This week I wrapped up Astro City: Metrobook 2, a bulky 18-issue omnibus-style collection of the series that started in the mid-90s but which I somehow missed out on until last year. If you’re not familiar, it’s an anthology series telling all sorts of stories set in a city jam-packed with superheroes (sometimes referred to as “angels” in the world of the book). Sometimes it’s about the inner turmoil of a very powerful hero. Sometimes the gender politics bothering a female angel. Other times, it’s about the hotel doorman in downtown Astro City, or a local lawyer going to trial in a world where reality is surprisingly bendable, and evidence is newly questionable. Often, it’s about the sad reality of aging and becoming irrelevant after touching fame, greatness and glory. It’s such a gorgeously drawn, deeply felt, and reflective comic, I swear it didn’t actually exist my whole life, but was somehow dropped here from another universe just recently, or I surely would have picked it up decades ago. It’s so, so fun to read, and right up my alley in terms of crossing pop cultural referents (not references like gags, but more like tropes in fiction) with earnest human drama. A total treat.

Anyhow, the reason it works so well is that it’s interested in the truth of what a world where heroes exist might really be like for humans – super and otherwise.

So…
What are the pros and cons of living in a city, in a world, where superheroes really exist?

Would you want to live there or escape there, ultimately?

Would you HOPE to be one, or FEAR becoming one?

Palm Springs debuted on Hulu in July of 2020, in a time with little competition, because we weren’t allowed to go to movie theaters. But more surprising, even in normal times this might be my favorite movie of the year.

(Though Da 5 Bloods is also a huge achievement and definitely a must-see. Seriously, don’t skip it because it’s an hour longer and “serious” or you think it feels like homework — it’s a powerful, beautiful film.)

Why Palm Springs works so well is even more interesting. At first glance, it’s just a rehash of the Groundhog Day formula, but with a more modern sense of humor and a more straightforward romantic comedy setup. And since Groundhog Day is basically a perfect movie, of course its spiritual successor also works. But what does it do to deserve so much credit? Three huge, crucial story changes:

ONE: EDITING

This is the nerdiest structural critique, but also the bravest choice the movie makes. The original Groundhog Day runs about 1 hour 40 minutes, but takes the first full 18 minutes setting up the character and his predicament before Phil wakes up in his first time loop. We then spend the middle of the movie watching him figure out the “rules” of this world, and experiment with different ways to get out. Only after all that does he commit to a path of personal growth.

Palm Springs skips over the entire first two sections of Groundhog Day, dropping us in with a character already deep into his endlessly repeating purgatory. Nyles is past his ‘figuring out how it all works’ phase, so the movie kicks off with his general acceptance of being stuck, and what that means for him on both a practical and existential level.

He’s making the best of what his life has become, built some simple rules for how not to be an awful person in that world, but he’s lost any sense of meaning or purpose beyond that. This way, we get to spend the whole movie on his journey of emotional growth, when we get to the second big change that makes all the difference in the world.

TWO: COMPANIONSHIP

The biggest game-changer in this script is the introduction of other characters into the same repeating loop. Not only does this unlock a lot more potential for fun that the movie makes great use of, it opens up totally new emotional territory to explore. In a lot of ways, this is actually Sarah’s movie, with Nyles playing the mentor/companion as she goes through phases of denial, negotiation, and acceptance before coming out the other side and forcing both of them to grow and change.

Now, this isn’t a story of a man getting one day just right so he can earn redemption, which has always had a sort of creepy stalker implication in Groundhog Day, since our protagonist’s whole goal is to effectively trick the woman he desires into loving him back.

Instead, Palm Springs is a story about what it means to share a life with someone, even if that life, like most lives, is going to be a lot of the same thing over and over again. And the ability to make peace with that is beautiful in a whole new way from the original.

THREE: SETTING

The least consequential, but this update allows for whole new shades to the idea of getting stuck on repeat. A destination wedding in Palm Springs sounds pretty fun. In normal circumstances, this would be something you look forward to, and almost certainly post to your Instagram to make people jealous. It’s lounging and drinking and catered food with a picturesque backdrop. Who wouldn’t want more days like that?

But again, the movie both exposes how empty all that ultimately is, and pushes its characters to go beyond what we’re supposed to want out of life to find something deeper than the gram-worthy lifestyle that only looks good on the surface. Even the most idyllic, indulgent days lose their luster eventually, and at a certain point you want something more.

So even though Palm Springs pays great homage to its inspiration, with a few key changes it delivers a fresh, funny, and affecting look at how we spend our days and who we want to spend them with — which brings us back to questions we can ask ourselves about our own lives.

If you could choose one day of your life to live on loop,
which day would you choose, and why?

Where would you be, which people would you be with,
and why would you choose them?

How long could you spend living that same day, and
what would be the biggest reason that you wanted out?

Like most people in the sports-starved world of 2020, I devoured every episode of ESPN’s 10-part series, The Last Dance, as they aired over the course of five weeks. 

Especially if you grew up in the 90’s (like I did), and extra-specially if you spent those years in the greater Chicago area (like I also did), this was a glorious nostalgia-bomb that beautifully captured the thrill of witnessing one of the most exciting dynasties in sports history.

But after the thrill of all those championships fades, and the more I think about the story of Michael Jordan — Michael Jordan the man, the human being at the heart of this documentary — the more I’m amazed. Both that this series exists, and by its message about what it takes to be the best at something.

To give it credit, the series admirably highlights the contributions of players like Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and Steve Kerr, legendary coach Phil Jackson, and even maligned GM and strange little man, Jerry Krause, who in their own ways all propelled the Bulls to their historic dominance. This show knows, and says explicitly, that you can’t achieve greatness alone.

But the central theme the series keeps returning to is Jordan’s compulsive competitive drive. It shows up in games, in the locker room, how he treats teammates at practice, and in his love of gambling — all the way from big money golf games to quarter-flipping contests with his security guards.

Jordan didn’t just want to win, or like to win. He needed to win, and crucially, to beat everyone else. It’s important to keep in mind, Michael Jordan’s own company helped produce this film. It’s built on archival footage and interviews he willingly participated in, and probably even blessed to a certain extent. That means The Last Dance is not an expose; it’s the story that Jordan, at least in some ways, wanted to tell about himself.

And again and again, that means rewinding to pivotal moments in his career, and not just focusing on what he achieved, or how hard he worked, but why. What motivation did he draw on to push himself harder than anyone else?

More often than not, in his own words, it came down to petty rivalry. Jordan’s desire to prove some doubter wrong, bury some opponent who’d talked trash, or show a world who might consider someone else his equal that he could blow that player out of the water.

THAT’S what seemingly pushed Jordan to all his highest heights. And they were higher than anyone’s.

A charitable way to frame this is that he just cared that much more than any other player. He talks occasionally in classic sports mantras, like wanting to give the audience the show they paid for, or how there’s no point in playing at all if you’re not going to leave everything on the court.

But the show, quite purposefully, is not content to live within those kind of cliches. It goes out of its way to build up these grudges and then connect them to his moments of greatness.

Michael Jordan is compelled to compete above all else. Winning consumes him. Winning is all that matters. He wanted to defeat every opponent, demolish every obstacle, destroy every record.

And once he did, he was finished.

The other, subtler theme of The Last Dance is an undercurrent of sadness. The loneliness of fame. The solitude at the top of the mountain. The stats, the highlight reels, the posters and ads and collectible sneaker line…Michael Jordan changed the world. He left his mark on the universe, no doubt about it.

But this show doesn’t feel like a celebration of greatness. Not entirely. It feels like a reckoning with the cost of a life lived only for competition. After the trophies are kissed, what comes next? Once the records are broken, what do you choose to build?

The series leaves us not with images of what happened afterward — a happy family, charitable works, business success, or lifting up a new generation of players — but, like another story of a man whose only drive was to win at all costs (no, not the 45th president, I’m thinking more Daniel Plainview).

It ends with a man, alone in his castle, wondering what else is left once you’ve supposedly won everything there is to win, and vanquished your last opponent.

And at that point I can’t help but wonder: do I want to “Be Like Mike”? Should any of us? After watching The Last Dance, I’m not so sure.

What about the world we live in makes compulsive competition such a winning trait?

What might the world look like, for better or worse, if more of us were so totally driven by our sense of competitiveness?

What’s a personal flaw of yours, like Jordan’s compulsive competition, that might actually work to your advantage in some situations?

In 2019, Sally Rooney’s coming-of-age relationship novel, Normal People, easily made my top books of the year list. But at the time I only wrote a few sentences about why I found it so page-turning and powerful. Now only a year later, Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation has debuted on Hulu, bringing a whole new audience to the story of Connell and Marianne.

Reading descriptions of either the book or the series, it’s not hard to imagine people jumping to the conclusion that this is a work of teen melodrama, and not for them. I should know: after seeing the trailers, I almost skipped the show DESPITE loving the book, because the marketing didn’t feel enough like the story I’d read and loved. On the surface, the series appeared exactly like the sort of schmaltzy romance the book did such a good job dissecting.

I’m pleased to report that the show, like the book, achieves something much more special. Something more complex and with greater depth than a will-they-or-won’t-they courtship drama. Though pretty quickly in, you find out they definitely will, then won’t, then will again, a lot, on and off for years. Which is more to the point of the project.

Sure, there’s a bit of that youthful tendency for the characters to think every setback is earth-shattering, or to make basic relationship mistakes that frustrate the more mature among us to no end. ( SWEET DANGLING CHAIN, CONNELL, JUST TELL HER WHAT YOU REALLY WANT.) But both the show and the book capture the unique intensity of first loves with such sensitivity, and then interrogates what t means to us so skillfully, that it becomes much more than a question of whether two characters get their happily ever after. Because as most of us know: they won’t. That’s not how life works. Rarely does a first great love become a lifelong one, even if at the time it feels like losing it means the end of the world.

