The Serious Stance

Upon reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, I was struck by how close her description of the ‘serious man’ resembles a certain species of self-righteous political disagreement, especially online. Here, I attempt to explicate upon some of her remarks about how I see it playing out in Twitter, ‘the culture wars,’ and wider discourse. I develop a notion, born from her serious man, of a subjective state I call the serious stance and how it fails to consider error and change. I instead argue we ought to take up the fallible stance.

Double Feature Series #2: Mob Justice

This is the second post in what I'm calling my Double Feature Series, in which I post a pairing of two movies that I love. These movies will usually be made 20+ years apart and are thematically related somehow. I try to draw out these relations, and in doing so, bring two seemingly disconnected films together, into one thought.

The second entry in this series illustrates the temporal possibilities of influence we see in film! They are two quite harrowing movies about the dangers of mob justice, directed by Fritz Lang and Thomas Vinterberg respectively: