Star Fox (Velan Studios / Nintendo, 2026)

    Last week, my dad was in the hospital for a few days because he had stents placed in each of his carotid arteries. Between helping my mom around the house and prepping for a friend to visit from out of town, I spent my downtime playing Velan Studios’ revision of Nintendo’s Star Fox. Silly me, forgetting that this game is all about making your dad proud of you for carrying on his legacy after his death. Maybe I should have played a game with less baggage.

    This version of Star Fox is the fifth version of the 1993 Super NES game that Nintendo has published. Even with the different title of Star Fox 64, that 1997 Nintendo 64 game functioned as a remake of the original. The souped up version of the 1997 game for the 3DS (Star Fox 64 3D) that came out in 2011 was a remake of a remake, and the Wii U’s Star Fox Zero from 2016 was also a remake of the 1997 edition of the game. (I haven’t played the 3DS or Wii U versions.) You’d think they’d include a new character, like Word Girl’s Lady Redundant Woman, to let us know they have some self awareness about the absurdity of remaking a game five times.

    Five games, five platforms, one story. Rather than a simple cash grab, this revision of the game seems more like an instance of theme and variation. There’s only so many ways to play the blues, yeah? There are five access points to this series that have been available for players over the past 33 years. This isn’t preservation (a topic that took on additional significance last week as publisher Sony announced that it was going to no longer manufacture physical discs for its consoles beginning in 2027), but revision. When you’ve got a really good idea, stick to it.

    Well, I don’t know about that. I first played 1993’s Star Fox for the Super Nintendo because Nintendo Power convinced me that the polygonal graphics were at the cutting edge of technology. Sure they were, but that doesn’t mean the game is good or that it’s pretty to look at. Even if I understand cognitively that using polygons means programmers have more options for how many things can happen on screen in a game, it doesn’t mean that I will enjoy the game they create. I didn’t then and don’t now think the graphics look good. It wasn’t until the N64 version that I really fell in love with the game. The improved graphics, actual voice acting, and decreased difficulty all certainly helped. Those are the kinds of variations on a theme that open up the paths of the game to new players.

    The N64 version is good enough that I bought it three times: soon after release, at some time in college, and around 2018 when I was getting reacquainted with video games. (Previous to that, the last console I bought during its lifespan was a refurbished PlayStation from FuncoLand in 1999.) Because Nintendo can apparently read my mind, they released Star Fox in the summer. Both this Switch 2 version and the N64 version found their way to consumers’ hands in the final week of June of their release years. It’s a summer game through and through. You are recklessly making space junk explode by hitting it with lasers and bombs. In other words, you’re making fireworks and having someone else foot the bill.

    You might be wondering (as I did) how much of my enjoyment of this game is bound up in childhood nostalgia. I don’t know. I am not in touch with the friend group that I enjoyed playing the N64 game with when Nintendo released it in 1997. I don’t have fuzzy feelings about those people. As I mentioned, the game itself was good enough that I bought it multiple times. That also means I sold it that many times, too. I would get to a point of complete satiation with it after running through all of the medals, high scores, and achievements. Just looking at the cart would repulse me. I wasn’t interested in jumping back into it like many other games. Over time, the feeling would wane and I would track it down again (and again). I felt skeptical when I saw the news of this remake a few weeks back. Would I really want to go through that cycle of emotions again? When I saw the updated graphics and added interstitial narrative scenes, I couldn’t help myself. This time I can’t sell it either, so I’m stuck with it until Nintendo decides to pull the plug on “my” digital copy of the game.

    In this latest revision, it took a few times through each level before I felt like I was competent at the game. That feeling of “how did I ever do this?” crossed my mind more than once. After I got the hang of it, I was hooked. The updated controls for the Switch 2 work well. I like having a single button to press for somersaults and U-turns. The graphics are excellent. In levels such as Meteo, Sector Y, and Area 6, you get a real sense of depth with the details in the background. I like the voice acting just fine. After a few times through the game in English, I did get tired of the same dialogue over and over again, so I’ve changed the spoken language for each successive playthrough. I’m on Brazilian Portuguese at the moment, so that’s something like at least 10 times through the game. I do wish the subtitles weren’t only in English so I could pretend like I’m learning new languages while I play.

    One reason I have kept changing the voiceovers is because I want to watch the scenes that occur between each level repeatedly to pick up on the subtle details hiding inside. In the previous games that I’m familiar with, you would get comments from your crew as you entered or exited each level. General Pepper would give maybe a line of dialogue between missions once you’d selected your path. The story itself isn’t very special but it gets the job done. In these new scenes, the relationships are fleshed out more fully with dialogue and actions. You get a third-person view of what it’s like to hang out in the Great Fox between missions. There’s a lot to be read into the body language of your crew. The way they are incorporated into the branching paths of your attack on Venom is interesting, too. A holographic avatar of General Pepper explains the situation to you and the consequences for each choice. Sometimes your crew will go rogue and offer suggestions that conflict with Pepper’s advice, but not in front of him. It’s ultimately up to you (as Fox) to decide which path you’ll take. You do so by looking at a 3D projection of the Lylat System on a holoviewer. The music that plays as you look at this scale model of the system gives a relaxing feeling to the time between missions so that you can decompress with your crew before jumping into action once again. These are also the points where you can resume your game if you don’t end up completing it in one sitting as you would have needed to in the original game.

    Between that upgrade to the gameplay experience, the vastly improved music, and the gorgeous graphics, this revision is just about the best it can be as far as I’m concerned. It’s slick and it’s smooth, which is just how it should run. There’s also the multiplayer mode that you can engage with even if you are a solo player (local and online matches exist; I played against the computer and had fun). You can also get different avatars and backgrounds for the battle mode by completing levels in the Challenge mode. There’s a lot to do besides the main storyline. I don’t think I’d call the Star Fox series one of my favorites, even though I bought the N64 cart multiple times and have since played through it via the Nintendo Classics service. It’s familiar and filling like any good comfort food should be, but I don’t get a lot of nourishment out of it. There’s no moments of genuine wonder or awe or drama in the game. It simply excels at what it is meant to do. Until Nintendo revises the game again, the Switch 2 version will stand as definitive. These Arwings’ engines are firing cleanly on all cylinders.

    As of Saturday, my dad is out of the hospital and is recovering at home. Turns out his carotid blockage was 50 percent on one side and 80-90 percent on the other. He’s got improved blood flow to his brain as a result of the stents. I imagined he would feel much different with this increased circulation. He said he did not and that the doctor told him he wouldn’t feel different as a result of the surgery. That outcome is counterintuitive to me, but I’m not that kind of doctor. I figured if you opened up a passage more widely and allowed for additional blood flow that you would feel more in tune with your body or feel like it took less energy to do the same tasks. He’d been compensating for so long under inadequate circumstances that it seems reasonable to think that restoring the previous status quo would result in a noticeable change. Once you’re habituated to an experience, a revised version of it might be difficult to discern as different. It’s easy to know in your heart that it is better even if words might escape when you try to provide reasons why.

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Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity (Samuel Woolley, Yale University Press, 2023)

    A colleague of mine usually tells me she “lives under a rock” when I’m telling her about whatever it is that has set me off in this news this week. There’s times when I speak with her or other people in my life that I feel like my views are out of synch with theirs. Somewhere, some machine has slipped a gear. There are many possible explanations for why each of us sees the world a little differently, and the nature of those misperceptions are part of what Samuel Woolley explores in Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity. You may have heard the phrase manufactured consent and so you’re thinking this book is a new update on that idea, and you’d be correct. Woolley argues that the nature of what used to be known as mass media has changed significantly in the days since Herman and Chomsky gave a name to the idea of a small number of broadcasters being able to create wide support for certain ideas through one-way messaging. What’s different now is that we have devices with worldwide reach in our pockets and we can use them to remain anonymous while sharing our perspectives with each other directly. More than that, we can hide our perspective behind that of a bot that interacts with other users according to our programming instructions. As a result, Woolley contends that instead of manufacturing consent, we are instead involved in a process of manufacturing consensus; it may seem that the majority of people share the same viewpoints, even when that is not the case.

