You Suck At Watching Movies

Cultivating A Good Conscience for "Second Renaissance" Entertainment

(Paid subscribers got this a week ago & with a fun audio version recorded by the author. This was notably entertaining for me to read…)

I. A LIMINAL CAT NAMED LORE

I have a friend named Kayt. She had a cat named after “Lore,” the pale anarchic android twin of Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was a helluva show. Took a few seasons to find its footing, but it was smart, imaginative, philosophical, very popular, and probably got more people thinking about post-capitalism than Karl Marx ever did. People still go to fan conventions dressed up as the pale droid, the sexy empath, or that wise bald British guy from all the memes.

Resistance is futile.

While folks in the overlapping transformational, developmental, and regenerative networks are wringing their hands about the production of mobilized communities & new post-religious cults, the Trekkies, Star Wars fans, Juggalos, Airbenderites, X-filers, Avatarians, Dune-ists, Matrix Neo's & neo-Orcs (ie, the fan communities) have been successfully doing this stuff for decades.

Sacred participatory indulgence in repeated storyworlds is the backbone of religiousness. And while Gnostic Gospels, Sufi poetry & Buddhist Middle-length Discourses offer material not usually found on the silver screen, our screens and books nonetheless provide a shared language of potential depth and serious play. We would be fools not to explore the heart-sharing, mind-clarifying, and culture-provoking power of the various forms of fictional LORE in which we find ourselves embedded.

At Limicon II (2025), Joe Lightfoot & I hosted a session together called: One Lore to Rule Them All. If you were not at Limicon, shame on you! (Or shaman on you? We’ll see.) Anyway, it was the second annual, month-long gathering of the denizens of the “liminal web” — which is one way to describe transdisciplinary, metacrisis-informed folks with a high facility for moving between worldviews and value systems.

You know the type.

I have done some work to define liminality & Joe Lightfoot coined the term liminal web, (soon to be displaced by the World Wise Web ?) so together we were well-positioned to have a fun session. The premise was simple: select your favorite contemporary “lore” and explain it to your peers. But what’s a lore?

Our definition was “a popular shared storytelling universe from the last hundred years.” Any contemporary mythological alternative worldspace. Dune. Middle-earth. Game of Thrones. Harry Potter. Conan. Twin Peaks. The Marvel Cinematic Universe. Etc. People really seemed to dig it, man. There was even a follow-up session on fictional characters at the All-day In-person Limicon Event in Toronto, and the Stoa’s Peter Limberg recently analyzed emergent AI through the lens of Dune People or Matrix People?

There is something crucial to these stories. We might even undervalue them. Almost all of us were raised with multiple pop culture “alternative universes” as our primary or secondary form of mythology. Most people in our culture consume vast amounts of books, television, cinema, comics, etc. We can humorously call it nerdy but it’s pretty damn mainstream. Walking Dead. Batman. Game of Thrones. Matrix. Star Wars. Etc. These the among the most watched, and rewatched, human artifacts in the history of the world.

These story realms are a low stakes / high insight form of serious mutual play. And we might not take this play seriously enough. If, for example, your only access to shared storyworlds was through the Vedas, Koran, Eddas, Bible, or the cosmogonic folk tales of your elders, you would both enjoy them AND you would treat them as something worthy of profound pondering.

But we have learned — partly through the reactionary ghettoization of science fiction and fantasy in the early 20th century, partly through the distrust that all authoritarian regimes have toward the human imagination, and partly through the anxious idea that we are watching too much, consuming too much, on our devices too much — that we should not fully rejoice in, or treat as profound, our engagements with “mere” fantasy.

I disagree.

There are few things as delusional as the idea of a sharp, obvious boundary between fiction and reality. Some of the most fantasy-prone people I know are those who define themselves as “realists.” Today, we understand that imaginal patterns can be useful cognitive tools. That is, if we can first distinguish them from imaginary patterns.

The issue is not the superficial contrast of “movies vs reality” but rather the degree of effort, pondering, and shared nourishment that differentiates useful impressions of all kinds from reactive and moralizing trivialities — whether social, perceptual, or fantastical. And we all simply start where we are. We have to work with whatever our predilections involve.

