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1.5.2025
Owen McClintic
January 05, 2026
Happy New Year! Will things be better in 2026? I have my doubts!
YouTube Obsession
My first stop after the first of the year is Steve Shives channel as he breaks down (almost) everything that has just entered the public domain.
You never know where inspiration might strike, so seeing what is on the market and free to adapt is always interesting to me.
Reading
Here’s the thing about critique: None of it is wrong.
That might be hard to hear, especially to creatives. I know when I make something I have an idea at the center of it, a theme, a subtext, a central conceit that the piece is “about.” It is my goal to help the audience see that idea to the best of my ability. Yet, despite all my toil, once I put a piece of art into the wild: It is no longer mine. People can read whatever they want into a piece, that is beyond my scope as an artist but it is my prerogative as an audience.
Colin Trevorrow can yell at me till he’s blue in the face that Jurassic World does not hate single working women, yet the fact remains that his movie depicts a millionaire single woman in all white (Virginal, ice queen) who is ambivalent about starting a family (Read: unfulfilled) until she meets a rugged man and is thrust into caring for children to give her life meaning. This was not his intention I’m sure but that is my reading as the movie is presented. It’s valid.
That’s why I love reading critique from people who have differing opinion from myself on media. And, if it is a well reasoned differing opinion, force me to have thoughts I would not normally have.
Case in point; I only just started reading Carmen Petaccio’s substack about movies and their Top 25 films of the 21st Century and while I don’t agree with most of the rankings I genuinely enjoy reading their justifications.
Take this qualification for ranking M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable, a film I have rarely thought about since seeing it in 25 years ago.
Why Unbreakable Made Our List: In M. Night Shyamalan’s follow-up to The Sixth Sense, there are two great twists, one of which remains mostly unheralded. The first is the director’s trademark late-in-the-game plot twist: a trusted ally is revealed to be a psychopathic villain. The second twist occurs on a more existential level, and upends coming-of-age tropes to ask a frightening question, What if the grandest delusions that a child entertains about their parent were revealed to be true? While the preponderance of superhero movies this century have leant Unbreakable a deserved prescience, the heartrending focus that it retains on its father-son relationship remains at the core of its timelessness. Patient, mature, grimly hopeful, the film marks the moment just before superhero stories drove its director, his medium, and the movie-molded collective consciousness to lose their minds.
To contrast the grounded depictions of family, heroism, normalcy, and sacrifice in Unbreakable with their expressions in Marvel and DC movies is to understand that Shyamalan’s film has retroactively become counter-programming for a media landscape dominated by shallow spectacle and profit-driven infantilization. Unbreakable technically has two sequels, but even M. Night, today descended fully into bonkers-brilliant B-movie psychosis, knew better than to title them Unbreakable 2. Holy ground.
Having robust thoughts about media and being able to convey those thoughts well is like having a super power. I am now having new thoughts about film that I would not have otherwise had. That’s cool af. Stop reading self-help books and read more critique.
MM
In another bit “accidentally of perfectly timed” reading; I just read this great post from Freddie deBoer about the lost art of being a hater.
But mostly, while I enjoyed the conversation and thought it was energizing, I found myself depressed by what didn’t happen: these two professional critics did not, at any point, forcefully defend the idea that negative criticism is valid, important, and necessary in an unqualified way.
As mentioned earlier, I love reading different opinions on media and I enjoy informed and passioned hate for media. It is all valid to hate a beloved movie, song or TV show.
deBoer also talks about the trend of “poptimism“1 in media critique which holds that, for various reasons, it’s just much easier to like everything than to have a negative stance on art.
The piece is cap-stoned by a wonderfully thorough and vicious takedown of the last season of Stranger Things.
