When someone tells me about their favorite movie (or book), I can’t help but ask the following:

Does the dog die?

Many viewers are prompted to ask this question — so many, in fact, that an entire website has been dedicated to the answer.

Does The Dog Die is a database in which users can type in the name of a movie or television series and find a list of triggers, and often time stamps, for the potentially offensive material. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Animal death (dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, and so on)
• Child abuse
• Dismemberment
• Needles
• Teeth
• Sexual assault
• Gore

Some moviegoers avoid sensitive content because it genuinely bothers them, while others avoid it simply because they do not find it entertaining to watch.

“But it’s fiction,” fans might argue. “It isn’t real.”

That’s true. But the emotional distress that may occur in response to our viewing that material — like nightmares, anxiety, or nausea—is very real.

If animals are killed in a movie, especially in a violent or gruesome way, I have a tendency to avoid them.

There are exceptions, of course: The Conjuring (2013) and Secret Window (2004) to name two. But in such movies, the moments are predictable. And now, we have the ability to fast-forward through content at will.

Some movies that contain triggers are still worth watching. But these scenes are often unnecessary — used for shock value or emotional appeal — and usually detract from the value of the film.

The fact that there is an entire website called Does the Dog Die proves that millions of people have a meaningful bond with animals. A bond so strong that the mere idea of harm coming to a member of their species—even fictionalized — heightens their anxiety.

Those of you who understand this concept will nod, and perhaps you’ve already bookmarked the website to explore at a later date.

Those of you who do not understand why some viewers avoid onscreen animal deaths will ask, perhaps in a mocking tone…

“Why?”

Let’s answer that question.

Why Avoid Onscreen Animal Deaths?

According to Dr. Stanley Coren, one reason some viewers avoid onscreen animal deaths is because of how they understand dogs. For example,

“We are more likely to feel empathy for a victim if we consider them to be helpless and unable to look after themselves, much like an infant or toddler, and we view dogs in the same way — ultimately defenseless and requiring assistance.”

Most people respond with anger or disgust when a child is killed or abused onscreen because it’s not entertaining. It’s disturbing. If it is essential to the plot, though, sometimes audiences can get on board, e.g., The Walking Dead, The Hunger Games.

But the bottom line is that, for many of us, animals are like children.

Dogs are innocent and naïve, and even though we as audience members know that the humans are acting, it is far more difficult to believe that the animal actor is acting voluntarily or without abuse.

We see a dead dog, we feel as though there is a dead dog.

Not to mention, there are numerous films out there in which genuine animal abuse occurred. (Warning: clicking on these links may spoil your favorite childhood films.)

Despite our empathy for injured, abused, or suffering animals, there is often a disconnect when we see the same happen to a human being on the screen.

There are several ways to explain this phenomenon:

1. The disconnect could be attributed to “the collapse of compassion.” Amy Gardner describes it as “the psychological principle which tells us that the more tragedy we see, the less we care.” When we empathize with a dog or a person in a movie, that empathy is usually limited to a handful of characters. But when there is mass slaughter like in Zombieland (2009) or The Lord of the Rings (2001), we care less.
2. The human brain is wired to focus on human survival, not on human death. Ian Sample explains, “the brain shields us from existential fear by categorizing death as an unfortunate event that only befalls other people.” In other words, when we see other humans die onscreen, we disassociate ourselves from that experience because we view it as separate from ourselves. Survival instincts, in a nutshell.
3. We are not naturally inclined to trust other people. Jessica Wozinsky believes “[h]umans have to individually earn our trust, but pets get our compassion when we first encounter them.” This suggests that there is a complex relationship between ourselves and other human beings — something beyond a simple “friend or foe” — and for our animal friends, this complexity is often stripped away.

Still, for the eyes of the empathetic—the “dog moms” and “cat dads” of the world—the reasons spurring the phenomenon are less relevant than the truth we take away from it:

Life is precious. We recognize it, and we want to protect it.

And even though we can’t fix or avoid all of the ugliness in the world, we can at least avoid content in the entertainment industry that makes us uncomfortable, because, with Does the Dog Die, we have the ability to obtain that information in advance.

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But Does the Dog Die? was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

May 2007

I’m finishing my bachelor’s degree at the Los Angeles Film Studies Center. For the last four months, I’ve spent endless hours working on student films and group projects. I’m going on three days with no sleep, but the deadlines are done.

The war is won. It’s finally time to fly home.

On the final night of film school, I walk through the Park La Brea complex where students live. Two-story townhouses and apartment towers line the streets. Beyond them both: the Hollywood hills.

I’m surrounded by a metropolis. Traffic horns. Sparkling lights. Skyscrapers. Compared to my hometown, it’s vast.

Home is the Midwest city of Canton, Ohio, one hour south of Cleveland. My parents’ house sits in a wide suburb cradled beside open farmland. Drive 15 minutes in one direction, you’re downtown. Drive 15 minutes the opposite direction, you’re in cow town. Weird juxtaposition.

I’ll return to Canton for one month. Then, I will fly back to this megapolis and get my first industry job. Los Angeles will become my home for 13 years.

