Case Study #12: The Case of the Twist at the End That's Right Outside Your Window

1.       Introduction

Time plus the mass of human creative output would result in a graph as beautiful as any canonized work of art in the classical or modern canon. That macrocosm would be an ur-story told by innumerable contributors, whose voices on their own don’t often make a lot of sense, though we celebrate them for exactly that: circumventing the understandable in innovative ways.

All art, to some degree, is an expression of the artist’s subconscious; if its purpose and message were completely clear, to them and others, we’d call it something else instead, like propaganda or marketing or an example of a mass-produced craft. It’s only over time, looking back over an artist’s oeuvre that we can discern the pattern that suggests what their subconscious might have been working through, such as with Alfred Hitchcock and his tendency to film protagonists stuck in places (whether a physical location or a mistaken identity) or Edward Hopper and his tendency to paint melancholy moments of mid-Century Americana. Hopper, in fact, himself said, “So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect.”[1] Similarly, the broad patterns of culture can be seen as the cris de cœur of society’s subconscious, the aggregate message spelled out by all the individual efforts of artists in a particular epoch.

The word we use for this is zeitgeist, and just as the different periods in an artist’s career can be seen on an interlinked continuum upon close examination (e.g., Pablo Picasso’s shift from his Blue Period to his Rose Period to African Art/Primitivism and then to Cubism), so too do adjacent swathes of zeitgeist overlap and lead into one another. To our conscious mind, the clues that float up from our subconscious seem random and inscrutable, but of course, below the surface, everything’s connected and speaks as one. The march of history as shown through the changing themes in culture is like this too: A Russian Doll that builds and builds upon what has come before, while maintaining the same general outline and thrust up and outward.

Certainly, yes, the same mundane genres persist – for example: romance, melodrama, comedy, sci-fi, mystery, cops and robbers, and so on. But I’m talking about the unique themes that blossom out of the blue, grabbing the spotlight for a while before being nudged off stage by the next, with each speaking in an uncanny way about not just the latest gears to appear in the contraption that is humanity, but also its overall, ongoing trajectory.

Culture, of course, is too broad to cast a net like this uniformly across all its spokes, so I’m turning for examples to a few of those I know particularly well: film and televisions shows from the last couple decades. (When I say television shows here, I also mean shows on streaming channels – Note also that this essay will be full of SPOILERS). What began for me as a growing catalog of examples of a certain theme cast into relief another that followed it, with that making salient a third one entirely, like the concentric circles a rock tossed in water pushes across the surface, right up to our feet standing on the shore.

After running through all the examples I could come up with for these three themes, I’ll return to look across the topography of this rippling, liquid distance and roughly guess at what lies under recent culture’s surface. The names I’ve given these thick strata of zeitgeist are: WHAT IS REALITY?; TWO OR MORE DISTINCT VERSIONS OF THIS WORLD, and DOUBLE/MULTIPLE SELF STORIES. I’m aware that each of these has antecedents from the previous decades (e.g., 1982’s Tron, 1984’s Dreamscape, 1990’s Total Recall and Jacob’s Ladder, 1996’s Multiplicity, and so on), to say nothing of the influence of all the strands of culture leading to them from well before my own lifetime. I’m also aware that many examples of classic genres, such as space and time travel, often touch on one or more of these three themes, but those I’ve tried to leave off to the side, as stalwart but already well-oiled parts in this machine I’m examining. No, what I’m interested in here is the way these crowd together some years so much the phenomenon can’t be ignored; and in the cumulative family resemblances that become evident over the course of a complete read-through.

2.       WHAT IS REALITY?

·         Lost Highway (1997): Directed by David Lynch and written by him and Barry Gifford, in which Bill Pullman stars in the first of Lynch’s three LA-set films about someone experiencing a reality-blurring psychotic break

·         Dark City (1998): Written by Lem Dobbs, David S. Goyer, and director Alex Proyas, in which Rufus Sewell’s John Murdoch discovers that his city is not a normal one on Earth, but rather an experiment on an asteroid conducted by aliens who want to study how people do when the circumstances of their lives are rearranged

·         The Truman Show (1998): Written by Andrew Niccol (inspired by the Twilight Zone episode “Special Service” from the 1988-1989 season, which itself took inspiration from Philip K. Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint) and directed by Peter Weir, in which Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank discovers his whole life is being filmed and everyone surrounding him are actors

·         eXistenZ (1999): Written and directed by David Cronenberg, in which Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Allegra Geller and Jude Law’s Ted Pikul get lost within a biological-based video game, which itself, the characters learn, may be embedded within another game called tranCendenZ, leading someone to state before the closing credits roll, “Tell me the truth, are we still in the game?”

