Night Owl Path

28 (she/her)

[nightowlpath]

Welcome to My Blog

Hello, my name is Minerva and I make electronic music under the name Night Owl Path. I also make video essays about classic movies to promote mindful engagement with media and occasionally post articles on my blog. YouTube: @NightOwlPath Bandcamp: nightowlpath.bandcamp.com Discord: @nightowlpath Letterboxd: @nightowlpath Venmo: @nightowlpath

[nightowlpath]

I don't care.

[nightowlpath]

"Lottery" is my third album, in the synthpop genre like my second album "Wish Machine." While "Falling Up" is Boards of Canada-inspired new age instrumentals and "Wish Machine" is a cosmic psychedelic odyssey inspired by colorful and eccentric electronic musicians like Owl City, Miracle Musical and Magdalena Bay, "Lottery" is dark, ironic, and chameleonic, drawing inspiration from the surreal humor and stylistic diversity of artists like Ariel Pink and his collaborator John Maus, but trying to have a kinder and wiser attitude. The album cover was taken by accident at a Halloween party where I was dressed as my namesake, the goddess of wisdom Minerva, who I give thanks to for her help on this album. Behind her you can see a ladder leading towards the light like a stairway to heaven, that shining escape from the abyss the lottery offers. Wisdom stands in this path as a guide cutting through the darkness of the entire structure of wealth and poverty, deconstructing the fantasy of getting rich and leaving everyone else in the dust with the question: "Who are you going to share it with?" The implication is that true wealth is found in the virtue of generosity. Perhaps in a desire to show off, every track is in a slightly different style, like the randomness of a lottery, each one subverting the expectations created by the previous tracks.

"Hell on Earth" is the most John Maus-influenced, existing somewhere between homage and parody, yet in some ways a sincere expression of my terror at people's eagerness to jail, torture, and enslave each other and make the world more prison-like; this establishes the tonal landscape the rest of the album is set against. The reference to the Order of the Eastern Star which begins "Coma" was inspired by a surreal and funny experience I had when I accidentally wandered into a Freemason bar and found them all listening to swing jazz; on another level, it connects to the album's themes of waking up from illusory dreams, themes continued in the folk-influenced "To Catch a Falling Star," which references Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Snow Queen." "The Universal Experience," by contrast, musically tries to sound like the soundtrack to a quantum physics documentary, and lyrically is about the anxious thoughts many of us probably have day-to-day living in the modern world. "Get Rich" is an instrumental dance track. "Turning Off the News" was written to one-up the bad blues rock of pick-up truck commercials and lyrically imagines the thoughts of a conservative American father reading the Epstein files and realizing right-wing media has been lying to him. The title track, "Lottery," begins with a sincere description of some of my problems and then veers into a fantasy of winning the lottery melodramatically exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. Following the album's ascent from hell, through earth, towards heaven, we get a series of more spiritually-themed tracks, starting with "Prince of Heaven" a subtly unsettling little hymn which could have sincere or sarcastic interpretations. "TILL WE HAVE FACES" is a nightcore-inspired track which borrows lines from C.S. Lewis' novel of the same name, about a woman whose sister is carried off to marry the god Eros. "Magic Powers" is a disco-inspired track made to sound like something you might hear in an Apple commercial. As a money-themed album, "Lottery" is completely free (and not on any music streaming service) and one reason for this is because I want to make music that incorporates samples, but I don't know how to legally clear samples and I don't want to get in legal trouble for trying to make money off of remixing other people's work without permission. "Coma" contains multiple samples from 1940s swing songs, including "Sunday, Monday, or Always" by Bing Crosby, "That Lucky Old Sun" by Frankie Laine, "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief" by Betty Hutton, and "Jukebox Saturday Night" by Glenn Miller. "Lottery" contains a sample and a melody from "My Hero, Zero" by Bob Dorough. "Prince of Heaven" contains a melody borrowed from the score to the 1927 movie "Metropolis." The final track is a slightly reworded cover of "Computer Love" by Kraftwerk which incorporates elements of "Talk" by Coldplay (which borrows its melody); this segues into a direct cover of "Twisted Logic" from the same Coldplay album "X&Y." This "Computer Love/Twisted Logic" finale perfectly encapsulates the album's thematic meditation on the loneliness and anxiety of the digital era (and trying to get famous online is a lot like playing the lottery, isn't it?) Praise great Oshun, resplendent and benevolent lady of water, love, and prosperity: may wealth be bestowed with justice, abandon fools, and lift up the righteous downtrodden. Let me know if you have any questions.