Malcolm Gladwell said we could be experts with 10,000 hours of practice. I’ll bet we've all spent that much time walking, breathing, and watching shows. Why aren't we geniuses at these skills? It doesn’t happen automatically. We have been walking, breathing, and “watching” on autopilot.

What are the alternatives?

The next few sections of this article will pretend to be an autobiography of my own evolving relationship to shared storyrealms and popular art forms. Although the events are true, they are also tweaked to be a “delivery vehicle” for certain general points and principles that might help us make more productive use of our entertainment worlds.

And then we’ll circle back to Limicon…

II. A BABE IN AN EGG OF PIXELS

I was way into it.

From an early age, I saw how to take deep emotional pleasure and sustained intellectual interest in what they called “shows.” I recognized the structures of jokes, and the cliches of plot. I connected actors to other shows, and, above all, I paid attention to the “writers” and “directors.” In hindsight, this seems essential.

Some educational theory posits that a child’s ability to form positive relationships with teachers is more important than their overall cognitive capacity. So maybe the degree to which you regularly and easily notice that somebody made this informs the depth to which you can experience a show.

The adults around me, from early on, used to ask me questions about things we were watching. What? I was small and certainly did not have any extra information. I was merely watching the same thing they were! Wasn’t I? Maybe I just cared more? Or maybe, as I realized with time, I knew what I was looking at. Of course, everyone knew that it was a TV show. Or movie. Or book. But they seemed to forget this fact while viewing.

The famous “suspension of disbelief” (which I think has been drastically exaggerated as a description for human involvement in fictional universes) seemed to take hold. They pretended we were watching a fake “real world” in which there were real people, who we either didn’t like OR really liked (and therefore wanted to save or help win).

I didn’t see that at all.

I was seeing a writer or director who had made something they loved, and who were trying to communicate their love and insight to me. It was a relationship. I never forgot the makers of the show. I never took the content as primary. This was not an alternative reality. It was a coded artistic message from real people about THIS reality.

So I put effort into it. I would read the TV Guide each week and circle promising new shows well in advance. Naively, I assumed that the rest of the family would scan this and modify their viewing accordingly. No such luck. I also read a great deal about my favorite shows. The making of Star Wars. The backstories and engineering schematics of the original Star Trek. The history of James Bond girls. And why did Patrick McGoohan make The Prisoner like that? If I was going to bother watching, then I should learn the nuances of the imaginal universes.

Most of my friends were watching “popular contemporary” shows. That means, they watched whatever they thought people in their generation were mostly watching. And that means, they weren’t really applying any serious evaluation filter at all. I probed the “classics.” Marx Brothers. Casablanca. Blade Runner. Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Kubrick.

Being part of the cultural moment started to seem like utter stupidity. Or rather, it was a very narrow slice of the Great Present Moment of All History that I was connecting with aesthetically and emotionally.

When my family moved from the wilderness to a moderate-sized town, I could suddenly take the bus to a movie theater on my own. First stop — David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.

I knew the Canadian auteur director David Cronenberg because his early horror films combined high weirdness, graphic nudity, and intense cultural literacy. And he was filming the crazy, dreamlike, science fiction pseudo-autobiography of beat poet, language guru, and experimental magician William Burroughs. With the inimitable (meaning highly imitable) voice of Robocop’s Peter Weller!

I basically had to go.

The dingy downtown movie theatre at night, which was populated by myself and three other lone males, all of them much older than me, was an opportunity to contemplate the notorious homosexual content of the film. I had heard about the “homosexual content” from some television interviews and newspaper articles. Yet I had also heard that the medium is the message. And some old Taoists had told me that “what happens” is not as relevant as THE WAY things happen.

So I was content-skeptical in the same way that people get described as being vaccine-hesitant. Insofar as I found myself responding to the “categories of things in the film” (e.g., gay sex, drug use, alien typewriters), I scolded myself for sheer idiocy. And the more I enjoyed berating myself about this, the more I saw the unquestioned assumption everywhere in life. We warn people about shows based on what kind of stuff might be in it. Nudity? Smoking? Strong language? We ask people to choose preferences based on categories of content. Do you like the ones with the space ships or the romances or the magical creatures or World War II events?

It is simply assumed that our concerns and preferences should be related to the category-of-stuff. When we ask ourselves what shows children should or should not see — we immediately try to gauge what’s in it. Do we ever try to gauge how good it is? Does anyone ever have a strong moral stance that children should only be allowed to see material that is novel, complex, and well-directed?

Isn’t the value of artwork in the HOW not the what?

III. ALL ALONG THE REWATCH TOWER

I was about 30 when I realized what the word “forest” actually means. Sure, my elementary school teachers might claim that I already knew this word, but I remember that Spring day in the woods when I exclaimed aloud and triumphantly, “Now THIS is a forest!”

Perhaps, if I am lucky, I will learn this word again one day, freshly, and at last, retroactively re-evaluating my previous so-called understanding as being virtually worthless. Some things are only real when they come again.

One of the most popular podcast genres (after true crime) is “rewatch.” That’s where people return to TV shows and movies, sometimes even the actors who were in them, to see it again with fresh eyes. We might roll our eyes at this. We might roll our eyes at ourselves when we indulgently return to our favorite classic shows or books. But this indulgence is also the model for depth.

Around the ancient campfire, we would have heard the mythologized tales of the Elders many, many times. We are exhorted to return endlessly to our Bibles, Korans, and aphorisms of wisdom. It is in the revisiting that true relationship starts to unfold. And only by re-encounter can we gauge whether depth, nuance, or complexity is blossoming in our patterns of response.

So let us teach each other a good conscience about rewatching.

What a mercifully short section this is!

IV. DOESN’T ANYONE SAY inter alia ANYMORE?

I recently sat down with Rufus & Sylvie from Life Itself and The Second Renaissance to discuss, among other things (wink), Sylvie’s art manifesto. Therein she layeth out a set of 10 principles, or inquiries, for the current phase of Art in liminal culture. They’re pretty good. And they made me think, as I told them, of True Detective (Season 1) as a potential test case.

Many people consider it to be one of the best things from television in the last few decades. Others critique it as a misogynistic and nihilistic portrayal of toxic masculinity. And, yes, the two main characters are not meant to be role models of healthy masculinity for the New Aeon. However, it is not nihilistic.

It is a wholesome portrayal of unwholesomeness (much better than an unwholesome insistence on wholesome content). And it is trans-nihilistic. Post-tragic. Do not get lost in the dialogue about meaninglessness because the conclusion of the series is the revelation of a necessary quality of transcendental meaning. That’s on Sylvie’s list.

True Detective weaves together the spiritual, artistic, and socio-political. It attends to the ecosystem and the historical and cultural moment. Those are also on the list. It enfolds the mystical dimension without losing rational critique. It is a compass, not a map. It displays communication between past and future time frames.

So if we are looking for the redemptive art and entertainment (and I’m vaguely ashamed of having written those words as they were two different things) of the emerging epoch, we must start to formulate some basic principles of recognition that operate beyond the nominal forms of the material. Any genre, any types of characters, any worlds, can be the context for presenting and unfolding an embedded spiritual leading edge. And while there is some spiritualizing value in a conventionally beautiful and beatific statuette of Christ, Buddha, or Tara, there is as much, or more, in Zen Master Hakuin’s grotesque self-portraits.

Again, who and how tell us much more than what (and what it reminds us of) but, for that to work, we need a refined visceral sense of the principles that need to be recognized within whatever genre and realm is being artistically probed.

And speaking of alien probes…

V. AN ILLUSTRATIVE STAR WARS FANDANGLE

Something changed for me after Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I stumbled out of the movie theatre in 2017 in an unusual daze. I had a vague, vast, and drifting sense of subtle nausea that might characterize a man who had been too long at sea.

But which sea?

Hmmmmmm.