H-O-M-E: four heavy letters. And it’s all about to change—kinda like Superman, my inner geek whispers.

I’ve been on a Superman kick lately: revisiting the movies, discovering new books. Something about this character I identify with as I’m finishing college and readying to enter the workforce. What is it? Why now?

At this moment in the evening, I finally understand.

Superman’s origin has been compared to the biblical stories of Moses and Christ, along with the collective story of early 20th-century European immigration to the United States. My origin story lacks such magnitude. The fictional character and I could not be any different.

But at this moment, there’s something I share with the character: I’m transplanting my roots, moving forward to a new home—moving forward to a future.

Childhood landmarks lie behind me. Avondale Elementary School is no longer just up the street. I won’t run into former classmates from Heritage Christian School at retail stores in the Belden Village mall, or at restaurants in The Strip shopping center on Portage Avenue. I won’t be able to meet friends during closing hours at the Muggswiggz coffee shop.

I have new ground, a future that will resemble nothing from my past, merely by its displaced geography.

In the comics, you’ll recall, baby Kal-El leaves the planet Krypton and crash-lands in Kansas. Now called Clark Kent, the character moves from farmland to Metropolis. His secret hiding place, his Fortress of Solitude, lies in the arctic far from the city. Then, depending on your comics reading list, Superman gets married, has a son, and supports a family. Heck, he even keeps getting new names.

The story of Superman’s life dramatizes progress. Ever moving forward. Looking back for guidance, but never staying put for too long.

I’m still walking the massive apartment complex in the middle of this metropolis. The evening grows late, but my mind is racing.

For the first time in my life, and uncharacteristically for such a nostalgic person, I’m thinking only of my future. By leaving my former home and making a new one in this city, I’m cutting tethers. The horizon now stretches much farther with possibilities.

That’s probably why the comic book character always moves forward: when you gain new perspective, you invite propulsion.

May 2011

It’s four years later. The film industry has weathered a writers’s strike and a recession. I’ve worked a number of odd jobs in the big city.

At this point, I’m recently laid off from being the front-desk receptionist for a visual effects company. Bad timing, because my fiancé and I will marry in September.

I’m at a crossroads. I examine my every choice and ask, Now what? Return home and reset, or keep moving forward?

Coincidentally (or not), this is when I write and direct a short film about Superman. The plot was inspired by a dream. It boils down to a single scene in which a compassionate Clark Kent sits down for a conversation with a runaway teenager and gives her the encouragement to keep moving forward in life.

Both characters are orphans. Both have suffered past trauma. But one of them has a higher perspective: Look. Up here. You have a future. Don’t give up.

Moving Forward

I have felt stuck. I have seen endless roadblocks. I have lain awake at 4:00 AM with the fear that improvement is impossible.

My remedy? A change in perspective.

Small changes. Strolling down an unexplored street. Eating new foods. Writing new stories. Reading new authors. Watching new movies. Asking new questions to old friends. Reframing values.

I tell myself, You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to solve everything. Just keep moving forward—kinda like Superman. Then I smirk, a subtle nod to my inner geek.

Jake Thomas is a writer, filmmaker, and wannabe chef. Along with writing articles and reviews for Fanbase Press, he has toured with the improv comedy groups Spats&Cane and Nice People. To create the perfect evening, he adds a dash of black-and-white movies with a splash of chilled white wine. He’s on Twitter and Instagram, and you can see his work at jakethomasmakesmovies.com.

Keep Moving Forward, Kinda Like Superman was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

During my junior year of college, my dad died.

To say I was devastated would be an understatement. I missed three weeks of school. I dropped a class and took an incomplete in another. I earned a “C” in editing — the task I wanted to do for my career! Overnight, I’d gone from a lifelong A/B student to someone struggling just to get by.

Honestly, it’s hard to remember what I was thinking back then. Everything was a blur. I broke down constantly, and I was in over my head. Being overwhelmed and stressed out with daily life became the new normal.

These feelings continued the following semester, and I toyed with the idea of quitting college altogether — a decision that would have surprised anyone who knew me. School was draining me.

Luckily, I stuck with it, and the following year, I registered for a class that would change my life: Introduction to 3D.

I went into the course knowing almost nothing about 3D film, but I quickly fell in love with it. Early on, pivotal moments sold me on various aspects of 3D and convinced me I wanted to be a stereographer. But perhaps one of the most profound moments was when I watched the French short Forget Me Not.

In the first few minutes of Forget Me Not, we see through the eyes of the main character as he learns of his mother’s death and then attends her funeral. It’s how this moment is shot that matters: it’s exclusively point-of-view shots, and the camera movements are blurry and disoriented.

We don’t see anyone’s faces at the funeral. People talk to the character, but he doesn’t know who they are, nor does he care. They all blur together in a string of meaningless platitudes as the audio fades in and out of clarity. He may be physically at the funeral, but mentally, he’s not processing anything.

Eventually, the funeral ends, and the lead wanders around his mother’s house in a surreal combination of reality and memory that only the French can represent well.

I may have cried when I saw Forget Me Not; I’m not sure. I probably cried. I must have because I remember it hit me like a ton of bricks. Finally, somebody got it. I had been struggling to put into words what I’d been feeling for so long, something that seemed like an impossible task precisely because it defied words, yet someone had managed to put it on film.

Granted, I might have reacted this way had I seen the film in 2D. But the 3D made it more real. I wasn’t just watching the character’s experience; I was there. I was the character at the funeral. I was me at my father’s funeral, not knowing what to say when my best friend’s little sister, too young to understand, asked me where my dad was.

Right then, I realized that 3D film, when made by people who love and respect the form, had the power to be transformational.

Originally published at stereosight.com

How I Fell in Love with 3D Film was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Damn, I miss going to the movie theater. Thankfully, my life has been relatively unaffected by the deadly virus currently ravaging the globe. I’m still employed, I’m able to work from home, and my favorite restaurants are still serving take-out. But not having my favorite hobby to comfort me has been less than ideal. Watching movies at home is fun, but it’s not the same experience.

Recently, as I was confronted with the paralyzing freedom of scrolling endlessly through the entire history of cinema, I decided to revisit a film that radically changed the way I view the world and brought me a surprising level of comfort in the process.

Martin Scorsese’s religious epic Silence released widely in early January 2017 at a low point in my spiritual and emotional health. Donald Trump had just won the presidency on the back of strong Christian support, and I was struggling to reconcile the tenets of the faith with the actions of its current hero.

How could the members of a religion that supposedly values love and compassion almost unanimously support a leader who is so joyfully bigoted, self-absorbed, and unqualified? How could so many people that I love vote for this man with such bald enthusiasm? More than three years later, these questions seem naive in retrospect, but they haunted my soul that winter.

I grew up in a conservative Christian household, and I was always an unwavering believer until I left the Baptist bubble of north Dallas to attend college in the godless capitol of hedonism 200 miles south on I-35. In Austin, I learned more about the world and politics, and I began to see things outside of the worldview I had always known.

I had begun to doubt my faith in the year or two leading up to Trump’s election, but that event pushed me over the edge. I understood doubt as weakness, and it filled me with unshakable guilt. The belief system I had clung to for the entirety of my existence had become woefully inadequate to explain the world in which I found myself. I was lost.

It was this broken, depressed version of myself that elected to skip church one fateful Sunday morning and instead walk into a nearly empty movie theater to undergo the strongest religious experience of my life.

Silence flew under the radar of both audiences and critics upon its release. The film only made $24 million at the box office worldwide, falling well short of its $46 million budget. Critics liked it, but it didn’t get a lot of buzz. The awards conversation that year was centered around Moonlight versus La La Land, and Silence was all but forgotten.

I’ve made no secret of my Scorsese fandom on this blog. I was expecting to enjoy the film, but I was completely unprepared for the lasting impact it would have on my life.

Silence is the harrowing tale of two Portuguese priests who travel to Japan in the mid-17th century in search of their former teacher who has reportedly apostatized. In an effort to preserve its culture and stave off Western colonization, the Japanese government tortures and kills anyone who professes belief in the Christian faith.

At its core, the film is about perspective. The Portuguese priests have almost no interest in learning the language and culture of the Japanese locals, despite expecting that exact thing from them. When the government captures Rodrigues, played by Andrew Garfield, he engages in several philosophical discussions with Inoue, the leader of the effort to end Christianity in Japan.

Both men are singularly focused on winning each argument and have no ability to hear the other person. This approach puts the two at a standstill and stifles any chance that they might learn from each other. Rodrigues is determined to convince the Japanese to end Christian persecution or to die a glorious martyr’s death in the process. He arrogantly views himself as a Christ figure and is ready to take on the torture and death experienced by Jesus.

This inability to communicate is a foundational problem in today’s culture. Republicans, Democrats, and Progressives shout information at each other without any intention of listening to what the others have to say. Similarly, Atheists and Christians try to convert each other and fail to gain wisdom from the opposing viewpoint.

We all see our belief systems as irrefutably correct, and we tie them into our personal identity, making it extraordinarily difficult to admit any flaws in our understanding of the world. We are all entrenched inside our own perspectives, unwilling to emerge no matter the information presented before us.

As it becomes clear that Rodrigues’ opinion will not be swayed through oral argument, Inoue selects a shrewder method to shift his mindset. Rather than playing to Rodrigues’ ego by testing his limits of physical pain, he torments him emotionally by torturing and killing Japanese Christians in front of him until he renounces God. As the days and weeks pass, Rodrigues begins to doubt his faith. He prays and hears nothing but silence in return.

These feelings of doubt and loneliness were all too familiar to me at the time as I grappled with current events and the church’s role in them. I desperately sought answers and found nothing. The few liberal Christians in my social circles were as confused as I was. Trump-supporting Christians provided nothing more than generic Fox News talking points. And God responded with a deafening silence, if He was even there at all.

When Rodrigues finally hears God’s voice, it contradicts his fundamental understanding of Christianity. In the film’s emotional climax, God tells Rodrigues to give in to his oppressors and apostatize. This long-awaited answer to prayer allows him to let go of his pride and his view of himself as a savior figure to the Japanese people.

In a cruel twist of irony, Rodrigues realizes he must renounce his faith in order to demonstrate Christ’s love to his vulnerable, tortured followers. He rejects his rigid western form of Christianity in favor of a more selfless, compassionate version that looks outside the individual to assess how one’s faith impacts the larger community. He doesn’t give up his faith entirely. He learns to live it out in a radically different way.

When the credits rolled, I was filled with a sense of calm that I hadn’t felt in years. It would take me several weeks and a second viewing to process fully what I had just seen, but I came away with a revelation that immediately altered my perception of the world as I stepped out of the theater.

My doubt was not a weakness, but a strength. It was not a sign of decay but a sign of health. It was Rodrigues’ doubt in the predominant Western understanding of Christianity that allowed him to make the right decision and show compassion to the persecuted Japanese believers.

Doubt is a necessity. The moment you lose the capacity to doubt your worldview is the moment you lose the capacity to think critically. Learning becomes impossible. Self-improvement drifts out of reach. You harden into an unchanging rock, incapable of conversing with anyone who’s worldview doesn’t exactly align with yours.

A few days later, I came across the interview below with Andrew Garfield and Stephen Colbert. As Garfield discusses the themes of the film, he comments on the nature of doubt and certainty. “Certainty about anything is the most terrifying thing to me,” he remarks as Colbert stares back in confusion.

“A life of faith is not a life of certainty. A life of faith is a life of doubt, and I think it is so healthy to doubt. It’s so healthy to doubt oneself. It’s so healthy to doubt any assumption we make about how to live. What I mean when I say certainty scares me — certainty starts war. Certainty starts war on behalf of ideology. I know, and you don’t. That’s the scariest thing to me.”

In the months and years that followed, my newfound comfort in my own doubt reshaped my approach to life. As I became open to new perspectives, I began to question authority and my ingrained presuppositions. My political and religious views changed, and I grew more comfortable with ambiguity. Doubt can be unnerving at times, but it’s far superior to the alternative. It continually motivates me to learn and grow.

Seeing Martin Scorsese’s Silence for the first time was one of the defining experiences of my life. It introduced me to the transformational power of cinema. The most exciting aspect of watching a new film is to see life through that director’s perspective and to gain a new appreciation for the world that we share. I’ve never had more doubt in my worldview than I have right now, and I think that’s a good place to be.

Michael Dixon is a mild-mannered accountant by day and a mild-mannered movie-watcher by night. He will not do your taxes for you. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his lovely television and collection of fine whiskies. You can’t purchase his book anywhere because it doesn’t exist.

How Martin Scorsese’s SILENCE Changed the Way I View the World was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was raining. Hard, unrelenting torrents.

This was a problem since my borrowed car suffered from “wet wires.” At least that’s what I dubbed them. Every time more than a drizzle fell, the car’s engine would die. No mechanic had been able to identify or to fix the problem; so I lived with it, avoiding puddles and rainstorms entirely.

I was young, a graduate student living with her parents, and still raw from a dissolved relationship. I needed my friends. Staying home — or even worse, turning back for home — was not a valid option. So I kept driving.

I prayed the engine would stay dry enough to run. But my prayers were drowned. My car died in the middle of the highway.

I eased my way across traffic and into the first parking lot I saw. The car came to a stop, lights fizzling out.

There used to be (or perhaps still is?) a certain class of motels nicknamed No-Tell Motels. These establishments rent rooms by the hour — or however long a guest would like to enjoy its threadbare, dingy, and oft-stained ambiance.

There also used to be no cell phones, no means of calling someone without a landline. I had no choice. I had to call someone for help.

I got out of my car and ran through the rain into the motel’s reception area. It was quiet, and two decades ago, its goldenrod, avocado, and cantaloupe furnishings would have been tasteful decor.

The employee behind the desk looked behind me for my company, listened to my tale of woe, and turned the desk phone to me while saying, “No charge.”

I phoned my friends to tell them I’d be late. Then, I phoned my parents: I explained I was fine, my friends were picking me up, and I’d bring the car home in the morning. This line of reasoning was apparently unacceptable. Giving no explanation, my parents told me they’d be at the motel in an hour. My friends would have to venture on without me.

At this point, I had an hour to kill with a cold, dead car. The hotel employee invited me to watch television with him, as his favorite show was about to start. I looked around the lobby and then at my short, greasy-haired benefactor and agreed.

His favorite show was The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–85), a family-friendly, action-comedy series that ran on CBS for 7 seasons.

The show’s premise is simple: in Hazzard County, Alabama, cousins Bo Duke (John Schneider) and Luke Duke (Tom Wopat) are on probation for running moonshine. They fill their days in a 1969 Dodge Charger (a legitimate member of the cast itself) embroiled in strange schemes initiated by the greedy county commissioner, Boss Hogg (Sorrell Book), and his goofy sidekick, Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane (James Best).

In hindsight, The Dukes of Hazzard is simple, backward, and preposterously dumb. Yet that night, waiting for my parents in the dry and occasionally bustling motel reception area, I had a good time. The little man laughed heartily at the antics of the Hazzard boys, at how they thwarted the mean guys and executed stunts with their orange car.

