The Hollywood Bowles

(Spoiler alert: I have a friend of a friend who talked to somebody who saw this movie.)

A friend from the dog park recently saw You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

Her one-word review was perhaps the best I’ve ever heard.

“And?”

Welcome to the Age of Unapologetics.

America has become a nation where getting caught can be good for business. Where disgrace becomes publicity.

And where the commodity of truth is losing its value.

Consider Billy McFarland.

He went to prison for the Fyre Festival fraud. Then he promoted Fyre Festival 2, which collapsed before it happened. He sold the brand for $245,300.

Alex Jones spent years calling the Sandy Hook massacre a hoax. Courts ordered him to pay more than $1 billion. He kept broadcasting, selling merchandise and portraying himself as the victim.

George Santos fabricated his résumé, pleaded guilty to fraud and went to prison. Donald Trump commuted his sentence. Santos returned to television as a reality-show contestant.

And, of course, there’s Trump.

Courts rejected his challenges to the 2020 election. His own administration affirmed its security. He continued insisting he won, turned that claim into a political movement and returned to the White House.

Richard Nixon lived in another America.

When the Watergate investigation exposed his administration’s crimes, his party abandoned him. Nixon resigned.

The evidence mattered. The truth carried consequences.

Today, exposure can become an opportunity.

The internet and social media have transformed the economics of belief. Anyone can find an audience willing to embrace a claim, however absurd. The flatter the Earth, the more committed its defenders.

And the more committed the defenders, the more valuable the audience.

That audience becomes a market. Attention becomes income. Every challenge to the story gives its believers another reason to defend it.

The commodity of truth once commanded a premium.

Journalism depended on that value. Reporters investigated. Evidence established facts. The public could distinguish what happened from what someone wished had happened.

Now the marketplace rewards something else. Conviction.

An unapologetic needs only enough people who share the feeling. The evidence becomes an inconvenience. The lie becomes an identity. And abandoning the lie means abandoning the audience that rewards it.

Which brings us back to You Can See Everything.

The documentary opened to $15 million, an extraordinary debut for a film about a woman convicted of defrauding investors in her blood-testing company.

Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, has pursued another blood-testing venture. Holmes herself continues to attract fascination. And Fielder has a hit built around the spectacle of trying to determine whether a convicted fraudster believes her own story.

Both benefit from the attention, though their conduct and responsibilities differ profoundly.

Even the film’s title plays with our predicament.

Read from top to bottom, it says You Can See Everything. Read from left to right, it says Everything You Can See.

One promises access to the whole truth. The other describes the limits of our perception. That is an actual difference, one that matters, and one that is increasingly getting blurred.

We have begun treating everything we can see as everything there is to know. We confuse interpretation with evidence. We mistake the strength of someone’s conviction for the strength of their case.

Fielder profits from our uncertainty about Holmes. Holmes gains another audience for her story. Viewers get another opportunity to decide what to believe.

Yet a jury already decided the question of her fraud.

The commodity of truth keeps falling as the market for doubt keeps soaring.

And?

The most terrifying villain in movie history carries a cattle gun, wears a ridiculous haircut and looks like he would rather be anywhere else than work.

He is Anton Chigurh, and Javier Bardem’s portrayal of him in the Coen brothers’ 2007 masterpiece No Country for Old Men remains the most frightening characterization ever put on film, regardless of EW’s preferences. Chumps.

Nothing comes close.

Entertainment Weekly recently published its list of the 25 most terrifying horror movie villains, a collection stretching from Dracula to the Babadook. Hannibal Lecter ranks second, Norman Bates fourth and Michael Myers fifth. The shark from Jaws swims in at No. 13.

It’s a respectable list, which is precisely why it deserves an argument. These rankings exist to start fights among movie lovers. But this one raises a more interesting question: What, exactly, constitutes a horror movie?

Jaws was marketed as a thriller. The Silence of the Lambs won Best Picture as a psychological thriller. Yet both occupy permanent places in the horror canon. And if a great white shark qualifies, surely the Xenomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien deserves a seat at the table.

Death can be a horror. Shopping at Ikea can be a horror. Anyone who has endured a family Thanksgiving understands what terror requires.

Horror is an experience before it is a genre.

And few movies understand that better than No Country for Old Men.

Consider the celebrated monsters on EW’s list. Dracula has his appetites. Freddy Krueger enjoys his work. Hannibal Lecter savors the intellectual pleasures of murder. Michael Myers has elevated relentless pursuit into something approaching a religious calling.

They are theatrically aggressive. Their menace requires a performance. Even their silences have a theatrical quality.

Chigurh seems vaguely inconvenienced by the entire business.

He moves through the world with the weary bearing of someone who has another appointment. His face registers little beyond mild irritation. His victims receive the same consideration a plumber might give a clogged drain.

Killing is his occupation, and he appears to dislike his job.

But that interpretation only gets us halfway to the character’s horror.

Anton Chigurh is death itself.

He is mortality given human form, moving across the Texas landscape with the indifference of a natural process. He seems to regard murder as an administrative duty, something required of him rather than desired.

And the cruelest part is that he occasionally lets people believe they have a say in the matter.

His coin toss with a gas station proprietor is terrifying precisely because Chigurh appears willing to accept either outcome. When the man survives, Chigurh seems almost pleased. For a fleeting moment, he reveals something resembling human satisfaction.

There is another glimpse of emotion in his opening murder, when his expression carries an almost sexual suggestion. The violence seems to excite him before his customary indifference returns.

The rare exceptions make his emotional vacancy more chilling.

Most cinematic monsters are driven by appetites. Their cruelty has a motive, however deranged. Chigurh operates beyond appetite. His philosophy turns murder into fate, although he alone decides whose fate deserves consideration.