    The book’s cover communicates this idea beautifully. There are 28 dots on the cover that comprise shades from blue to red. Only the bottom three dots are completely red, and they also have shoulders attached to them that make them appear as generic social media avatars. What it seems to be saying is there is a diversity of voices available, but only the three voices that are fully red are taken as representing the whole group. It’s a biased sample. Our perception may be that three out of every three people agree with a certain perspective, but those three are from a population of 28 and they are in the minority. It’s easy to be confused in a context where those three voices dominate, even if you occasionally have evidence that the other 25 voices exist. You might feel that you live under a rock if one of those 25 voices speak to you, regardless of whether you agree with the perspective espoused by the three red voices.

    Woolley provides an operational definition for propaganda early in the text, writing that it describes “the use of politically biased information in considered attempts to manipulate or influence the opinions and actions of individuals and, more broadly, society” (p. 4). He goes on to state that the purpose of propaganda may not be to effect concrete changes in its targets’ behavior. It can be enough to seed certain emotions (anger, apathy) that result in a target taking no concrete actions or behavioral changes. Think about people who have convinced themselves that not voting is some kind of message. It’s not. Non-voters are telling candidates that their opinions can be safely ignored. Getting enough people to feel cynical about the process of elections or other social participation is the goal of some propaganda. It seems easier than ever to get people to sit home and rot these days, which is just what the propagandists want.

    Later in the first chapter, Woolley is explaining how powerful propaganda can be in the world of social media. He uses the case of Martha Coakley’s failed 2010 run for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts as an example of how social media users influenced the result of a race. Widely seen as an easy win for Coakley, the race went to her Republican opponent. Woolley explains how a small number of social media accounts were able to successfully pounce on Coakley’s gaffes and missteps, which helped to blunt her momentum and cost her the seat. More generally, Woolley uses a section of this chapter to explore the truism that “if you don’t know what the product is, the product is you” with regard to social media (p. 15). I was a little surprised to not see Shoshana Zuboff’s revision of this statement cited instead. She claims that its not “you,” but “your behavior” that is the product on social media. Her analysis dovetails nicely with Woolley’s because what is important is not just the social media user, but how propagandists can manipulate their behaviors through anonymity and automation that is important. So, what is key is not just the users on social media, but the behavior of the people that a small number of social media users manipulated to prevent Coakley from coasting to victory in her 2010 race.

    Further into the text, Woolley defines more clearly three levels of manufacturing consensus and how they interact. He describes them as “a kind of ouroboros of manipulative information” because of how they rely on each other (p. 55). Each level is based on different types of users. There are political-bot-, sockpuppet-, and partisan nanoinfluencer-based propagandists. Then there are social-media-algorithm-, recommendation-, and trend-based propagandists. Finally, there are news-media-based propagandists. Each level relies on and interacts with the others. The first type (bots and sockpuppets) give the illusion of wide support for marginal ideas. The second type (algorithms and trends) are taken as genuine public opinion polling, even though they can be manipulated or gamed. The third type (news media) gives an institutional sheen to the propaganda created by the other two and broadcasts it to wider audiences as they “reproduce, recreate, and further launder content” (p. 55). One of Woolley’s interview participants grasps these levels of manufacturing consensus with his rhetorical question, “Why would I focus on trying to change someone's mind with a bot barely capable of communication… when I could get the trending algorithm on a site to reprioritize and reshare the content I'm pushing with five thousand bots?” (p. 121). It’s clear that Woolley’s levels are grounded in the reality of social media users. This particular user (among his other interview participants) is able to articulate exactly how to move from the first to the second level of manufacturing consensus, and there is reason to believe that he could easily understand why getting the news media to cover his propaganda campaign would lend it further legitimacy.

    At this point, you yourself may be feeling there is no sense is fighting back against these interlocking systems because there is no way to undo all the damage propagandists have wrought. Woolley tells us later that “there are, sadly, no easy fixes” (p. 84). One that he proposes is based on the work of Joan Donovan and danah boyd, who argue for “strategic silence” from news media (p. 138). The attention the news media give to trends on social media amplifies, launders, and legitimizes propagandists’ campaigns, as Woolley has explained. (He uses 2016’s Pizzagate incident as an illustrative example of how this process unfolds.) So, part of the solution does rest on the shoulders of mass media. How and whether the local or national news covers certain trends has a large influence on whether it is seen as an idea with consensus.

    Woolley doesn’t let us down in the end with a despairing conclusion. One immediate change that would be helpful would be to replace the U.S.’s Section 230 with “legislation that takes account of the massive rise of social media” (p. 176). He also calls for interaction between the Federal Elections Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Federal Communications Commission to “prevent manipulation via digital tools” (p. 176). That he cites a thirty-year-old law and three large governmental bodies that need to work together to solve this problem gives a sense of how immense the problem is. Both of these changes in regulation sound like excellent ideas. 

    Normally, about here is where I’d sign off with a comment like “well Trump won again after this book was published, so there’s no hope.” However, this past weekend’s comically mismanaged Great American State Fair shows just how little actual power these folks have. The consensus they appeared to wield is has been manufactured and their low level of support is undeniable. They’re outnumbered and we will win.

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Paper Airplane, Vol. 2 (edited by Nick Norlen, Paper Airplane Publishing, 2026)

    When I saw the notification last week that my issue of Paper Airplane, Vol. 3 was on its way to me, I realized I hadn’t looked through Vol. 2 yet. Ah, me! This oversight has more to do with the deluge of other demands on my time than it does my lack of desire to read the magazine itself. That’s right! This time, there is a physical edition to accompany the PDF version. There’s also a subscription service now, and you’d better believe I signed up for it right away. As I await the next quarterly installment of this periodical, let’s take a look at what makes its first printed edition such a joy.

    The cover illustration by Kaitlyn Brito depicts a person (the artist?) at a cafe table, sketching their view. We see that view from the artist’s perspective, complete with sketchbook and writing implements, croissant and kerchief, and cup and saucer. They are sketching a rough draft of what we would see if we were in their seat. If you look closely, there is a picture-within-a-picture element to the sketch. What’s more, we can see the artist’s reflection in the mirror across the cafe with the same accoutrements on the table as they are in her (our) view. It’s a trip.

    The contents of the issue are no less impressive. The editor’s note calls out the back cover as a consumable set of four postcards that are meant to be sent to friends just because. It’s a gentle invitation into the rest of the issue. Norlen asks us to “enjoy it with abandon,” which felt more pleasant than most imperative sentences should.

    In between the cover pages, I delighted in reading Sasha Nyary’s stories of fact-checking for Sports Illustrated and Life magazines in the time before the Internet. The stories are concise and demonstrate the cleverness and dedication it took to make sure facts were correct when only a few people in the world may have been able to make that determination. Well, that’s still true, but it is easier to get in touch with potential more knowledgeable others these days. Reading it made me appreciate how many hands a page has to go through before publication in major magazines. One gets the sense that Paper Airplane goes through a similarly robust editorial, design, and art revision process as well.

    A major feature in this issue is Jonny Teklit’s interview with Hanif Abdurraqib about his collection of vintage music shirts. I’ve read some of his books and essays, but I hadn’t heard of this passion of his before. I am also someone who has “a drawer full of band tees, like DIY band tees, and half the bands didn’t exist anymore,” so this part of the issue was right up my alley. I have much more anxiety around wearing and washing and caretaking my shirts. They are fine in their drawer. Who knows whether the next wash will be the last wash? It’s too much for me to think about. That’s why it’s refreshing to hear from someone who knows the shirts “aren’t meant to stay pristine forever. And to wear them out, eagerly, joyfully, is to—at least for me—form a relationship with the mortality of the item, so that I don’t think about any of it as too precious.” Maybe someday I’ll finally relax. Interviews such as this one might get me there.

    The set of four brief comics toward the middle of the issue are varied in their style and content but consistent in depicting small moments that connect us to family, ourselves, our animals, and each other. They’re on consecutive pages because they are the comic section of the issue, but they also seem to be addressing the same motifs from different angles. Each is lovely in its own way.

    Also lovely are the word nerd and puzzle pages that follow. I can’t bring myself to write in the actual magazine, so I’ll be printing the word spiral, escape page, and crossword pages myself. (I promise, I will get over my hang-up of not wanting to leave blemishes on the things I love.) Sadly, because I came to this issue too late, I have no current use for the Field Guide to Simple Pleasures: Winter section. In a couple months, I’ll pull this out again and enjoy checking off the list. Even though this is a periodical, I’m going to hold onto it for the long term because it’s just that much fun. Get yourself subscribed here.

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The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comic Books, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture by Robert Warshow

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The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comic Books, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Robert Warshow, Harvard University Press, 2001)

    There’s a first time for everything. For all the other books, albums, games, episodes, singles, shows, and movies I’ve reviewed for this blog, I have always finished them. I feel like I owe it to you and to myself to be as informed as possible about whatever it is I’m discussing. Cutting corners feels like it would be cheating. Maybe it’s OK to “cheat” once in a while.

    Truth be told, I suppose this is not the kind of book one reads from cover to cover. It’s a collection of essays from the author and it spans 1946 to 1954. He died in 1955 and the original edition of the text dates to 1962. I wish I could tell you where and when I added it to my reading list. I can at least tell you why I did so. I was excited about the idea of reading a book about pop culture commentary from well before such a practice became commonplace. My impression when I learned about the book was that Warshow was one of the first to treat pop cultural artifacts with the respect they deserved. I took that to mean he was a fellow nerd. That he would have made a fanzine about comics or movies if he could have.

    That’s not the case.

    Turns out Warshow was an accomplished writer who just happened to focus his lens on the stage and the screen as well as the panels and gutters of the Sunday funnies. Even though The Immediate Experience is not what I thought I was signing up for, I’m still glad to have engaged with it. I do plan to finish it, mind you!

    Let’s start with a searing riff on the kind of pieces Warshow sees when he reads The New Yorker. He begins a review of E.B. White’s The Wild Flag (itself a collection of essays!) by claiming, “The New Yorker at its best provides the intelligent and cultured college graduate with the most comfortable and least compromising attitude he can assume toward capitalist society without being forced into actual conflict.” He then goes on to write, “The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.” Can you imagine writing like that? It’s a dream of mine. That must be why I closed the book and went to sleep upon reading it. After having struggled through the author’s preface and the first essay on “The Legacy of the ‘30s” in film and culture, I was not sure this book would be for me. It was like I had given myself homework and I wasn’t liking it. The scintillating brilliance of Warshow’s words on White forced me to shut my eyes lest I go blind.

    I’m in no position to evaluate the truth value of his claim about what The New Yorker was publishing at the time. All the same, I’m able to recognize an accurate diagnosis. There is value in having the “right” opinion or attitude to have about a text borne not of engagement with it, but from consulting with trusted sources who may also not have engaged with it. Warshow is recognizing the bullshit artist by calling out the tricks of his trade. The idea of feeling “intelligent without thinking” (p. 75) is exactly what generative artificial intelligence’s large language models aim to do. To have the “right” take without any insight into why it is correct.

    Reading and re-reading the opening paragraphs of that essay was enough to motivate me hundreds of pages further into the book. I have little to no background knowledge of the media environment Warshow inhabited and he does not always do a great job of giving me as a reader enough information on the topics or subjects he’s discussing. That’s where my struggle to enjoy the text came from. I simply hadn’t seen (or read) the movies or plays he was analyzing. He did not give even a cursory summary of their plot or themes. I resigned myself to not being able to fully grasp the meaning of each essay while also being on the hunt for passages that might catch my attention in other ways. I cringe to think of what Warshow would say about how I’m reading him.

    Those who have read theories of reading surely know about Rosenblatt’s (1978) aesthetic and efferent stances toward a text. To oversimplify it, you are either reading to enjoy a text or to learn from it. Hold on, that’s too simple. You are likely somewhere between those two extremes when you read. When I select books to read for fun, I can calibrate my expectations based on those two factors. I incorrectly assumed that Warshow’s collected essays would provide a helpful framework for reading comics or watching movies in a new way; I had an efferent stance. Instead, I am finding that I am enjoying the writing as writing; I have switched to an aesthetic stance. I don’t need to make a list of all of the movies, plays, and comics he’s discussing and then go to the library and chase footnotes until I go dizzy. I don’t need to know every fact about every cultural artifact that has even existed. That’s OK. My goals as a reader can be modest.

    As a result, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I am taking some of Warshow’s insights in a different direction than he could have imagined. Take this one from an essay on Westerns and gangster films. In contrast to the heroes of Westerns, Warshow writes that “The gangster is lonely and melancholy, and can give the impression of a profound worldly wisdom. He appeals most to adolescents with their impatience and their feeling of being outsiders, but more generally he appeals to that side of all of us which refuses to believe in the ‘normal’ possibilities of happiness and achievement; the gangster is the ‘no’ to that great American ‘yes’ which is stamped so big over our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really feel about our lives” (p. 106). The way Warshow connects “the impression of a profound worldly wisdom” to adolescent impatience rings true. It’s another way of understanding the appeal of genAI LLMs, especially for gangsters such as the U.S. president—the kind of person who takes shortcuts to success and makes the rest of us suffer for the damage he leaves in his wake.

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I Am Not Good: The History of Cheating in Video Games (Nate Drake, Retro Game Books, 2026)

    It can be helpful to explore the difference between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge of different daily activities. Doing so can help us understand what knowledge and skill are, which can lead to deeper discussions of what we mean when we use intelligence as a descriptor. For many of us, the knowledge of a best friend’s phone number from childhood might be committed to memory, even if we have not called it in decades. Reaching that same friend (or even a newer, but just as dear one) today might not even involve knowledge of area codes or local exchanges. Once a number is in your phone, you add a name and / or a face to it, and you know to press it if you want to speak to that person. Past you had declarative knowledge of a friend’s phone number; you had it memorized. Current you has procedural knowledge of a friend’s phone number; you may not have it memorized, but you know the sequence of steps that will result in a phone call to that person. Neither of these methods is any “better” than the other. They are simply different ways of achieving the same goal.

    Alternate routes to the same ending come to mind when reading Nate Drake’s I Am Not Good: The History of Cheating in Video Games because he explores the uses and purposes of cheat codes, easter eggs, and glitches in a variety of video games. He opens by explaining the book’s title. It is actually a passcode for Lemmings that allows a player to select levels and thus see more of the game than they could if they were limited to their own insights and coordination (p. 14). The code itself seems to be written with the intent of shaming the player, but Drake had and has no qualms about using it. Lemmings is a single-player game and he is not competing for prestige or money, so there’s no larger moral issue at play. He just wants to experience as much of the game as possible. He knows a procedure that will allow him that access, even if his declarative skills (i.e., gameplay prowess) have limited it.

    This framing of the use of cheats is instructive because it does not position them as having a negative connotation. The word itself, even outside of video games, is often associated with bad behavior. Framing it as a means of opening access and ability to games helped me to see cheating (if there’s no better word for it) as having a positive connotation. It’s not like I’ve never cheated in a video game before! These things cost a lot of money and it’s only reasonable to want to get plenty of satisfaction from them. If that means using a procedure that is written into the game’s code to do so, then so be it. I will take my 30 lives, my invincibility, my unlimited continues, and my infinite power-ups over dissatisfied frustration any day.

    With that orienting framework in mind, Drake then sets out to explain what might be considered some of the first cheats or easter eggs in video games. Some of them are notorious enough to have had full articles written and investigations done about them. From those stories, we learn that the Konami Code originally existed to help programmers debug the game they were coding (p. 22). Meaning, even the people who wrote the game had to make shortcuts for themselves so they could more easily experience specific parts of their games before releasing them to the world. No big deal to make use of something that’s already in the game if it can help you increase your enjoyment of it.

    Readers of a certain age will be familiar with devices such as the Game Genie, Pro Action Replay, or GameShark that allowed players to use predetermined codes to enable in-game behaviors that even the programmers may not have intended. In his explanation of these devices, Drake cites a court case that Nintendo lost against Galoob (the manufacturer of the Game Genie). In judge Fern M. Smith’s 1991 ruling, these kinds of temporary modifications to game code were allowable because actions like modifying board game rules or fast-forwarding movies are the same kind of temporary change that does not involve altering copyrighted material (p. 57). In that light, cheating is a series of mutually agreed-upon and temporary modifications that increase participation and joy.

    Drake spends some time discussing how codes come to public knowledge, from the way Nintendo Power used its “agents” to share “Classified Information,” such as the Konami Code itself, with players. Previous to that, early internet users could swap codes or passwords via Bulletin Board Systems (p. 75). Failing that, there would always be school or other social places where children gather. The rumor mill is not a reliable source for accurate video game information, but it can be a fun source of speculation. I’m remembering a time when I called a friend on the phone because I’d heard he had an issue of GamePro with a code that would unlock Goro as a playable character in Mortal Kombat for the SNES. He convincingly rustled some paper and did his best to recite what sounded like a legitimate sequence of button presses for me to execute. Needless to say, it didn’t work. It felt good to believe for a little while.

