, asking how he got his hands on such a stone and how much he paid for it. Howie answers that he paid $100,000 for it, while demurring on how precisely he got it (the answer: through the stomach of a fish shipped from overseas). But Howie does not back down on the importance of his role. Refusing the idea that a middleman like himself collects unearned profit, he identifies the story of the stone as the well worth the money that Garnett has paid. Garnett then leaves, apparently unsatisfied.

Nonetheless, the fetish holds. Indeed, when Howie watches the final game later, we see Garnett holding the stone, truly possessing it, on the sidelines. Unsurprisingly, Garnett wins. For a moment, Howie is very happy.

But only for a moment. The money that he has bet on this second game was not truly his, instead it belonged to criminals, organized slightly better than the Ethiopian workers. Howie figured that the people he borrowed it from would not mind, considering that they would get back more money than they had originally lent him. But Howie has forgotten a key commandment of a storyteller: know your audience. These men think in terms of money, but they also think in terms of respect and honor. They reclaim their honor not by taking Howie’s money, but by taking his life. The hole Phil (Keith Williams Richards) shoots in Howie’s head bleeds a color similar to the swirls at the beginning of the film.

In his initial beguilement of Garnett, Howie comments how Garnett is a type of stone. This comment was enough to convince me of the sorcerous powers of this movie: what are the chances that the basketball player who is perfect actor for this role also has the perfect name for this role? Howie also explains how the men who mine black opals say that it contains a whole universe within it. That is to say, this uncut gem also contains Howie’s own asshole. Perhaps it also contains another uncut gem.

 


   

On Tuesday, November 13, I got two of my friends from grad school to join me on Zoom to discuss the 2018 book Climate Leviathan: A Political of our Planetary Future by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright.
We agreed that the title was intriguing, as was the four-fold schema that as it the center of the book.
Basically, Mann and Wainwright peer into the future and see four Weberian archetypes as ways to describe how humanity will react to the climate crisis. These four archetypes are the results of answers to two questions: first, whether the reaction to the climate crisis will be capitalist or anti-capitalist; second, whether the reaction to the climate crisis will promote planetary sovereignty or not.
The answers to these questions are best summarized in this graph.
 
This idea is simple, but has some power behind it. Indeed, it’s so powerful it’s not surprising that there’s a similar version of this idea out there, specifically Peter Frase’s Four Futures. In 2011, Frase wrote an essay for Jacobin in which he posited a similar schema for the future based on the dichotomies of hierarchy versus egalitarianism and abundance versus scarcity. A book later followed. Likewise, Mann and Wainwright initially wrote an essay entitled Climate Leviathan in 2012, in which they posited their schema. This book followed in 2018. It was not clear to our group that the book length treatment benefited the argument.
 
Indeed, the litany of climate as an adjective – combined with the authors biblically poetic tinge – had me wondering at times how other figures from the Hebrew scriptures could be recruited to confront the climate crisis. The figure of Job came to mind, especially how he questions the fairness of his absurd situation.   
 
Climate Leviathan is divided into three parts. Part 1 defines the key terms, Part 2 provides an intellectual history of key concepts to theorizing the climate crisis politically, such as adaptation, capitalism and planetary sovereignty. Strangely, Part 2 the real heart of the book, rarely engages with the above schema. Part 3 is perhaps best understood as an apologia for Climate X, their preferred future.
 
To do injustice to their definition, Climate X is the future imagined by the Climate Justice movement. It is international, composed as per the actually existing Climate Justice movement of non-governmental organizations, social movements and individuals around the world. Nonetheless it is against planetary sovereignty. Through their critical examination of Hobbes and Schmitt in Section 2, Mann and Wainwright provide some reasons why we should be suspicious of planetary sovereignty.
 
Their investigation of Schmitt revolves around the question of exemption, especially the exemptions that come from states of emergency, and in this way their text immediately sprung to life for me. On November 8, I listened to some of DemocracyNow!’s candidate forum on climate justice. In his presentation, Tom Steyer explained that one of his first actions are president would be to declare a national emergency around the climate crisis. For a flickering moment the billionaire’s voice seemed to be the draconic purr of climate leviathan.
 
I have yet to find their description of Climate X so resonate. Furthermore, it seems to me that if Project X is to ensure Climate Justice, it seems to me that it needs to accomplish two projects: first, the replacement of current practices that produce carbon emissions. Second, prevent the re-establishment or creation of future practices of carbon emissions.
 
The practicalities of these issues are at the forefront of my mind in New Hampshire because of the movement to shut down the coal fired Merrimack Station Power Plant in Bow. While the tools of strike, civil disobedience are key to this struggle, what about ensuring that the workers there have good jobs to replace their current ones? What about the fates of similar workers across the globe?
 
Such questions of economic planning would seemingly shift the discussion away from Climate X and towards Climate Mao, as Climate Mao is positioned as both anti-capitalist and pro-planetary sovereignty. However, Mann and Wainwright explain that they chose the name Mao because they conceived of this form of power as arising specifically in Asia. Climate Mao is therefore not simply a form of eco-socialism that is more amenable to centralized planning, but rather a revolutionary force that results from billions of people having a lot to lose in a short amount of time.
 
While Mann and Wainwright end the book anchoring their conception of Climate X in recent events of the global climate justice movement, when I put the book down, I found myself wishing that they had been more convincing that Climate X had the power and discipline to confront the practical concerns that I raised above. In short, is there a way to avoid both the tyrannical excesses of Climate Mao and the fecklessness of the anarchic street protests that best embody Climate X?
 