My own inner psychological constellation of responses to the Star Wars universe started early. Joseph Campbell and a half dozen other white, middle-class “boomer” mythologists were whispering into my soft, juvenile ears that George Lucas had revived human mythos for the new electromagnetic post-60s epoch. Knights, Princesses, Wizards, and esoteric Dharma hints were coupled with lasers, force fields, and the quintessential epochal struggle between Rebel Green & the Imperial Machine. It was powerful. It moved me. And it seemed, to a child, homogeneously positive and enchanting until I got old enough to start disliking The Return of the Jedi.

Dislike is probably too strong. My positive regard became complexified by the addition of an extra set of evaluations. Lucas’ third episode started to stand out to me as childish and de-pressurized. It was not just because of the corporate insertion of teddy bear merchandise (Ewoks) or the mostly thoughtless repetition of the same ending from the first movie (another Death Star?). What unsettled me was harder to put my finger on.

The removal of Darth Vader’s helmet at the end of that movie started to symbolize, for me, that the lid had been taken off the mythic pressure cooker. Now all the steam was leaking out. The mythos machine wasn’t operating. Bathos replaced pathos.

Now, instead of “liking” or “not liking” Star Wars, I was shifting my evaluation-tentacles around, trying to find any consistent difference between the bits with which I strongly resonated and those that felt oddly flat or even de-spiriting.

Like most intellectual young men in the final years of the 20th century, I decided that The Empire Strikes Back was empirically (sic) the best film. The only problem with this conclusion was that it remained objective, external, official, distanced. I could not intimately re-experience the same mythic & aesthetic intensity with which I remembered originally encountering the film.

And, believe me, I tried.

Watch in complete darkness. Or in the middle of the night. Watch with other fans. See it on larger screens. Dress up. Take different kinds of drugs. Rev up your focus with a long period of pre-viewing meditation. All great experiments, but they could never quite retrieve the mythic potency that I believed was still encoded in the film.

At this period of my life, you understand, I was deeply invested in what Soren Kierkegaard called the Aesthetic Stage. Life and effort seemed justified only by the peculiar artistic intensities of “pure experience.” Special, vivid, and participatory affects were my religion.

Like most teenagers, I was reading a lot of the 18th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and so I was certain that the intense experience of art and music could create a transrational suspension of the endlessly unresolved seeking of the “Will” of Nature.

I also had Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind on my mind. I probably could not, I reasoned, fully re-enjoy The Empire Strikes Back because my pure capacity for perception was obscured by ego, thought, and social conditioning.

So I practiced and became pretty good at “seeing with fresh eyes.” I could recontextualize and decontextualize my perceptions so that the forms, flavors, and textures of experience stood out as if being encountered for the first time. Unrecognized in the starkness of their novelty.

Yet even this thoughtless suspension of associative psychological data, applied more or less consistently while watching a Star Wars film, was not ultimately fulfilling. You’re shocked, I can tell. The sense of meaning that I remembered (or imagined that I remembered) was always incomplete.

And so I gradually lost interest in cultivating the aesthetic freshness of my perceptions. In fact, I started to feel distanced from the “romantic” fantasy of complete immersion. I observed that my previous perceptions of the difference between Kairos and Kronos, quality and structure, engagement and freedom, participation and withdrawal, were… exaggerated. There was no special necessity to try to show up as fresh, present, fully attentive, and totally engaged.

“Totally” started to sound like a non-concept. When people said “the Absolute” or “100%,” I somehow didn’t know what they meant. What a strange feeling. And who could I tell? Only you, dear reader. Lucky, lucky, you.

Anyhoo, I still loved that Star Wars universe, with all its imaginative creatures, immersive worlds, playful sound effects (and seemingly valid tactics for utilizing mind-strength in tandem with the subtle energetic fields operating between organisms). So I was still a card-carrying loyalist when the prequel trilogy came out.

It didn’t bother me much that they were unnecessarily goofy, clearly rushed, and definitely overburdened with early CGI. What I did dislike, though, was the reactive attitude of the people (and corporations) defending these films against attacks. They had to be good BECAUSE they were Star Wars. Anyone complaining was probably (gasp!) a mature fan.

