Journal

Long-form essays exploring what great films and books reveal about purpose, responsibility, and human experience.

From the Journal

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

Film Essay

Monte Hellman • 1971 • 8-minute read

“Cars become meaningful only when they stop being identities and become places where people share life together.”

Editor’s Reflection

Two-Lane Blacktop suggests that our passions, no matter how consuming, cannot sustain us in isolation. Cars, races, and endless highways become meaningful only when they create opportunities to encounter other people. Hellman quietly asks whether the identities we've built have become destinations rather than bridges.

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From the Journal

The Exorcist (1973)

Film Essay

William Friedkin • 1973 • 12-minute read

“Its greatest horror is not that demons exist. It is that suffering will always exist in one form or another. Its greatest hope is that someone will answer.”

Editor’s Reflection

For years, I believed The Exorcist endured because it terrified audiences. Watching it again, I found myself returning instead to its quieter moments: an exhausted priest answering a desperate question, an aging man walking toward a battle he may not survive, and a mother refusing to abandon her child. Beneath its unforgettable horror lies something even more enduring—a story about what human beings owe one another when suffering becomes impossible to escape.

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