My parents arrived within the hour, shocked where I was sitting, so happily chatting with a strange old man who fit perfectly into his armchair. We headed home, me already planning my next night out.

Other than the show’s theme song, a rousing and happy tune, the appeal of The Dukes of Hazzard did not last past that evening.

But what did last was the memory of a man who shared his lobby, his favorite show, and his phone with a drenched young woman dressed up to dance, but who instead, sat damp and happy on a decades-old fuzzy gold couch.

How ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ Saved Me was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

National Security (Dennis Dugan, 2003) is an action-comedy starring Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn. Like its predecessors 48 Hours (1982) and Rush Hour (1998), its narrative revolves around an unlikely cop partnership wherein both parties find themselves all mixed up in mayhem, violence, and requisite race jokes.

National Security earned over $50 million worldwide, was the second highest-grossing movie in America on its opening weekend (Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday), and stayed in theaters for several months. But for the year, it was the 78th most-profitable movie domestically. Moreover, compared to Big Daddy (1999) and Grown-Ups (2010), National Security serves as one of its director’s biggest misfires. The same goes for Martin Lawrence as the film stands as one of his worst-performing vehicles.

In 2015, I hadn’t seen National Security. There may have been a point at which I thought about the film. Maybe when I was a 19-year-old screenwriting student in Los Angeles, I saw a billboard for it. Or I noticed it on the marquee when I went to see something else. It’s possible I considered seeing it — I liked most of Martin Lawrence’s movies up to that point — but I didn’t.

It’s inconceivable, then, the last conversation between my father and me, of all possible topics, would be about this mostly forgotten buddy-cop movie.

I haven’t spoken to my father in two years. I haven’t seen him. I haven’t touched him. He is gone, and he is never coming back. Yes, people die every day. But not people you know, not your parents.

I had thousands of conversations with my father. At the time of his death, he was neither medically ill nor ailing from the usual effects of aging. So there was no way to know that, when he called me three days before he died, it would be the last time I would speak with him.

In real life, there are two kinds of deaths: expected, which may follow a long illness and allow those left behind a chance to say goodbye; and sudden, which happen unexpectedly and afford those remaining no opportunity to say their farewells.

Movies often blend the two: expected and sudden. A character has been shot and is bleeding out in the street, but he’s still able to muster a few words. A sidekick jumps in front of the villain’s knife, but she has time before she dies to hear her partner say, “Thank you.”

Scenes like this force the writer to think about what they might say in that kind of moment. But such scenes don’t often play out in the real world, and the hope behind them is misplaced. Few people get to create any final scene. In real life, a sudden death denies you those last few words.

Aneurysms. Heart attacks. Car accidents.

The last day I spoke with my father, he had watched National Security on Netflix, and he wanted to tell me about it. I’m a screenwriter, and the two most recent projects I had been hired to write were, what the industry calls, “urban” films — or the preferred euphemism for films with lead characters who are black.

Knowing the basics of my early professional writing assignments, National Security had sparked an idea in my father’s mind: that I could write something similar because it starred a black actor. At first I didn’t get the connection. But after figuring out what film he was talking about and hearing what he liked about it — along with his insistence I should try to write something similar — I told him I would check it out.

I hung up the phone, disheartened my father didn’t understand anything about my career and what I was trying to do with my life. The thing I pour my energy into, the thing that keeps me going through late nights, the challenge of writing words that both make sense and are important — none of that was in my father’s mind when it came to me and my desire to write movies.

My ambitions had been reduced to a particular niche that could be filled, effectively, if I would only sit down and do it. To my father, my work seemed to be laughable — or at least as laughable as National Security.

My father was born in Denver, but spent all of his childhood in Tustin, a small city in Orange County, California. His California was not Steinbeck’s pastoral lament. Instead, it was the rapidly evolving Southern California landscape of the 1950s and 1960s, which saw Disneyland plow over the orange groves and Surf City USA rise from the newly manicured coastline of Huntington Beach.

His parents, at one point, owned a chicken ranch, but they were not farmers. His youth consisted of cars, motorcycles, Little League, and a father who ate eggs and bacon for breakfast every morning.

When it came time to finish high school, my father had the opportunity to go to college. He enrolled at San Diego State University and moved to San Diego, where he would live for the rest of his life and where I would grow up.

My father was an engineering student. After graduating, he took his first of the many technically oriented jobs that would constitute his career. Although he professed to having very poor abilities in math or memorization, he found tremendous success as a manager and a project leader.

For him, there were the details, and then there was the bigger picture. During most of my childhood, I felt my father wasn’t as concerned with the details. I don’t know if this is necessarily true. Like many things that we think about our parents, that idea may have been based solely in emotion.

From an early age, I felt as though I didn’t have a lot in common with my father. I loved sports, and he didn’t. I was drawn to the arts, and he was not. Even as a boy I wanted to be a writer and work in the movies, but I never asked him what my career might look like because I thought he didn’t understand my ambitions. We didn’t talk about movies. In fact, I don’t recall my father ever taking me to a movie theater (maybe we did as part of a family outing, but I don’t recall going only with my father). Movie theaters would become a sacred place to me, but they were not something I shared with him.