Apparently, decades spent loving something, holding true to its spirit, and combining all that with adult analytic capacity was… bad. Why couldn’t these people just understand that the films are for children??? That’s a dangerous rebuttal. Children are a major target demographic, sure, but what does it mean when the makers of a large-scale cultural artwork say, “It’s just for kids” ? That is a comment by adults who are confessing their own lack of interest in the intergenerational mythic potency of their project. It means they have no emotional, aesthetic, or mythological skin in the game.

But while Lucasfilm was leaking its soul, another phenomenon was emerging. Lucas’s weirdly infantilizing re-edit and re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy converged with better digital processors and a new wave of professional video editing software to create The Phantom Edit. It was the first of an ever-growing genre of passion-driven, multi-year, nonprofit fan improvements (re-edits) of Hollywood films. A quintessential sign of what digital civilization is becoming.

All this time, I had been sailing on Star Wars seas.

Then I washed ashore in the wreckage of The Last Jedi. It was not terrible. It has witty parts, interesting twists, great visual effects — it’s just not very Star Wars. Instead of feeling like you are “expanding into a greater universe,” it makes you feel that the universe does not matter, growth is a doomed fiction, and all sacred things should be easily tossed aside.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of blue milk, female heroes, and “troubled Luke.” The problem is storylines that go nowhere. Heroic gestures that accomplish nothing. Inner power without growth. Disregard of the seriousness of the storytelling world. And, perhaps the greatest sin of all in mythic lore, no preferencing of awesomeness.

Initially, despite that odd feeling as I wandered away from the movie theatre, I still assumed that I had liked it. But over the next few days, the subtle sensation grew more salient, and eventually I stopped assuming.

First, I tried to poetically articulate my situation. This grew into a primitive form of my ongoing critique about “cinematic nihilism” and the difference between a functional mythos and a parasitic mythos.

I got interested in other critiques and became a connoisseur of YouTube essays that analyzed the structural faults of the films. This was a revelation and a community. I found that I could still get those Star Wars feels while also exploring the subtleties of mythic art through a more critical lens. It was very nourishing.

Slowly, bit by bit, I was building up the strength to invert my values.

Nietzsche had done this. It was part of his theory of development that you had to sometimes experimentally reverse your current highest values to find your own next intensity of being. There is a rung above you on the ladder but to go past that rung, you will need to put your foot upon it — and press downward. Nietzsche grew up as a mega-fan of Jesus and Socrates and Wagner. That’s why, in later life, he spent so much time attacking them. They were worth it.

Star Wars was worth it.

After studying Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset and Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, I made this meme:

It took effort to unlearn my fetishization of Star Wars. My authentic childish experiences of wisdom and wonder in the theatre had to be disentangled from the wildly popular ideological framing of the films, television shows, and other materials.

It was not enough to say, “The originals were great, but it has gone astray under Disney’s ownership.” I went further. I became an arch-cynic about degenerative assumptions built into the inspirational ideals of Star Wars from the very beginning. I chewed it up. It felt healthy. Whatever is real and important about these films will survive my intentional reversal of evaluation and become reorganized into a new complexity. Meanwhile, much that I initially found captivating and suggestive of life-wisdom will be abandoned. Good.

Why have I told this story? It was half-autobiographical, half esoterically instructive, half a cultural history, and half a paean to using shared storytelling universes — in which we are already invested in anyway — as frames for unfolding a series of self-transformative reconsiderations, existential experiments, and unique growth in our evaluative capacity.

And to feel good about that.

Which is the point of this article.

VI. TRANSCENDENTAL JUDGEMENTALISM, TRANSCENDENTAL JUDGEMENTALISM, & SOME TRANSCENDENTAL JUDGEMENTALISM

Did you try saying that aloud? In ye oldentimes, Judgment was highly prized. It even had its own Tarot card. Today, we are taught to fear the accusation of being too judgey or too discriminating, but with a little Buddhist literature in your back pocket, you are at least still allowed to “practice discernment.”

