The Logic of Addiction

State of the Art. Cutting Edge. Cultural Psychology and Addiction.

Category: Addiction and Cinema

  • Midnight Mass and the Completion of Transcendence

    A Second Look Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass is often received as a religious horror story—a cautionary tale about fanaticism, blind faith, or the dangers of belief taken too far. Such readings remain trapped within a moral frame the series itself quietly abandons. Midnight Mass is not about the corruption of religion but about what religion…

  • “MIDNIGHT MASS”

    When Resurrection Becomes a Drug (Abridged) There is a promise that keeps returning in modern life. It is not the promise that suffering will someday be redeemed, but that suffering can be ended now. Not endured, not worked through, not transformed over time—but stopped. This promise appears in substances, in technology, in optimization culture, and…

  • When Evil Becomes Necessary

    Thunderbolts (2025) functions less as a conventional superhero film than as a cultural dream in which unresolved moral structures are staged rather than resolved. Beneath its surface narrative of antiheroes and state-sanctioned violence, the film quietly incorporates multiple historical and symbolic layers: a Dantean stratification of moral culpability, a post–World War II logic of “necessary…

  • Se7en and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals

    Ressentiment, Bad Conscience, and the Addictive Superego David Fincher’s Se7en can be read as a cinematic enactment of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: a world in which morality has lost its life-affirming function and survives only as punishment, guilt, and compulsive cruelty. The film does not depict sin in a theological sense, but sin…

  • Grace, Law, and the Fear of Power

    New Testament Logic in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Introduction The New Testament is less a moral code than a crisis text. It emerges at a moment when authority has lost credibility, law has become punitive rather than redemptive, and inherited structures can no longer secure meaning. Its central question is not whether power…

  • Watchmen: Salvation After God and After Man.

    Watchmen begins where both Christianity and humanism have already failed. God is absent. Meaning is exhausted. History no longer believes in progress. What remains is power—naked, ironic, technologically amplified—and the question the New Testament and Nietzsche each pose in opposite ways: Who bears responsibility for the world when transcendence is gone? The film does not answer…

  • False Gods After God

    The Boys and the Crisis of Modern Meaning The Boys is not, at its core, a satire of superheroes. It is a drama about what happens after transcendence collapses, but its symbols remain. The series stages a world where god-images persist without God, power persists without meaning, and morality persists without grounding. What results is…

  • Clyde Bruckman and the Way Scully Listens

    X-Files Season 3 Episode 4 Clyde Bruckman knows how everyone dies. He doesn’t say this proudly. He doesn’t say it dramatically. He says it the way someone mentions the weather when it’s already too late to change it. The knowledge hasn’t made him powerful. It’s made him careful. Gentle. Tired. He sees death everywhere, but…

  • Rita and the Trouble with Knowing

    Groundhog Day Reorientated Rita arrives in Punxsutawney already oriented. She listens. She asks real questions. She notices small things. She believes that if people pay attention—to themselves, to one another, to the day in front of them—something honest can still happen. She doesn’t say this out loud. She just lives as if it were true….

  • The Day That Finally Counted

    Groundhog Day Revisited Phil wakes up to the radio again. Same song. Same voice. Same joke about the weather.At first, it feels like bad luck. Then a prank. Then a curse. But beneath the irritation is something quieter and more modern: disorientation. Not fear exactly—more like the ground refusing to stay solid. Time moves, but…