    During my time with the text, I thought about the ways that cheating in video games is about not just access or ease, but control. This thought came to mind at first during the explanation of Doom’s “God Mode,” where the player is invulnerable and does not consume ammunition as normal. It’s right there in the name of the cheat—you are playing God with the game. You are in full control. I thought again about the power of control in Drake’s section on Tomb Raider (p. 88). The desire for many horny players to see protagonist Lara Croft in the nude made for rampant rumor-mongering about a code that could supposedly make this possible. There was no such code, but that didn’t stop losers from making a website that depicted such nudity, against the wishes of the developers. The idea that the game does not allow players to have control over a woman’s appearance means that some of them had to create a website where they could is disgusting for many reasons. It also reveals the seedier side of cheating, which is the mentality behind making things work for you, no matter what. Compare that kind of participation in a game’s world with the narratively creative, social (and occasionally horny) practice of writing fanfiction.

    Later in the text, Drake discusses online multiplayer games and esports, where cheating has a far different reputation than in the single-player, no financial stakes games he played in his youth. In these realms, cheating is just as awful as it would be in a competitive sport being contested for any kind of prize. If advantages are available only to certain players and they have concealed those advantages, then the play is not fair. (I’m reminded of Adrienne Massanari’s explanation of dark play in her book Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right, where bending the rules, or denying that a game is even being played, causes harmful outcomes.) So it seems a little unsurprising to learn that modern players, whose games are often multiplayer, online, or contested for prize money or status, are firmly against cheating. They’re not using the games as solely a means of recreation, so cheating in this kind of context breaks the social contract.

    As a result, many of the largest or most successful games do not feature or even allow cheating to occur, which means there is less of an incentive for programmers to include these features in their games. What has happened instead is much better. Drake explains in the book’s Epilogue that many games now come with accessibility options available from the start. These options can allow for modification of lives, chances, energy, and starting points, but they can also change the contrast of the display, the sound levels, the controller sensitivity, and the control scheme itself. These features would have been beyond the capabilities of programmers to include in the first decades of gaming due to storage issues on the games’ circuits. It’s a clever choice for Drake to have saved this discussion for the Epilogue because it seems like an area that would be interesting to continue learning about. Mia Consalvo’s Foreword also provides a possible place to start footnote chasing. Her book, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, seems a good a place as any to continue explorations of what cheating means in this context and how it can be distinguished from the accessibility features that make for considerate gameplay for all involved.

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From Pixels to Prose: What Video Games Taught Me About Storytelling (Nadia Oxford, Retro Game Books, 2026)

    Most of our lives involve reasoning from incomplete information. We’re rarely lucky enough to have all possible information at our disposal, so we need to make inferences. This is evident in reading, such as with the following sentences:

    John got a cup of coffee. It was very hot. Now there is a stain on the rug.

    Our brains connect the pronoun it at the start of the second sentence with the antecedent cup in the first sentence. We know it does not make sense for “John” to be an it and we know that the heat of the coffee will make its vessel increase in temperature, so it does not refer to “coffee.” We also know that gravity exists, that rugs are on the floor, and that coffee is dark in color, so John must have stained the rug by dropping his coffee.

    As skilled readers, we do not stop to take in all of this information as deliberately as I’ve laid it out above. This inferential processing happens in the blink of an eye. I chose a simple example to illustrate this point, but it holds for more complex texts as well. What’s interesting is that because each of us has different lived experiences and have read different texts (broadly defined), our inferences about a given text will vary widely. Our inferences also vary when the text we’re given is degraded or incomplete in some way.

    With all of that information in mind, imagine you are a young adolescent girl from Toronto in the early 1990s and you are playing a rented copy of the role-playing game (RPG) Dragon Warrior III on your NES. This is the kind of game that can take more than twenty or thirty hours to complete. You don’t have enough time to finish the game during the rental period and you will not be able to renew your rental because your family has set up a rule that says your pesky brothers get to have a turn at selecting rentals on alternating weeks. You cross your fingers each time you rent the game, hoping someone else hasn’t deleted your save so that you can continue the game’s story. But, even if your save has been deleted, there is also an unspoken trust that the first save slot on the cartridge is reserved for whoever it was who has been able to reach the end of the game with a fully powered up party. You can use this save to your advantage by learning how the game’s narrative concludes. Never mind that you don’t know the middle parts. You just know John once had a cup of coffee and that there is a stain on the rug. What happened in the time between is a complete mystery. That’s where our imaginations thrive by making inferences based on incomplete information and missing evidence. That’s how Nadia Oxford explains her interest in responding to video game narratives by writing fanfiction.

    Though she does not include her first story, inspired by the fragmented playthrough of Dragon Warrior III, in this book, she does assure us that she still has a copy of it. It was exciting to read through how she filled in the narrative blanks as a young player, but I will take her word for it that we do not need to see the entire story. See, now you can make up your own fanfiction about how her Dragon Warrior III fanfiction went because we don’t have access to all of the information in it… The cycle continues!

    We are much better served by her discussion of how she kept thinking about the implied narrative of the games she played through the intervening years. Even a game series such as Mega Man or Mega Man X that does not have a story as robust as a thirty-hour RPG can provide enough of a narrative for a player and writer like Oxford to create one of her own. For most of the book, she takes us through her evolution as a writer and how it relates to the games she played over the years. In many cases, she doesn’t have access to enough of the game to know how the full narrative resolves. That doesn’t matter! Make up plausible scenarios in your head! Share them with like-minded people on the nascent internet! Meet your spouse! Go nuts!

    In a chapter dedicated to her experiences with Secret of Mana, Oxford explores how the game taught her that an author doesn’t owe their readers a neat and tidy ending; it can be satisfying and meaningful even if it is not happy. Even in a fairly traditional action RPG like Secret of Mana, there is room for the author to mess with the player’s expectations of how the narrative will turn out. I, too, remember feeling a mix of emotions upon seeing the sprite child sitting in a tree looking pensive at the end of the game. With the additional knowledge that this particular game bore the scars of corporate fallout during its development process, it’s no wonder that its disjointed and rough second half leads the player to wonder what is happening in the characters’ minds and worlds. Again, with more narrative information left unknown, the player has to do more work to discern what might be significant to the plot. If that is not possible within a high degree of certainty, then imaginations run wild and fanfiction can take root.

    In cases where the author of a text or the scenario designers of a game have made events unequivocally clear, it still pays to be a close reader to get a fuller interpretation of the text. Oxford demonstrates the truth of this claim in her discussion of “Aria de Mezzo Carattere,” part of the famous opera scene in the RPG Final Fantasy VI. At this point in the game, you, the player, are aware that Celes Chere and Locke Cole might eventually become more than friends. You are also aware that each character has a masterful leitmotif that plays when they formally join your party. Oxford points out that a few measures of “Aria de Mezzo Carattere,” which Celes “sings” in the game’s opera scene are inserted into Locke’s theme at the end of the game during the credits. As she writes, “Locke and Celes never say ‘I love you’ to one another, but the marriage of RPG characters’ personal themes feels much more intimate” (p. 91). This statement is part of her larger argument that Final Fantasy VI successfully addresses topics such as love, the apocalypse, duty, and friendship in a mature manner. I’m biased because it is literally my favorite game of all time, but I also have a hard time disputing her case.

    It’s also hard to take issue with the larger point that Oxford makes in her book. She invites you to participate in your favorite media by creating your own. I learned about the beauty and power of the do-it-yourself ethic from another subculture, but the lesson still holds true with video games. Do your part by making art in response to the conditions in the world that have moved your emotions. It feels good to build something from nothing, even if you never share it with anyone else. You may also use your artifact to create a physical or virtual space for an affinity group that can continue to create and socialize and turn ideas into physical matter. What are you waiting for? Do it!

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Lord of the Flies (Jack Thorne, BBC One / Netflix, 2026)

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that watching a movie is no substitute for reading its source novel. Having survived high school and college without being asked to read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, I have no grounds to compare this adaptation to the novel itself. I’ll just be discussing it on its own terms. Even though it’s not in the genre of films about school that I’ve been writing about recently, there is still a strong connection in this short series to how school systems socialize their students.

