Un-bullshitting Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation is a book that can't stop talking about itself. Critics noted on release that its chapters get lost in a vortex of digressions and asides before abruptly moving on, that it reads like a first draft no editor was allowed to touch, and that its cult-of-personality side too often grabs the wheel from its more thoughtful side. Every chapter threatens to become a memoir or a Video Archives oral history before it gets around to the movie it was supposed to be discussing. The chapter on The Outfit (1973) is no exception — Tarantino buries his analysis of Parker adaptations under a mountain of eighties Hollywood war stories and auteurist chest-puffing that has nothing to do with the subject at hand. What follows is that chapter stripped to the bone: all the digressions cut, factual errors flagged or corrected, the Parker and Westlake material kept, and the argument — that John Flynn's film is the definitive Richard Stark adaptation — allowed to breathe on its own.

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The Outfit (1973)

Beginning in 1963, the mystery writer Donald Westlake, under the pseudonym Richard Stark, wrote a series of books about a professional armed robber named Parker.

I discovered the books sometime in my twenties and went gaga for them.

Parker was a cold, emotionless bastard whose only identity was his armed robber's code of professionalism. He robbed banks, bonds, rare coin collections—you name it, Parker stole it.

The conflict in most of the novels came from the fact that, usually, the other members of whatever crew he was working with weren't as professional as he was. And that's when the armed robber could become the unstoppable killer.

Parker may not have been burdened by the normal human emotions most of us have, but that shouldn't suggest he was cynical. In book after book, he kept expecting his criminal colleagues to be as professional as he was, and when they weren't, he was appalled.

Some of the books featured Parker helping a former colleague out of a jam, or righting wrongs for a former colleague, or going after a greedy former colleague.

Even though Parker wasn't a professional killer, he dealt in armed robbery and all that implies. He wasn't trigger-happy (that would be unprofessional), but he wasn't afraid to use his gun if need be. You always risk certain consequences when you carry a loaded firearm into any endeavor. And Parker was always willing to face those consequences.

In Stark's first Parker book, The Hunter, our main character ties up and gags a female secretary in an office he's robbing, and inadvertently ends up suffocating her to death. Well . . . that's unfortunate . . . especially for her . . . but them's the risks. And Parker never shied away from the risks inherent in his chosen profession.

What makes both the character and the books so interesting is their insistence on the code of ethics involved in a criminal activity. It's as if, by insisting on a professional code of ethics, the characters can convince themselves that being a thief is a trade.

The closest thing to a humanizing trait that Stark allows the character is Parker's genuine fondness, bordering on affection, for his only friend, a fellow thief named Cody. Cody appeared in the books every so often and his presence is always welcome.

Still, discovering a heartless, lethal, uncompromising character like Parker was a breath of much needed foul air.

The first three Parker books, The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Outfit are drastically the best ones. Once it became next book, next score, they lost something. But even in the later Parker books I started but never finished, Parker was always true to Parker.

The first three books in the series are connected. The Hunter was made famous by John Boorman's cinematic adaptation Point Blank, with Lee Marvin becoming the first of many movie Parkers (in this one named Walker).

The movie doesn't really follow the plot of the book that much, but they both get to the same place. Parker stalking, terrorizing, and murdering a bunch of high-powered mobsters—who aren't used to this type of treatment—over his share of a score they owe him (45,000 dollars). By the end of the book, he's created such bloody havoc throughout the organized crime syndicate (or "the Outfit" as they call it in Stark's universe), that even Parker knows he must disappear.

And his attempt to disappear is the plot of the second book, The Man with the Getaway Face, which has never been made into a movie.

On the first page, Parker gets a completely new face from a shadowy underground plastic surgeon, who performs such operations for people trying to disappear. Unfortunately for Parker, after the operation the plastic surgeon is murdered. The doctor's family believes Parker is responsible. And they intend to alert the Outfit about Parker's new identity and face. Parker insists he had nothing to do with it, and he asks for a week to track down the real killer before the doctor's family does anything drastic.

He spends the rest of the book accomplishing this. Even, in a stroke of poetic justice, removing the new face the shadowy plastic surgeon gave his killer.

At book's end, he arrives back to the family, explains who the murderer was and why he did it, and presents them with the cut-off face. Only, the doctor's family—sure of Parker's guilt—didn't give him the week he asked for. They've already informed the Outfit of Parker's new identity and new face. Thus rendering everything that happened in the book ironically useless.

The Outfit is the third book in the series. Knowing his powerful enemies are going to come after him—instead of running away from the mob—he runs at them.

For a character as rough as Parker, he's been remarkably well served by the movies. There's been as many Parkers as there's been Philip Marlowes. And when you consider Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Mel Gibson, and Anna Karina have all played some variation of the character, quite a wide array.

They haven't always been called Parker. Till recently they never were. Stark didn't mind selling his books, but he never sold his character. As the director John Flynn explained to me, "Westlake didn't want his character to be affected by whatever happened in some dumb movie."

In my opinion the best movie Parker isn't from an adaptation of one of Stark's novels. It's Robert De Niro as armed robber Neil McCauley in Michael Mann's Heat. While it's not literally based on a Richard Stark novel, it's pretty fucking obvious McCauley is, at least inspired—if not outright based on—Parker.

His professionalism, his creed, his held-in-check emotions, even McCauley's motto, "Allow nothing in your life that you can't walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner," sounds like some shit Parker would say. McCauley is a little more expressive than Parker, Mann having him verbalize lines Stark would have expressed in prose. And the end—McCauley missing his window of opportunity of escape and staying in L.A. to get revenge for a respected colleague—is totally a Parker dilemma.

However if it had been a Stark book, Parker's professionalism would have led him to flee. Because Parker knows there's nothing more important than not getting caught. Sticking to the code is how one maneuvers in this world without getting caught. Consequently, in twelve books Parker never gets caught and never gets killed. At the end of Heat, McCauley gets shot by the law. Not just because I wanted to see De Niro get away, not just because I didn't want him to break his code, and not just because I didn't want Al Pacino's detective to win. But from the moment Jon Voight tells him he found the guy who killed Danny Trejo, you know how the movie's going to end. The close-up of De Niro driving, making up his mind . . . incredible. But once he jerks the wheel, you know he's doomed. The by-rote moralistic functionality of the last fifteen minutes, compared to the two hours and fifty minutes that preceded it, is a drag.

Of the straight Parker adaptations, most people choose Boorman's Point Blank and consider Lee Marvin the living embodiment of Parker.

I've never understood the reputation that baby-boomer critics assigned Boorman's nonentity crime film. Yes, it has a dazzling (for its time) opening ten minutes. But the truth is, it seemed more dazzling when I was twenty-six than it does now. Even in terms of ruthless Lee Marvin gangster film openings, it can't hold a flickering birthday candle next to Don Siegel's opening for The Killers.

What's effective about Boorman's opening is the way it builds and keeps building. The way the forward momentum of Marvin's shoes tap out a rhythm on the floor brings to mind both the sizzle of a dynamite fuse and the screech before a car collision. And the sequence pays off when Marvin bursts through Sharon Acker's door, blasting his pistol. But that's by far the best filmmaking in the movie. After the opening ten minutes, except for the violent fight in the discotheque, it never hums again.

After the show-off opening, Point Blank settles down into sixties television. It's pretty much indistinguishable from a Mannix episode of the same era.

I disagree that Lee Marvin is the quintessential Parker. I don't even think it's a good performance. Marvin was one of the most exciting actors of the fifties and in The Professionals and The Dirty Dozen he modulated that excitement into stardom. But starting with Point Blank, Marvin went from his greatest lead performance in The Dirty Dozen to acting like a leafless tree.

But Point Blank, when compared to other Stark adaptations—like the abysmal Jim Brown one The Split (not Brown's fault), the practically comedic Point Blank remake with Mel Gibson, and Godard's non-adaptation Made in U.S.A., which wastes Stark's book, the audience's time, and a lot of Kodak film stock—Boorman's movie is at least an honorable effort.

My nomination for best Richard Stark novel adaptation (by far) is John Flynn's The Outfit, starring Robert Duvall as Macklin (Parker), Karen Black as Bett (in the Angie Dickinson role from Point Blank), and a perfect Joe Don Baker as Cody. If you like Point Blank, fair enough, then The Outfit is its de facto sequel. The events in the book The Hunter and Boorman's movie are what lead the syndicate to target both Parker and Cody, and then lead Duvall and Baker to execute a full frontal assault against The Outfit. Flynn, forced to start from scratch, has Duvall's Macklin finishing up a prison sentence for getting picked up by the cops in a bar during a vice raid for carrying a hot weapon. He relates that story to someone and they reply, "Damn, that's some hard time."

As he gets out, his brother is assassinated by two mob triggermen (in a real cool opening that just screams seventies cinema). Then two triggermen (familiar ugly face Tom Reese, who would've been a great post-plastic surgery Parker), disguised as quail hunters, show up at the woodsy breakfast diner that Cody (Joe Don Baker) runs when he's not doing a score. However, they pick the wrong time, because the local sheriff (who has no idea about Cody's double life) is in the joint having his morning coffee. But now Cody knows a couple of out-of-town torpedoes are on his trail.

Macklin (Duvall) is picked up from prison by his old lady, Bett (Karen Black), who sets him up for a hit at a local hotel. She's forced into this betrayal after she endures a torture session conducted by the Outfit, where they burned a cigarette up and down her arm (we later find out it was none other than Timothy Carey who used her arm as an ashtray), but she tips Macklin in time for him to ambush the gunman (Felice Orlandi), by breaking a bottle across his face ("I've got glass in my face"). Macklin tortures him for information, learning why the Outfit is targeting him.