·         Being John Malkovich (1999): Written by Charlie Kaufman and Directed by Spike Jonze, in which a fictionalized version of the titular actor discovers strangers can briefly take over and control his experience of reality

·         The Thirteenth Floor (1999): Written and directed by Josef Rusnak (remaking the 1973 Rainer Werner Fassbinder German television miniseries World on a Wire, which itself was based on Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 novel Simulacron-3), in which Craig Bierko’s Douglas Hall, heir to a virtual reality company, discovers that the Los Angeles he’s been living in is a computer simulation also

·         The Matrix (1999): Written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski (based on one of three screenplays they presented to producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, President of Warner Brothers Pictures, in 1994), in which Keanu Reeves’s Thomas Anderson, AKA the computer hacker Neo, discovers he and almost all the rest of humanity are enslaved by robots, which keep them in a shared dream world

·         The Sixth Sense (1999): Written and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, in which it is revealed at the end that Bruce Willis’s Malcolm Crowe has not been alive, as we’d been led to believe, but has been a ghost ever since he was shot in the beginning

·         Fight Club (1999): Written by Jim Uhls (based on the 1996 book by Chuck Palahniuk) and directed by David Fincher, in which it is revealed in the end that Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden has all along just been a split off persona of Edward Norton’s Narrator character (who tellingly already goes by numerous names throughout the movie)

·         Waking Life (2001): Written and directed by Richard Linklater, in which Wiley Wiggins’s unnamed protagonist comes to understand through his observation of other characters, and his own interactions with them, that he is living in a lucid dream, which may or may not also be real life

·         Mulholland Drive (2001): Written and directed by David Lynch, in which Naomi Watts stars in the second of Lynch’s three LA-set films about someone experiencing a reality-blurring psychotic break

·         The Others (2001): Written and directed by Alejandro Amenábar, in which it is revealed at the end that the characters of Grace Stewart, played by Nicole Kidman, and her two children, whom we’d been led to believe existed as living people in a house, are ghosts haunting it

·         Vanilla Sky (2001): Written and directed by Cameron Crowe (remaking Alejandro Amenábar’s 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos), in which Tom Cruise’s David Aames realizes he is in a lucid dream state, while his body is held in cryonic suspension

·         Memento (2001): Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, in which Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby, who suffers from anterograde amnesia, must continually recreate his reality from scratch via annotated Polaroids and other clues

·         The Matrix Reloaded (2003): Written and directed by the Wachowski siblings, in which Neo and his cohort continue to free the rest of humanity from their shared dream world

·         The Matrix Revolutions (2003): Written and directed by the Wachowski siblings, in which Neo, in the end, sacrifices himself to the machines, renewing his presence in the computer simulation as a planned piece of rebellious code

·         The Machinist (2004): Written by Scott Kosar and directed by Brad Anderson, in which Christian Bale’s Trevor Reznik’s reality, as presented to viewers, is revealed to have been distorted by his guilt over causing a hit and run death a year before

·         Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, in which Jim Carrey’s Joel Barish undergoes a novel procedure that erases memories of his ex-girlfriend, something he changes his mind about, leading to a battle inside himself over how he will perceive reality

·         Lost (2004 – 2010): A television show created by Jeffrey Lieber, JJ Abrams, and Damon Lindelof, in which the survivors of an airplane crash struggle to understand the reality of the island they’re on and its place in the universe they’ve known

·         Paprika (2006): Written by Seishi Minakami and director Satoshi Kon (based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui), in which Megumi Hayashibara’s titular character works to reign in the blended reality created when a machine that allows therapists to enter patients’ dreams is stolen

·         Stranger Than Fiction (2006): Written by Zach Helm an directed by Marc Forster, in which Will Ferrell’s Harold Crick discovers he’s a character in a book being written by Emma Thompson’s Karen Eiffel

·         Inland Empire (2006): Written and directed by David Lynch, in which Laura Dern stars in the third of Lynch’s three LA-set films about someone experiencing a reality-blurring psychotic break