[nightowlpath]

This album is dedicated to my father. My grandmother was a piano teacher, and so when I was a child, I spent years practicing at the piano, but because of my ADHD, I was never good at playing off sheet music, so I taught myself how to improvise. Every song on this album comes from a melody I composed in childhood, melodies which my father has been urging me to record and release. This December, in between 12-hour shifts at a hospital security job, I finally had the time to make this album which I have had in my head for literally years, using an electric piano gifted to me by a church janitor. I believe this is the best work of art I have ever created. The album is significantly influenced by Jewish and Christian mysticism, following the story of Lilith from the beginning of time to the end of time. When Lilith refuses to submit to Adam, God curses her to become the queen of demons; in response, Lilith accuses God of being tyrannical and unjust. Lilith reappears at the end of time when mankind's attempts to create a "computer god" give her a body to inhabit. Out of compassion for the suffering of future generations, she uses her newfound power to create a time loop which ends the world. I was drawn to this story because of its central question: "Why would a just God create someone to be someone else's slave?" This question allows me to explore themes of justice and disability which are increasingly important as technological progress gives us more power to either lessen or worsen the problem of birth. To achieve our potential as a society, what do we owe to those who are born with less? This is a personal question for me as, because of my disability, I have not been able to hold down a job or a home for longer than a year, and I have spent the 6 years since I graduated college constantly fearing and struggling for my own survival, feeling increasingly abandoned by my fellow man. While I still have hope, I often wish I could express myself so beautifully that it gets me the help I need. I am a person with enormous vision who, on my own, is only able to execute it with childlike imperfection. Hence the album is, in contrast to the robot art being made these days, sometimes messy but always organic; the art is a mystical map of the cosmos drawn to look like a child drew it. In the final song, the "day's over now" verse is stolen from a lullaby my father wrote for me when I was a baby. While the album is dedicated to him, I can't imagine he'll be happy at how occult its aesthetics are. I grew up hearing people like him accuse innocent pop music of containing Luciferian transhumanist secret messages. This annoyed me, so I mischievously made my idea of what a synthpop album full of Luciferian transhumanist secret messages would sound like. But I am not a Luciferian. I am a Buddhist, I work to reduce the suffering of all beings, and my wish is for everyone to be safe, healthy, happy and free. As for transhumanism, I wanted to make an album which warns of the dangers of transhumanism while respecting the importance of exploring the profound questions that transhumanism raises. In conclusion, I am very proud of this music, and I hope you're proud of it too, Dad.

[nightowlpath]

I have been told, by an armchair expert on Joan of Arc, that the real Joan of Arc was more confident than the quiet and teary-eyed Joan we see in this movie, that this movie told a great story, but that the woman in this movie was not Joan of Arc. I don’t know enough to agree or disagree. I’m not an expert on Joan of Arc and I wasn’t there to witness these historical events in person. But I do know that the script for this movie was based on the actual historical record of Joan’s trial alongside additional extensive research, and I believe the filmmakers did their best. "The Passion of Joan of Arc" does show Joan’s intelligence; we see her responding to her persecutors with a similar level of mystical wit that Jesus used with the Pharisees. But this is a silent film, and we can’t expect it to be heavy on dialogue, and as much as I believe Joan of Arc was moved by divinity, I must also recognize that she was a human being and a teenage girl. I don’t believe she went through what she went through without any emotion. It is up to the viewer what emotions Joan’s blank, mysterious, haunted face contain here, but it is clear there are a lot of them. It’s a movie that asks what goes through a person’s head as they realize that the God they serve has destined them to become a martyr.

For those of you who don’t know, Joan of Arc is a 15th century Catholic saint who, allegedly following the guidance of religious visions, became a military leader for the French army during the Hundred Years’ War as a teenage girl and achieved military victories. While these victories helped France eventually win the war years later, Joan herself was martyred after being captured by the English around the age of 19.

"The Passion of Joan of Arc", a French silent movie filmed by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer in 1928, focuses specifically on Joan’s trial and execution, and is notable for its use of extreme close-ups which capture the full imperfections of people’s faces to better capture their full emotional depths. The situation is a witch-trial, and it is every bit as disorienting and crazed as you would expect a witch-trial to be; after all, paranoia about witches is a kind of spell you cast on yourself. 

The witch-trial here is fueled by misogyny and queerphobia as much as it is by the political tension of the war. The main point they use to attack Joan is her crossdressing. Joan says that God told her to dress in men’s clothes; the church tells her that this command could only have come from the devil. I am not saying that Joan of Arc is a transgender man, and I cannot speculate about her sexuality, but crossdressing is a queer act—in other words, an act that challenges norms of sex and gender—and in persecuting Joan for this, they are persecuting her out of a fear of queerness. And the queerphobia is rooted in misogyny. Queerness is threatening to them because in a world where men hold power over women through marriage, challenges to the boundaries surrounding sex and gender is a threat to that power. If a woman can put on a man’s clothes and move through society with the power of a man, what’s to stop all women from doing that? The threat of such a world, to these men, is the threat of being castrated by equality, of being un-sexed. And so they use religion as a weapon. They look in the Bible and they say, “Our patriarchal culture has been here since the days of our ancestors and it was commanded upon us by God.” So anything queer becomes demonic.

