The Screenwriting Shelf

The Screenwriting Shelf: What 24 Craft Books Actually Agree On (and Where They’d Fight About It)

A read-through of twenty-four screenwriting and dramatic-writing books — what they agree on, where they'd genuinely fight, and which ones are worth your money.

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Everybody wants to tell you how to write a movie. Walk into any bookstore’s film section and you’ll find a dozen competing systems, each one promising the one true shape of a story — fifteen beats, twenty-two steps, three acts, eleven steps, a “magnificent seven.” These books cite each other, borrow from each other, occasionally take open shots at each other. What almost none of them agree on is how much you should trust a formula in the first place.

I read twenty-four of these books cover to cover — the famous ones (McKee’s Story, Snyder’s Save the Cat!, Field’s Screenplay, Truby’s The Anatomy of Story) alongside the ones nobody talks about at parties but should (Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing, from 1946; Mackendrick’s posthumous On Film-making; Jule Selbo’s two books on genre and character) — tracking how each one handles six things: length, structure, transitions, character, plotting, beats. The point wasn’t to crown a winner. It was to find the actual consensus underneath all that competing vocabulary, name the real disagreements instead of pretending they don’t exist, and — since nobody has infinite reading time — tell you which of these two dozen books earn a spot on your shelf and which ones you can skip guilt-free.

The Two Camps

Nearly everything in screenwriting theory sorts into one of two philosophical camps, and naming them up front will save you a lot of confusion later, because most of the disagreements below are really just this fight wearing different clothes.

The formula camp — McKee, Snyder, Field, Trottier, Hunter, Duncan, Vogler (with real caveats), Schwartz, Cole — treats structure as something discoverable, teachable, and diagrammable. Put a number on it. Plot Point I lands around page 25. The midpoint lands around page 55. If your script doesn’t hit those marks, something’s probably off, or at least worth a second look.

The organic camp — Truby, Egri, Kaufman, and Jule Selbo in both her books — thinks this whole approach has it backwards, maybe dangerously so. Structure isn’t imposed from outside, it’s grown from the inside, out of character and premise, and a writer who fills in a template before understanding their people will produce something that clanks no matter how perfectly the beats land. Truby’s The Anatomy of Story is the purest statement of this position: he calls three-act structure “hopelessly simplistic and in many ways just plain wrong.” Egri got there first, in 1946 — “character creates plot, not vice versa” is close to a founding manifesto for the entire wing.

Neither camp is right in a way that makes the other wrong. What’s more interesting is how often the formula-haters end up reproducing formula’s rhythms anyway, and how often the formula-lovers insist, in the same breath, that what they’re teaching isn’t a formula at all. Keep that tension in your back pocket. It resurfaces under every topic below.

Where They Agree

Strip away the competing vocabularies and there’s a surprising amount of consensus hiding underneath. Ten points, ranked by how broadly they’re confirmed.

Scenes must be caused, not just sequenced. The single most universally endorsed idea in the whole set, phrased a dozen different ways. McKee frames it as causality versus coincidence. Kaufman: “because of this, that happens,” never “and then… and then.” John Schimmel — a former studio executive — credits South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone with the cleanest version: every scene connects to the next with “but then” or “therefore,” never “and then.” If you could swap two scenes in your script and nothing would notice, one of them isn’t doing its job.

A screenplay runs ninety to a hundred and twenty pages, one page reading as roughly one minute of screen time, and acts split close to 25/50/25. Independently confirmed by Field, McKee, Trottier, Hunter, Duncan, Seger, Selbo, and Schimmel — different decades, different specialties, same numbers.

Plot and character can’t be separated as design problems. Arguably the deepest agreement in the collection, because it cuts straight across the formula/organic divide. McKee, Kaufman, Truby, Egri, and Selbo all state some version of this as a first principle, using five completely different vocabularies to say the exact same thing: a plot poured onto a character from the outside always reads as mechanical.

A load-bearing pivot belongs near the story’s mathematical center. Eleven-plus independently built systems — Field’s Midpoint, Snyder’s Midpoint, Trottier’s “Pinch,” Hunter’s floating page 60, Vogler’s Ordeal, Selbo’s “Battle of the Bulge” split — all locate a major turn at roughly the halfway mark. Nobody borrowed this in a straight line. Screenwriting teachers, script doctors, editors, and mythologists all found their way there separately, which is exactly what makes it worth trusting.

The first act — specifically the first ten to thirty pages — is the highest-leverage real estate in the whole script. Field says you get about ten minutes to establish who your character is and what’s at stake. Schimmel calls it “the thirty-page rule”: if the first thirty pages don’t work, nothing after them matters, because that’s as far as a professional reader gets before making up their mind.