·         Life on Mars, British (2006 – 2007): A television series created by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan, and Ashley Pharoah, in which a 2006 Manchester police officer is hit by a car and awakens in 1973 as an employee at the same police station, with the twist being that he has manifested this reality while in a coma in the future

·         Synecdoche, New York (2008): Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Caden Cotard directs actors in a reproduction of his life over the course of many years, to the point that, for film viewers, it becomes unclear if they are seeing his reality or his simulation of reality

·         Sleep Dealer (2008): Written by David Riker and director Alex Rivera, in which characters can buy and upload other people’s memories and experiences, obscuring which aspects of their lived reality have been their own and which have not

·         Life on Mars, American (2008 - 2009): in this version (one of half a dozen foreign adaptations of the hit British series), the reveal is that the police officer who’d envisioned himself bouncing back and forth between the 1970s and early 2000s was actually dreaming while cryogenically frozen in a space ship approaching Mars

·         Inception (2010): Written and directed by Christopher Nolan (based on an 80 page treatment he presented to Warner Brothers in 2002, well before Paprika came out, disproving accusations he ripped off the Japanese film), in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb leads his team ever deeper into someone’s dreams, with some characters getting stuck and losing their sense of what is reality and what is not

·         Shutter Island (2010): Written by Laeta Kalodridis (based on the Dennis Lehane novel) and directed by Martin Scorsese, in which it is revealed at the end that Leonardo DiCaprio’s US Marshal character is in fact himself an inmate of the mental institution on the island and all his interactions over several days that seemed to involve him investigating a woman’s disappearance were facilitated by staff members play acting, to help him toward catharsis

·         Birdman (2014): Written by Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., Armando Bó, and director Alejandro Iñárritu, in which the mental health struggles of Michael Keaton’s harried Broadway actor Riggan Thomson cast in doubt the veracity of all that viewers see on screen

·         Mr. Robot (2015 -2019): A television series created by Sam Esmail, in which Rami Malek’s Elliot Alderson hacker character is revealed to be experiencing a version of reality fractured by his mental illness

3.       TWO OR MORE DISTINCT VERSIONS OF THIS WORLD

·         TRON: Legacy (2010): Written by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and directed by Joseph Kosinski, in which Garrett Hedlund’s Sam Flynn, the son of the original film’s protagonist, receives a message from his father and enters the iconic virtual world himself

·         Source Code (2011): Written by Ben Ripley (with clear inspiration from 1993’s “Groundhog Day,” written by Danny Rubin and director Harold Ramis) and directed by Duncan Jones, in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s Colter Stevens is sent by the military again and again into the final minutes of memory in the mind of a man who died in a train explosion, to try and track down who planted the bomb, to the point that in the end Colter Stevens figures out how to stay in that other version of the world

·         Another Earth (2011): Written by Brit Marling and director Mike Cahill, in which Marling’s Rhoda Williams enters a contest to win a trip to a newly discovered mirror Earth

·         Melancholia (2011): Written and directed by Lars von Trier, in which Kirsten Dunst’s Justine is getting married on a big estate just as a suddenly-discovered rogue planet is due to impact with Earth [technically this is the only film included in these lists that doesn’t actually fit in its category, but the superficial similarities to the films on either side of it are too uncanny to ignore]

·         Upside Down (2012): Written and directed by Juan Diego Solanas, in which Jim Sturgess’s Adam Kirk and Kirsten Dunst’s Eden Moore fall in love across two worlds that are directly opposite each other, to the point of having mirror image gravitational pulls

·         Coherence (2013): Written by Alex Manugian and director James Ward Byrkit, in which a comet’s passing reveals to a group of dinner party guests and hosts that a house down the road is full of their counterparts from another world

·         Comet (2014): Written and directed by Sam Esmail, in which the romance of Justin Long’s Dell and Emmy Rossum’s Kimberly is shown playing out between two parallel universes, after meeting during a meteor shower

·         Parallels (2015): Written by Laura Harkcom and director Christopher Leone, in which four characters are thrown into drastically different alternate Earths

·         The Leftovers (2014 – 2017): A television show created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta (based on the latter’s 2011 novel), in which it is revealed in the end that the people who have gone missing from the world have populated another version of Earth