About twenty months before my father died, I moved back to the United States after several years of living overseas. Now in San Diego, I saw modest success as a screenwriter. My writing partner and I had found representation, we were hired to write a script, and we had people willing to talk to us about our work.

As monumental as this success was for me, it was difficult to convey to my father. After all, since graduating college I had spent years working freelance jobs, living on friends’ couches, pursuing a Master’s degree, making films nobody was watching, and working as an assistant on studio films in London. I know my “reckless” path, though not unusual for filmmakers, couldn’t have looked great to my father. It was as insecure and unstable as his own had been calculated and assured. He must have been worried for me, confused as to what I was trying to do with my life.

My father didn’t understand my work, and that is largely because I gave up on trying to help him understand. In my mind, the only way I could show him I was “okay” was in basic terms: my name onscreen (“Written By”), in a movie he’d heard of, accompanied by a serious paycheck.

That was the only success my father would be able to grasp, I thought. He never got to see it. When he died, I wasn’t there yet.

The last day I saw my father was Easter Sunday. We had dinner. There were other people there. He and I laughed secretly at two of them, an inside joke between us. We joked with each other, too. We talked about current events. He told me what was going on with his house and what he hoped to do with it in the near future.

Since moving back to San Diego, I discovered how much I had in common with my father: a common love of exploration and a desire to take on project after project. Just prior to Easter, we rebuilt the fence in his backyard. It was a big project, the kind that he loved, and I enjoyed every minute of working on it with him. When we were finished, he was pleased.

After thirty years, I was happy in my relationship with him and looked forward to making the next few years count in terms of strengthening our bond. I was also more secure in my career and poised to bring him into it in new ways.

I left my father’s house after dinner, and he walked me out alone, as he always did. We said goodbye. Not unique among men, or sons, or fathers, he had a hard time saying “I love you.” I don’t know if, during the last moment I saw him alive, he said it. I don’t know if he did in that last phone conversation that we had. I don’t know. I wish I could remember. But I don’t.

Strangely enough, during that last Easter dinner, my father talked with me about dying. He felt good and was healthy. He had plenty of things he was still planning to do, and there was no reason he wouldn’t be able to do them. He told me that he thought he had twenty years left.

I don’t know if I believed him or if I just wanted to. But he didn’t have twenty years left. He had six days.

No relationship is one-sided. Over the years, maybe I didn’t consider my father as his own person. As I struggled to build my own career, I didn’t stop to think that he could appreciate my work without understanding it. But he had his own way of looking at movies, and his own way of looking at my success.

National Security is not what most people would call “a great movie.” It is not the kind of movie most filmmakers aspire to make. But it is a certain kind of movie and a certain kind of success necessary to advance the career of some filmmakers, especially those who work deep in the studio system.

I try not to think that my father, while watching National Security, felt it contained the kind of dialogue I write or that its clunky plotting is something I’m capable of or that a low-brow comedy is what I have oriented my life towards.

At one point Lawrence’s character, a security guard trying to be a cop, turns to Steve Zahn’s, a cop who has been forced to be a security guard, and says,

“Let me get this straight. Your partner got killed. You lost your job. You got thrown in jail. Your girlfriend walked. And now you’re a security guard making $182 a week. Know what you are, Hank? You’re a black man.”

This is the kind of heavy-handed, overtly racial dialogue that characterizes many movies. It’s a familiar line because it emulates other movies with similar lines. It’s a line an audience expects to hear, especially in a Martin Lawrence movie. It not necessarily a fault of the film; it is part of the film’s essential constitution.

That is what I wish I would have talked to my father about: why National Security works on some levels and doesn’t on others. I could have used the opportunity to explore films with him, illustrate what I love about them, and why I have always wanted to be a part of them.

I could have also explained why I may have to write a few National Securitys before I write The Godfather (although he never watched The Godfather, either). I could have seized the opportunity to start that process of helping him understand, ahead of my own arbitrary schedule for it. But I didn’t. I merely counted this as another example of my father’s not “getting” me.

Only now, after time has passed, can I see that on one afternoon, he sat down to watch a movie and as soon as it was over, the first thing he did was think of me. Good movie, bad movie, forgettable movie — it didn’t matter.

After years of wondering whether my father would watch a film in which he could see my work, he had done just that. Maybe I didn’t have anything to explain to him after all.

My Father and ‘National Security’ was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Survivor Memory about Not Watching Survivor

Today — or yesterday, once I finish writing this — is the ten-year anniversary of the Survivor: Cook Islands finale, which aired on December 17, 2006.

I didn’t need to look this up — it’s a date that has stuck with me, albeit for reasons indirect to Survivor itself. Cook Islands, beyond being one of Survivor’s most memorable seasons, resonates with me because it was the first Survivor finale I didn’t watch live. Survivor finales were a big deal in the McNutt household, and when I woke up that morning I had planned out viewing it with my family, home from college for Christmas.

Those plans changed when I got word that my high school friend Kyle had died following a car accident the night before. It’s the kind of news you don’t really prepare for — I was one of the few among this group of friends who went away for university (albeit an hour away), and so I was less close to Kyle than others, but the idea of him being gone at 20 was nonetheless difficult to fathom.

