Strange Days #31
April 2026 | American Nightmares
The ghost of an old Blockbuster Video has returned to haunt the high street. I don’t have any particular affinity for the days of video rentals, but it’s nice to be reminded that, in the not so distant past, there was a need for buildings as large as this one, most recently a furniture showroom, to house a supply of VHS tapes big enough to keep a small town in movies. I’ve not had time to do much of anything this month, for a variety of reasons. But the two things I was planning to talk about are both steeped in the same kind of “the best days are behind us” energy as this empty building on the edge of town. Not in a nostalgic way, I don’t think. But objectively. Sometimes things are just better the way they used to be.
First up, I went to the cinema for the first time since January to see Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama (2026), starring Robert Pattinson as an Englishman in Massachusetts whose relationship with his American fiancée, played by Zendaya, starts to fall apart when a detail about her past comes to light in the days before their wedding. I haven’t seen Borgli’s first film, Sick of Myself (2022), which I’ve heard is pretty good, but I have seen Dream Scenario (2023), his first American film, starring Nicolas Cage as a man who inexplicably (and ruinously) starts to appear in other people’s dreams. In that film, Borgli pushes this concept to its most extreme edges, generating a horrible tension from what at first appears to be a fairly silly situation before becoming something a lot more sinister. In The Drama, he once again takes great pleasure in pushing at the boundaries of good taste, only this time with a much darker and more fruitful idea (which I appreciate I’m dancing around, but it’s much better to know as little as possible). And while Dream Scenario is largely just a fun ride, The Drama feels like a big step forwards. A deeply uncomfortable film about an outsider’s utter inability to comprehend the normalised horrors of American life. Borgli plays this discomfort for laughs, wringing as much as he possibly can from this man’s spiralling imagination as it starts to rip his reality apart. Everything from a photographer reading a guest list to a mug in a cupboard becomes charged with violence as he confronts a very American nightmare that he will never be able to make sense of, all while longing to live in blissful ignorance once again.
In Paul Auster’s wonderful Mr. Vertigo (1994), which I read this month, ignorance is the problem, rather than knowledge. And it’s a very difficult problem to overcome. The novel follows Walter Rawley, a young orphan plucked from obscurity in 1920s St. Louis by a mysterious drifter who promises to teach him how to fly. The core idea of the novel is the value of gaining experience. Walt knows nothing about the world, but his time under the tutelage of this man is a crash-course in everything he could ever want to understand. At first, he’s put through his paces and learns all about himself. His strengths and weaknesses, his fears and desires, his limitations and his potential. And when they eventually get out on the road, performing in towns across America, he learns about people and places, about business, relationships, and all the ways in which the world works. The more he learns, the better equipped he is to be a part of this society. And he thrives in it.
But society isn’t ready for Walt the Wonder Boy. On small stages in small towns, the stakes are low, and he’s met with adulation and wonder. But as his popularity increases, so does the scrutiny. There are more eyes on him, and the positivity that followed him before gives way to scepticism and fear. There’s no way to know how people will react to something they don’t understand, and it says a lot that ignorance is the primary destructive force in Mr. Vertigo. You can have the best intentions of changing the world, but if that world is hostile to such a change then it’s very hard to make it stick. And so Mr. Vertigo becomes a tale of readjustment. When your sense of reality changes beyond all recognition, rejecting everything you believe in, how do you move forward?
Speak soon,
Matt