·         The Man in the High Castle (2015 – 2019): A television show created by Frank Spotnitz (based on the 1962 novel by Philip K. Dick), in which alternate versions of Earth can be accessed via a cave in the Adirondacks, as well as via meditation and death

·         The OA (2016 – 2019): A television show created by Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, in which a group of people slowly become aware of alternate versions of Earth, with the final season actually taking us to a meta-level, as it ends with a character perceiving actors on a television stage set working on an earlier scene we saw

·         Counterpart (2017 – 2019): A television show created by Justin Marks, in which J.K. Simmons plays a low-level espionage clerk in one world and an ruthless field agent in another, connected mirror world

·         Dark (2017 – 2020): A German television show created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, in which not only is time travel discovered to be possible via a cave beneath a nuclear power plant (in addition to a couple other methods), but so is travel between alternate Earths

·         Castle Rock, Season 1 (2018): A television show created by Dustin Shaw and Dustin Thomason (based on Stephen King’s oeuvre), in which a young boy and a young man each end up in the other’s mirror world, causing a ripple effect of bad events

·         The Legend of Korra (2012 – 2014): A television show created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, as a follow-up to the popular cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender, in which, among other feats, the heroine reopens the portals between the Human and Spirit Worlds

·         She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018 – 2020): A richly reimagined television reboot of the 1980s cartoon created by Noelle Stevenson, in which, among other feats, the heroine transplants the planet Etheria out of an empty dimension back into the greater universe

4.       DOUBLE/MULTIPLE SELF STORIES

·         Palindromes (2004): Written and Directed by Todd Solondz, in which the protagonist, ostensibly a 13 year-old girl, is played in different scenes by eight different actors and actresses

·         The Prestige (2006): Written by Jonathan Nolan and director Christopher Nolan (based on Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel), in which it is revealed that of two competing stage magicians one has been achieving his final trick by cloning himself, then immediately killing one of his selves; while the other has spent a lifetime of performing hard to figure out tricks by continually switching places with his twin who has been disguised as his assistant all along

·         I’m Not There (2007): Written by Oren Moverman and director Todd Haynes, in which six different actors and actresses play the musician Bob Dylan at different points in his life

·         Moon (2009): Written by Nathan Parker and directed by Duncan Jones, in which Sam Rockwell’s lunar worker Sam Bell discovers that he is one of many clones with a very limited lifespan that the mining company cycles through to save costs

·         Surrogates (2009): Written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris and directed by Jonathan Mostow, in which Bruce Willis’s FBI agent Tom Greer investigates a murder in a world where people control synthetic versions of themselves to enjoy the life vicariously, from the safety of their homes

·         Enemy (2013): Written by Javier Gullón (based on the 2002 book The Double by Jose Saramago novel) and directed by Denis Villeneuve, in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays both a history teacher named Adam Bell and his doppelganger, an actor named Anthony Claire

·         The Double (2013): Written by Avi Korine and director Richard Ayoade (based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novel), in which Jesse Eisenberg plays both the meek Simon James and his doppelganger, the assertive James Simon

·         Orphan Black (2013 – 2017): A television show created by Graeme Manson and John Fawcett, in which Tatiana Maslany plays five distinct main clones, as well as several other secondary ones

·         The Reconstruction of William Zero (2014): Written by Conal Byrne and director Dan Bush, in which different versions of a cloned geneticist try to gain dominance over each other

·         The One I Love (2014): Written by Justin Lader and directed by Charlie McDowell, in which a couple, played by Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss, go to a special house recommended by their marriage counselor and they discover that a cottage on the property contains doppelgangers of each of them

·         Identicals (2015): Written and directed by Samuel Pummell, in which Lachlan Nieboer’s Slater must fight off a copy of himself created by a corporation

·         What Happened to Monday (2017): Written by Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson and directed by Tommy Wirkola, in which Noomi Rapace plays identical septuplet sisters who must all pose as one person, taking turns leaving home, in order to circumvent 2043’s overpopulation-caused one-child policy

·         Gemni Man (2019): Written by David Benioff, Billy Ray, and Darren Lemke and directed by Ang Lee, in which Will Smith plays both 51 year-old assassin Henry Brogan and Jackson Brogan, AKA Junior, as well as Senior, two clones of himself that he must fight off

5.       Conclusion

The facile explanation I remember hearing during the heyday of the WHAT IS REALITY? zeitgeist was that it reflected our uncertainty about how to proceed in grasping the world, due to the increasingly central presence of the internet in our lives. While it’s true that internet usage was skyrocketing in those turn-of-the-century years, I don’t think that’s quite the answer – and this isn’t something I could have pinned down without the further passage of time that allowed the two subsequent zeitgeists to roll out all their examples, thus casting the first into relief. With TWO OR MORE DISTINCT VERSIONS OF THIS WORLD and DOUBLE/MULTIPLE SELF STORIES added into the picture, we can see that these themes nest into each other, with overlaps happening between them in many cases, because in fact they are just the progression of the same dire message: We are losing our collective mind.

