Serenity
***This movie is a sequel to the TV show Firefly; I would NOT recommend seeing the movie without having watched the show first.***
This is one of my favorite movies, period. Evocative, emotional, about real struggle, it humbly plays with genre, overlapping the classic western with space scifi, cyberpunk, and the martial arts movie, while maintaining an emotional vulnerability that holds genuine weight. Having gotten to know the characters in the more playful context of the show, everything that happens to them hits hard. The themes are technologically prescient, explicitly anti-authoritarian, and get real about the dangers of resistance and why we do it anyway. As all media should, Serenity poses more questions than it answers, leaving the viewers to decide where they stand on morals, religion, the human condition, and what it means to go up against the overwhelming power of a state regime.
Run River by Joan Didion
To be honest I don’t get all the hype around Joan Didion, but this was a good book. It forms part of a specific genre – I’m thinking of The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye in particular here, among others – around a driftless, depressed elite. Their characters are ultimately an expression of deep loneliness, poorly smothered over with vain judgement, substance abuse, and sex. Beyond cause and effect, actions and events happen to the characters rather than by any choice or freedom to do so. Now, in some ways all books are threaded with loneliness, as a medium particularly well suited to conveying inner emotion, but this kind of American Novel reveals the gnawing heart of a system built on settler colonialism. Run River ties in women as equal forces while bringing land and property to the forefront of the constantly developing American West, and the charade of class society that wears thin with the emergence of newer, shinier forms of capitalism. Run River captures this feeling, stirring like a current, of how abysmal fulfilling the American Dream really is.