I think Corey Devos (the primary digital custodian of Ken Wilber’s work and also the world’s leading artist of metatheoretical woodcraft) has good discernment but he himself “promiscuous” when it comes to films and shows. We both love so-called science fiction worlds but we differ, playfully, about how much judgmentalism should be involved. He is less inclined toward critique and aggression in his evaluation. He remains happily open in all directions.

Many of my favorite folks share his sensibility.

They leverage our liminal, or multiperspectival, capacity for flexible inclusivity to discern & affirm whatever qualities, however partial, are latent in the material. Using their ability to access relatively benign and non-reactive states of coherent psychology, and recollecting that multiple different contexts might determine the quality of a perspectival experience, they are very charitable and available. Plus, they just want to have a good time watching shows.

Not me.

I believe in savagely attacking the things I watch.

Especially in the first few minutes. If you aren’t ready to turn the damn thing off in the first three minutes because the tempo is wrong, the dialogue is flat, or the camera work is just leaden mid-shots (!) then, frankly, you’re not really ready to watch. Of course, I’m being a little bit fanciful and, as usual, I am making fun of the socialized tendency to automatically prefer positively “inflected” terminology. But there is something about this attack stance.

I will assume you have read Fritz Perl’s proto-integral masterpiece on embodied developmental Gestalt psychotherapy (i.e. Ego, Hunger & Aggression) and that you recall his point about teeth and taste. And since you recall it perfectly, I must apologize in advance for the completely unnecessary summary that I am about to present:

Fritz tells us that as babies we are toothless, open-mouthed suckers driven toward the nipple. And maybe not just as babies. At first, we do everything through the mouth. When mommy withholds or scolds us for clamping too hard on the nip, it is completely natural, but also a devastating disruption to our entire infantile scheme for survival and pleasure. Maybe we learn that the feeling of completing a mouth chomp is dangerously ambiguous.

We grow teeth. We enter a new world in which we can access complex nutrients but only by hunting, biting, chewing, and basically destroying the active pieces of food. That’s what it takes for them to be digested — i.e., become a real part of us.

Fritz thought that slack-jawed mouth breathers (still gaping for the teat), tended to remain fixated in a soft sucking mode. They expect eating to be a continuous passive flow of mild, sugary pseudo-food. It feels awkward to direct their aggression toward the radical deconstruction of incoming nutrient packages. As a result, they not only prefer junk food but they end up lacking “taste.” They never really learn to sample the deep flavors of active consumption that are required in order to make parts of the outer world into living aspects of the inner world.

He said this also happens with art and entertainment.

If we do not attack, chew up, and pulverize our incoming packages of music, movies, fashion, sexual turn-ons, favorite paintings, etc., then we never really taste them — and they never really become part of us. And people who don’t use their aggression to develop a deeply personal sense of taste will return endlessly to popular cultural content that is sugary, mild, easily swallowed, endlessly flowing, passively received, and appropriate for everyone.

So, following Fritz, I don’t hesitate to bite when I first encounter a new show.

Food is an interesting metaphor when it comes to art & entertainment. It poses questions beyond simply how to use aggression as a critical faculty for assimilation and evaluation. One additional question is found in food travel shows like Somebody Feed Phil.

Phil is (or plays) a happy schmuck and folksy humorist with a very broad style. It looks far from elite, which allows him to get away with being a relentless gastronomical elitist.

He is very open about his strategy. Do NOT eat what you like. Instead, find a local cutting-edge or classical expert and consume anything they tell you to eat. That is a pathway to magical experiences. Does it also work with “watching shows?” Should we eschew (that’s a great word) our personal preferences and start focusing on what experienced and nuanced people say is AMAZING?

Why not? Haven’t you already had enough of your favorite things? Let’s move on already. But how? Good question. You can ask around, but today we rely heavily on our robot friends. These robots come in two species: review aggregators & recommendation engines.

The problem with recommendation engines (e.g., what Netflix suggests you might want to watch next) is that their recommendations, even when they are real and not just algorithms pushing certain commercial content at you, are severely limited by the categories with which they model human beings.