What would it take, do you think, for people to admit that the “nerds” have won? What level of totalizing cultural, social, professional, and economic victory would be required before the nerds started to ask themselves hard questions about whether they’re really so marginalized? They really underline the whole “nerds are the downtrodden saints of suburbia” shtick, in season five, with condescending asshole Dustin involved in a pointless and stupid dick-measuring contest with over-the-top jock stereotypes, a plotline that ensures everyone knows nerds are good and everyone else is bad. That element has always been potent in Stranger Things, but at this point it’s not just stale, it approaches the grotesque. In 2025, nerds are not the bullied kids hiding in basements - they are the ones who own the basements, the houses above them, and the streaming platforms that beam this cosplay of victimhood into your living room. Silicon Valley billionaires, Marvel’s endless nerd-baiting franchises, the algorithmic chokehold of tech monopolies, the cultural hegemony of Comic-Con aesthetics, even total control of sports franchise front offices and the analysis of those sports…. Nerds are not marginalized in 2025! We live under the thumb of the ever-growing nerd empire! To keep portraying nerds as lovable outsiders is to watch the new aristocracy spike the football over and over again, insisting they’re still scrappy underdogs while they dictate the terms of our economy and our imagination. It’s ugly and it’s dishonest. Nerds are the new bullies, and Stranger Things is their victory parade, disguised as nostalgia for a false past. Yes, I understand that the show takes place in the 1980s. But, for one, I think a lot of nerd mythology about the past is just that - everyone who complains that the kids at school made fun of their Star Wars lunchbox is ignoring the fact that everyone had a Star Wars lunchbox in the 1980s, I was there, those were the biggest movies of all time! and two, the show might depict the 1980s but it’s being released in the 2020s, and I just don’t see any more utility in the never-ending quest to prove that nerds are better than everyone else.
Being a hater takes skill. I can’t get behind a negative critique if it isn’t backed up by good reasoning. Please see above for the blueprint.
Playing
Despite my best efforts, every so often I get the urge to play GTAV. To be perfectly honest I love this game. It’s systems, that first heist, the open world, complete player freedom and now, having lived in LA for 6 years, I enjoy spotting local landmarks.
But from my very first playthrough in 2014 I have really despised most of the writing. Usually I quit once the player is forced to torture an NPC, while one of the most vile characters ever written, explicitly chastises the player for enjoying violence in video games. It’s the writers having a cake/eat it too moment at the behest of a player that cannot advance the story without playing this mission. The first time I played this mission it left a really sour taste in my mouth and tinted my view of the rest of GTAV’s LA. The light jabs on American culture no longer felt like astute observations from outsiders, they felt like admonishments.
Don’t get me wrong, part of the lasting appeal of GTA3 is it’s hyper-American satirical humor. It works because it is an American crime game made by people who have only experienced America through action movies. There’s really nothing deeper there. Also, this abstraction is aided by a “blank slate” protagonist. When I project myself on the silent protagonist of GTA3, I am taking responsibility for the story of that character. I can choose to run over civilians, kill hookers or I can choose not to. In GTAV, I am suddenly forced to play a psychopath who smokes meth and kills indiscriminately. I as the player have no choice for the character to engage in those activities.
I fully understand that by having a written player character allows Rockstar to have a more fully-developed story. However, there is a balance that must be achieved for a game’s story to have weight but also not remove all agency from the player -in a video game- to get immersed in that world. Rockstar can do this, as they have done it before with the protagonists in San Andreas and Red Dead Redemption. In Rockstar’s most recent games (GTAV, RDR2), I don’t think the trade-off has been worth it.
Maybe I need to give San Andreas a replay but CJ never felt like a sociopath. Probably because the game is not continually telling the player that CJ is a sociopath like in GTAV. And trust me, I GET IT, no GTA protagonist is a good person but man they really tried to make the PCs in GTAV into pieces of shit.
Anyway, by the time this comes out I have probably already given up on this playthrough and moved on to something less annoying.
Other Notables
** Great video on a bit of domestic terrorism that I have never heard before.
1 A term originally coined for music criticism but is apt for all modern media.
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