Apparently, before he got pinched in the vice raid, Macklin, his brother, and Cody robbed a bank that unbeknownst to them was a mob front. Upon his release from jail, the word has come down from the Outfit's big boss man Mailer (snicker-snicker) played by Robert Ryan to eliminate these small-timers.

Macklin and Cody figure the best defense is a strong offense. Instead of running away from the mob, they run at them. With Bett operating as their getaway driver, Macklin and Cody start robbing Outfit-fronted operations. Not used to being fucked with, almost every robbery starts with somebody screaming, "Do you know who runs this place?" To which Baker yells back, "I don't give a rat's ass if your mother runs it!" Or Macklin just smashes them in the teeth with his gun. A big part of the movie's enjoyment stems from the mob associates' shock at the brutal treatment they receive at the hands of Macklin and Cody. But there's more to their plan than just revenge for Macklin's brother and a mad crime spree. Both figure if they can cause enough trouble and hurt the syndicate where they're most sensitive—in the pocketbook—since Mailer fancies himself a businessman, maybe they can broker a deal. Well, naturally that doesn't work.

So the movie ends with Duvall and Baker doing an all-out assault on Ryan's home compound. And it's one of the more satisfying sequences of that type I've ever seen — it puts the similar climax in Michael Mann's Thief to shame. And the scene between Duvall and Baker on the stairs is the epitome of poignant masculinity. With the picture's final freeze-frame capper displaying a self-mocking tone that ends the whole film on a hearty macho guffaw.

In a 1981 cover story for the magazine American Film (done to promote Duvall in True Confessions), the writer described him as a "Hard-boiled Olivier." Not a bad description of Duvall's performance in this movie. In the Santa Clarita, California, newspaper The Signal, film critic Phillip Lanier wrote about Duvall as Macklin: "Earl is one of the most interesting gangster figures to screen in a while. He is intelligent and his brutality is as calculated as it is unsympathetic. To him, robbing and killing is just a nine-to-five job which he has to take home with him too. His [Duvall's] quiet determination brings across a character who appears to be a desperate man by choice. It's a mysterious kind of masculinity that only he seems to possess."

Macklin may be Stark's Parker, but both Flynn and Duvall open up the character. Macklin definitely has more of a sense of humor than Parker (in the movie Duvall laughs every once in a while). But it's Macklin's affection for Cody that separates him from the literary Parker. The Parker of the books has affection for Cody as well. But Duvall's masterful performance conveys it stronger without abandoning that turtle shell he uses as a face. And he and Baker make a marvelous team, with Duvall mumbling all the cryptic lines and Baker spitting out all the funny ones. When the two men discuss how they're going to attack Ryan's heavily guarded home compound, they even predate Flynn's greatest cinematic moment, the "I'll just get my gear" scene between William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones in Rolling Thunder.

While I doubt any actor could be the definitive Parker, Joe Don Baker is absolutely the perfect embodiment of Cody. Joe Don has always been one of my favorite screen actors, but for me, it's his performance in this film that's my personal favorite. The movie even gives Baker the film's terrific curtain line. According to fat hack James Bacon in a profile he wrote on Baker, when director Flynn, producer Carter DeHaven, and MGM studio head James Aubrey went to a screening of Walking Tall together, halfway through the picture they shouted in unison, "He's our man!"

As I pointed out earlier, Point Blank has that canned quality of sixties television. Marvin aside, it even has a television cast. The whole supporting cast could have been the guest star lineup of an episode of Cannon. John Vernon, in the sixties and early seventies, was constantly playing the heavy on episodic TV. And while I like Vernon, it was after The Outlaw Josey Wales and Animal House that I started liking him a lot more. But back in 1967, Vernon's part in Point Blank was too big for him. He couldn't hold his own with even a low wattage Lee Marvin (Keenan Wynn would have been better in Vernon's role).

And then there's fish-faced Lloyd Bochner. The type of tight-lipped stiff who regularly appeared on Quinn Martin–produced TV shows. Any movie that casts Lloyd—fucking—Bochner has serious casting issues.

But by contrast the supporting cast of The Outfit is filled with one terrific actor's face after another (Timothy Carey, Richard Jaeckel, Sheree North, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, Henry Jones, Bill McKinney). Director Flynn told me he cast the film with his buddy Walter Hill by going through a book of great B-movie character actors.

When it came to casting, Flynn told me he was happy with the lead cast of the movie. He liked Baker and Black, and thought Duvall was a fine actor and an interesting rising star. But they wouldn't have been his first choice. If he could have, he would have rather gone less modern-day seventies casting, and more film noir. His dream cast would have been Burt Lancaster as Macklin, Kirk Douglas as Cody, and Angie Dickinson as Macklin's wife. I considered doing an adaptation of the book in the late nineties, with Robert De Niro as Parker, Harvey Keitel as Cody, and Pam Grier as Bett. And just writing that now makes me wish I would have done it.

The Outfit was one of the last films made under the tenure of MGM studio head James Aubrey (aka the smiling cobra). Aubrey was pissed off at the way the New York and Los Angeles critics had treated his slate of MGM films, so he began opening new MGM movies regionally first. It took The Outfit an entire year to make the rounds through the United States—starting off in October 1973 in Chicago and Baltimore, and not opening in California (its last stop) till a year later in October 1974.

The first press clippings to appear about Flynn's film were almost all from fat hack James Bacon, who wrote in his syndicated column on Oct 23, 1973, "Saw The Outfit the other night at a cast and crew preview and it's The Godfather of 1973." But the less-biased critics across the country were in a three-way split between declaring the film a routine crime picture, a slightly above routine crime picture, or a drastically below routine crime picture.

Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote that The Outfit "doesn't attempt to do anything except pass the time, which simply isn't good enough when most of us have access to television."

Greg Swem of the Courier-Journal (out of Louisville, Kentucky) obviously enjoyed the movie but ultimately concluded it was "well written and well directed by John Flynn, but the script and direction are fragmented. The film as a whole doesn't have any great attraction."

Gary Arnold of the Washington Post declared it "a lugubrious, derivative thriller," concluding that "Flynn has a flat, dawdling way of spinning a yarn, so the essential grubbiness and brutality of the conception aren't leavened with much flair or excitement."

Jeanne Miller of the San Francisco Examiner referred to Flynn's work as "dismal direction" and the film itself as "disastrous."

Bernard Drew of the Journal News (White Plains, New York) disparaged Flynn further: "Writer-director John Flynn, who once unwittingly made one of the funniest pictures of the sixties, The Sergeant, and later succeeded in making a bore out of the holy land in The Jerusalem File, now rises to new heights of ineptitude in The Outfit."

But Roger Ebert, in his Chicago Sun-Times review in October of 1973, gave the film three and a half stars out of four, writing that "The Outfit is a classy action picture, very well directed and acted, about a gangster's revenge on the mob death of his brother." Ebert went on to clarify: "We don't care much about what happens, the same things are always happening in action movies, and when you've seen one car burst into flames you've seen them all. But the people in this movie are uncommonly interesting."

Then a full year later in October 1974, in the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin concluded his positive review: "There is always a particular pleasure in watching a movie which is in command of itself all the way, an exercise in professionalism, and The Outfit offers that kind of satisfaction as the bonus beyond the surprises, the suspense, and the vivid portrayals."

But it was only John Fox, writing for the Oakland Tribune, who offered any serious insight that went beyond a plot summary and a good, bad, or indifferent verdict. "The film is perceptive in its understanding of the attitudes men have towards each other. And although the violence may prevent some viewers from seeing the message, there is a fine statement about an individual's ability to overcome a threatening force if only he can find the means and the nerve."

I first saw The Outfit when it played in Tennessee in March of 1974, under the title The Good Guys Always Win (actually, if you've seen the movie, not a bad title). Due to Joe Don Baker's incredible popularity in that state because of Walking Tall, it was Baker and the Buford Pusser connection that was emphasized.

And eight months later, when it finally opened in Los Angeles under its original title of The Outfit, I saw it again at the United Artists Cinema in Marina del Rey on a double feature with Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (talk about an action-packed PG-rated double feature!).

I actually thought I was buying a ticket to the sequel of The Good Guys Always Win. No worries. It was even better the second time. And the hearty audience of macho guys scattered around the little cinema made it even more fun. They laughed at everything Joe Don Baker said. Including his terrific curtain line that brought the little house down.

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Editor's note: Tarantino refers throughout to Parker's criminal ally as Cody, which is correct for the film — Joe Don Baker's character is named Cody in Flynn's adaptation. In Stark's novels, however, the same character goes by the name Handy McKay. Flynn renamed him for the screen. For a full breakdown of the novel-to-film changes, see The Violent World of Parker.

The Coming Storm: Class Conflict in The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises may be the most politically conflicted superhero blockbuster of the 21st century. Released in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse and in the shadow of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the film arrived at a moment when conversations about wealth inequality, institutional collapse, police militarization, populist anger, and class resentment had moved into mainstream culture. Nolan's film absorbs those anxieties, filters them through the mythological machinery of DC's comic book vigilante Batman, and produces a work that feels at once reactionary, confused, and deeply revealing.