If, for example, I recently re-watched Blade Runner because I am a fan of novelists who are also mystics (like Phillip K. Dick whose book it is based upon) and I love the curiously evocative style of pronounciation used by Rutger Hauer and Edward James Olmos, (“It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again… who does?”), the stalwart recommendation might suggest that I want to watch “Other Science Fiction,” or “Movies with Harrison Ford,” or “Dark 20th Century Classics.” None of these categories reflect the qualities that I am using to make my decisions.

The colors with which they are painting a portrait of me are… the wrong colors. And this failure to discern many of the subtle motivating contexts used by human beings is one major reason why the world’s most popular recommendation engines (i.e., dating apps) have not significantly improved their success rate in the last few decades.

Review aggregators have their own problems. What they do is combine a lot of different people’s “reviews” in one place — and try to synthesize them.

The first, and most obvious, issue is that the reviews are already unreliable. People with strong feelings tend to “review bomb” these sites with very positive or excessively negative comments. These are meant to mislead users and skew the averaged result. It gets even worse when corporations claim that anyone who dislikes their movie is engaged in review bombing, so they are entitled to “counter bomb” with positive reviews written by robots or Filipino children. And of course, major companies like Disney and Amazon bribe professional film and television critics by granting special access only to people who write nice things about them.

And any regular reader of these essays will know that there is also an issue surrounding the manner in which we arrive at our averaged review results. If we just vote 100% Thumbs Up or 100% Thumbs Down (i.e., did you like it) then your Rotten Tomatoes score can’t differentiate between 51% approval and 95% approval. A lot of nuanced information is missing from that kind of average.

So if I try to be Phil, placing confidence in expertise, I have to go to a place like Metacritic (every few months), and see what are the combined professional and amateur scores out of 100. I expect them to be slightly biased. Okay. But I also anticipate that if there is wild praise for a show that I would never watch, then I should probably watch it.

If I prefer romantic comedies to war films but the average of people who love movies and have seen this particular war film is weirdly high — then there’s a good chance that I will be surprised at how much I like it. That’s the Somebody Feed Phil sweet spot.

And while we’re talking about food as a metaphor for shows, we could digress into Gurjieffian theories of “impression food” (See my Gurdjieff book for hints), but let’s not do that right now.

I’ll just mention one final thing.

Healthy food is typically complex, organic, fresh, and requires that you chew it up carefully — and challenge yourselves to accept strong or unusual sensations. Bad food, which is widespread, addictive, and malnourishing, is usually simple, friendly, easy to consume, and does not require much work.

Obviously, enjoy whatever you enjoy. BUT if you are thinking about “what is good show” for “healthy person,” then maybe ask yourself what forms of available entertainment are alive, fresh, complicated, strangely shaped, and require a lot of chewing…

VII. THE URBAN TEMPLE

It was never an escape.

At least not for me. I was strange enough or lucky enough that “entertainment” never interested me as a release from or alternative to life. It is a field of study and exercise. When the curtain opens or the TV turns on, I go to work. For me, shows worth watching require more than ordinary attention and effort.

You cannot entice me into a cinema by promising the idea of ESCAPE. Or by suggesting that this is a portal to a magical other world in which we can temporarily lose ourselves. I go to the movies to find myself.

In this world.

My life of using movie theatres as public stations for inner practice started with Die Hard 3: Die Hard With A Vengeance. That was the first time I ever went to a matinee by myself. Amazing. One is so awake at 1 pm compared to 10 pm! And the theatre is less noisy, less packed, less social. More like church.

It was also the first Hollywood film I saw that skipped the opening credits. A revelation!

Sure, you can enjoy classic opening credits scenes, like in those old Pink Panther movies, but usually, I hate introductions of all kinds. Just start. We’ll figure it out. So it was in this new mood of alert pleasure and efficiency that I noticed, with mild disgust, that I was continually readjusting myself in my seat. I was like an infant. The ancient yogis of Valhalla would be mocking me severely.

I took the very simple task of sitting motionless for the rest of the film.