    A common complaint about schooling is that teachers ask questions and students answer them, which seems counterintuitive. Students need to learn, so they should be the ones asking the questions. In the absence of a school setting, what kinds of questions do children have about their world? For the characters in Jack Thorne’s Lord of the Flies, important questions to consider seem to be “What does your daddy do?” “Can my dad beat up your dad?” “You’re British, aren’t you?” and “What do the social ties bound at school mean for friendships and factions outside of the school day?” Only one of these questions is posed in the duration of the series, but the answers to all of them are contested verbally and physically by the children on the island.

    For background purposes, it will be helpful to know that this story is set on a unsettled island in the tropics. The characters are a couple two three dozen school-aged boys. None seems to be over the age of 12, and all are from a public school whose plane has crashed, leaving no adult survivors. 

    Well, the classification of their school is never stated, and the meaning of public school in England is the opposite of what a U.S. resident might have in mind; across the pond, a public school is one open to anyone in the public who can afford its tuition. It’s not a school that is open to all members of the public in a given area. Over time, what England calls public school is more like what the U.S. calls private or prep school. But I digress. 

    A key factor in the socialization of these children is that a few of them are in their school’s choir. The choristers band together immediately upon survival of the crash. Their faction wields enormous power over the others due to its domineering and manipulative leader, Jack. Simon is part of the choir, but is much less respected than Jack because he faints occasionally and is not as ruthlessly interested in pursuing power. The principal quartet of boys is rounded out by Piggy (aka Nicky) and Ralph. Piggy is a chubby orphan who has asthma and wears glasses. Ralph is kind and easygoing and so has the quality of being silently respected as a leader by the entire group. With that kind of dramatis personae, you can see where things will be going from a mile away. Still, how we get there is the enjoyable part of participating in the unfolding of a narrative.

    Maybe enjoyable is the wrong word here. This short series is such a downer. Just because you know where things will end up, it doesn’t take the impact out of seeing the ways they get there. The producers and cinematographers must have known the spiral into violence would be too much to take in scene after scene, so they make use of beautiful shots of the island in between the action. Some of the shots have a deep red tint to them that seems otherworldly. It could just be the hues cast by the sunset and sunrise (or even the many fires the boys light on the island) that give off these colors that seem to be blood-soaked. God, even when we are supposed to feel a reprieve from the tension and violence, we are still seeing red. The shots that are less affected by color filters are breathtaking. I could watch hours of the long overhead shots of the island or even the dolly-tracked, eye-level shots of the island’s trees.

    The conflicts that erupt between those beautiful moments are where the boys attempt to address the questions they won’t learn the answers to in school. Or at least, not directly as part of the curriculum. Aside from their names, one of the first things we learn about the characters is what their dads do for a living. Piggy’s dad is dead, Jack’s does a secretive job he can’t even talk about, and Simon’s and Ralph’s fathers are in the armed services. The mystery of what Jack’s dad actually does (is he a spy?) helps him assume the mantle of leader of the pack. In the absence of finding some other kind of pecking order, the boys are comfortable with the implicit suggestion that what each of their dads does reflects on their own status in the group. Which dad is the toughest or most respected or most qualified is a proxy for their status as boys.

    This message of top-down designation of status is reinforced in the final episode when naval officers rescue the boys. Ralph identifies himself as the group’s chief. The lead officer asks him how the boys are doing and how many of them remain. He’s shocked when Ralph tells him he’s not sure how many boys were originally on the island. “You’re British aren’t you?” is his cutting retort. The idea that the nationality of the boys would engender some kind of order or structure is an unquestioned assumption. It’s simply unacceptable to not have instilled a hierarchy. Through tears, Ralph tells the officer that they’d tried to create a social structure, but it fell apart quickly. There is only the smallest hint of sympathy in the naval staffer’s eyes upon learning this information.

    For Jack and for Simon, whose dads are not present in their lives, even on school breaks, the absence of a loving parent seems to have manifested in different ways. Jack tries his best to “man up” as far as he’s concerned. Simon is less sure that might makes right but also can’t seem to find the courage to challenge Jack. We learn via flashback that Ralph’s dad has tried to share his own love of the hunt with him, but it went sideways. Piggy’s parents are deceased, so he’s raised by his aunt Jeanie and the many other adults that come into her candy shop. 

    What Thorne’s interpretation of Golding’s text may be saying is that young male adolescents’ responses to authoritarian or neglectful parenting will vary. We are meant to sympathize with Piggy, not just because of his derogatory nickname but because of his disabling conditions and his status as an orphan. He is also the most reasonable of the four main boys of the group. Jack’s attitude and actions are repulsive, as is his inability to appear weak in front of others. He forces Simon, Ralph, and Piggy to each “take back” truthful things they’ve said to challenge him in private. He and his crew of choristers survive their time on the island, but at the cost of losing their humanity. Jack may be able to imagine that his father will be impressed with his son’s killer instinct, but the lessons of Simon, Ralph, and Piggy will give him plenty of reason to doubt his received wisdom in the years ahead.

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The Perfect Score (Brian Robbins, MTV Films, 2004)

    Here’s a movie I’m glad I don’t have to watch twice. It’s hardly a movie about school at all. It’s not even a movie mostly about testing. No, the score in the title isn’t just the 1600 on the SAT but the hoped-for result of the heist that takes up most of the plot. The six New Jersey high schoolers are motivated to break into the headquarters of ETS so they can get a copy of the SAT before they need to retake it again. Each has their own reason for wanting to do well on the test. More accurately, each of them needs to do well to get into the college of their choice: Cornell, Maryland, St. John’s, and Brown. Yes, that means two of the characters have no post-secondary ambitions. Scarlett Johannson’s Francesca and Leonardo Nam’s Roy are just along for the ride. The latter because he accidentally overheard friends Kyle and Matty detailing their plan in what they thought was an empty school bathroom. The former is involved because her dad owns the building where ETS has its offices, so she can help the crew get into the facility itself.

    The details of the plot are less germane to my discussion of what this film has to say about teaching and learning. From the start, Roy’s obnoxious voiceover tells us that SAT may stand for “suck ass test” because it’s a source of stress for so many students. It’s the task that stands between hundreds of thousands of high schoolers and their futures and it reduces them to numbers. OK, nothing revolutionary in this commentary. Nothing wrong either. We soon see Kyle and Matty together at work in a package-sorting facility where Kyle explains to Matty (and us) the history of the meaning of the letters in SAT. It was the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then the Scholastic Assessment Test, and now the three letters mean nothing. Again, correct, but not very insightful.

    It’s at this point that the other movie I watched last week provided a helpful context for these teenage testing frustrations. In Valerie Veatch’s recent documentary Ghost in the Machine, the history of measuring intelligence and its close relationship to eugenics are explored in the context of programming generative artificial intelligence systems. When advocates for these systems refer to metrics such as “Ph.D. level intelligence” or even intelligence as a quantity, they are taking for faith the idea that tests such as the SAT are valid measurements. If your only idea of what makes someone intelligent is how well they can do on a multiple-choice test, you are going to have a skewed idea of what it means to learn, let alone to live. I know I’m asking too much for a 2004 movie by MTV Films to go into an exegesis of the eugenicist underpinnings of so much of schooling in the United States. What would be cool is an update of The Perfect Score that explores these ideas and the purpose of education itself.

    But I digress.

    Kyle proves to be fairly critical of the political economy of the SAT when he says “the College Board made millions last year” in fees from students taking the test. He seems to be angry that someone is making money from the process and that he didn’t think of that idea first. He appears less annoyed about what that means for access to post-secondary education for families that are facing financial hardship. He’s also frustrated that his mom, a first-grade teacher, tells him that the kids in her class have to learn to “bubble in” on worksheets rather than spend time reading. Again, there’s the beginning of what could be a fruitful critique of what counts as literacy learning in the early elementary years. I doubt anyone involved in this film is familiar with Bond and Dykstra’s First-Grade Studies.

    Additional critiques of the test appear courtesy of Erika Christensen’s Emma and then-NBA player Darius Miles’ Desmond. When we first see these two interact, he asks her for help studying. She mentions to him the concept of stereotype vulnerability as a possible explanation for why he may be underperforming on the test. This comment makes her reconsider her initial doubts about helping him. Shortly after, there is a scene where each conspirer explains their motivation for taking part in the heist, Desmond says “I’m here because the SAT is racist.” He elaborates, “Who made the test? Rich white guys. Who scored the highest on the test?” Roy’s witty reply is about another stereotype about who is successful on the test. Deflating Desmond’s criticism with a joke prevents this line of inquiry from going further. Look, I know it wouldn’t be an interesting movie if they sat and had a discussion about why standardized tests exist, but I also don’t think making a heist movie about stealing test answers was super interesting to begin with!