[I’d include a photo of me and Kyle, or even just Kyle, here, but I don’t think I have any of them handy. There’s some photos kicking around on a hard drive somewhere, but those are in my office.]

Kyle’s death resonates with me in many ways, but two stand out. One was the way it highlighted how our lives are shaped by our different relationships: when I attended Kyle’s funeral, the first I’d attended for a non-family member, I was struck by how much the version of Kyle being presented by his family was not the Kyle I knew.

That shouldn’t have been surprising, maybe: of course he’s going to be different with his family than he is in the halls at school, or hanging out with me and my friend Ryan after they drove down to visit me at university. But when I read his obituary it sounded like a different person, and it wasn’t until the funeral that I realized everyone there saw Kyle differently, and that was just how life works, especially with someone still caught between childhood and adulthood in the eyes of the world.

The second, though, was why I missed that Survivor finale. That night, our group of friends reunited in the parking lot at our high school to throw a football around. It was what we did every day at lunch, Kyle included, and it was a way to help us process what was happening. These were friends I usually tried to see when I was home from school, but it felt particularly important to see them that night. While my instinct is often to process things independently, it was a reminder of the value of community, and the way those communities continue to be a part of our lives after we’ve “left” them (like if, say, you moved to another country as I did).

And so tonight I think about Kyle as I do each December — it was hard to imagine life without him then, but on this anniversary it’s maybe too easy to imagine how life might’ve been different if he was here. That’s the joy and pain of perspective, and I take the lessons learned from that with me now and on each and every future December 17.

December 17, 2006 was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, the Guardian published a piece by film critic Ben Child on the role of women in superhero films. Focusing on the newly released Doctor Strange, Child argues women with superhero girlfriend roles are underdeveloped and do not fit into modern times. This, according to Child, is because superhero girlfriends don’t have superpowers.

I’d like to question and expand on some of Child’s points. While Child’s point that more needs to be done to bring forward women’s representations in mainstream media has merit, we also need to keep an eye on the nuances of current portrayals and how they relate to wider cultural issues.

History and Convention — What’s the Problem?

Child begins by noting the superhero girlfriend character type can be traced to the comics, “which have always imagined their (usually male) costumed titans requiring support of a (usually female) love interest in order to save the world.”

Historical context doubtless plays a role here. After all, comics fans and writers have been talking about “Women in Refrigerators” since at least the late 1990s, when writer Gail Simone coined the term. It refers to a narrative trope, or a repeated series of events in superhero stories, in which superhero girlfriends are killed, maimed, raped — or all of the above — in order to propel the (male) hero’s story and motivate his action.

The villain goes for the superhero’s girlfriend in order to “attack his heart,” as Willem Dafoe’s Norman Osborn puts it in Spider-Man (2002). Thus, the superhero has no choice but to save his girlfriend, an act which moves the narrative from one point to the next.

I refer to “women-in-refrigerator” characters as representing “active passivity,” for while they remain passive objects in need of rescuing within the narrative, their integral role in propelling action not their own is fascinating. Without them, the film would fall apart.

At the risk of devaluing film adaptations just for, you know, being adaptations, Child then argues that some superhero girlfriends have been depowered or made less physically strong than their comic book counterparts. Here, he uses Morena Baccarin’s character in Deadpool (2016) to illustrate the ways in which the adaptation process has “downgraded” her superhero girlfriend character. He says

“If being superpowered is what gets you screen time and a little extra attention from the script polisher, there are plenty of comic book paramours due an upgrade.”

Superpowers, it seems, are the key to successful female empowerment in superhero films.

Thinking about these characters in terms of whether or not they have superpowers and then valuing them accordingly has its drawbacks though. Throughout the history of superheroes, there have always been non-powered civilians of all genders (well, maybe not all genders but that’s a topic for another day). Foggy Nelson seems to get by in Daredevil stories without people saying, “Where are his superpowers?” Then again, you don’t see Foggy Nelson pining after Daredevil and constantly needing saving by him.

I would argue, though, that the problem isn’t that superhero girlfriends don’t have superpowers. The problem is with the way in which these non-powered women are devalued through their positioning in the narrative (as being in need of saving).

Giving them superpowers won’t necessarily fix everything. Look at Rogue in X-Men (2000) or Black Widow in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). In X-Men, Rogue, who is a superpowered mutant, is just a tool which villain Magneto wants to to use to control humans, thereby placing her in danger and need of saving. Meanwhile, Black Widow’s portrayal in Age of Ultron attracted severe criticism for the ways in which she was victimized in the film and positioned as love interest for Bruce Banner.

Superhero girlfriends don’t underwhelm because they don’t have powers. They underwhelm because they’re placed in a particular position in a narrative which relates to bigger issues about what it means to be a woman. And with more widespread awareness of feminist issues, this becomes a more overt problem than it maybe was a few decades ago.

The Amazing Gwen Stacy

Let’s talk about Gwen Stacy, perhaps the ultimate woman in the refrigerator. Gwen Stacy’s comic book story in which she is brutally thrown off a bridge by the Green Goblin only to have her neck snapped by Spider-Man’s web shooter marked the beginning of a more serious mode of comic book storytelling in the 1970s.

