Category: Culture, Politics & Technology
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Severance: A Consciousness That Cannot Bear Itself
by Brenton L. Delp The consciousness that cannot bear itself is not simply a weak consciousness, nor merely a diseased one. It is a divided consciousness: a form of inward life compelled to remain with itself beyond what it can humanly sustain. It does not merely feel pain. It must witness its own pain, manage…
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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
by Brenton L. Delp Mother, Repetition, and Feminine Redemption An absurd film, of an absurd world, done brilliantly. The symbolic center of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die becomes much clearer once one sees that Ingrid is the Man from the Future’s mother. That fact shifts the film from a merely clever science-fiction comedy into…
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“The Man in the High Castle” and the Historical Consciousness of Modernity
by Brenton L. Delp The Man in the High Castle appears, at first glance, as a work of alternate history. The narrative imagines a world in which the Axis powers prevailed in the World War II and divided the United States into rival imperial territories governed by the Greater Nazi Reich and the Japanese Pacific…
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The Modern Tragic Condition and the Daimōn of Shakespeare
by Brenton L. Delp Shakespeare and the Tragic Condition (Revised Analyses) PDF Abstract This essay reads Shakespeare and modern cinema as witnesses to metaphysical instability after symbolic certainty begins to fail. Through Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and later films such as Blade Runner, Se7en, and 12 Monkeys, it argues that modern life is marked by…
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From Sabbath to Screen: Black Mass and the Cinematic Ritual of Horror
The medieval Black Sabbath was not merely an episode in the history of superstition; it was a ritual condensation of a fully articulated theology of evil. In the Sabbath, the metaphysical adversary took liturgical form. The Devil was not only believed—he was enacted. The Black Mass, in particular, represented the inversion of sacrament, the parody…
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True Grit (2010): Pursuit, Payment, and the Long Patience of the Righteous
True Grit, directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, opens not as a myth but as testament. Mattie Ross speaks with declarative calm: “People do not give it credence that a young girl could leave home and go off in the winter time to avenge her father’s blood. But it did happen.” The tone is…
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“Better Just to Kill Him”
Dignity, Endurance, and the Ethics That Remain “I’m just saying, no way to treat a man. Take away his dignity like that. Ain’t right. Better just to kill him.” This line—spoken by Patrick Crump in “Drive” (Season 6) of The X-Files—is not a moment of despair. It is a moral judgment. Crump is not asking…
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Groundhog Day: Phil, Rita and the Trouble with Knowing
Groundhog Day and the Limits of Reflexive Consciousness (Originally written as two essays) Each year on February 2, the ritual of Groundhog Day reenacts a familiar cultural gesture: the repetition of time under the promise that, eventually, something different might happen. The persistence of this ritual gives renewed relevance to Groundhog Day, which remains one of the…
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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…
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“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…
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Mary Shelly
Frankenstein and the Collapse of the Unus Mundus before Modernity Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as a decisive cultural drama in which an older symbolic vision of unity—articulated by figures such as Gerhard Dorn and later psychologized by C. G. Jung—breaks down under the pressure of modern, implicitly Hegelian consciousness. The novel stages the…
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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…