My Superpower Is Being Rich

The Dark Knight Rises desperately wants to say something meaningful about class conflict and social collapse, while simultaneously struggling to imagine ordinary people as meaningful political actors. Gotham — here closest to New York City — is portrayed on the brink of revolution, but its citizens barely exist as citizens. The narrative remains trapped among billionaires, vigilantes, corporate board members, police officials, and theatrical supervillains. "The people" are invoked constantly yet rarely seen, and that absence may be the key to understanding Nolan's intentions and limitations.

From its earliest scenes, the film establishes Gotham as a city built atop inequality. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has withdrawn into aristocratic isolation. Wayne Manor resembles an English estate more than an American mansion, evoking old-world nobility rather than entrepreneurial capitalism. Bruce Wayne is not simply rich; he is patrician. He belongs to a ruling caste — and that distinction matters. Nolan's trilogy operates on the thesis that society functions best when guided by enlightened elites. Institutions fail repeatedly — police departments are compromised, politicians are weak, the legal system proves fragile — but salvation continually arrives through exceptional individuals possessing wealth, discipline, and access to militarized technology.

When Marvel's Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) acknowledges that without his Iron Man suit he's still a "genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist," he's motivated to make the world better by dismantling his own legacy of war profiteering and falls when he makes the misguided decision to build "a suit of armor around the world." Like Stark, Bruce Wayne's superpower has always been money. However, his raison d'être stems from the death of his parents and a thirst for vengeance. Nolan intensifies that aspect until Bruce Wayne becomes less a superhero than a privately funded shadow state.

Both Stark and Wayne are billionaire technologists who use advanced weaponry to reshape global events. Both operate outside traditional state structures. Both rely upon privately owned military technology to enforce their vision of justice.

Yet the two characters are perceived very differently because their films approach power differently.

Tony Stark's story begins with a direct confrontation with the consequences of his own industry. Iron Man explicitly links Stark's wealth to global violence and arms profiteering. Stark attempts — however imperfectly — to reform the system that made him powerful in the first place. Bruce Wayne lacks a comparable reckoning. Wayne Enterprises develops military technology, surveillance systems, and advanced tactical weaponry, yet the trilogy rarely interrogates the broader implications of Bruce possessing unilateral control over those resources. Instead, Batman's authority is largely treated as morally necessary.

This distinction helps explain why Nolan's Batman often feels colder and more authoritarian than many other superhero protagonists of the same era. The films acknowledge the dangers of concentrated power while ultimately placing enormous trust in Bruce Wayne's ability to wield that power responsibly.

The Surveillance State and the Post-9/11 Superhero

Nolan's realism ironically strengthens and weakens his series. The Batman Begins trilogy helped establish the modern template for "grounded" superhero cinema. Nolan attempted to place Batman within a world shaped by surveillance technology, terrorism, military hardware, and urban sociology. The villains were no longer flamboyant comic-book figures operating in fantasy spaces; they became reflections of contemporary fears.

That realism gave the earlier films enormous cultural weight. The Dark Knight in particular captured post-9/11 anxieties about extremism, institutional fragility, and the ethics of mass surveillance. Batman's use of invasive technology became one of the defining moral conflicts of the film. Realism also imposed new constraints; once Gotham begins resembling the real world, audiences naturally scrutinize its politics more intensely. The symbolism in The Dark Knight Rises therefore becomes harder to separate from contemporary political debates.

Nolan's Batman exists within the logic of the post-9/11 security state. Throughout the trilogy, Batman deploys surveillance systems capable of monitoring entire populations. He weaponizes military-grade technology developed through Wayne Enterprises contracts, bypassing democratic structures entirely. Wayne Enterprises' Board of Directors are a puppet regime. Even when the films critique his excesses — as Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) does in The Dark Knight when Batman creates a surveillance system that makes Fox balk — the narrative ultimately validates Batman's actions because the threats are always catastrophic enough to justify authoritarian intervention.

The sonar surveillance network in The Dark Knight remains one of the clearest examples. Lucius Fox openly condemns the system as unethical because it grants one individual total access to the private lives of Gotham's citizens. Yet the narrative simultaneously validates Batman's decision because the threat posed by the Joker (Heath Ledger) is presented as so overwhelming that extraordinary measures become necessary.

This logic mirrors the political arguments that justified the Patriot Act and the broad expansion of the post-9/11 intelligence apparatus — the same reasoning that wrapped a surveillance state around American life in the name of keeping it safe. The trilogy repeatedly raises concerns about authoritarian overreach while simultaneously insisting that exceptional crises justify those methods. Batman becomes a kind of privatized intelligence apparatus operating entirely beyond public accountability — more shadow state than superhero. That tension becomes even more visible in The Dark Knight Rises, where Gotham's survival ultimately depends not on public institutions but on heavily militarized intervention led by elite figures. Batman's role increasingly resembles that of a private military actor preserving social order through force and surveillance.

In this way, Bruce Wayne anticipates a figure out of British imperial mythology — and presages the contemporary American billionaire. Bruce does not simply inherit wealth; he inherits cultural authority. Wayne Manor resembles an aristocratic estate deliberately detached from ordinary urban life, and Bruce himself operates less like a capitalist entrepreneur than a member of an entrenched ruling class whose legitimacy is assumed rather than earned. Batman's authority emerges not from democratic legitimacy but from inherited privilege combined with specialized violence. Gotham does not choose him. He appoints himself as its protector, because the trilogy assumes that someone with Bruce Wayne's resources, intelligence, and discipline naturally possesses the right to govern the city's fate. He is not elected. He is not accountable. He simply is.

In Nolan's revised origin story, Bruce travels abroad, acquires secret knowledge through elite training, and returns home armed with techniques and discipline inaccessible to ordinary people. He then imposes order on Gotham from above. The narrative admits two readings: the colonial tale, in which aristocratic figures venture into distant lands, absorb "forbidden" knowledge, and return as self-appointed guardians of civilization — or the radicalization story, in which a traumatized young man disappears into the margins, is shaped by extremist doctrine, and comes back to reshape society through fear and force. Nolan never fully reconciles these readings, and perhaps doesn't need to. The ambiguity is the point.

Gotham Built on Lies

By the time The Dark Knight Rises begins, Gotham's peace rests on a lie: Harvey Dent's (Aaron Eckhart) false martyrdom. The city's stability has been purchased through mythmaking and concealed violence. Nolan is clearly fascinated by the idea that civilization itself may depend upon carefully maintained illusions, pushing that fascination into overtly political territory by staging what appears to be a populist uprising. Or at least a distorted fantasy of one.

The film's imagery unmistakably evokes the French Revolution. Bane (Tom Hardy) gives speeches about returning Gotham "to the people," while scenes of wealthy elites dragged from their homes and subjected to public judgment deliberately conjure revolutionary iconography. Public tribunals unfold in frozen city streets. Mansions are occupied. The wealthy are dispossessed while Gotham descends into chaos.

The parallels to A Tale of Two Cities are explicit. Nolan repeatedly references Charles Dickens throughout the film, culminating in Commissioner Gordon's (Gary Oldman) recitation of Sydney Carton's famous closing lines. Dickens's novel portrayed the French Revolution as both a justified eruption of rage against oppression and a terrifying descent into mob violence. Nolan borrows the imagery and emotional architecture of Dickens, but he strips away much of the ambiguity. In Dickens, revolution emerges from systemic injustice. In Nolan, revolution feels imported from outside reality — an artificial performance orchestrated by terrorists masquerading as populists.

This distinction becomes especially important when considering the film's relationship to Occupy Wall Street. When The Dark Knight Rises premiered in 2012, audiences immediately connected Bane's assault on Gotham's financial district to Occupy imagery. Protestors had spent months criticizing the concentration of wealth among the "1%," condemning financial institutions, and challenging neoliberal economic structures. Attacks on stock exchanges, rhetoric about giving power back to "the people," and imagery of class upheaval all echoed contemporary headlines.

The film ultimately treats populist revolution less as a legitimate political movement than as a form of manipulation. Bane is not a sincere revolutionary. His rhetoric about liberation conceals nihilistic destruction. The uprising is fake from the outset because Bane never intends to empower Gotham's citizens. Instead, the revolution merely functions as cover for annihilation. Revolutionary politics are portrayed not as misguided attempts to correct inequality but as forces that inevitably collapse into authoritarian violence and social chaos. At the same time, the film also recognizes that Gotham's existing order is unsustainable.

Nolan appears genuinely aware of structural inequality, aware of elite decadence, aware of institutional collapse — but incapable of imagining democratic transformation outside aristocratic stewardship.

The fusion reactor subplot reflects another recurring anxiety within the film: fear of losing institutional and economic control. The reactor initially represents technocratic optimism — a clean-energy solution capable of transforming Gotham's future. Yet the film quickly reframes that achievement as a catastrophic threat once it can be weaponized.

Bruce Wayne's greatest vulnerability throughout the film is not simply physical destruction but economic collapse. Bane attacks Wayne's fortune, destabilizes his corporate power, and strips away the institutional structures that sustain Batman's identity. Bruce's wealth is inseparable from his ability to function as Gotham's guardian. Without Wayne Enterprises, Batman loses access to the technological and economic infrastructure that allows him to operate above society. This reinforces the trilogy's broader worldview: social order depends heavily upon elite stewardship, private capital, and centralized control. Gotham's collapse begins not only with terrorism but with financial destabilization.

The Dark Knight Rises acts less as a coherent critique of populism than an expression of upper-class anxiety about populism. The film repeatedly acknowledges inequality, corruption, and institutional fragility, yet it remains deeply fearful of what mass political unrest might produce. That fear shapes nearly every aspect of Gotham's revolution. Public anger becomes inseparable from mob violence. Economic resentment leads not to reform but to authoritarian spectacle. The collapse of elite control results in chaos rather than democratic transformation.