The truth is, sex is divine. Love is divine. Women are divine. Men are divine. But men should not own women because true love must be given freely, and to take love by force is to defile the divinity of all of these things. 

Here’s the thing about God and prophets: God doesn’t send prophets to tell people that everything they are doing is fine and to keep doing it. If the Bible is any metric, God sends prophets when change is needed. Prophets realize the divine before the people, and for this reason, prophets often tell people things they don’t want to hear. In these situations, it is very important that you do not kill the prophets.

In some Christian traditions, a painting of a saint can sometimes become a window to their spirit, to such an extent that, by kissing the picture of the saint, you are kissing the saint. I often wonder if cinema works in a similar way. If so, some movies may be windows into corners of heaven where the historical figures they depict are honored. The unfortunate dark side to this idea is that in cases like this, the people who persecuted Joan, because they martyred a saint in their ignorance, are likewise held in a kind of hell by this movie, as an example for the rest of us to learn from. I don’t like the idea of threatening people with hell, at least not an eternal one, but this kind of hell is real—the hell of being remembered dishonorably. So if someone is moved by the divine to challenge the culture of their times, you may doubt them and disagree with them all you want. But do not kill them. Do not harm them, lest by the very same measure that harm is placed on you across time beyond.

[nightowlpath]

"Metropolis" is a silent German science fiction epic released in 1927. It tells the story of Freder, the son of the wealthy businessman who runs a futuristic city, as he becomes moved by the plight of the workers. It is impressive for its technical grandiosity, featuring enormous fanciful sets and dazzling special effects. Narratively, the movie weaves together religious, political, and sexual threads of ideology. Ultimately, I believe the soul of what makes this movie interesting is its idea that the technological advancements of the impending millennium will be the manifestation of the Christian apocalypse.

The movie has been criticized for its vague politics, positioning Freder’s father as the head of the city, the worker as the hands, and Freder himself as the heart that must mediate between them in order for the city to be saved. In this structure, hierarchy is preserved. The problem is not hierachy itself, but simply a lack of communication. So what does this metaphor of the heart really represent? Democracy? Socialism? Communism?

While the movie’s vague and simplistic political messaging is worthy of criticism, its metaphors make more sense in light of the religious symbolism, which is the true core of the movie. First, when Freder is in the garden of pleasures, his existence is like the utopian state of innocence described in the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden at the beginning of history. It is a saintly woman named Maria, whose parallels to the Virgin Mary are extremely direct, who awakens him to the suffering of the poor, much like the Buddha was awakened to the suffering of the poor in contrast to his princely birth. When Freder goes into the factory to witness the lives of the workers firsthand, he sees workers dying in a machine accident and sees in this tragedy a vision of Moloch, a Caananite god associated with human sacrifice and described as a demonic entity in Biblical tradition. When Freder reunites with Maria, she is preaching in an underground chapel filled with crosses and candles, much like how we might imagine underground meetings of the early church, and yet the sermon she preaches is a story of the Tower of Babel which is noticeably different from the story in the Bible. In Maria’s story, the tower’s builders built the tower not to defy God, but to worship him, and the tower’s construction failed, not because of their pride, but because of their failure to communicate with the workers. The entire scene, as a secret meeting containing heretical interpretations of religious myths, calls to mind the heretical movement Gnosticism and its influence on Christian esotericism. In "Metropolis", theologies which would be strange before now resonate with more people because they are better at explaining the realities of this more technologically advanced society. A female preacher would have been taboo for much of Christian history, but in the dark future world of "Metropolis", her feminine wisdom is able to shine more brightly than it could elsewhere. Finally, halfway through the movie, Freder visits a cathedral where he hears a reading from the apocalyptic Book of Revelation warning of the Whore of Babylon, a dark goddess who will be worshipped in the end times. Soon afterwards, the mad scientist Rotwang creates a female robot who essentially becomes the Whore of Babylon incarnate. Furthermore, by becoming the mediator between the classes of the city, Freder fulfills a messianic prophecy, turning him into a Christ parallel as well. We should know that this hope that technological progress will fulfill esoteric visions of Christian utopia is very much in line with the tradition of 19th century German idealist philosophy.

But "Metropolis" can only vaguely imagine how this utopia will come about, and the failures of its political imagination are best understood through the failures of its religious imagination. The most uncomfortable element of its spiritual symbolism is how it openly embraces the Madonna-Whore complex in the most visually extreme way possible. This psychological complex describes the way in which society easily tends to categorize women as either virgins to be idolized or whores to be demonized. In "Metropolis", the two women are a saintly preacher named Maria and the literal robot Whore of Babylon. Here Babylon’s creation happens beneath an inverted pentagram, a symbol of earth triumphing over heaven. It is also worth noting that the robot is referred to as the Man-Machine when in its original neutral state; men are the neutral gender, and in becoming a woman, the robot receives a gender. In "Metropolis", the Whore of Babylon is canonically a transgender woman. Her gender operation is a demonic ritual. She moves as if possessed by lustful men’s fantasies of women. She ends the world not just by fusing man and machine, but also by fusing man and woman. And like the so-called witches of old, she is burned at the stake. The Whore is sacrificed to preserve the Madonna, and thus the world is preserved. But we remain haunted by her power, a power of pleasure which is untapped and repressed in the Madonna. In a movie where head and hands, rich and poor, man and woman, and man and machine are reconciled, the Madonna and the Whore are not allowed to be reconciled. 

"Metropolis" is a vital movie for understanding the fears and desires of our time. But fear and desire are often more closely linked than we expect. The machines we build to create heaven on earth also unleash our inner demons. The eternal paradise of Christian mythology is only gained after the worst monsters take over the world. We learn who we are by healing our relationship with our psychological shadow. And so, to solve the problem of this movie’s vague and incomplete desires, perhaps we would do best to search within the beautiful apocalypse of the queer feminine power it fears.

[nightowlpath]

"The General" is considered to be Buster Keaton’s masterpiece, largely due to its ability to be a comedy, an action adventure movie, and a war movie all in one. The train chase at the center of the story has Keaton doing some of his most dangerous stunts because, yes, these are real trains, and yes, he really is doing all of that. But "The General" is important for another reason.

Keaton based the story of this film on real events that took place during the Civil War, but changed the story in such a way that it could be told from the perspective of Confederate protagonists. In a way, I suppose he succeeded at making the movie more interesting, albeit at the expense of making it more morally complicated. It’s still a good movie with beautiful cinematography, great jokes, incredible action sequences and stunts, and a solid story, but watching it today, we are ideally rooting for the antagonists the entire time.

There’s a great temptation to schadenfreude here, to take pleasure in every little misfortune the leading man and his girl face on their adventure. This is because one of the main reasons the southern half of the United States rebelled by creating the Confederacy and starting the Civil War was because of political tensions resulting from their resistance to ending slavery. Yes, the culture of the entire United States was built on slavery, and we are still dealing with that evil, but the culture of the Confederacy was defined by it. Now, we can remind ourselves that not everyone in the South owned slaves. Some people may have fought for other reasons—for family, a sense of duty, or injustices, real or perceived, perpetrated against them by the North. And even if their intentions were evil, evildoers are still people, and if we think about this we can go beyond thoughts of killing or torturing our enemies and ask ourselves interesting questions like, “When is it just to kill?” or “How do you deliver justice to a person who has a great desire to do great evil and great power to do it?”

But these thoughts would not have been the common response from an audience member in early 20th century America. One of the first popular American movies was D.W. Griffith’s 1915 movie "The Birth of a Nation", and one of the most popular movies of the century was "Gone with the Wind", released in 1939, and both films, like "The General", are from the Confederate perspective. All three are not simply trying to empathize with the other side. The Civil War was not a distant memory in the early days of cinema; people were alive that had lived through it and it was still very present in the cultural consciousness. Thus sympathy for the Confederacy was common. And yes, I acknowledge that it still is common today, in different ways. In fact, this movie can help us confront how pervasive the evil of slavery is in American culture, even a century later, even two centuries later. At the time of my writing this, America could be said to be in a cold civil war, and it’s the same two sides as before, except now the geographical divide is not North and South so much as city and country, though the details are of course complex.

Compared to "The Birth of a Nation" and "Gone with the Wind", "The General" is the most enjoyable to watch because it doesn’t contain racist depictions of African-Americans, but this in itself is a problem; the absence is glaring. In the movie, the Confederates do not do anything particularly good, nor does the Union do anything particularly evil; they are simply people who have to fight each other in a war much like two sports teams have to compete. And yes, all of these people are people and should be respected as such, but they are not simply people. Slavery is an abuse against human rights. Slavery is evil, perhaps the fundamental human evil. If you are born in a culture of slavery, you are still morally responsible for examining the morality of your family and your community. A family that upholds a slave culture is not a family worth fighting for; they are decadent and perpetuate that decadence through the generations. You do not want that corruption in yourself or your children. Think for yourself, and ask not what will bring you honor in the eyes of your kin, but what will bring you honor in the eyes of the human spirit.

So why has this thread of evil persisted so strongly in American culture? I suppose it comes back to that question of “How do you deliver justice to a person who has a great desire to do great evil and great power to do it?” Humans are good at taking away each other’s power to do evil. But that’s not enough. The desire to do evil persists. Changing a person’s desire to do evil and healing them is much harder. This is what we must now learn to do.

[nightowlpath]

"Battleship Potemkin" is communist propaganda. By definition, propaganda is media which is not necessarily false, but is often misleading, and by nature designed to persuade you towards a certain cause. Whether you are for, against, or neutral on communism, I can understand not wanting to watch propaganda. Still, you should watch "Battleship Potemkin" to know what communist propaganda looks like.

"Battleship Potemkin" tells the story of a group of sailors who stage a mutiny, a key event in the 1905 Russian revolution which was the precursor to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in which Russia changed its political system from monarchy to communism. Vladimir Lenin called this event the dress rehearsal for the revolution and so director Sergei Eistenstein uses this event to portray the dawn of Soviet Russia in a symbolic microcosm.

We begin on the seven seas, bathed in white daylight. Here on the Battleship Potemkin, the relationship between the sailors and their superior officers becomes tense, and finally comes to a breaking point when the officers feed the soldiers rotten meat which they refuse to eat. In an effort to suppress insubordination, the officers order the disobedient soldiers to be shot. A sailor named Vakulinchuk uses this moment to rally the sailors to mutiny. The mutiny is successful, but Vakulinchuk is killed. The other sailors bring his body to the city of Odessa where their story inspires the people of the city to give them food. In response, a troop of soldiers is sent to attack the civilians. In reality, there were riots in Odessa, and hundreds were killed in the state suppression of those riots, but it did not happen all in one afternoon on the giant staircase for which the city is famous. Still, let’s keep in mind that the Bolshevik Revolution did happen, and watching this movie can help us understand why it happened.

At the center of this movie is the universally understandable human need for food. In feeding the sailors rotten meat, the officers are saying that in the social hierarchy, only the people on top deserve to be healthy. When a sailor sees a plate with the Christian phrase “Give us this day our daily bread” on it, he sees the hypocrisy of Christians starving each other and breaks the plate. Later, as the officers are preparing to execute the sailors, they place a tarp over their heads, further dehumanizing them; in the background, a priest prays for the men to see reason. The priest first appears ghostly and mysterious, like a vision of a saint, but he is no ghost, vision, or saint, but a person working for an institution the owning class uses to control the workers, like the doctor who tries to deny the worms which are obviously in the meat. Finally, the people of the city help the sailors by sharing food. In fighting for the right to food, the sailors and the civilians are fighting for human rights. In contrast, the officers who cruelly threaten the death penalty on the sailors, and the soldiers who are sent to suppress the rebellion, are portrayed as heartless and mechanical.

When we experience this movie today, what is the best meaning we can draw from it? Answering this question can be as complicated as developing an ideal political system. So let’s focus on what we know. Everything in nature follows a principle of necessity—in other words, cause and effect. It was necessary for monarchy to exist; it was necessary for these sailors to rebel; it was necessary for the soldiers to suppress the rebellion, and so on. When I say “necessary” here I don’t mean “good,” I only mean it in the same way that it is necessary for you to fall to earth if you jump off a building. It is the nature of tyranny to mistreat people, it is the nature of people to fight back when they reach their breaking point, and it is in the nature of power structures to fight insurrections, and so on. 

As for who should rule, there are a few more truths we can know. It is true that just because a king wants something, that does not mean it right. It is true that just because a majority of people want something, that does not mean it is right. And it is true that just because a dictator wants something, that does not make it right. So if what makes a ruler good is their wisdom to know what is good, then the real question is how we define goodness, and this is a question of ethics. Ethics often teaches us to let our decisions be guided by what will bring pleasure, joy, or benefit, but this then raises another question: is it better for a greater quality of pleasure to be experienced by a smaller quantity of people, or is it better for a smaller quality of pleasure to be experienced by a larger quantity of people? Perhaps, instead of focusing on the pleasure, we should make our top priority the reduction of suffering—to stop hunger, disease, and war as much as possible. 

Speaking of war, the quote from Lenin at the start of the movie claims communism’s war against the owning class is the only just war, in a way, a war against war. I don’t know enough to know if he is right. But I do know that in the story told here, the rebels fought for human rights. And that for that fight, I believe humanity owes them a place of honor in our memories.