Deus ex machina is the cardinal sin of plotting. McKee calls it “the writer’s greatest sin.” Kaufman, Mackendrick, and Selbo all say some version of the same thing independently, and all four land on Aristotle’s Poetics as the root of it. Coincidence is allowed to complicate a story early, while it still has to be dealt with. It is never allowed to resolve one.

History should work as a lens on the present, not a diorama. The strongest single convergence in the whole set, because it comes from two writers arguing from unrelated theories. McKee, working from genre theory, says the only legitimate reason to set a film in the past is anachronism — history “as a clear glass through which you show us the present.” Truby, working from his organic character-web theory with no apparent debt to McKee on this point, calls the opposite instinct “the Fallacy of the Past”: the mistaken belief that historical fiction’s job is to avoid judging people by present standards. His actual position: “we show them in order to judge ourselves by comparison.” Two writers, two frameworks, one conclusion. That’s worth more than either claim on its own.

Camera direction doesn’t belong in a spec script. Trottier, Cole, and Schwartz converge almost word for word: no CUT TO, no shot specification, let the story direct itself.

On-the-nose dialogue — dialogue that explains instead of dramatizes — is the most common, most damaging mistake an amateur script makes. McKee, Kaufman, Hunter, and the dialogue specialists Driver and Bloom all name this as the tell of an inexperienced writer.

A script can only sustain a small number of fully realized characters. Seger puts a hard number on it: six or seven at the outside, usually three to five drawn in real depth, with everyone else serving a clear, nameable function.

Where They Genuinely Disagree

This is the part most summaries flatten out, and flattening it is a mistake, because the disagreements are exactly where a working writer has to actually make a call.

The deepest fault line, again, is whether structure should be imposed or discovered — formula camp against organic camp, as above. Nothing in these twenty-four books resolves it, and it probably shouldn’t be resolved. It reads less like a question with a correct answer and more like a genuine difference in how different writers’ brains work.

Does genre buy you extra pages? Schimmel says yes — a hundred-and-thirty-page historical drama is fine, a hundred-and-thirty-page rom-com will end your career. Duncan says no — even a sprawling sci-fi epic has to fit in roughly a hundred pages, full stop. Two format-minded professionals, flatly contradicting each other.

Does your protagonist need to be likable? Michael Rogan, writing in a deliberately brash, contrarian register, calls the likability rule “total horse crap” and argues obsessive drive beats sympathy every time, citing Michael Corleone and Popeye Doyle as his exhibits. Schwartz, writing a gentler beginner’s guide, insists the audience has to feel for your characters or nothing else works. Schimmel and Truby split the difference independently: audiences need to identify with a character, which is a lower, different bar than liking them.

Is a protagonist’s own flaw a legitimate antagonist, or do you always need a separate opposing force? Schimmel says flaw-as-antagonist “almost never” works, allowing Raging Bull (1980) as close to the only real exception. McKee and Truby are looser about it, letting antagonism be personal, extra-personal, or entirely internal depending on the story.

Are page numbers literal targets or loose guidance? Worth flagging as a disagreement one author had with himself. Snyder’s original Save the Cat! gives you a literal page number for the Catalyst (page 12) and the Midpoint (page 55). By the time he wrote Save the Cat! Strikes Back, and in the posthumous Goes to the Indies, his own collaborators were converting those page numbers into percentages, because the literal version was producing formulaic scripts. Even the most rigid system in the whole set revised itself toward flexibility.

Is flashback a legitimate structural tool or an inherent weakness? Cole and Mackendrick both treat it as close to a crutch — Mackendrick calls it “inherently weak as a transition device” because it lacks forward pressure. Schmidt builds an entire structural model around it (she calls it the Fate structure; it covers most film noir), and Jessica Brody’s prose-focused Save the Cat! Writes a Novel treats it as completely normal. My read: this isn’t really a craft disagreement, it’s a medium difference. Prose tolerates a jump backward in time better than film does, because film has to solve it visually, in real time, in front of you.

Should marketability shape character and structural choices? Schimmel builds castability and “trailer moments” directly into his craft vocabulary — commercial considerations as legitimate design inputs, not an afterthought. The organic camp, Truby and Egri and Kaufman especially, would call that close to a category error: you discover the story’s shape from the material first, and the poster is a later problem.

Does a character have to change? McKee and Snyder both lean toward treating an arc as close to mandatory for a complex protagonist — Snyder’s own phrase for it is “the Covenant of the Arc.” But Duncan’s genre chapter identifies whole genres (the Whydunit is his example) built around a static hero where the audience’s understanding changes instead, and Snyder’s own later book, breaking down All the President’s Men (1976), admits exactly this: “the hero doesn’t change — the audience does.” Schmidt goes further, building a formal “Rebellion” branch into her Masculine Journey model specifically for protagonists who refuse to change, citing Ahab as the type. Even the writers most committed to arc-as-mandatory carve out exceptions in their own later work.