At the same time, the film cannot entirely dismiss the grievances driving that anger. Gotham's wealthy are insulated, detached, and frequently corrupt. The system is visibly unequal. Selina Kyle's frustrations are treated as understandable. Even Bane's rhetoric occasionally brushes against legitimate social concerns before collapsing into nihilism.

This unresolved tension is part of what makes the film endure as a cultural artifact. The Dark Knight Rises captures a historical moment in which public trust in institutions was eroding, economic inequality was becoming impossible to ignore, and fears about social instability were moving into mainstream political consciousness.

Neither Lady Nor Tiger

Outside of the machinations of the secret cabal of Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard) and Bane, and the brief appearance of Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred (Michael Caine), the lower classes get little to no representation in the film other than Selina Kyle/Catwoman and her "friend," Jen. Because of this, Catwoman becomes central to this tension.

Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle is arguably the film's most politically coherent character because she emerges from Gotham's lower classes to fleece the rich. Unlike the mobsters in the earlier films — who accumulate wealth yet remain culturally coded as outsiders — Selina represents precarious survival within an unequal system. She steals not because she seeks domination but because she wants escape. She's looking for a mythological "reset" akin to Tyler Durden in Fight Club, whose master plan is to reset the world to zero by blowing up credit card companies.

Her famous warning to Bruce Wayne about an approaching reckoning remains one of the trilogy's sharpest moments: "There's a storm coming." This calls to mind the third part of A Tale of Two Cities, "The Track of the Storm." Unlike Bane's speeches, Selina's critique feels rooted in lived experience. She understands resentment because she inhabits the world beneath Gotham's elite structures. The relationship between Bruce and Selina briefly transforms class conflict into something emotionally tangible.

Their attraction carries ideological tension as well as a heterosexualization of Catwoman. Her relationship with Juno Temple's Jen character is never made overtly clear but they are coded as being "more than roommates." This bucking of the heteronormative power structure is yet another threat to Bruce Wayne and Gotham. In each film Batman must have a love interest, and in The Dark Knight Rises he is given a "lady or the tiger" scenario — but the feline Selina Kyle is the easier of the two main women to conquer and normalize over the daughter of his one-time mentor who now lives to destroy Gotham, even at the cost of her own life.

Selina Kyle's relationship with Jen introduces another layer of instability into Nolan's Gotham, one the film gestures toward without ever fully exploring. Jen is coded less like a traditional roommate and more like an intimate domestic partner. Their apartment is one of the only genuinely lived-in lower-class spaces in the trilogy, and its atmosphere contrasts sharply with the cold sterility of Wayne Manor or the masculine institutional architecture of Gotham's police and corporate structures. Selina and Jen occupy a fragile pocket of emotional and economic mutual survival existing outside the power structures that dominate the film.

That dynamic matters because Nolan's trilogy repeatedly restores order through heterosexual normalization. Bruce Wayne is continually paired with women who either stabilize his emotional life or reinforce his moral authority. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) functions as Batman's ethical conscience. Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) presents herself as a philanthropic capitalist partner capable of legitimizing Bruce's reentry into society. Selina Kyle initially resists that structure. She exists outside bourgeois respectability, outside institutional legitimacy, and outside the clean moral binaries that define Gotham's ruling elite.

Her connection with Jen subtly complicates Batman's inevitable attraction toward her. Selina's life already contains emotional intimacy and domestic structure independent of Bruce Wayne's wealth or paternal authority. That independence creates another form of instability within Nolan's worldview because Gotham's social order depends heavily upon the restoration of recognizable hierarchies: wealth over poverty, order over chaos, institutions over outsiders, heterosexual domesticity over social ambiguity.

Batman's eventual union with Selina therefore functions not merely as romantic closure but as ideological normalization. Catwoman, historically one of Batman's most socially disruptive figures, is ultimately folded back into the same aristocratic structure she once navigated from the outside. The film grants her escape, but only after integrating her into Bruce Wayne's orbit. In another version of the story, Selina's refusal of Gotham's power structures might have remained unresolved or even revolutionary. Nolan instead domesticates her by the conclusion, transforming one of the trilogy's few genuinely destabilizing figures into a companion within Bruce's restored social order.

Batman and Catwoman are drawn toward one another despite embodying opposing relationships to wealth and social order. In another version of the film — a more daring version — Catwoman herself might have become the revolutionary figure. Ultimately, Nolan cannot commit to that possibility because he cannot fully imagine ordinary people changing history. He's fully invested in the "Great Man" narrative. Revolution therefore requires a superhuman avatar like Bane, whose theatricality removes class conflict from recognizable political reality and transforms it into operatic spectacle.

The Great Man of Gotham

One of the most revealing aspects of Nolan's trilogy is how completely it embraces the "Great Man" theory of history. Gotham does not evolve through collective political struggle, civic reform, labor organization, or democratic action. History moves only when exceptional individuals intervene violently enough to redirect it.

Batman operates as the ultimate expression of this worldview. His wealth grants him technological superiority, his training grants him physical superiority, and his moral certainty grants him political superiority. Gotham's citizens are not asked to shape their own future. They are asked to endure catastrophe until elite actors restore order above them.

Even the film's revolution cannot emerge organically. Nolan appears incapable of imagining genuine populist energy without attaching it to a singular mythic figure like Bane. The underclass never becomes politically legible on its own terms. Instead, social unrest must be filtered through charismatic theatricality and militarized leadership. Gotham's citizens remain spectators to their own history.

This is one reason the film repeatedly feels emotionally detached from the city it depicts. The trilogy speaks constantly about Gotham while rarely portraying civic life beyond police departments, corporate boardrooms, prisons, and elite spaces. Ordinary people appear primarily as crowds needing rescue, manipulation, or containment. The result is a version of urban politics stripped of actual public participation.

The irony is that Nolan clearly recognizes systemic instability. The trilogy understands corruption, wealth inequality, institutional decay, and elite manipulation. What it cannot imagine is collective democratic transformation. Every crisis ultimately demands a singular savior figure capable of imposing order through force, sacrifice, or deception.

This explains why Gotham's citizens feel strangely absent throughout the film. Bane speaks about "the people" while Nolan rarely depicts them as individuals possessing agency, desires, or contradictions. During Bane's speech outside the Stock Exchange, there are no people visible or even present — an awkward edit that reveals Bane's limited audience of the Gotham media. Crowds exist as symbolic masses: panicked civilians, trapped police officers, or faceless mobs.

The film's treatment of revolution becomes even more striking when compared directly to the imagery it borrows from Charles Dickens and the French Revolution. Dickens portrayed revolutionary violence as horrifying but inseparable from the injustices that produced it. Nolan removes much of that causal relationship. Gotham's revolution arrives less as a social eruption than as an invasion.

Bane repeatedly speaks in the language of class liberation, yet his movement has no visible ideological infrastructure. There are no organizers, no workers, no neighborhoods, no communities, and almost no meaningful civilian participation beyond looting and spectacle. The revolution exists primarily through televised imagery: tribunals, explosions, frozen streets, and rhetorical performance. Nolan wants the iconography of revolution more than the lived social reality of it. Gotham's underclass remains strangely invisible even while supposedly taking control of the city.

The result is a revolution detached from material politics and transformed into operatic nightmare imagery. Public anger becomes aestheticized. Social collapse becomes cinematic texture. The film therefore acts less as a study of populism than as a portrait of elite fear imagining what populism might look like from inside a billionaire's nightmare.

Order Restored

What does Gotham look like when the dust settles? Exactly as it did before.

That is perhaps Nolan's most revealing political choice. The Dark Knight Rises gestures persistently toward systemic critique — acknowledging inequality, institutional rot, elite decadence, and the legitimacy of public anger — yet it cannot follow any of those threads to their democratic conclusion. The solution to Gotham's crisis is not structural reform, civic renewal, or collective action. It is Batman's return.

Every argument the film makes circles back to the same ideological center. Bruce Wayne's aristocratic authority is treated as natural and necessary. The surveillance state is validated because the threats are always just catastrophic enough to justify it. The revolution fails not because its grievances are wrong but because it was never a real revolution — just theater, orchestrated by terrorists wearing the costume of liberation. And the one character who genuinely inhabits Gotham's lower classes, who understands resentment from the inside, who resists the power structures that define everyone around her — Selina Kyle — is ultimately domesticated, folded back into the aristocratic order she once navigated from the outside. The storm she warned Bruce about arrives. And then it passes. And Gotham's ruling class is restored.

This is the worldview Dickens was willing to challenge and Nolan is not. A Tale of Two Cities portrayed revolutionary violence as horrifying but causally inseparable from the injustices that produced it. Nolan borrows Dickens's imagery — the tribunals, the frozen streets, Gordon's recitation of Sydney Carton's final words — while quietly removing the causal relationship. In Nolan's Gotham, revolution does not emerge from the bottom up. It is imported, manufactured, and imposed. The underclass never becomes a political subject. It remains an audience.

Seen from a distance, The Dark Knight Rises feels less like a coherent political statement than a portrait of a particular cultural moment's anxiety. The early 2010s produced a society struggling to process widening inequality, collapsing institutional trust, and the first serious populist rumblings of what would become a decade of political upheaval. The film absorbed all of those tensions and reflected them back — not as analysis, but as fear. Elite fear. The billionaire's nightmare of what the streets look like when the people finally decide they've had enough.

