Well, instead of watching Baby Doll yesterday, I started the day with Cape Fear.
Mitchum is great. It takes a certain level of fearlessness to act this unlikeable. Mitchum has it.
My problem with the film isn't Mitchum. It's not Peck. It's not any of the performances.
My problem with the film is my problem with the "thriller" genre in its entirety. It's a sub-genre of the horror film and it's what most "horror" films in fact usually are. It's a narrative that dabbles in the horrible, the terrible, the outrageous, the unbearable, and then reels it all back in for a happy ending, a triumph over whatever evil the audience has been enjoying for an hour, but the audience can only feel good about their enjoyment, their "thrills" by all of this, if the evil is conquered, if the baddies get beaten.
But the real horror is not the last minute rescue. The real horror is when the father's stupid plans fail and the wife and daughter suffer. The real horror is when the audience is made to feel ashamed for their thrills.
When Cape Fear succeeds is when it makes the audience feel the father's pressure. What does one do against an evil that does not respect the rule of law? Sam Bowden knows that Max Cady cannot be stopped by anything short of murdering him. The film is at its most interesting when this moral dilemma is being explored. The entire final act is constructed to let Bowden kill Cady within the limits of the law. Maybe this is believable for a high-class lawyer with high-class friends. But the privileged "good guy" winning after a series of "thrills" is just not something that I care about. It just reinforces the perverse audience participation in the transgressive "thrills" and then lets the audience off the hook by punishing those thrills (that were committed by another and not by the viewer). So, the audience gets to join in on the crime and then gets to join in on the condemnation of the crime, feeling good the whole time. I hate this.
At the end of the day yesterday, I put on The Day the Earth Blew Up.
My sleep schedule has been stupid, so I hope you will all forgive me for falling asleep (yes, admittedly after a few Saturday afternoon beers) early in the film, after Daffy and Porky have cleaned their house, but before anything really fun begins.
I'll return to the film and finish watching it soon, sometime in the next couple of days.
Today, after being gone from home for most of the day, in the evening, I have watched some gymnastics with the kids. There was a great moment in which a great athlete failed horribly and as she recovered on the ground, the crowd applauded. That was a great "film" moment.
Ezekiel is watching some baseball in the background as I write this. Televised baseball games are motion pictures.
I watched this video and loved it: I’ve Searched 30 Years for a Book that Doesn’t Exist. It's a static shot of a man and his life-sized mummy doll in front of a bookshelf. It's an installment in a "serial" story that has been going on for years.
But this particular video stands above the rest. The description of dreams resonates with anyone who has had a startling recurring dream and with anyone who has had to struggle with the failures of memory. There are books from my childhood that I remember that I cannot name. There are books that have formed me that I don't even know how to begin to search for to identify them (and I am supposed to be a professional in searching and identifying). What this video does for me is evoke this very real experience of trying to remember something, knowing that something exists but not being able to name it, knowing that something exists but not being able to find it, knowing that something exists but not being able to read it, not being able to fully enter into the experience of it.
Vaughan:
The paperback's title is called Doorway
That short YouTube video, that short film, is the acknowledging of something that C.S. Lewis wrote about in one of his best essays:
“Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.”
Descriptions of dreams are terribly boring, we all know. But I've watched this Michael K. Vaughan video twice in one day, this video about his recurring dreams. A single shot of a guy telling a personal story over the course of about 14 minutes. You may not like it. It's one of my favorite "films" of 2026.