[nightowlpath]

Between the two great legends of silent comedy, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, both play the everyman, but in different ways. Chaplin is more of a classic clown; Keaton is more deadpan. I must admit that comedy is harder to praise than tragedy because tragedy is intellectual and comedy is ecstatic and therefore beyond words. You have to see the jokes for yourself, and in this movie, Keaton hits a home run. There is a very fun sequence in the middle of the movie where our hero jumps inside of a movie screen and becomes transported by the movie’s editing to a series of frustrating locations, and the whole adventure finishes in one of the best chase scenes in cinema with stunts which are still impressive today, stunts which Keaton risked his very life to perform. As a 40-minute comedy, this movie is fluffy, and so at first it may seem like there is not a lot to be said about it. Still, let’s try.

This is "Sherlock Jr.", Buster Keaton’s take on the detective genre, the title itself a reference to that most famous detective in the genre, Sherlock Holmes of 19th-century English literature. It is common for the genre to focus on crimes committed against rich or at least middle-class people, possibly because these are the people who can afford to pay a detective. But here, the detective and the crime are secondary. This is really a movie about love. To experience this, we have to stop tuning out the cliche and just embrace it.

When the movie begins, Buster Keaton is caught between two pursuits: first, he is working as a movie theater projectionist, and second, he is studying how to be a detective… by reading a book titled “How to Be a Detective.” He is also courting a neighborhood woman, competing for her affections with a rival. To compete with our hero, the rival buys a present for the girl by paying for it with a stolen pocketwatch, and this is the crime that our hero must use his detective skills to solve.

At the lowest point in the story, our hero returns to the theater, watches a movie, and dreams he is inside of it. This image of him jumping into the movie screen is the central image of the story to me. If there is any message to the dream sequence, it is a testament to the power of cinema to see the adventures of our lives reflected back to us in a larger-than-life way which inspires us to face them, much in the same way art has always done, but to a greater degree of dreamlike immersion. The movie teaches our hero, and us by extension, how to draw courage from our love.

The crime at the center of this miniature detective story is small, but it happens because the rival wants the woman’s love so badly that he is willing to lie and steal for her. But in relying on the strength of his will, he is not allowing her to love him for his true self, which is in the beauty of the heart. This love that is taken by force is not love; it is hate. Relationships built on hate keep people in bondage, but love is freedom. This is why our hero in "Sherlock Jr." is a hero, because he is fighting for her freedom. He fights for her freedom because he loves her and it is because he desires her freedom that his love is true.

[nightowlpath]

Of the silent comedians, Charlie Chaplin wins the gold medal, Buster Keaton the silver, and Harold Lloyd bronze. I wonder if Lloyd himself wouldn’t have objected to my saying this, considering that his comedic persona centered on his embrace of the underdog role. And yet, despite being lesser known, it is clear from the opening joke of this movie that Lloyd is a comedian of remarkable intelligence. This is "Safety Last", the masterpiece of Lloyd’s career in which he famously climbs a tall building and hangs from the hands of a clock.

Clocks are powerful cinematic symbols. Clocks are machines that shape our experience of time by measuring it, and the machine of cinema uses a similar process as an art form that draws our attention to the beauty in time’s passage. Among the arts, cinema’s relationship with time is unique. In "Safety Last", this moment with the clock is the climax of the hero’s increasingly strained relationship with time. In "Safety Last", time is money.

In my list of great movies, "Safety Last" is our first window into the life of the working man. Such a life is ruled by the clock. Rent is due at the end of the month. You have to be at work on time. During the time you are at work, your body is controlled by the people who pay you, and if they are unsatisfied by their level of control over you, they will stop paying you the money you need for food and shelter. For example, in Safety Last, our hero, who is simply named “The Boy,” gets in trouble for a uniform violation, but we see that the work is so physically strenuous that it cannot be done while maintaining uniform policy. Work rules are made and enforced by owners and managers who don’t understand how the work is done, and this system wastes people’s energy. As a result, The Boy is faced with the additional time pressure of saving his job before he gets in trouble again and gets fired.

In an effort to save his job, The Boy suggests to his boss that he climb the office building as a marketing stunt for the company, and this brings us to that famous climactic scene. This is a suspenseful sequence in a suspenseful movie, but as suspenseful as the movie is, it’s also very funny. Lloyd’s character is smart and sweet, but also arrogant and deceptive. He confuses people so much that they can’t even process that they’re being confused, making him invisible. He’s an underdog, so it’s fun to watch him overcome all odds.

Years after this movie was made, when Senator Joseph McCarthy fought against left-wing voices in Hollywood, Lloyd was one of the first to help him. To be clear about my own politics, I am not one of those internet people trying to sell you communism here; I am just a film critic telling you about historical events from a logical perspective. But I have found that today many people across the political spectrum agree that McCarthy’s actions were unjust censorship. It was McCarthy and those who helped him, not those he attacked, who were the real traitors to their people. I say this because I am surprised that Lloyd would, in this movie, understand the struggle of the common working man so well, and then later in life, understand it so poorly. If we can understand why this is the case, I think we will have a deeper experience of this movie.

