It'd been about 20 years since I last saw Alien, and then it was only because a roommate demanded it of me. I've never gone further into the franchise.

We've been trained to go into every movie as if it's an amusement park. There was a time (and Alien is a prime example) when movies were approached as art exhibits. Yes, Alien has moments of horror. But it's not primarily a horror film designed to carry us on visceral reactions. Instead, it's a finely tuned suspense movie.

In every frame there's something to consider. It might be the characters, how their unique motivations and personalities draw different things from the others. It might be the texture of the ship, not polished like the USS Enterprise or an Imperial Destroyer, but wet and dirty. It might be space itself, which is vast, unknowable, and filled with unspeakable terrors.

H.P. Lovecraft knew a thing or two about unspeakable terrors. He wrote, "Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood."

It's not that you need to be "media literate" to appreciate Alien. The media literate person will look at the opening of the movie and note how the camera floats through the empty ship while the crew is asleep to give us, the viewers, the sense of intruding where we don't belong. If that's your thing, I'm right there with you. Most people don't want to be media literate, and that's a good thing.

In order to appreciate Alien, all you need to do is allow yourself to slip into the atmosphere, the mood, it creates.

When I first saw Rope, as a young college student, I didn't really appreciate it. Sure, the illusion of the 82 minute continuous shot was impressive. Watching the "perfect" murder fall in on itself was satisfying. But now, having lived some life, and especially in light of recent events, Rope is more poignant than ever.

Rope was Hitchcock's first color film and is based on a play, which was in turn inspired by actual events. Two gay men attempt to commit the perfect murder, and then ghoulishly host a dinner party at the scene of the crime, going so far as to serve the meal on the trunk in which the body is hidden.

In an even more perverse flourish, they invite the victim's parents, girlfriend, and her ex-boyfriend. But they make one mistake: they also invite their prep-school headmaster (played by James Stewart, who was looking for more serious roles after the War). The headmaster is one of those people who is rude because he thinks he's smarter than everyone else, and it was his philosophy that unintentionally inspired the murder.

See, our murderers feel that they belong to a class of intellectuals who have the right to kill their inferiors if they feel like it. One of them spouts his philosophy at dinner, to which the victim's father objects, noting that Hitler thought the same thing. But no, no, our killer says: he's, well, in modern parlance, an anti-Fascist.

To Stewart, the idea is completely rhetorical, and he initially and cheerfully goes along with it. Only in the end, when he begins to suspect that his rhetoric has led to actual consequences, does it break him. When you stop to think about it, any moral code not rooted in "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," leads society to dark, dark places. In his closing monolog, Stewart dismantles his old philosophy in favor of the ancient one.

If you haven't seen Rope, or not seen it recently, it's worth watching now.

As a nation, the United States is unique. We don’t share a genetic heritage, but a creed. Americans and our ideas come from all over the world. But we’re at our best when take those outside ideas and make them our own. Everything we have came from another culture, but there was a time when we could take things and collectively make them better.

Democracy? Check. Rock’n’roll? Check. Heck! Chinese food? Yes, we did.

Don’t hate. You know I’m right.

One of the greatest art forms we’ve given the world is the western genre. While rooted in courtly romances of King Arthur, we took the idea of the man on horseback who makes things right on his quest for something spiritual and made it distinctly American. Most of the time, these stories aren’t historically accurate, but that’s not the point. They’re soaked in the American ethos. For better or for worse, the western has become the American myth, even more so than 1776.

And the cool thing about myths is that you can take them and tell other stories. 

Star Trek (and later Firefly) took the western to space. 

A few weeks ago I was able to see F1: The Movie on IMAX, and I had high hopes. Director Joseph Krasinski had proved himself with Top Gun: Maverick, which is about as American as a modern movie can get. But mostly, I just wanted to see if he could do with racecars what he’d done with fighter jets. In that regard, I was everything I’d hoped it would be. The idea of Americanism didn’t even cross my mind, since F1 is primarily a European sport.

Boy, was I surprised.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes with all the careless cool of Paul Newman in his prime and a Steve McQueen swagger. While Pitt has never played a cowboy and isn’t a racecar driver in real life, Newman and McQueen played both, and did both. Hayes has been keeping himself busy with no-name races since an F1 crash nearly killed him some 30 years before. But when Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), an old friend and rival, needs some wins to save the team, he tracks down Sonny.

And the old dog knows a few tricks.

Naturally, his tactics put him at odds with his teammate, Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris), and his cocky attitude is a big red flag to the team’s engineer, Kate McKenna (Kerry Conden). So the movie all the tropes of a sports film, and I don’t think I need to summarize further. But it’s not a sports film. Or rather, it’s not just a sports a film. Surprise, surprise, it’s the western myth transposed into a racing a story.

It’s spelled out in the trailer, but it didn’t strike me until the very end.

Kate calls Sonny Hayes an “old school rough and tumble cowboy” in a line used in the marketing. When he arrives in the garage, only Ruben knows him. Sonny is the stranger in town. Like James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff, his method of restoring order and winning is unorthodox and effective. Like Shane, in that Alan Ladd classic, he’s guarded about his past. And like John Wayne in The Searchers and so many other westerns, Sonny Hayes is the outsider who must leave civilization once he’s made it civilized for those who belong there.

But he doesn’t.

Perhaps the hardboiled crime story, another uniquely American genre, is also an outgrowth of the western. Philip Marlow is the man who must walk down mean streets, who is not himself mean. As Raymond Chandler said, “He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.” Basically, the man he’s describing is dangerous, but not cruel. Dispassionate in taking revenge, and restrained by a code of honor.

But destined to be lonely, nonetheless.

Why we’ve made that an essential part of the American is a topic for another time. But there it is. And it’s the story of Sonny Hayes. At the end of the movie [SPOILER], he rides off into the sunset as the credits roll. The western isn’t dead. It’s still there, in essence, speaking to our hearts in different ways.

Nothing more American than that.