After Henry: Essays

Americans are good at responding to a crisis and then going home to let another crisis brew both because we imagine that the finality of death can be achieved in life—it’s called happily ever after in personal life, saved in politics and religion—and because we tend to think of political engagement as something for emergencies rather than, as peopl

The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men, not even in his despair at not making a difference or in the great hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he’d clung to as evidence that even though he was emerging as sort of a failure

The conditions of a minimal underground classic—that the shape of a film be discernible in any single frame; that a single-camera strategy be the basis for the movie’s metaphysic and any situation within the film; that the repetitions of the camera, which is always obviously present, creates a spirituality; and that the field of examination be more

To die violently is “righteous,” a flash. To keep on living, as Peter Fonda points out in The Wild Angels, is just to keep on paying rent. A successful bike movie is a perfect Rorschach of its audience.