Batman wins.

The city survives.

Order is restored.

But the storm Selina Kyle warned about was never really stopped. It was only postponed.

RIP Stuart "Feedback" Andrews

I recently learned of the passing of Stuart Feedback Andrews. He was our co-host on the Adventures of Ford Fairlane episode but, more than that, he was a friend.

I don’t remember how or where I met Stuart. Despite what listeners may think, my memory, especially about myself, is rubbish. I'm sure a mutual friend must have introduced us as I have a number of friends in Toronto.

When I met Stuart he was still the host of the Rue Morgue Radio podcast. I know we had talked via email before we met in person. I’m pretty sure I met him in December 2010 where I had set up a screening of John Paizs’s Crime Wave at the Toronto Underground Cinema. If I remember right, I met up with a lot of friends including Mr. Paizs, for dinner beforehand and I was either almost or actually late because of Stuart.

Stuart could talk -- and, as evidenced by this show, so can I. We got together at the Rue Morgue HQ which, on a Saturday, was completely empty. Stuart showed me around a bit and then we sat down to talk about the book, Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection, and mostly Quentin Tarantino for at least four hours -- if not more.

Now, that episode of Rue Morgue Radio never came out. And me, like a dope, went back again to the studio on another trip to Toronto -- that might have been 2017 but I think it was earlier. Whenever it was, I sat with Stuart again for at least another five hours where we discussed Columbo -- going through the NBC years episode by episode. Again, that was never aired. I’m not sure if either of those even got edited. Stuart was an inspiration when it came to editing as I loved how his Rue Morgue episodes would cut in sound clips, trailers, and songs as the episodes went along.

Stuart was an odd bird. I remember him complaining that Rue Morgue kicked him off the air and that they were taking all of his episodes down. He gave me a lot of details of this that I don’t want to get into too much here. I don’t really want to make any new enemies.

I don’t know why he didn’t have back-ups of all of his shows and published them himself or at least had them available for download somewhere else. Or maybe he did and just didn’t care.

He has done a radio show on CKLN-FM 88.1 and I remember even going to the studio with him either on that first time I met him or another. The show was Cinephobia Radio and he turned it into a podcast as well. I’ll admit that I had a hard time keeping Cinephobia and Rue Morgue Radio straight as Stuart had such a strong personality that they both seemed like one show.

He also had a very interesting use of language. He already had the English accent -- I think it might have been a Liverpudlian accent but he emphasized those melodic tones in his voice with his vocabulary that brought in bits of Nadsat like “Slooshy Well” or, rather than Chodes, he’d say “Chones” and double down on this with a Cinephobia episode called “Attack of the Chones”.

I always enjoyed listening to his shows despite some of the dramatics and behind-the-scenes drama that would bleed through into the episodes. I remember it took a long time before I could tolerate Stuart’s co-host, “Last Chance” Lance. I ended up meeting Lance in person once and he was a decent bloke and I wonder if he was supposed to be as obnoxious on air as he came off.

I met Lance at one of the two Fanexpo events that I was invited to. That’s where I moderated Q&A sessions one year for Orlando Jones and Danny Trejo, and the next for Christopher Lloyd. And who did I have to thank for that gig? Mr. Stuart Feedback Andrews. He looked out for me.

In 2013, Stuart was responsible for connecting me with the person who figured out that Lianne "Spiderbaby" MacDougall was a serial plagiarist just like her then-boyfriend Quentin Tarantino. Stuart gave me just enough information and forwarded enough emails for me to piece together the same evidence that Paul - is it okay to finally say it was Paul Corupe who did all the hard work for that? Anyway, it’s been 12 years. I always wanted to give Paul credit and I felt bad being something of the “public face” of unmasking the scandal but I was far enough away from it and had my reputation of being a burr under Tarantino’s butt to maintain.

Back in 2015, Stuart latched on to a story about Tarantino’s buddy, Eli Roth. 2015 was an interesting year for Roth as his cannibal movie, Green Inferno, had a US Theatrical run starting September 25, 2015 -- despite it playing the Toronto Film Fest back in 2013. He also had the remake of Death Game called Knock Knock coming out October 9, 2015.

I remember being reached out to and asked if I could please give Knock Knock ten stars on IMDb in what felt like a weird marketing effort. I definitely was going to the IMDb page for Knock Knock as I was trying to correct the credits as there were no mentions of it being a remake and based on a previous script. Though, I’d ask for people to listen to our two Death Game episodes to find out more about the writers and the antecedents for Death Game.

Anyway, there was also another marketing plan going on for Green Inferno and that was a fake petition on Change.org trying to ban the film. Stuart took to the air to debunk the petition and take the piss out of the pissed off people who were outraged by the petition, not knowing its spurious origin.

Going back to the idea of Stuart’s digital footprint, his Cinephobia episodes are in short supply. I did my best to try and even find just how many episodes he did. I know it was at least 35 but this was over a long period of tim. Maybe as long as from 2007 to 2025. It’s unclear. And just a handful of those survive.

If people have those collected or even individual episodes, please send them along and I will start an archive of them.

All of the removal of episodes or recording things and never releasing them felt like self-sabotage more than anything. Stuart had a paranoid streak and this came out in spades via the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the COVID pandemic in 2020. Stuart and I talked to each other just a few times after that. I was still friends with him on Facebook up until at least December of 2022. I had long before ignored his posts on Facebook which kept getting more and more unhinged.

Stuart had to be right about everything he thought and that everyone was entitled to his opinion. I don’t know when he fell off or if he’d even identify as such but he became a big time anti-vaxxer. His Twitter feed is filled with things like calling Anthony Fauci a modern Mengele and terms like “Moderna Gate.” Suffice it to say, I had to cut him out of my life but I doubt he even noticed or cared.

The last I heard from him was December of 2022 when he told me this:

I live in Niagara. I work in medical cannabis and manage the building where I live (12 units). I also produced the movie PG (Psycho Goreman) which requires constant attention.

And I know I've threatened this before, but I am resurrecting my old podcast.

Going through some of this old stuff is part of the process.

But this time, it's not going to be all nice and cuddly like it was before. This time, it will be weaponized.

And he concluded with this:

I'm retiring at 77 and will completely remove myself from all public platforms.

I will die at 83.

That's the plan.

The plan didn’t work out.

Stuart passed away at 57 years old on November 23, 2025. I don’t know how he passed but I hope it was peaceful.

It was only after hearing that he went that I learned that Stuart Andrews wasn’t his real name. His musical name to his friends from his band days was Andy Feedback, and the listing for his cremation has him as Andrew Stuart Morton.

Whatever his name, he made quite an impact on my life and I appreciate all he did for me and the horror community. He loved to stir up shit, and I so liked that about him. He will be missed.

Clueless

When I was working at Federal-Mogul (later re-named DR1V after they were aquired by Tenneco -- the reason I left the company), I worked quite a bit on all of the brand websites for things like Wagner Brakes, Fel-Pro gaskets, Champion Sparkplugs, etc. My boss, Jessica, really liked the idea of each of these brands having a "Merch(andise) Store". I didn't necessarily see the point of that for most of the brands but helped get them built out anyway. I always felt that of all of the brands under the Federal-Mogul banner, Champion was the most recognizable. This was proven out when I saw an on-set photo from Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where Brad Pitt was wearing a Champion t-shirt. I saved out the photo and sent it over to my boss as well as our social media manager.

"I don't know if they needed to get permission for this but I think it's a great opportunity for us to sell some Champion t-shirts!" I wrote to them along with details of the film and its release date. I figured they would take this information and run with it -- coming up with potential tie-ins, a social media calendar, and more. Instead, they did nothing.

I left the company shortly after that (and a few months before the July 26, 2019 release date). I kept tabs on my co-workers for a few weeks after I left (as one is wont to do). I went out to dinner with one of the guys who took over my position and I asked him for an update about the Champion Merch Store. Did they ever do anything to capitalize on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? No. Nothing. They didn't even order extras. The style of the shirt worn by Pitt "mysteriously" sold out by August, 2019 and was never re-stocked.

I don't know when the Merch Store went away but it's not on the Champion website -- which is riddled with broken links and hasn't had its copyright updated since 2022. Looks like all of my hard work wasn't appreciated despite almost literally gift-wrapping a great idea for them. More reasons that I left.

Sick of It

I don't have anything against Karina Longworth or her podcast, You Must Remember This. I've listened to a few dozen hours of the show and apart from Longworth's delivery and over-ennunciation, I think it's a very well-researched and produced show. Am I jealous that Longworth has a staff to do the production and some of the research? Not really. Do I think she got anywhere due to her husband, Rian Johnson? Absolutely not. She's doing something right and I just wish I knew it was.

I spotlight Longworth because You Must Remember This consistently lands on lists of the best movie podcasts available. What prompted me to write this piece is that I recently read The Best New Podcasts of 2024 (so far) by Nicholas Quah from Vulture / New York magazine. Since 2015, Quah has consistently put You Must Remember This on "Best of" lists and that's his perogative. He apparently loves the show, writing about it at least 9 times over the last 9 years (potentially a lot more as not every plug is on Vulture nor is every piece on Vulture tagged "You Must Remember This"). This latest listicle stuck in my craw, however, as the episode Quah named to his "Best Podcast of 2024 (so far)" is "The Hard Hollywood Life of Kim Novak — 10th anniversary restoration" which was a "restoration" of the first episode of You Must Remember This. So, not exactly new.