The story had an effect on superhero narratives which we can still feel in “dark and gritty” stories today. Her death, of course, served no purpose other than to fuel Spider-Man’s fury against the Green Goblin (on a related note, the editors were convinced the only options for Gwen were death or marriage to Peter Parker — and Petey just wasn’t ready for that yet! So death it was!).

Gwen appeared in the ill-fated Amazing Spider-Man reboot film series, which only lasted two films before they hit the reset button, played by the ever-loved Emma Stone. As insignificant as the film might seem from here, The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) is one of my favorite superhero films, and this is partly to do with its portrayal of Gwen Stacy. The film was referred to in the press as “Twilight in spandex” and “a superhero film for women” because of its central love story, but also perhaps because it brought forward the narrative of the superhero girlfriend.

In The Amazing Spider-Man, Gwen’s role forms the backbone of the narrative. In the Raimi Spider-Man films, Mary Jane’s presence and actions are a constant source of pain, woe, and irritation for Spider-Man. But in The Amazing Spider-Man, Gwen’s relationship to Peter is not detrimental to his life, but enhances it. This is most obvious in the scene in which Peter tells Gwen that he is Spider-Man. Subsequently, he is no longer burdened by the isolation of being a hero.

Although part of Gwen’s role is to help Peter by contributing her resources and scientific skills further along the narrative, this is only one aspect of the character. Gwen’s intelligence is often highlighted in the film, but it does not necessarily function in opposition to her status as superhero girlfriend. And at no point is she kidnapped by the film’s villain, the Lizard, although she is part of action scenes between him and Spider-Man.

Gwen’s ill fate in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) is probably most representative of the struggle for the portrayal of women in superhero films. A central conflict of the film regards Gwen’s choice in partaking of the action.

Choice is an interesting concept when it comes to feminist ideas. Women’s choice to do what they want with their lives and bodies is often referred to when thinking about feminism. But it’s also something that has been incorporated by the mainstream and is used with varying results.

In one scene moments before her death, Gwen screams at Peter that it should be her choice whether or not she should be involved in his heroic life. Framed by the language of choice, then, Gwen is ultimately punished for not knowing her place in the superhero narrative, as her death from the comics is repeated in the film, almost panel by panel.

Reconciling Girlfriendism with Heroism

None of this should be thought of as straightforward though. The superhero girlfriend is a complicated character because of the way in which her very presence serves the interests of the male hero. But the bigger picture here points to more general issues about women’s roles in Western society.

One of these issues, for instance, is the role of heterosexuality in women’s identity. Through the positioning of superhero girlfriend characters as both objects of heterosexual desire and things that need saving, the superhero narrative is ultimately linked to specific ideals about heterosexuality and the ways in which this links to gender roles.

Superhero girlfriends also undoubtedly fall into the reinvigorated traditionalist ideas about gender which are part and parcel of postfeminist culture. But they’re also complex in their relationship to old-timey gender representation. Their sassy, even ball-busting, personas are both modern and reach back to an age in which cinema was dominated by what Maria DiBattista refers to as “fast-talking dames.”

Back in the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, DiBattista argues, women were portrayed as sassy and quick-witted. Their verbal expressions were sharp, snappy and came at one-hundred miles per hour. These factors contributed to their representation as empowered in an age which we might associate with overt gender inequality. Both Pepper Potts and Gwen Stacy are arguably presented along these lines in their respective films, making them both contemporary and old-fashioned (indeed, in Stone’s case this might even spill over into her celebrity persona).

It’s not enough to look at these films and simply trace the history of the comics and say “well, this was better and that was worse.” We need to think about the links to wider cultural issues present in the narratives. What’s at stake? How can we make sense of this?

Part of this involves thinking about the ways in which we value some gendered characteristics over others. Is it just an inherently bad thing for a woman to play a superhero girlfriend or is there more to it than that? Is being physically strong really the key to adequate representation? How do other factors such as race and sexuality factor into this?

When Zendaya, a woman of color, was cast as Mary Jane Watson in the upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming, the decision was met with backlash regarding the changed race of the traditionally white character. The fact that there was backlash speaks to the general issue of the dearth of representation of women of color in superhero films. The superhero girlfriends we’re used to are white, heterosexual, thin, and middle-class.

Interestingly, most have received “upgrades” in terms of profession and intellect — Pepper Potts is CEO of Stark Industries, Gwen is a science genius, Betty Ross is a scientist, Susan Storm is a scientist, Jane Foster is an astrophysicist. This is perhaps ironic in an age in which women and minorities are still criminally underrepresented in STEM fields.

Criticisms not withstanding, superhero girlfriends have played an important role in superhero narratives whether we like it or not. This in itself should be approached and investigated with some degree of sympathy. If a mainstream culture is really into one particular thing, we should be asking why it is into that thing and what that might mean.

Portrayals of women in superhero films undoubtedly need to go further in terms of presenting female superheroes. But the opportunity for groundbreaking representation shouldn’t end there — it is present in every aspect of the superhero narrative, including superhero girlfriends.

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The Superhero Girlfriend was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.