Carla Jean Moss ultimately exposes the fraud when she refuses his coin toss. The coin decides nothing. Chigurh does.

And therein lies the horror.

We fear death because it operates beyond reason. It can arrive through accident or disease, indifferent to virtue or deserving. Chigurh possesses that same terrible impartiality, with one crucial distinction: He has appointed himself its instrument.

Spielberg made us afraid of the ocean. Hitchcock made us nervous about taking a shower. The Coen brothers made us afraid of an ordinary conversation.

Perhaps No Country for Old Men is a western. Perhaps it’s a crime thriller. Genres are classifications invented by people who need somewhere to put things.

Fear observes no such boundaries.

And Anton Chigurh remains its most convincing human incarnation, because the most frightening thing about death is how little it seems to care.

He already knows how it ends.

Netflix’s new documentary Tyson accomplishes something extraordinary: It turns one of the most compelling lives in American sports into riveting television, then allows some of the least trustworthy people in that life to undermine the enterprise.

The four-part series, which premiered October 13, traces Mike Tyson’s rise from a troubled Brooklyn childhood to the heavyweight championship through remarkable archival footage and revealing interviews. Director Floyd Russ also secures the participation of President Donald Trump, whose history as a boxing promoter makes him relevant to Tyson’s story. His record of falsehoods also raises questions about the documentary’s credibility.

The opening episode delivers a masterclass in documentary filmmaking.

Russ assembles astonishing footage that captures the speed and ferocity of Tyson’s rise. Consider a sequence from Tyson’s amateur career, featuring an eight-second knockout at the Junior Olympics. The teenager attacks with such explosive force that the fight ends almost before the eye registers the first punch.

The footage alone justifies watching.

Tyson’s life gives Hollywood a story it could scarcely invent. Poverty shaped his childhood. Violence defined his Brooklyn neighborhood. Police arrested him repeatedly before adolescence. Boxing offered an escape, and trainer Cus D’Amato recognized extraordinary talent in a boy whom society had largely discarded.

Their relationship gives the first episode its emotional center. D’Amato became Tyson’s guardian and father figure. He taught the young fighter to channel his rage into discipline and transformed a street kid into a phenomenon. Their story gives Rocky the dramatic sophistication of a coloring book.

Tyson remains a fascinating contradiction. His fists carried devastating power. His emotional constitution was Waterford crystal. Behind the most terrifying fighter of his generation lived a frightened young man desperate for affection and vulnerable to anyone offering it.

That vulnerability drives the second episode, appropriately titled “Greed.”

Here the documentary begins to unravel.

Russ examines the men who surrounded Tyson once his fists started generating millions. Promoter Don King emerges from a boxing establishment that rewarded hustlers and enriched opportunists. Tyson’s career exposes the financial machinery that exploits fighters while celebrating their achievements.

Russ makes that point effectively.

Then Donald Trump enters the picture.

Securing an interview with a sitting American president about a sports figure represents a rare documentary achievement. Trump promoted Tyson fights during his Atlantic City casino years and witnessed the fighter’s commercial ascent.

His involvement deserves examination. His testimony deserves skepticism.

Trump spent decades building a public record of falsehoods and self-serving accounts. Yet the documentary grants him the authority of a witness whose recollections warrant acceptance.

The irony is enormous. A film about the manipulation of Mike Tyson recruits one of America’s most accomplished manipulators to help explain it.

And Trump’s appearance exposes a larger weakness in the project. The filmmakers rely on people who profited from Tyson’s talent to explain how others exploited him. Their access supplies colorful testimony while their motives demand scrutiny.

Tyson’s life also includes a rape conviction, domestic violence and profound personal damage. Those chapters require the same rigorous examination that makes the opening episode so powerful. Compassion for Tyson should sharpen that scrutiny.

Russ possesses the footage and storytelling instincts to produce a definitive portrait of an American original. The opening episode establishes that promise. The second exposes the danger of giving the people who helped shape Tyson’s mythology another opportunity to shape it.

The tragedy is that Tyson’s story already contains everything a great documentary needs. His ascent illuminates the brutality of boxing and the price of celebrity. His downfall reveals the human cost of an industry that can transform a vulnerable young man into a fortune.

For all its remarkable craftsmanship, Netflix’s Tyson leaves us with an uncomfortable achievement: a wonderfully polished turd.

“I’m in deep despair as I write this tonight. RJ Mitte, my sweet son on Breaking Bad has died.

I met him when he was only 14 years old when he was cast as Walter White Jr., a part he played with such joy and enthusiasm.

Born with Cerebral Palsy, he never – ever – allowed that challenge to be an excuse for anything. He met the demanding shooting schedule head on with great determination.

Always listening to the advice that his TV parents (Anna Gunn and myself) gave him – but being a teenager, sometimes mischievously ignoring the counsel in order to learn the hard way… He was one of the stars of a hit TV show – but still a kid.

That kid was pretty raw when we started shooting the pilot in February of 2007, but little by little we watched him grow into a really fine actor. He parlayed his experience on the show to be a vocal advocate for performers with disabilities, and was the head of a philanthropic organization with a focus on helping the disabled community.

All that promise and potential now is such a loss.

It is especially devastating to hear that he took his own life.

Why?

We were texting each other just a few weeks ago – figuring out when we could meet for lunch. I don’t know if that lunch would have changed his future…

But I do know that I loved him, and thoroughly enjoyed being with him throughout the years on the series, and after the spotlight on Breaking Bad dimmed…

I’ll miss you, son.

I can’t stop there without imploring anyone who is contemplating suicide to please call for the support you need at 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (https://988lifeline.org/). There is hope.”

— Bryan Cranston