The episode was (re-)published April 1, 2024. Quah's post was published on April 1, 2024. This seems very odd to me, unless this is some kind of elaborate April Fools joke.

Again, I'm not picking on Longworth or You Must Remember This. I'm not even picking on Quah. I'm complaining that there are a handful of podcasts that consistently fill these listicles which either cannibalize one another or are written by publicists in the employ of these podcasts. These shows are backed by the handful of companies control "big podcast", hosted by celebrities, or a combination of the two. Now, this may be a really bad look for me to complain about the repetition and redundancy of these lists as I've been trying to crack that secret formula of getting on one of them for 13 years. But, the "best new" label for a podcast that hadn't had an episode since October 2023 and whose first episode shows up on the day the listicle is published was just a bridge too far.

Really, it's probably just sour grapesssssss.

The State of Plagiarism 2023

No one seems to be learning a lesson from Lianne Spiderbaby. Instead, things are worse than ever -- at least on YouTube. This is a great video that looks at several YouTube "personalities" that are shamelessly copying and pasting as a career.

We Don't Use That Word Here

After my adventures with VMLY&R, I moved over to Quicken Loans. This was something I thought I'd never do. Hell, I didn't think they would have ever hired me since I've written so many bad things about Dan Gilbert (the founder of Quicken) over the years. His shenannigans had cost me a pretty penny due to some stock options I had at ePrize years before.

Regardless, somehow I snuck into Quicken -- and landed a director level position at that. Though, it was a bit odd that I was a director reporting to another director rather than a director reporting to a VP. And reporting to that VP as well.

That would change just a few months into me being there. It was a day in October 2019 when I learned that my boss, Sarah, was leaving for another company. That should have been my cue to start looking for another gig. If that wasn't it, then my complete humiliation that same day should have been.

Quicken has a weird corporate culture that tries to pretend it's not corporate. Rather than a "boss", I had a "leader." Rather than a "co-worker", we were all "team members." That same October day I was in a meeting with about 20 strangers where we were going around the table and introducing ourselves. I said, "I'm Mike White and I'm in the Experience Strategy and Design division...." Suddenly I was interrupted by a guy across the table, "We don't say that here!"

I was flummoxed, trying to replay my own words in my head. I started again... "I'm Mike White..." (Did I say that part right?) "And I'm with the ES&D group..." (Maybe he liked abbreviations rather than me saying the whole word). I could see the steam coming out of this guy's ears again when a "team member" next to me said, "We say 'team', not group or division."

I wanted to say, "You gotta be fucking kidding me." Instead I restated who I was for the third time, making sure I said "team" before the next person had their turn. I sad there, my face as red as a beet, flush with adrenaline. I wanted to jump across the table. Instead, I waited until everyone had introduced themselves before leaving the room to compose myself.

That was the beginning of the end. I just didn't know it.

I was on vacation when my boss left. When I came back I was now reporting full time to a veep named JT. He was a nice enough guy but I had a hell of a time understanding him -- as did just about everyone else. It got to the point where I started recording our conversations so I could play them back and try to make sense of them later. I also had been "tricked" a few times by hearing him say one thing but him meaning another. Not only did I have to record and play back his conversations, I had to start writing down what I had heard and send it to him no more than 24 hours after we met. Then he'd add corrections/ammendments to my notes which were meant to clarify but only made me feel like I was being gaslighted.

During one of my meetings with JT, he came out and asked if I thought I was meant to be in my position. Two weeks later he did the same thing as well as saying that I was more suited to a position a few rungs down the ladder. If not that, how about I start looking around the company for another job altogether? This freaked me the fuck out.

I ended up going to HR (of course we don't call it that, it's fancy name is "Team Relation Specialist") and they told me how I was just one of many people having issues with JT. We ended up setting up a meeting between me, JT, and his boss, Rebecca. We cleared the air a bit and JT assured me that he wasn't trying to threaten me with his suggestion... "I'm new to this culture," he would say, even after he'd been at Quicken for a year. At least my "team" faux pas was only six months after I had joined.

I kept my distance from JT as much as possible after that. He moved me literally across the floor to work with the "Partner" team. I was just starting to get into the swing of things when the global pandemic hit. Right around that time, too, I could tell that Rebecca had been busting his chops. He seemed frazzled and my HR person's assurances to "Act like JT isn't your boss," felt like they were carrying more and more weight.

When we went into the pandemic, I was still the director of UX Strategy at Quicken. JT was my boss and I had quite a few people reporting to me. JT was the kind of guy who liked to switch stuff up all the time, whether things worked or not. He would get frustrated at me because I was more of the "wait and see" person. I would do trial periods of things rather than just knee-jerk decisions that would upset the apple cart every few months. Obviously, the pandemic upset the apple cart quite a bit.

My primary concern when the pandemic hit was to try and maintain a sense of normalcy while checking in with my people quite often. I encouraged people to take time off, to not get stressed about this new world we were thrust into, and to keep me in mind if they needed to talk. I continued to be in meetings nearly 8 hours every day so I didn't feel very lonely. If anything, I was getting "Zoom Fatigue" from being on camera all day. More than half of my time was in meetings, the rest of the time was spent talking with my folks.

A few weeks into the pandemic, my HR person's advice came to fruition. No more JT as my boss. I was now reporting directly to Rebecca. One of the first conversations we had was at my review where she hand't worked with me at all and just delivered what JT had written about me. He liked to portray me as weak and indecisive.

A few months after the pandemic started I had a really bad week:

• One of my reports and her reports were having a series of miscommunications. I thought I defused the situation and set up a meeting with our HR person to talk things out.
• I was having a lot of issue with one of the people I worked with -- he liked to talk down to and bully my co-workers. I made mention of this to Rebecca in a meeting. "He's really good at managing projects but not so good at managing people."
• A leader in another division contacted me to see about moving two people from their area over to my area. Made total sense to me and it seemed to be fitting with the plans of another director so I started that process going. There was one stipulation, that one of the people coming over would be getting a promotion. I talked to Rebecca about this and she said that no one would be coming over in a leadership position. I had to go back to the guy who was asking and tell him this -- running from one side to another like a damned middle-man. That didn't fly with him, esp. as he had told the person that they'd be getting a promotion. So, back I went to Rebecca...

"Did you not ask this question before? You're not acting like a director!" She read the the riot act about this situation which really caused by a lack of communication between Rebecca and another director. There was another major communication gap between the two that had come up that same week. Rebecca also told me that I had handled the situation with my report and her report. And, last but not least, I shouldn't have "spoken out" about the bully co-worker like I had. I felt like I was just handed the shit end of the stick and most of the shit on it was hers.

She "politely encouraged" me to step down as director and take a role as a Team Leader.

I knew this was a losing battle so I conceded.

Demotion One

The next time we spoke, two days later, she let me know what kind of pay cut I'd be getting. This was news to me.

So, I was now making $7K less than I was the week before (less than I had been making at VMLY&R), and now reporting to someone that used to report to me.

I spun it as "I'm stepping down as director to spend more time with the Partner team."

That was all well and good until the end of 2020 when we finally got a replacement for JT. More than a replacement, it was replacements. I spoke with the User Experience portion of the two-headed director just a few times one-on-one. I was often in meeting with him and his other half dicussing how we were going to reorganize the team. Funnily enough, the idea of the reorganization was exactly the same as what two of my "team mates" and I were working on. But, no one said that or gave credit where it was due.

The reorganization came and I noticed a very funny thing: no where on the presentation of the new structure could I see my name. It was like I had been fired by ommission.

No, no, no... that's overreacting of course. No, it was all clarified at 4:30 on a Friday when the two halves of the director met with me to ask where I wanted to be. "Would you rather be a UX Designer or a UX Researcher?" I made a pitch that I would be great in a QA (quality assurance) role. Nope. That was quickly brushed aside.

The next Monday I met with them again and said, "Out of the two positions, I think I'd be a better UX Designer." "Great," they said, and made me a UX Researcher.

That was when I knew I had been set up for failure.

Demotion Two

Not only was I supposed to be a UX Researcher but I was supposed to be among the best. Here was something that I hadn't done, hadn't been trained to do, and I was supposed to be great at it. "You've got thirty days and then we'll revisit this."

Spoiler alert: Thirty days passed and I never heard from them. I never had another (two on one or one on one) meeting with him again.

After I wasn't a Team Leader anymore the touch-base meetings with the whole team went away. The re-organization put people in places where I no longer saw most of my co-workers. I went from 8 hours of meetings a day to maybe 1 or 2. Nearly a year after the pandemic started, I suddenly felt the loneliness that I had tired my best to help my reports from feeling.

Sixty days later, I ended up hearing from my new boss (this is the fifth one!) who had also reported to me when they started less than a year before. I was told that I should be doing a much better job at the position I hadn't asked to be in.

Two weeks after that I saw that my boss had made some notes in my personnel area. What I read there sealed the deal. I knew that I was going to get demoted for a third time if I didn't do something soon. I learned that:

1. I was only taking on easy projects (I was taking on projects that were assigned to me).
2. I was asking for help from my fellow researchers (I thought this was called collaboration).
3. I was ignoring my boss's feedback (I had acted on every point they ever gave me).
4. I wasn't presenting things at our weekly learning sessions (as I'm learning the job myself, I didn't feel like I could contribute anything).

I found out in this post to my record that I had been given a verbal warning (the first of three steps in firing). I didn't know I got a verbal warning. Again, I felt like I was beign set-up.

I began looking for a new job in earnest.