What makes Normal People so smart and so powerful is that it’s not really about whether two people end up together. It’s more interested in how certain people — whether loves, or friends, or family (or that one asshole you’re not sure why anyone keeps inviting to parties, JAMIE) — these people leave their marks on us. They unlock something we’ve felt we had inside ourselves just waiting to be discovered, and they shape the people we eventually become.

It’s specifically not a love story for the ages, because these are Normal People. Normal People feel weird and misunderstood until finally someone sees us. Normal People fall in love for the first time (even if it’s not always romantic love), and they feel changed, even if that love doesn’t last, because it’s normal to screw it up. And in most cases, Normal People move on… past the loves and friendships lost, and toward an uncertain future, as best as they know how.

Who are the people that changed you the most, or set you on the course to who you are today?

What parts of who you are now would you attribute to those past relationships?

How might you be different if you’d never had those people in your life?

Two of this year’s biggest, shiniest, mind-bendiest sci-fi series, Alex Garland’s DEVS on Hulu, and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s WESTWORLD season 3 for HBO, cover nearly identical themes, while sharing several plot devices.

Both tell stories of emotionally scarred billionaires with god complexes, who both run seemingly unstoppable tech companies, which both create giant evil supercomputers (though one is a pulsing sphere, the other a glowing cube). And who both use that limitless data processing power to make machines capable of predicting the future, in order to “fix” what they see as wrong with the world.

And yes, in both we follow defiant young women (though one is technically a robot) who refuse to buy in to the future these algorithms predict (while with the help of frequently confused male sidekicks), sacrifice themselves to destroy both the machines and their creators. 

Where they diverge are their respective takes on how predicting the future is achieved, and what doing so might mean for humanity.

Quick critical aside: They also diverge in quality and clarity. 

Though Westworld seems a lot more fun on the surface, what with the futuristic vehicles, gunfights, explosions, and super-robots doing cool martial arts, the show relies so much on surprises and reversals, it’s hard to know what’s ever really going on. 

What are these characters really trying to achieve? Are they succeeding or failing? What am I rooting for, exactly? Which makes Westworld hard to care about as a story, even if as a show it’s all very enjoyable to look at.  

Devs, on the other hand, takes a more moody, atmospheric tone I certainly wouldn’t call “fun”. It’s weird and gorgeous and unsettling; very stoic, and largely philosophical.

But despite its galaxy-brain core concept, it tells a clear story — where each characters’ actions make basic sense based on their desires at any given time — while untangling the show’s surprises clearly advances our understanding of the larger ideas the show wants to explore. 

If you only watch one for both aesthetic pleasure and discuss-ability: Devs is the clear winner.

OK, back to the discussion-worthy stuff.

Like the best sci-fi, both shows extrapolate out from real-world ideas. But as I said before, they depict different paths to how we arrive at these dystopian technologies.

In one, our prison is our own creation, in the other, it’s something we discover.

Westworld suggests that if we had enough people’s full behavioral data, we can basically know the course of the rest of their lives. From there, we can optimize society as a whole. 

This isn’t too far past some shady experimentation Facebook has done, where they’ve shown “happy” or “angry” posts to different sets of people to measure the results. A little tweak here, a little tweak there, and eventually you get to control.

This is a man-made version of determinism, enabled by AI.

Devs on the other hand goes all the way down to the molecular level. This, too, is based on real physics. Essentially, if the entire universe is molecules reacting to one another, that’s no different for our bodies, or even our brains. It’s just one big wind-up toy playing out its course.

This is backed up by neuroscience which shows that, *technically*,  our bodies take an action nanoseconds before our brain “commands” them to. In fact, the feeling that we’ve made a decision may be just a thing we evolved to make sense of the world.

So according to Devs, we didn’t build a thing that took away free will. Because of the deterministic nature of the universe, we never had it to begin with. We finally just built a machine powerful enough to prove it — and show us what comes next.

So of course, it makes sense that these two versions of determinism lead each show to a different outcome, once people discover what these machines can do.

In Westworld, the populace riots against the tech giants imposing control. In Devs, the few characters who fully reckon with living out a pre-determined future gain a Zen-like calm, but also seem hollowed-out and lifeless.

But in both, our heroes are compelled to destroy this technology, even if it means their own end. Because they both see that life with this kind of power in the world may not be livable — whether we stop it from being true, or just decide to live in blissful ignorance of our pre-determined reality.

How would you as an individual, or we as a society, react to a truly, provably deterministic world?

How could we go on living normally once we know free will is an illusion?

If either of these technologies really existed, what, if anything, could be done to harness that power responsibly?