And a smaller, more annoying one: these books don’t even agree on what “beat” means. McKee and Mackendrick use it for the smallest unit of action and reaction inside a scene, a pair of behaviors, like “Groveling” met by “Ignoring.” Snyder and Trottier use it for a named checkpoint on a whole-script outline — the Catalyst, the Midpoint, the moment everything falls apart. Selbo uses it for neither. For her a beat is specifically a silent, emotionally charged pause inside a scene, and she argues in print that the other two usages are simply wrong. Read enough of these back to back and you start needing to ask “which beat do you mean” the way you’d ask a doctor to clarify which kind of “positive” they meant.

The Best Lessons, Regardless of Camp

A handful of ideas showed up so often, from so many different directions, that they’re worth pulling out on their own — the things actually worth carrying into a draft no matter which camp you belong to.

Know your ending before you write page one. Field’s version is blunt — “Know Your Ending!” — and he backs it with a Billy Wilder line worth keeping on an index card above your desk: if you ever have trouble with your ending, the answer is almost always in the beginning. Kaufman calls the same instinct “progressing backwards.” Trottier calls it “outlining backwards.” Three books, no coordination, same advice.

Apply the deletion test. If you can cut a scene and nothing downstream notices, cut it. Shows up in Kaufman, in Mackendrick’s editing-room experience, in Schimmel’s studio-reader perspective — three people who never worked together, giving the same note.

Convert exposition into ammunition. Nobody wants to watch two characters explain the plot to each other. The trick, repeated across nearly every book that touches dialogue, is to make characters use facts as weapons in a live conflict instead of handing over information.

Melodrama isn’t a problem of too much emotion, it’s a problem of too little cause. McKee’s redefinition, and it’s useful precisely because it tells you what to actually fix. A scene that feels melodramatic doesn’t need to be dialed down. It needs more of the causal groundwork underneath it to land, so the emotional payoff feels earned instead of dropped on you from a height.

Real historical figures carry weight a fictional character can’t, and they don’t get a fictional villain’s exaggeration license. Two observations worth keeping together if you’re working from true events. Truby notes a documented historical figure arrives on the page with what he calls “prefabricated power, like the flag” — the audience has feelings about them before they say a word. Duncan’s caution runs the other direction: real people, even functioning as an antagonist, still need plausible, three-dimensional motivation. You don’t get to play them as a cartoon just because the story needs an obstacle.

The best biopics don’t cover a whole life. Selbo states this as flatly as anyone in the collection: find the pivotal window, not the whole chronicle, and let another genre — sports story, romance, courtroom drama — do the structural work of organizing the true material. A film that tries to be everything the subject’s life was ends up being a highlight reel instead of a story.

What to Buy, and What You Can Skip

Here’s the part you actually clicked for. A straight verdict, organized by what you’d get for your money and your reading time.

Buy these first. The essential shelf.

McKee’s Story (1997) is still the single most comprehensive book on this list, and it’s the one most of the other twenty-three are quietly arguing with or borrowing from. If you only ever read one screenwriting book, this is the one.

Field’s Screenplay is the ancestor text. Nearly every later beat-sheet system, Snyder’s included, descends directly from Field’s Paradigm. The film references are dated. The structural thinking isn’t, and reading it explains where half the other books’ vocabulary actually came from.

Snyder’s original Save the Cat! (2005) earns its reputation. It’s the most commercially minded, most immediately actionable book here, and whatever you think of formula as a philosophy, its fifteen beats are the shared vocabulary of the modern spec market. You need to know this system even if you have no intention of following it.

Truby’s The Anatomy of Story is the fullest, most rigorously argued version of the organic-camp position, and it’s worth owning even if you end up disagreeing with it, because it’s the best stress test I found for whether your own structure is actually motivated by character or just filled in from a template.

Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing is the oldest book on the list, 1946, and it holds up better than almost anything published since. His premise-and-character-first method quietly seeds most of what the organic camp argues today, and his chapter on building character through dialectical contradiction is the deepest single treatment of building a person from the inside out in the whole collection.

Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible is the one to own for format. Nobody else in this set gets as granular about margins, brads, and the seventeen things that make a script read as amateur before a reader’s gotten past page one. That’s genuinely useful, because format mistakes get scripts rejected before the writing is even judged.

Selbo’s Film Genre for the Screenwriter deserves to be better known than it is. Her “mental space” framework for how genre actually works on an audience is a genuinely original contribution, and she’s the only writer in this whole collection who treats biopic, historical, and period as three separate genres with concrete rules for each — directly useful if you’re working from real events.

Buy these if you have a specific need.

Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey is worth it if you’re working with myth-adjacent material or want an archetype vocabulary beyond McKee’s, but read Campbell’s own words too if the mythic structure genuinely interests you. Vogler’s adaptation quietly drops some of Campbell’s more interesting, more metaphysical arguments about why these patterns resonate at all.

Seger’s Making a Good Script Great is the best book on this list if your actual problem is a finished draft that isn’t working, rather than a blank page. It’s a diagnostic manual, not a drafting manual, and worth having for exactly that stage.

Hunter’s Screenwriting 434 overlaps heavily with McKee and Field, but his rewrite chapter — a genuine four-stage process that includes a read-the-dialogue-aloud pass — and his firsthand account of writing biographical teleplays earn it a spot if historical or true-story material is your focus.

Schmidt’s Story Structure Architect works better as a reference you dip into than a book you read cover to cover. The eleven alternative structures and the fifty-five dramatic situations (a Polti expansion) are genuinely useful when you’re stuck on a specific scene, less useful as a sustained argument.

Kaufman’s Plots and Characters is a good corrective if you’ve been reading too much formula, a produced screenwriter’s blunt skepticism about all of it, but it’s thinner and less systematic than Truby or Egri on the same territory. Read it after them, not instead of them.

Mackendrick’s On Film-making is technically a directing book, but it has more genuinely useful screenwriting material in it than several books explicitly marketed as screenwriting guides. His editor’s-eye sense of beats, density, and cutting is unlike anything else in this collection. Worth it specifically if you think visually.

Skip these, or treat them as optional extras.

The Save the Cat! sequels, Strikes Back and Goes to the Movies, mostly refine and re-argue the original book’s system with new case studies. Fine for a completist, not essential. Save the Cat! Writes a Novel is the exception, if you’re working in prose specifically, since it’s the only book in the set that seriously addresses what changes between page and screen.

Selbo’s other book, Screenplay: Building Story Through Character, is good, but it covers ground her own genre book and Truby’s Anatomy of Story already cover from a similar angle. Buy it only if you want a third articulation of the want/need split specifically.

Duncan’s Genre Screenwriting has a genuinely useful business chapter and some solid genre-by-genre templates, but as a genre reference it’s been superseded by Selbo’s more original, more current framework. Read Selbo first, add Duncan only if you specifically want his industry-economics data.

Schimmel’s Screenwriting Behind Enemy Lines has real value if you specifically want the studio-executive’s view of what makes a script sellable, but a good third of it overlaps with material covered more rigorously elsewhere. Library read, not necessarily a purchase.

The dialogue-specific books, Driver’s How To Write Dialogue That Sparkles and Master Screenplay Dialogue, are useful if dialogue is a specific, diagnosed weakness, but they’re built almost entirely from tools McKee, Kaufman, and Hunter already cover in less concentrated form. A targeted refresher, not a foundational text.

The beginner trio — Cole’s How to Write a Screenplay, Schwartz’s How to Write: A Screenplay, Rogan’s How to Write a Screenplay That Doesn’t Suck — are honestly interchangeable with each other, and all three restate fundamentals McKee, Field, and Snyder cover with more depth and more authority. If you’re a true beginner and want something shorter and friendlier than Story, pick one of the three, not all of them. Rogan’s is the most entertaining if you want a jolt of contrarian energy. Schwartz’s is the gentlest.

Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey: Campbell on His Life and Work is the odd one out here, because it isn’t a craft book at all, it’s a compilation of interviews and lectures. Genuinely worth reading if you want the theoretical roots underneath Vogler’s more practical adaptation, particularly Campbell’s distinction between a story’s local, culturally specific surface and its deeper universal pattern. Not a substitute for Vogler if what you need is a working tool. Most working screenwriters can skip it and lose nothing they’d actually use on the page.

The Real Takeaway

Read enough of these books back to back and a strange thing happens: the fight between formula and instinct starts to look less like a real disagreement and more like two vocabularies describing the same underlying shape. Even Rogan, screaming that three-act structure is “bull crap,” ends up recommending a reversal every ten pages, which is, on inspection, almost exactly Field’s Paradigm with the serial numbers filed off. Even Truby, the most committed anti-formula voice in the whole collection, still puts his major turns roughly where McKee, Snyder, and Field would predict. He just insists, correctly, that you have to arrive there through character, not a fill-in-the-blank template.

The honest lesson from all twenty-four books, taken together, isn’t “use this system” or “ignore every system.” It’s that the shape these writers keep independently rediscovering — causality over coincidence, a pivot near the center, character generating plot rather than the reverse, an ending you know before you write the opening page — is worth trusting precisely because so many people arrived at it from so many different directions. The vocabulary you use to talk about it matters a lot less than whether you understand why it works.

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.