I managed to get a job with Quicken's biggest competitor in the "Partner" space. I had heard that anyone who moved there would be "dead to" the rest of the team so I held my tongue after I put in my two week's notice.

That is, until my exit interview.

The Exit Interview

I wanted to unload all of the above and more at my exit interview but didn't. I thought I'd go out gracefully. No use burning bridges. Plus, nothing I would say would be taken seriously. I was just bitter and holding a grudge, right?

So, I let it slip in my exit interview where I was going. That was at 2PM yesterday.

At 3PM I missed a few messages via Teams from my boss and their boss -- the same one who wanted to connect after I put in my notice but never made the effort to actually do it.

This morning when I got up, I was excited for my last day at Quicken. I was going to clean up my laptop before sending it back, say goodbye to the Partner team at 11:45AM and then have a lunch with my fellow UX people at noon to say goodbye to them.

That was the plan.

The reality was that when I got up at 9:24 (why not sleep in, it's my last day?), I had a 9:30 meeting waiting for me with my boss.

When I signed in, I found her and another HR person waiting. Without any explanation I was told that I was no longer needed at Quicken. I was to sign off as soon as the meeting was over and close my computer. This was less than three hours before my farewell lunch and basically I was getting fired on my last day. At least, that's how it felt.

The day I got humiliated for not saying "team" should have been the beginning of the end but, after all that, I ended up exactly where JT wanted a year and a half before. It felt like he had been working behind-the-scenes the whole time to bring his plan to fruition. I know that sounds paranoid but I know my boss's boss spent a lot more time talking to JT than he ever did to me.

It was a dick move but not out of character.

The Clay Files

Here's a little story I had to write (to document) at my last job. Enjoy!

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I had heard rumors about Clay Carpenter before I started here at TPM (Taylor Properties Main), one of many satellite offices of the Ford Motor Company. Almost more than making cars, Ford is really good at owning real estate and they certainly have quite a lot of it around Metro Detroit.

While I knew of Clay by his reputation, I did my best to come at him with no preconceived notions. My presence at TPM was meant to signal a new day; a breath of fresh air. At 46, going on 47, with 20+ years in the web world, I was supposed to bring an air of experience and a calm demeanor.

However, it’s been difficult to remain the calm center of the universe. Clay’s reputation, it seems, is well-earned.

At 38 going on 39, Clay has the demeanor of a teenager. I find it difficult to not treat him like a very junior designer. I am constantly surprised that his demeanor has allowed him to progress to where he is in his career. Clay has a habit of starting every sentence with an exclamation: “Look!” he’ll say before launching into a pedantic explanation of why he has the best ideas and that everyone around him is wrong.

In particular, Clay feels that VMLY&R – the company for which I work – is a useless organization and has the incorrect impression that VMLY&R are interlopers who have insinuated themselves into the Ford Motor Company organization and add no value to the work being done. This first became evident toward the end of March 2019, when the team on which we both work was asked to participate in an exercise in “board building.”

If you’re not familiar with the advertising / marketing world, there’s an idea that the best way to garner feedback and insight is to deal not in the abstract but the concrete by physically presenting one’s work and ideas. This is done most often by taking a “gator board” – a large (roughly 7’ by 4’) black foam core board on which you tape actual pieces of paper that can include drawings, wireframes, designs, user flows, ideas, etc. These can and should be marked up or littered with sticky notes featuring comments, ideas, etc. It’s something like an open dialogue that can help shape the overall trajectory of a project. It’s like a living brainstorm.

As the gator boards began appearing in our area and pages were being hung, I received a rather large earful from Clay about how this is not how Ford does things. I told him that that was the idea. It’s the way VMLY&R – and just about every other creative agency – does things and it’s helpful for dialogue. Also, it was something that we (VMLY&R) wanted to do before a few upcoming meetings with some of the higher-ups at Ford.

As I hadn’t really been properly introduced to the project on which I was working I began the process of tracking down all of the background information so that I could speak intelligently to it and build the board as Clay was not willing to lift a finger to help.

I began soliciting the help of various members of the VMLY&R strategy team. On March 28 I was sent an incredibly helpful deck describing the overall idea to overhaul the vehicle service process and where the work I had been doing fit in to the big picture. I went over this deck with one member of the strategy team via the phone and physically met with two others (on April 3) for more insights.

I worked with another member of my team, Aravindh Baskaran, to help locate other insights about the research that had been done around the project. As we talked together about this, Clay couldn’t help but interject into our conversation that VMLY&R’s research was incomplete and that only Ford’s research has merit. He asserted that VMLY&R had not done anything. I tried to correct this by saying that VMLY&R had initially come together with Ford to craft the research and strategy. He didn’t think that was the case and seemed to get angry that I was trying to find out more information.

This incident was coupled with another one a few days prior where Aravindh had suggested that we speak to a strategist about another project that we had both been working on – Service History. We both wanted to know how this project would operate on both the FordPass (App) channel as well as the Ford website.

I am always frustrated to learn that multiple people or teams are working on the same project and not sharing information. To that end, I’m always searching for as many pieces of the puzzle as possible before diving in to form the larger picture.

Again, this idea incensed Clay. He also interjected into this discussion of the Service History conversation that he had already come up with everything that was needed for it and proceeded to bring up a drawing that he had shown me a few times before. I assured him that he had done a great job with this but that I wanted to see who else was working on the same thing. I tried to make him a partner in this, “I’m sure you’ve seen how different teams might all be working on the same thing. I want to make sure that your vision of this process is known. You’ve already done so much work on it, I don’t want it to be lost…”. This didn’t appease him. This was March 27. Clay didn’t speak to me on March 28 or 29.

To clarify, I was doing my due diligence to locate as much information as possible about the projects on which I was working. I was reaching out to people who knew more about things than I did, or that might have information that could further enhance these projects.

I got to work on my gator board March 29. As soon as work began, Clay got up from our desk (we share a very small workspace) and wasn’t seen again for the rest of the day. Aravindh was very helpful, getting everything printed for me as I don’t have access to the printers at TPM.

The following week (April 3) I had heard that “the designers” would be presenting the boards to the Ford client at 7:45 AM on April 5. “I’m not presenting anything,” Clay assured me. “Friday is my day to sleep in.” I told him that that would be fine and that I could speak to the work “we” had done. However, Clay was singing a different tune just a few hours later at our weekly team meeting where he presented concerns about me presenting to the Ford client.

“Mike doesn’t know anything about this project,” he asserted. “What if Jamie (the client) asks him something and he doesn’t know the answer?” He quickly rallied two other Ford employees to his side and eventually bullied his way into presenting the board – on which he had had no input – two days later.

The next morning, April 4, I was given the silent treatment again.

The meeting with the Ford client went pretty well. When Jamie asked about the future of the project, I showed him some of the examples of the next steps that came from the strategy deck on the gator board. Then I turned the proceedings over to Clay.

The strangest part of that morning was when Clay started talking to Jamie about the Service History project and requested five minutes of his time to go over the aforementioned picture that Clay likes to show about it.

Going back a bit, I had heard from the two aforementioned strategists that while I had been working on my main project that there was also a group of people who had “submerged” themselves in the same project. They were in what we call “a submarine” – away from the fray of Ford and solely dedicated to exploration of a single subject. This was the same kind of swirling that I had been afraid of. Rather than just plunge ahead with our assumptions, I reached out to one of the people who had been in the submarine, Jeff Huber, to see if I could get a debrief and include his learnings in the work I was doing.

I set up a meeting with Jeff to talk about the project. Clay heard about me doing this and told me that he needed to be at the meeting. I’m not used to having a designer following me to every meeting, especially when I’m on a fact-finding mission. This takes some getting used to in this environment. I forwarded the meeting invitation to Clay, but he didn’t get it. Rather than realize that VMLY&R employees can’t forward Ford invites to Ford employees, he thought I was trying to exclude him. I told him what room I was going to be in, but this wasn’t good enough. He wanted that invite.

He also wanted me to invite his boss, Sumanth Muthyala, to the meeting. I was hesitant to have too many people in the meeting. This wasn’t supposed to be a big production but a rather simple conversation. Clay has a way of wheedling and being aggressive at the same time. He was insistent on Sumanth’s inclusion. Again, I tried to forward the invite from Jeff Huber but it wouldn’t go through. Clay even watched as I forwarded the invitation. Finally, at the end of the day, I set up my own invitation and sent it to Sumanth and Clay.

The meeting with Jeff Huber on April 9 went well, though he has yet to share the information from his “submarine” (as of April 17). Though Clay took over the meeting about half-way through to again show his Service History drawing and turn the meeting into a Service History discussion rather than sticking to the intent of the meeting.

Through the project that I had been on as well as another Aravindh project I realized that there were two concurrent discussions of how users of FordPass would receive reminders for service due. One project had users getting calendar reminders while another gives users getting in-app “push” reminders. I decided that we should test the two ideas and see which users preferred. I began working on how these two things compared and contrasted while also telling the product owner of my current project that we should shelve the reminder process until the user testing results were in.

When I informed Clay of this, he got very close to my face and told me that I was wrong to want to formally test these ideas. “We should go down to the first floor and grab twenty people and find out what they like. I’ve done this tons of times before.” I asked if there was any proper documentation or survey process that he might have archived to help me set up such an ad-hoc process. He had none.

Clay was so insistent and so forward with his firm opinions that I felt shaken the rest of the day, as if I had been assaulted. I didn’t fear any physical violence, but I felt cowed by him. I wanted to get out of the building and get away from Clay.