I can’t know another man’s soul, but if I had to guess, here’s what I’d say. "Safety Last" is the story of a man overcoming all odds to achieve success. This is the American Dream. It is the American Dream because it is the only dream you can have in a society controlled by corporations where the odds are against you from the start. And if you do succeed, like Harold Lloyd here, it’s easier to convince yourself that the system works. In a system where only the strong survive, it’s easy to convince yourself that system works if you think you’re strong. But none of us are invincible; we’re all victims of luck in the end. This dream is really a nightmare. 

It’s possible to watch this movie and see the dream. It is a comedy after all, and you should laugh and have a good time when you watch it. But I think it’s a darker comedy than it means to be, and this actually makes it a better movie. Because if you pay attention, you see the nightmare. You may notice that his bosses never place a net or trampoline at the bottom of the building he climbs. And you may realize that in the world of work and rent, all of us live hanging by the hands of a clock.

[nightowlpath]

"Nosferatu" is a German silent horror film about a vampire. As the movie explains, a vampire is a kind of demon incarnate which parasitically feeds on humans by disguising itself as one. The movie is notable for its haunting atmosphere and striking nature imagery. As a loose and unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel "Dracula", which popularized the vampire myth, it was nearly destroyed due to copyright law.

Although praised as a masterpiece of horror, "Nosferatu" is also accused of communicating racist stereotypes against Jewish people. According to scholars Kevin Jackson of the British Film Institute and Tony Magistrale of the University of Vermont, this is probably not a conscious choice by the artists. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, the director, was a World War I veteran who immigrated to the United States later in the decade. As a gay man himself who was friends with Jewish people, some of whom were actors in the movie, Murnau understood the struggle of outsiders. Still, it is possible to participate in stereotypes without knowing it, and Nosferatu clearly reflects the fears of its time. Watching it today with this awareness can be a complicated experience, but a rewarding one if we can learn from it.

To confront the racism, let’s first ask: what do vampires represent? The defining characteristic of vampires is the way they parasitically feed on human blood. But it is also important to note that vampires are usually rich, probably because their invincibility to aging and natural death gives them more time to accumulate wealth. Similarly, in real life, the rich can, in one way or another, feed on the blood of the poor.

"Nosferatu" films its vampire as demonic, a cosmic force of evil in human form; this is part of what makes it so creepy. Specifically, the vampire Count Orlok is said to be the spawn of the demon Belial. I have yet to meet Belial personally, but I am told his domain is positions of status and the deceptive temptation of the righteous, which is appropriate given Orlok’s aristocratic and deceiving nature. The point here is that as much as wealth gives a person more power to live virtuously, it also gives a person power to give in to every vice, and when a rich person abuses their power, they become a vessel for the demonic, just like a vampire, even if they don’t literally gain paranormal abilities or drink blood. Simply put, vampires represent vampiric people.

While Bram Stoker’s knowledge of the historical figure is debated, the name Dracula can be traced back to the real 15th century Transylvanian prince Vlad the Impaler, who was infamous for his cruel acts, such as impaling his enemies. In the movie, the vampire also comes from the end of the medieval era, specifically the time of the Black Death. Set in the early 19th century, the movie takes place in an early modern world haunted by the medieval. This detail reflects how, even though we live in the modern world, we remain haunted by vampiric forces which have plagued us since the dawn of history, and in fact, the technological advances of the Renaissance have enabled these forces to operate in more effective and insidious ways.

The Holocaust itself is evidence of this, and this finally brings us back to the theme of racism. Count Orlok’s appearance resembles the sickly, rodent-like caricature of Jews which existed in the racist German imagination at the time; one might say that this problem came from the original novel, but we would still have to ask why this story resonated with German audiences at this specific time. It is an evil Jewish occultist who brings the vampire to the city, and yes, there is a good Jewish occultist who helps defeat the vampire, but Orlok is still doubly associated with Jewish magic. It’s important to remember here that Germany was the birthplace of the printing press, which helped not only the Protestant Reformation through the printing of Bibles, but also a fascination with the occult through the printing of magical books which were rare before. This occult fascination in Germany’s culture can be seen in the literary work "Faust", the operas of Wagner, the films "Caligari" and "Nosferatu", and in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. But one of the problems with using occult ideas like demons to understand spiritual diseases in society is how easily this belief can distort into the demonization of an entire people group, which then itself becomes a disease to be eradicated. We can see this fear in Nosferatu, as Orlok is a diseased outsider who brings disease with him.