    At least they all seem to learn that cheating is not going to get them what they want. Not because of some kind of moral awakening but because they realize they can get a decent score instead of a perfect score on their SAT and still go on living. The “right school” is the one you get into, even if it’s not your top choice. Quite a wholesome message from a movie with crude sexual stereotypes and trite stoner jokes. I see no reason to watch this again, but I’m glad I saw it at least once. If nothing else, the real-life circumstances of Darius Miles (prep-to-pro basketball star who signed a letter of intent with St. John's) and Mike Jarvis (the actual St. John’s coach who makes a cameo and was fired from that job a month before the movie came out) give the events of the movie weightier implications. There is too much riding on the results of this test, especially for those whose futures or careers depend on teenagers being successful at bubbling in.

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Afterlove EP (Pikselnesia / Fellow Traveler, 2025)

    It’s quite strange to think about a video game character going to therapy. Less so in a text-driven role-playing game, I suppose. Still less strange if the role played is of a young man grieving the simultaneous end of a life and the loss of a relationship. That’s the situation Rama, protagonist of Pikselnesia’s Afterlove EP, finds himself in as the game begins. As Rama, you have to get the band back together and try to write songs for an EP that’ll be released at a gig at the end of the month. The narrative picks up one year after his girlfriend Cinta’s unexpected death from an unspecified health complication.

    In grief, Rama has coped by having Cinta’s voice in his head at all times. It may not be just her voice actually. Her words are vivid enough for Rama that he can hold one-on-one conversations with her. Other characters cannot hear Cinta’s voice, so Rama’s sudden comments or replies seem a little out of the blue when he’s trying to have an in-person conversation with friends and also managing an internal dialogue with Cinta. They’ll call him out on it, but he remains oblivious to his condition. 

    All of the conversations with these characters happen through on-screen text. Cinta is the only character whose text is supplemented with voice acting. You are essentially getting to hear the voice in Rama’s head as he grieves his loss. This choice is very effective in drawing the player into Rama’s perspective while also not completely sharing it. As a player, you’re aware of the conversation Cinta and Rama are having even as Rama discusses other topics with whoever is with him in real life. You can sense the confusion he’s feeling and may even share the frustration of his friends when they cannot parse his seemingly random contributions to their discussions.

    Two of those friends, Adit and Tasya, play with him in the incredibly named SIGMUND FEUD. Their three-piece approach to slacker-y, pop-leaning shoegaze is soundtracked by L’ALPHALPHA, an actual band from Jakarta, Indonesia. Rama’s the principal songwriter and lyricist, so his lost year of catatonic depression has made it difficult for the band to continue. Practices are tense and both Tasya and Adit question their own interest in continuing the band beyond the scheduled gig at the end of the month. Even if the band members aren’t getting along super well, it’s still fun to practice with them. There’s a light rhythm game element to working through songs in the practice space or going over them alone in your room. Thankfully, there are no consequences for missing notes. Had there been, I think Tasya would have threatened to quit even earlier than she did in the plot!

    Most of your days as Rama are spent shuffling around Jakarta. You’re a minor celebrity, so you will get rockignized when you stop by the cafe, record store, ramen shop, or therapist’s office. The locations are spread out enough that you will occasionally make use of fast travel (via your phone’s map app; if only real life were so simple!), but it is relaxing to walk around the neighborhood and check in on the regulars who are waiting for their bus or trying to get up the courage to ask out their crush. You will also have a chance to try your hand at romance with one of three possible partners. I was either so devoted to being a good band member or was just as oblivious as Rama that I didn’t end up in a relationship at the end of the game. I guess the Rama I was playing was still carrying a torch for Cinta. Something about playing a noncommittal slacker in his 20s must have really hit home for me.

    Unlike mid-20s me, Rama understands the value of therapy. In his sessions, he works to understand why he is still able to have conversations with Cinta and also how those conversations might be getting in the way of his continued growth. These sessions are entirely optional, though the game gives you reminders to check in with your therapist every few days. One of my favorite minor characters is the receptionist in the office who brings up her Christian metal fandom repeatedly. It would have been hilarious if Rama could recruit her to join his band and completely alienate Adit and Tasya into quitting music entirely. He’s already speaking aloud to the voices in his head, so it’s easy to imagine a new version of SIGMUND FEUD that involves Rama speaking in tongues over some ripping thrash riffs while the demure receptionist hammers blast beats for Jesus. Maybe that’ll be the sequel—the Afterlife EP. 

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Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, Touchstone Pictures, 1989)

    Now here is a movie about education or based in a school that stands firmly on its own as a film. There is so much to praise and discuss with Dead Poets Society that I will not be covering in this post. I’ll be focusing on what comes to mind in terms of how Mr. Keating and his students interact as a community of learners.

    It’s so wonderful to see a movie dedicated to the full-throated support of the humanities, specifically poetry. It is earnest in its argument for making the examined life worth living. There is a catch, though. All students deserve this caliber of education. Yet, the opening convocation features the headmaster telling the students and their families that “75 percent” of the young men who attend Welton will eventually enroll in an Ivy League institution. That’s remarkable and is also a reminder that this is fiction. The implication is that the curriculum is so robust that these boys cannot fail. Less evident is whether this elite prep school is the kind of place where the old-monied or legacy-admitted may send their kids in the first place. Getting to the why behind that statement could make for an equally interesting, but also much less inspiring, film. A deeply cynical look at the kind of students and families involved in the Varsity Blues scandal could be a modern take on that idea.

    Robin Williams as John Keating is magnetic and magnificent. I have had teachers whose unorthodox methods must have been inspired by Keating’s approach. As a viewer, it’s easy to be taken in by the gimmicks he uses and then draw the conclusion that all teaching should be like that. Jumping off desks, marching through the courtyard, tearing pages from textbooks, inspiring clandestine poetry recitals… these are not pedagogical models just because of their shape. Keating has an evident, deep love for the written word and observation. He’s also seen enough of the world to know what these boys haven’t, and he knows how to play with that gap in their experience constructively. It’s certainly dramatic and attention getting to ask students to climb on their desks to get a new view of the world, or to offer a muscular repudiation of staid interpretations of poetry. The motions themselves are incidental, even though they make for exciting on-screen action.

    The film’s iconic final scene reveals that it wasn’t the mere appreciation of poetry that he was teaching. He was showing the way for these 17-year-olds to avoid the narrow, gilded path their parents and society forced them down. To have these genteel, patrician sons understand that there is a life outside of being a banker, lawyer, or doctor is a huge undertaking. Keating opens their eyes to the idea that there is a conflict between conformity and integrity that they have to resolve. He never tells them to take "the path less traveled by" but that they should know it exists and make an informed choice about where to go.

    Neil Perry’s pathetic complaint “can’t I even enjoy it for a little while?” is revelatory in this regard. He says these words in response to his roommate’s quick emphasis on the logistics involved in concealing his participation in a local performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this scene, Anderson doesn’t see the point in Neil honoring his own interest in acting; all he can consider is how pissed Perry’s old man will be when he finds out. Perry is rightfully upset with Anderson’s response because he did not need another reminder of how constrained his choices are. It’s always on his mind. Keating showed him a looser way of looking at the world and it’s not the way he thought it had been. Perry is unable to escape the conformity and authority of his father’s dreams.

    Anderson and the others who stand for their captain in the final scene do so not because they love poetry or the written word or because they hate their replacement teacher. Those who move do so because they know there is a world out there larger than the one they’ve known until this point. They are acknowledging the lesson of needing a different view on the world that Keating had taught them earlier. They love him for how he opened their minds.

    Although there are boys of various ages at Welton, it’s not clear whether Keating or the other teachers are responsible for all grade levels with their subject. We never see Keating teaching other classes nor is there evidence of younger students having reading, writing, literature, or English classes. This situation raises the question of whether Keating has only one prep. If so, then that is one hell of a position. What little we know of his life outside the classroom is that he has a love interest who is in London and that he has taught similar courses in England before coming to Welton. It would be nice to know whether he has only this one class because that information could explain his teaching methods. If he has all day to plan, then it makes sense that he would come up with some out of the box ideas and that he would have the patience to adjust them when they do not work the first time. As before, all students (not just those in cloistered academies) deserve teachers who can give this much time and attention to their subject and their students.