I met later with Aravindh to discuss proper user testing and we have since pursued a path with several people to determine the various user testing platforms available to us from surveys to more formal tests. This is still in process as of this writing. I’m waiting for Clay to find out that we want to do things the right way rather than the quick way and getting up in my face again. Even as I’m writing these words, I’m getting a bit of a stomach ache at the thought.

On Tuesday April 6, Clay went on a fascinating tirade about those darned gator boards. When Juan Castro came over to my desk to ask Aravindh and me how long we would need to update boards for monthly meetings with the aforementioned Ford client, Jamie. This set Clay off. He began railing against the boards, saying that several people had come to him and told him that they looked like “grade school projects” and that his boss had charged him with improving the board process. Why not use PowerPoint?

Juan pointed out that PowerPoint is not a public thing and does not invite the collaboration of the boards. Clay countered that boards were a waste of time and that he spent sixteen hours working on them. I don’t know if I laughed out loud at this outright lie or managed to maintain my composure. As Juan and Clay went over to the boards I do remember saying, “If this wasn’t so pathetic it might be funny.” Clay railed against the placement of items on the boards, insisting it was undignified to have items so low on the board that one might have to squat to see things.

This “discussion” went on for at least 20 minutes. I really had hoped that Juan would say, “These make your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss happy so that should be good enough for you.”

But, no, Clay knows better than all of us.

When Clay hasn’t fucked off to places unknown in the office, he’s often working projects that are unfamiliar to me. I found out recently that Clay claims to be part of the Innovation Team. This runs counter to what I was told initially that he’s a dedicated resource to the projects on which I’m working. Though, to be honest, there’s not enough to keep either of us busy during the day. Eventually some projects will be transitioned to us but even those run at a snail’s pace.

For every ounce of work, there’s a pound of reviews and opinions.

Since I’ve been at TPM I’ve primarily worked on a single aspect of the FordPass application. This has branched into a few side conversations as noted above such as in-app reminders, scheduling, and even button shapes and sizes. All of these are things that should be vetted before implementation though Ford has troubles with testing insofar as there’s one guy who is allegedly in charge of testing, Mark Duer, but there’s a lack of trust in his ability to actually get the work done.

Jeff Huber describes Mark’s work as “a black hole” into which projects go but never come out. In the meantime, I’m also trying to work with my own team regarding testing while also being told that Sumanth Muthyala is also taking up test organization. This feels like more of the “Ford on Ford Crime” that I’ve heard about since joining VMLY&R. It’s something we desperately try to cut through but it’s often like running one’s head against a brick wall.

I know this is supposed to be a documentation about working with Clay, but I have to say that the whole TPM / FordPass experience is pretty screwed up.

In Mid-April there was a gathering to let everyone on FordPass know that there would be a switch-up of teams of who was working on what. This seemed a completely arbitrary decision and was not communicated well with the people doing the work. Likewise, the roll-out of these new teams has been haphazard at best.

I started receiving emails about something called “Hydra.” (Hail, Hydra). A few weeks later I was added to a group on Slack called “Orion.” These are apparently code names for two of the teams I was suddenly on. I was never introduced to the team leaders and have yet to get any invitation to a physical meeting with the Orion team. Meanwhile, I keep meeting with the Hydra team and what they’re working on seems to have nothing to do with what I’m working on or have been assigned to do. Color me confused.

Two of the projects to which I’ve allegedly been assigned deal with insurance and integrating it with the FordPass application. I’m having a really difficult time with at least one of those projects which is meant to help users when they’ve had an accident to document the accident, call for help, etc. The interface is complicated, and the core idea seems flawed. It feels like FordPass is trying to intrude on a user’s life, not help them. Likewise, it’s another case where FordPass is trying to be all things to all people.

The App as it stands wants to do things that other Apps do better. There are maps, guides, and the weather (for just that moment). I already have Google Maps, Yelp, and a weather app on my phone. I don’t need FordPass for that. Allegedly there are many more things that the App can do but even as a Ford owner, I can’t see these things. Meanwhile, the testing tool that I have been promised since day one at TPM still has yet to come through meaning that I’m flying blind most of the time, unable to see various user scenarios and the actual interaction of the interface. This kind of thing exemplifies the divide between VMLY&R and Ford.

Another example of the “bass ackwardsness” of the whole TPM/Ford set-up is the need to have two laptops. There’s the VMLY&R laptop which can do 99% of tasks and then there’s the Ford laptop which does 1%. On the Ford laptop I can print, and I can read my Ford email. In order to do anything, I have to keep switching from the Ford WiFi to their Public WiFi because proxies have not been set up. This means that I usually save all of my printing for Fridays when I go to the VMLY&R office – though over there I can only print 8 ½” x 11” as a lot of the other printer functions are locked out to VMLY&R employees. This just give the impression that everything is being held together by masking tape and bubblegum.

And, I suppose, the real kicker of it all goes back to our good friend Clay. He’s not someone conducive to a good team environment nor is he really that good of a worker on more “menial” projects.

After we had an employee who walked out after six days at TPM, there was a concerted effort to circle the wagons and figure out what’s wrong here and if the situation can be fixed. It took a few weeks, but we had a “team building event” happen on May 1. It took a little bit for some of my fellow VMLY&R folks to realize that this was related to the walk-out, though I’m not sure it’s important that they did. Some people thought a “team building event” would be something like whirlyball or a customer experience workshop. Instead, it was partially the customer experience workshop and partially a bitch session about sins of the past.

There were three people at the workshop that I had never met before. These folks were from the “Innovation Team.” Color me surprised when the next day Clay told me that he’s a member of the Innovation Team. That finally explained some of the work that he’d been doing, though his statement doesn’t pass the sniff test.

There’s a lot about Clay that doesn’t pass “the sniff test.” He always strikes me a sneaky guy. He’s like Eddie Haskell but so many people see through his act in seconds – at least that’s the case with VMLY&R people. After we had our “team building event” I was told that the VMLY&R moderator easily picked out my “little buddy” after just a few minutes into the proceedings.

If Clay being the sore thumb wasn’t obvious at the start of the meeting, it was clear by the end when we went around the room saying how we were feeling. “Hopeful,” “Energized,” those were some of the words being bandied about until we got to Clay who brought down the entire room with one phrase, “Déjà vu.” He felt like all of these issues had been brought up and discussed before, so he managed to deflate everything. Rather than discussing this, the group was already dispersing. This is something that should have been addressed right then and there either with the group or between Clay and the organizers. Instead, it was just another act of Clay being pithy and not facing any consequences.

There are the issues with the team structures, the pace of work, the core functionality of the App itself, the bureaucracy, and more. It’s not just a Clay thing but he doesn’t make anything easier. If Clay wasn’t part of the FordPass app team, I don’t know how much better things would be. There’s still the awful lack of personal space – I had some of my things disappear because they were apparently inconveniencing someone.

Not having a spot to call one’s own at work is an odd feeling. I’ve never “hotelled” before at work. When I return to the VMLY&R office I feel welcomed by both the people and my desk. It’s great to have a mug for coffee, a few toys, a couple of decorations, and just a place to call my own. At TPM I get about six inches of space on either side of my computer -- things constantly threaten to fall off my desk onto the person’s next to me or intrude into Clay’s spot. Likewise, his stuff is always infringing on my area but it’s easy to do when even having a sheet of paper in one’s area can violate boundaries.

Having my stuff disappear (thrown away) was more upsetting than it should have been. Why should I get bent out of shape about losing a few protein bars and the cup I use to make my daily shakes? Probably because it feels like a little violation and yet another sense of invalidating me as a person. Yes, there are lockers here at TPM and I have taken over one of them though these tiny lockers get pretty full between one’s coat and bag. It’s typical of the lack of space at TPM.

For a while it was discussed that the VMLY&R people (and their Ford counterparts) would get a space of their own at TPM - someplace to brainstorm and collaborate. And, when I first got to TPM I sat at a desk that had three other VMLY&R people. Unfortunately with the team rejiggering people were dispersed across the floor, most of them too to see from where I sit.

On May 14, Clay spent a good 20 minutes trying to tell me about a vast Masonic conspiracy that has infiltrated the music world. “Look at this triangle on this Steve Miller album! And over here on Dark Side of the Moon. Even Justin Bieber has a triangle tattoo…” This reminds me that Clay allegedly moved from Wisconsin to Michigan to meet his wife after he had a dream about her and was inexplicably drawn to work at a company where his “dream woman” just happened to be. That sounds like a stalker situation to me, “You’re the girl of my dreams…” Man, what a creep.

Speaking of creep… Just last week I was on a personal call and Clay messaged me via Slack to ask me where I was. I told him and let him know when I would be done. Instead of waiting, he just barged into the room, plopped his ass in a chair, and listened to my half of the conversation. Whenever I would speak he’d respond as if I was talking to him.

Every day I was set to go into TPM I would wake up the night before at 3AM and not fall back into a peaceful sleep. I dreaded heading back into that place. I dreaded seeing and interacting with Clay. There was such a relief when I would come in and his chair would be empty. That hour/hour and a half I would get in before he would arrive was the only time I felt I could really get any work done. Otherwise I had Clay in my shit almost all day. It got to the point where I couldn’t even wear headphones and listen to music while I worked. Every time I would put them on, Clay would start talking to me -- almost like he was just waiting for it. It was like a bad “Saturday Night Live” skit. Then again, are there good “Saturday Night Live” skits anymore?

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I ended up putting in my notice and Clay ended up ostensibly being promoted.