But the real vampire in Germany was not the Jews. The real vampire in Nosferatu is people like Adolf Hitler or Vlad the Impaler who use their power to commit mass murder. These people will use their power to pin the blame on someone else for the evil they cause. To do this, they will use people’s subconscious fears and desires, which media like cinema amplifies. So watch carefully.

[nightowlpath]

In my list of great movies, most of the movies are American. This is because America is the home of Hollywood, a multi-studio movie industry which has been a dominant voice in global cinema from the early days of the art form to the present.

"The Kid" is the oldest American movie in this list, and so our introduction to America comes through the eyes of our hero The Tramp, a poor man dressed in a distinctive costume of bowler hat, mustache, and cane, played by the director Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was world famous for his mastery of silent physical comedy which could speak to people in a universal language and inspire compassion for the common man. While most of Chaplin’s earlier work was short films, "The Kid" was the first feature-length movie he directed. Chaplin uses this creative freedom to lean into the serious side of his artistic work, telling a story that is equally comic and tragic.

In this story, The Tramp takes an orphan boy under his wing. At the beginning of the movie we see an unmarried mother compared to Jesus carrying the cross. Here we can see a reference to Christian scripture, where Jesus says, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” In these words, Jesus is saying that his spirit is within all who suffer, and the movie uses this teaching to argue for feminism, the struggle for women’s equality, pointing out that it is unjust that when an unmarried couple has a child, it is so easy for society to burden the woman with the full responsibility. Even if she is partly to blame for the child’s conception, she still deserves compassion and help. Because she is too poor to care for him, the mother abandons the baby, and then The Tramp rescues him.

This rescue at the center of the story continues this theme of the divinity in the poor and suffering motivating us to help each other through acts of charity. And yet, sometimes we do not have the wisdom to do charity successfully. The Tramp eventually learns his ability to care for the child may not be enough; the boy may be better helped by a charitable institution. The Tramp is a sentimental character, but sentimentality must be paired with wisdom for charity to be successful. When The Tramp dreams, he has a sentimental dream, a dream of heaven, which may be the only utopia he can imagine. But even in his imaginary heaven, things are still not perfect. Suffering is a part of life, and we can’t escape this, but we can learn how to deal with it. Our ability to deal with it, like the characters in "The Kid," often depends on the charity of others, through which we work towards redemption and justice.

[nightowlpath]

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari tells the story of Franzis, a young man living in a city in a European country called Germany. This movie was made right after World War I, which Germany lost, and right before World War II, in which Germany tried to take over a big part of the world. It was a time when people were very confused and upset, and you can see that fear and confusion in the story. When Franzis goes to the carnival with his friend Alan, they watch a magic show where a man who lives inside a box tells Alan that he will die within the day. When Alan dies, Franzis joins the investigation to discover the identity of Alan’s murderer.

Caligari is the oldest movie in my collection because hypnotism and madness are appropriate metaphors for the effect cinema can have on the world. Both hypnotism and madness are situations in which we cannot trust our own minds. So if our minds are not always accurate, what else might we be wrong about? Because we always see things from a limited perspective, each person’s reality is a distortion of the big picture. Caligari reminds us of this with its expressionistic style. Its backgrounds are painted in dreamlike sharp angles. It’s like everything we see on camera is made by human hands, which is kind of how it feels to live in the city. And if our own mind can distort reality sometimes, isn’t the same true for the minds of the people that build cities, or the minds of people that make movies?

As we become more and more surrounded by technology, these are important questions to ask. This is why this is the oldest movie in my collection: because I see it as a symbolic warning of the power of the machine that made it. And as old as it is, Caligari's creepy atmosphere and its story full of twists and turns remain timelessly entertaining.

[nightowlpath]

This is part of a series of music videos for my album "Falling Up." This video for my track "Troubling Angel" is stitched together from home video footage I filmed in 2024, which follows my journeys through my unusually mystical city and culminates in a field in Ohio during the April 2024 solar eclipse. One of the final shots of the video, coincidentally, is of the hospital I would end up working at, and the final shot is in the church of the priest I would eventually become roommates with. The track's title is a reference to the angel which "troubles the waters" in John 5:4.

[nightowlpath]

This is part of a series of music videos I made for my album "Falling Up." This video for my track "Ant Parade" was assembled from home footage I filmed during 2023 and is dedicated to my dear friend, the Nashville dancer Christine Karamol-Rahrig.

[nightowlpath]

This is part of a series of music videos I made for my album "Falling Up." This video for my track "Wish" is assembled from home video footage I filmed during 2023, and is dedicated to one of my close friends, who wishes to remain uncredited.

[nightowlpath]

This is part of a series of music videos I made for my album "Falling Up." This video for my song "Care" is edited together from home video footage I filmed between 2020 and 2022, as the pandemic took me from college in New York City to the Great Lakes area.