The all too easy answer is some sort of democratic socialism, but Mann and Wainwright are clever enough that they have not made this an easy answer. For in their conception, Climate X differs from Climate Mao not by degree on issues such as freedom. Rather, Climate X is supposed to be project built upon ideas complete alien to governance and governmentability as commonly understood today. Given the close connection of governance with dominance, this guiding light makes sense in terms of humanity’s struggle for perfection. Interestingly, they ground this idea not in libertarian socialist thinkers like Murray Bookchin, but instead in counter-sovereignty, a term from indigenous scholars.
 
I left Climate Leviathan without easy solutions, unsurprising for a work of political theory. Neither am I sure, though, that my thinking around the climate crisis has been clarified either. As I mentioned above, the schema at the heart of the book is powerful. Nonetheless, I would be hesitant to encourage others to read this book. While the subtitle promise a political theory of our planetary future, it strikes me more as more similar to the second section of the Book of Job, when Job dialogues with his friends about the origins of his cursed condition: Mann and Wainwright present an archaeology of the ideas that trap currently trap us in the present.
 
NOTE: While I occasionally reference the thoughts, opinions and feelings of my other reading group members, they cannot be blamed for how they are represented in this post, as this post was a solo creation.

On Friday, I wanted to see Parasite, the film by the legendary film director Bong Joon-Ho. I talked to my two Boston-adjacent film companions. Neither were available. Unable to convince myself to drive from New Hampshire to Boston by myself to see a critique of capitalism by a director famous for making an action movie about a train, I instead drove to see Ford v. Ferrari at Chunky’s, a NH cinema famous for mixing food with movies. I arrived early and ordered an Impossible Burger, one of the two vegetarian burgers brands famous for how closely they imitate meat. As I masticated, I ruminated that in a perfect world, in five decades there would be similar chronicle of the competition of Beyond Burger v. Impossible Burger. Beyond impossible? Perhaps.
 
Parmenides argued that perfect, actually existing reality had four attributes, chief among which was motionless. For Ken Miles (Christian Bale), perfection firstly consists of seeing the needle go over seven thousand RPM, secondly, a wife and son who indulge his reckless racing dreams, thirdly, a man who endures amicable pugilism – specifically, a sudden punch to the mouth. But what is the fourth?
 
Parmenides came to my mind because Ken is painted as a Platonist, albeit one who grasps perfection through gasoline rather than rigorous contemplation of the good. An advantage of speed though is that it easier to share than abstract thought. Peter Miles (Noah Lupe) is a child who at once clear-eyed, seeing his father’s temper tantrums and overhearing his financial failures, but unwaveringly trusting, basically worshipful. Ken is comfortable with worship, and shares his secret mission with Peter prior to leaving for France: he seeks the “perfect lap”. Apparently a Platonic realist, Ken urges Peter to find the perfect lap not in his heart or mind, but in the skyline of a LA night above the test track of his work.
 
One could imagine the phrase “perfect lap” prompting chuckle or snigger from a character in the Fast and Furious franchise. But because the entirety of this film’s libidinal energy is directed towards the curve of wheels and windshields rather than legs and breasts, when Mollie Miles (Catriona Belfe) berates Ken for keeping a secret from her, there is no real suggestion that she thinks it is another woman. Given that Ken had recently hidden his innumerable troubles with the IRS, this suspicion of secrecy is well warranted. She breathes a sigh of relief when she learns that he has a new job designing and driving a new racing car worth $200 a day.
 
Ken, in short, is being paid good money for his dream job, which is a combination of engineering and athleticism. The perfect lap is a similar combination: in short, it is the absolute fastest one can drive a loop of a race. The race in question is Le Mans. Despite being British, Ken dutifully leaves unsaid the “n” in Le Mans to honor his French hosts. Perhaps hospitality also explains why he never explains why this race is measured in time and not distance. For it is quickly established that Le Mans lasts 24 hours. However, rather than showing the referees announcing a stop at 24 hours and then tallying who has gone the farthest, the film instead shows the race ending when the winner crosses the finish line.
 
But perhaps the blame for this confusion lies instead with Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), the man who is Ken’s friend and enemy, mentor and successor. The movie opens with Shelby racing Le Mans at night. As if to directly head off accusations this implies the movie is promoting reckless driving by theater goers, a doctor soon clarifies that Carroll’s heart cannot take any more racing. His decision to take this advice is what separates Carroll from Ken. For while Ken’s need for speed is irreplaceably insatiable, Carroll can and does train himself to find joy in leading a winning team, rather than being the winner himself. He is less successful at training himself to find joy as a middle-man. Which is too bad, as that in essence is his job, mediating between visionary and artist, Ken, and capitalist John Ford II.
 
In the Phaedrus, Plato uses an allegory of a charioteer and two horses to describe the human soul. One of the horses is beautiful and good, the other is neither. The charioteer, mediating between the two, creates that all too human result.
 
What this metaphor doesn’t take into account is that in the ancient Greek world, the real winner of a chariot race, isn’t the charioteer. Racing horses, then as know, were expensive projects. The real winner of a chariot race was the owner of the horses.
 
The film is called Ford v. Ferrari. For his fourth quality of perfection, Ken could have used some Marxist analysis.