    It’s worth noting that the only women and girls in the movie have extremely minor roles. The few times we see the students’ parents, their mothers are simply appendages of their fathers. The domineering Mr. Perry has hundreds more words that Mrs. Perry. The boys’ love interests are similarly one-dimensional. The boys have three girls who are peers and they exist solely as subjects of arousal. Even Keating argues that the purpose of language is to “woo women.” If that’s what he has to say about gender roles, I’m terrified of how he would explain the whiteness of Welton. He graduated from the institution, so he may be unable to see its whiteness as problematic. The fish is the last to notice the water and all that. It’s far too generous of an interpretation of the film to think that it does not directly say anything about gender or race because it is attempting to show just how sheltered the lives of these people are.

    That’s the one thought that bugs me still about this otherwise extraordinary film. No one text can do everything, so maybe I’m expecting too much of a movie from 1989 to have thoughtful commentary on race and gender in addition to its convincing argument in support of a liberal arts education. The tensions of social class are readily apparent in the characters’ interactions with the local public high schoolers and with Mr. Perry’s repeated comments about the sacrifices he has made to get Neil into Welton. It’s entirely possible that there is nothing interesting to say about the maleness or whiteness of Welton: it is white and masculine because that is its raison d’être. The exclusion is the point.

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Times and Seasons: The Rise and Fall and Rise of The ZOMBIES (Robin Platts, HoZac Books, 2025)

    Jesus Christ, The fucking ZOMBIES!

    What a great band. They’re a bunch of school friends in England in the 1960s who won a battle of the bands competition and got signed to Decca Records and whose first single, “She’s Not There,” was an overnight sensation. That would be an interesting enough story on its own. But, as Robin Platts covers in the 350-plus pages of this extensive biography of the band and its members, there is so much more to the story. Even more than their other two most famous singles (“Tell Her No” and “Time of the Season”) as well as their magnificent second album.

    The core members of Rod Argent (songwriter and organist), Chris White (songwriter and bassist), and Colin Blunstone (vocalist) are the ones whose lives and experiences comprise most of the text. I learned more about Argent’s and Blunstone’s solo careers than I thought possible because nearly a third of the book is dedicated to the years-in-between, when The ZOMBIES broke up and before these core members began to play together again on a regular basis. The subtitle of the book is not merely clever phrasing. Those years of “the fall” were much longer than the initial career of the band or their subsequent reunion. I am keen to explore some of the work these men did during this time, but it was a bit much to get through without having prior knowledge. If you are a fan of either one’s solo careers, I can’t imagine there could be a better or more meticulously researched resource than this book.

    For me, though, thoughts of The ZOMBIES mean the conversation turns to “Odessey and Oracle.” It’s the best album of the 1960s. Better than “Black Monk Time,” and “Forever Changes.” Of course better than “Revolver,” “Let it Bleed,” and “Pet Sounds.” Better, too, than “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake”, “SF Sorrow,” and, yes, even “Village Green Preservation Society” and “Arthur.” I haven’t revisited this opinion in 18 years and I’m sure it still holds up… It’s important to have thoughts like these because it shows you’re a serious music fanatic… There’s no need to expand your horizons, Rob…

    To learn more about the recording of that album is a pure delight. Even when I got my mom a copy of the CD reissue in 2004, I didn’t know all of the ins and outs of its recording. They were the next band to go into Abbey Road Studios after The BEATLES had finished “Sgt. Pepper” and benefitted directly from some of the recording set-ups that the Fab Four had used. As there were no eight-track recording consoles in England at the time, it was kind of a big deal that engineers Geoff Emerick and Phil MacDonald had daisy-chained multiple four-tracks together to achieve the illusion of eight-tracks of mixing, generation loss on the tapes be damned. The ZOMBIES insisted on keeping the set-up, even though it was a pain to work with for the recording staff. If they hadn’t come into the room at that time, before the equipment had been disassembled, it’s unlikely that the vocal harmonies and instrumental complexity of certain passages of “Odessey and Oracle” would have sounded so lush and delightful. It’s really something to learn that The ZOMBIES were able to piggyback off of The BEATLES in this way, even before “Sgt. Pepper” began to make waves.

    If not for the recording quality, the compositions of tracks such as “Friends of Mine” could have easily made the album worthwhile. As a friend of a friend of mine once put it, it’s a unique song because it’s about being happy for other people who are in love. He pointed out that there are plenty of songs about being in love, or no longer being in love, or being envious of those in love because you are single. There’s not many songs about this particular perspective. As the liner notes of that 2004 reissue indicate, only one of the named couples in the chorus stuck together for the long term. Ah well.

    Turns out “Changes,” the first track on the second side of the album, is the only song where all five members of The ZOMBIES sing together. Deep down, I already knew this to be true. It was extremely validating to have it confirmed in the text, though. You see, there is a moment after the second chorus where the instruments drop out and the vocals are all you can hear. It is in this precise moment that you can hear at least one, if not all five, of The ZOMBIES smack their lips in unison to sing the next line. You may have to turn your stereo up quite loud to hear it, and then immediately back down to not blow out your speakers or your ears when the song begins again. This one moment is the quintessence of being a Friday Night Part. It sounds like a frog being born. I absolutely love it. Maybe you do, too?

    In all seriousness, this book is an excellent overview of the career of The ZOMBIES. Their tentative comeback around the turn of the millennium wasn’t some kind of cash-in on their name. Except for drummer Hugh Grundy, all members had continued to be involved with music whether as writers, performers, or promoters. (Turns out guitarist Paul Atkinson is the A&R guy who got JUDAS PRIEST signed to CBS; I am so glad there is a connection between these bands!) So, when Argent and Blunstone began to write together again in the late 1990s, they were pleasantly surprised to learn that “Odessey and Oracle” had developed a cult following since its 1968 release. Instead of resting on the laurels of doing the front-to-back, album-in-its-entirety tour forever (they did do so for a time), they have put out new music. Platts makes their constant writing and touring—for musicians in their 60s and 70s—seem necessary, unavoidable. There was no cataclysmic split in the band’s original run. They all were on the same page about calling it quits, even before they bestowed us with the majesty of “Odessey and Oracle.” There were never any competing factions vying for the rights to the band’s name. Well, not within their camp, at least; Platts recounts the grifters who took advantage of the name recognition of the band after they split and “Time of the Season” became a surprise hit in the U.S. in 1969. It’s the kind of scam that would be unimaginable now—trying to pass off a couple of bearded schlubs from Michigan as a British Invasion band. The surviving members have continued to enjoy each other’s company enough to keep the band going in some form or another after 30 years apart. It seems the genuine awe of feeling so good about seeing friends of theirs so in love represented a deep way of connecting with others that would eventually give The ZOMBIES eternal life.

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Mr. Holland’s Opus (Stephen Herek, Hollywood Pictures, 1995)

    This movie is so saccharine that it contains a week’s worth of sugar content for the average American. Good thing I’m not looking at movies like this one as an example of cinema qua cinema. Let’s be clear that there’s not a whole lot to be gleaned from it in terms of teaching and learning, either.

    One wonders about the motivating factors behind writing a screenplay for a movie like Mr. Holland’s Opus. After a casual watch, it’s clear that Stephen Herek likes his warmed-over ’60s nostalgia as much as he likes hero narratives and cheerleading for music education. Something like American Graffiti, a tepid drama, and The Miracle Worker mashed together. Those pieces don’t fit. There’s too much happening and it takes way too long to happen, which is a dreadful combination.

    You’re not here to hear me crab about bad movies, so let’s get to what the movie is saying about or doing with the educational setting. Richard Dreyfuss’ Glenn Holland is of a type: the second-career teacher who thinks the job is a “fall-back position” that he can just walk into. His principal correctly chides him for thinking that way as she walks him to his class on the first day. I’d love to know what the interview process looks like for a position of music director in a public high school. It’s evident that his first passion is music composition and not anything to do with education. He begins his first class with a closed, known-answer question: What is music? The students do not know what you think music is or how you define it—that is why you are there! Give them ideas to consider and then explain to them how to critique those ideas, at a minimum. His principal has a similarly limited view of teaching. She thinks it involves the filling of young minds with information and then giving them a compass to navigate the world. She suggests Holland does not have a compass, but is just filling their heads with information. Fair. I’m reminded of a comment the director of my grad program in teacher training made early in our coursework. We were aspiring high school English teachers in our early 20s. She made it clear that we should not get into teaching high school English if we wanted to share a love of literature, of Shakespeare, with our students because that is not what the daily life of a teacher is about. Her comment was a bit overstated, but it does capture the vision of teaching and learning that Holland holds. He thinks his passion will carry the day with teenagers, at least, at first.