And by the end, seething with the emergent coherent energy of extended inner self-struggle, I stepped out into the daylight — still day! like the pharaoh coming forth on the equinox! It felt god-like. Wow.

The world around me looked clean, sharp, transfigured, and pregnant with empowering mysteries. We are all Tibetans, I thought! Everything is as crisp as the ineffable Himalayas. So I vowed (a) to prioritize matinees, and (b) to redouble my efforts to use movie theatres as special public spaces for esoteric practice.

Suppose you find yourself in a modern city. Where else can citizens congregate, in the middle of the day, to sit silently and motionlessly in the dark and apply a self-disciplinary rule of attention? And if you are streaming shows at home, you can still do breathing exercises and all kinds of sustained concentration.

One of my favorites is to try to split my attention evenly between my physical awareness of the theatre, my emotional tracking of the characters who are journeying through symbolic plot events, and my intellectual analysis of the details of the filmmaking.

And it is not so much the split attention itself, but the repeated effort of internal intention as it attempts to recollect and engage this temporary pre-set splitting and balancing.

Sometimes you get a real “explosion” after an hour or two.

When I came out of Iron Man 3 (which I had chosen over an interfaith discussion I was supposed to attend at a Catholic cathedral downtown), I had spent two hours struggling to remain continuously aware of the outer frame of the screen without allowing my attention to collapse into identification or reaction with particular points of film content. My head got real buzzy. When I stepped out onto the street — perfectly timed! — I heard the church bell ring. And it rang me.

It rang right through me & everything, as though I were a bell struck by a universal hammer. And for a while, there was no thought, no problem, no question.

True story.

The other interesting thing about the Public Temples that we call movie theatres is that they present a massive lens for inspecting the imaginal and ideological infrastructure of the collective unconscious. Many people, many visions, and enormous money and effort were deployed to create this “structure” by which you can take a look at the self-revealed insides of the current common soul.

Put aside “liking it or not” or “having feels about the characters,” or “pretending it is real events.” Try to see it through the vision-logic gaze of a Rudolph Steiner or a Dion Fortune or Karl Marx smoking hashish. What is it showing us about inner structures?

The screen is a stained glass window, but you must focus past the pane toward the light. It is not another world.

It is this one.

VIII. BATTLE OF LORES: The Return of the Premise

At the end of Limicon’s “Lore Session,” Joe Lightfoot pondered the role of singular commitment. He spoke, perhaps with some envy, about his partner’s recent reignition of interest in the traditional Buddhism of her homeland.

Joe wondered aloud if our contemporary panoply of fictional universes is too messy and multifarious to grant truly profound depth-access, the way that a single shared storyworld can? Chase two rabbits, catch none. What is the monogamous and ancient opportunity that our polyamorous approach to entertainment might be missing?

And are we all secretly longing to get beyond the many worlds of free choice in a deep return to an ancient, unquestioned mythos embedded in the local landscape and our inherited ethnicities?

I said no.

I don’t have that yearning. Not anymore. For me, this contemporary plurality of fluctuating shared storyworlds IS my “one tradition.”

Obviously, TV cannot do all the work of ancient lore, but we need not feel alienated. To some degree, it is a choice of interpretation. Those who strike us as committed or embedded or exotic do not necessarily have special access to the imaginal and mutual facets of wisdom-development that our particular language, technology, art, stories and historical moment are lacking.

The depths that (we imagine that) we perceive in various ancient or singular cultural contexts were, I believe, slowly accumulated results that began with their good conscience about themselves. They went ever deeper into the nuances and expanses of the lore-realms that they already happened to know about. Their mythos was the unfolding root-structure of their colloquiality.

Any surface can have depth.

We can do this with our form of “having stories,” just a well as anyone else. We work with what we have, we use what enlivens us, & we take advantage of shared imaginal realms to deepen our new sense of community.

Just like we don’t need to persuade anyone to abandon their religion or learn a new language to become liminal, we also can feel completely secure that our favorite stories have functionality and depth — if we use them for that purpose.

So use your stories and favorite storytellers. With each other. And with a good conscience.