    One student in particular provides him with a learning opportunity that he eventually capitalizes on, though it’s not clear whether he applies this learning in later years. Gertrude Lang, a clarinetist in the school’s band, can’t form notes with her instrument without squeaking. He tries to teach her directly with private lessons before school, but her frustration mounts. She is ready to quit the instrument when he tells her that music is more than notes on a page. He knows that she knows the music “in her head, her heart, and her fingers” but needs her to develop the self-trust to perform it fluently. She, of course, excels once he gives her the chance to mediate her thinking by reflecting on what she already knows about her skills. He’s becoming aware that his students’ emotional lives and their motivations matter as much as their “pure music” knowledge.

    The other student who we are meant to have feel-good moments about is Louie Russ, one of the only Black characters in the film, and the only one who gets a name. The football coach tells Holland that Russ is academically ineligible for football, but that he could make the wrestling team with the academic credit that Holland’s music class could offer. As the coach tells Holland, Russ has “got nothing else,” so he needs Holland to do this favor. (In return, coach will help Holland’s scrappy group of instrumentalists learn to march in formation so they can perform during football games.) Just so we’re on the same page, it’s 1965 and the only thing a Black student has going for him is sports because he is “not a school kind of person” but he “can work hard.” This is reductive stereotyping at its racist worst. The movie is from 1995, so maybe we are meant to think that these white teachers’ views of this student are retrograde with the passing of 30 years. I don’t think so. When Holland works with Russ, he learns that Russ isn’t able to keep a beat on the drum. In a montage, we see Holland trying to get Russ to clap along with him, tap his feet with him, and bang his drum with him. Here are some of the only moments of physical humiliation in the film. Holland is so fed up with Russ’ lack of progress at toe-tapping that he begins to tap on Russ’ foot forcefully. Is this feedback meant to tell Russ to press down when Holland presses down, or is it meant to tell Russ to stop pressing down and keep his foot still at that moment? I guess his intent is clearer when he grabs the laces of Russ’ Chuck Taylors and jerks his foot up and down in frustration. Worse yet, Holland has Russ don a football helmet while sitting to play his bass drum. Holland then pounds on Russ’ head with a mallet in time with the song. Oh, but it’s OK because “Mr. Russ has found the beat” by the end of the sequence. This result would be heart-warming if it weren’t so revolting. Russ later dies in Vietnam, just to reinforce that he is disposable as a character.

    Those moments should have been enough for this film, really. The principal who hired him retires and kisses him goodbye because he’s her favorite. Gross for a few reasons. Then, she gives him a compass, as if it weren’t obvious enough that he has “found his way” as a teacher. Too much. When that scene faded to black, I was glad because I was sure there was nothing more to cover. But, of course it went on. There’s an even more cloying moment still to come when Holland sings and signs JOHN LENNON’s “Beautiful Boy” to his son who has 90 percent hearing loss.

    Despite all of the changes Holland and his students have been through over the 30 years of time that the movie encapsulates, the board still eliminates his position along with all of the other art programs at school. Here is where the most real part of the movie happens. A despondent Holland is talking with his football coach teacher friend and he observes that it would be the end of Western civilization if a high school cut its sports budget. His buddy reassures Holland that “they’ll miss [him]” when he’s gone. Holland counters that he feels “expendable.” That’s a succinct summation of what teaching feels like. Some may remember you, or how you made them feel, but you are still a line item on the budget of an institution that cannot love you back, no matter what trinkets it provides you with. A triumphant exit with a supportive crowd at your back does not take away from the fact that teaching is more than just a deeply emotional labor. Recognizing and managing those emotions is necessary, but it is not enough. Beyond respect, teachers deserve much higher levels of the kind of compensation that goes into gas tanks, grocery tills, and mortgage accounts.

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Teachers

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, 20th Century Fox, 1969)

    Miss Jean Brodie is quite a character. A leader, if not just a teacher. She says as much when speaking with the headmistress at Marcia Blaine’s School for Girls. where she teaches 12-year-olds. The headmistress is unhappy with Brodie for taking girls to the theater and the museum on weekends. Brodie defends herself by saying that the root of educate is the Latin educere, meaning “to lead out.” As in, she is leading the girls out of the darkness and into the light. Her headmistress counters that surely there should be some “putting in” happening as well. Brodie has read well, knows her etymology, and replies that that would be an intrusion, from the Latin “to thrust into,” which she does not capture how she sees her role as a teacher.

    It’s these word games that give Miss Jean Brodie a sheen of unassailability. She seems to float through the school, dispensing pithy observations about culture and the proper way to live. She is “in [her] prime,” don’t you see? That teaching girls is “[her] vocation” must mean that her pedagogical methods are beyond reproach. She just wants her kids to prize “goodness, truth, and beauty” in artwork and poetry. Sounds pretty good to me. Parents would love for their children to have a teacher who is so dedicated to her calling.

    The problem Brodie creates in focusing on the rearing of her “brood,” as she calls it, is that her ideals are those of the Fascisti in Italy. It’s 1936 and they are in Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s far enough away from the front that Brodie’s ideas about what makes for skilled pedagogy never come into direct contact with the realities of war or the effects of fascist ideology. On a walk with her students, she sees a bag of trash on the ground and uses the moment to praise Il Duce himself, saying, “In Italy, Mussolini has put an end to litter!” She says this without a thought of its accuracy or implications. Suddenly, her prior praise of Robert Burns and Giotto di Bondone seems a little less like mere eccentricity and more like cultural supremacy. The late Maggie Smith does a commanding job of keeping our attention on the force of Brodie’s personality throughout many scenes like these. She really sells the idea that Brodie is a misunderstood intellectual who is trying hard to lead her students into a more cultured world, even if they are not ready for it.

    It’s not only Brodie who takes the “leading” part of education too far. One of her colleagues forces her into a bathroom in an early scene and forcibly kisses her. They had had a consenting relationship before, but that kind of behavior is obviously inexcusable. Worse still, this teacher later forces himself on one of Brodie’s students while she is in his art studio and later paints her in the nude, even though she’s a child.

    Brodie later comments that “A mature man can find love in a young girl,” which is the kind of sentence that repulses me to even type. It’s not taken as a wild idea, either. The lack of reaction to it makes the apparent ordinariness of the observation all the more appalling. Whether we are meant to think of this comment as par for the course in 1932 or even 1969 is unclear. Set against Brodie’s other seemingly benign cultural observations, it’s easier to see the non-response to this comment as further indication of the rot in her mind wrought by fascism.

    Her ultimate fate is the result of her misplaced faith in her brood, which is a delightful consequence for such a flawed character. As a teacher, I want to see her survive to stick it to the board and the headmistress. She’s going to go down fighting! That rules! But, what she’s fighting for is based on her reputation in the community, which is in tatters. Although it’s the implication of an affair that the board sees as uncouth, the final betrayal is from Sandy, one of her former pupils. Sandy is disgusted with Brodie because her desire to see her students “serve, suffer, and sacrifice” has led to one of their deaths in the war. Her rhetoric finally has real-world consequences. Even more humiliating for Brodie, she learns that this girl’s brother, who she had assumed was fighting on the side of the Fascisti is actually a Republican. Meaning, this student of hers has died for nothing.

    So, what responsibility do teachers have for their students once they leave their care for the day or for the year? Is education “leading out,” or is it the intrusion of new ideas? What can we actually learn about teaching in 2026 from a movie based in 1936 and filmed in 1969 about the impact of a pathologically dedicated, and yes, Fascist, teacher? As with Jim McAllister in Election, Jean Brodie is a good reminder of how not to conduct oneself in the classroom. I admire her ability to sneak her own ideas into the curriculum, right in front of the administration’s faces. It’s a shame that those ideas are so poisonous. Getting kids to think that your teaching “makes history seem like the cinema” is a true gift. What she calls the “leading out” of education turns out to be nothing more than the intrusion of Fascist ideals into her charges’ minds.

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