I began at the top here by talking about the way art, both at the individual and societal level, is almost a lockbox of subconscious intentions. Paradoxically, though, I also believe the treasure in there is hidden in plain sight, on the surface of the container. I got this idea from the modern philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who wrote on Twitter in 2018 (distilling an idea he’s written about in his books): “There is more truth in the mask we wear, in the game we play, the fiction we obey and follow, than in what is concealed beneath the mask.”[2] In this sense, then, the literal terms of the three zeitgeists I’ve identified tell us all we need to know. It’s just as easy, however, to discern additional evidence to support this thesis, when viewing these cultural trends overlaid upon corresponding changes in America during the same timeframe.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the prevalence of mental disorders did not change over the course of the 1990s.[3] In contrast to that period of stability, a recent American Psychological Association study found that “Between 2008 and 2017, the amount of adults that experienced serious psychological distress in the last month increased in most age groups,” with a decline only showing for those 65 and older and the greatest increases happening among adolescents and young adults.[4] Now, in 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website states that “Nearly one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (46.6 million in 2017).”[5] With that affliction affecting so many individuals in our country, it would go without saying that its imprint could be seen across society in wider ways.

Along that line, in August 2019, Foreign Policy in Focus published an op-ed by John Feffer (originally published in the English language Korean periodical Hankyoreh) titled “Is America Crazy?” Its subtitle is “Mass shootings, economic inequality, a racist president: have we grown dangerously accustomed to a country gone mad?” Midway through his recitation of all the shocking things that occur here with such regularity that we’ve practically become inured to them, Feller writes:

People from other industrialized countries must think that the United States has simply gone insane. It is a nation of terrible extremes: grotesque wealth and horrific poverty, brilliant minds and widespread ignorance, high rates of volunteerism and endemic violence. America seems to be suffering from some kind of bipolar disorder with pockets of manic energy and large areas of deep depression.

The way his insight dovetails with what I’ve written about here warrants these additional quotes:

Individuals with mental disorders can seek professional help. They can take medication and enter psychotherapy. They can check themselves into a hospital.

But what happens when a country is crazy?

…

People with psychosis don’t realize that they’re in a psychological crisis. America has similarly lost touch with reality. Much of the country doesn’t even realize that there’s a problem.[6]

Unsurprisingly, Feller points to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 as the apotheosis of the direction we’ve long been heading. Trump’s elevation to the highest office wasn’t a fluke, as much as Democrats tried to paint it as such. He perfectly represented the broken psyches of the 62,979,879 Americans who voted for him – and perhaps even a large percentage of the roughly 100 million people who didn’t even bother to vote back then.[7]

Trump himself has frequently been scrutinized as a prime example of the “dark triad”: psychosis, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. In fact, in 2017, Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee spearheaded the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, and she has continued to publish articles on the topic, such as July 2020’s “Yale psychiatrist: Trump’s psychosis has infected his followers. Here’s how to get them better” in Salon.[8]

The problem, though, is that Trump isn’t the problem; the mental health issues that beset much of America preceded him, and, while he has exasperated them through his corrupt and negligent conduct as president, they will find unified outlets even with him off the world’s stage. In fact, we can see that now, with the jaw-dropping rise of the cult conspiracy movement QAnon, which in just a couple years of existence has grown to have millions of followers, spread across 71 countries, with 15 congressional candidates blatantly promoting it in the summer of 2020 and numerous people committing acts of violence in the name of its nonsensical dogma.[9] As Norman J. Ornstein writes in in his January 2020 New York Times review of Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized, “Trump is more a vessel for our division than the cause, and […] his departure will not provide any magical cure.”[10]

Klein’s thesis, Ornstein explains, is that “There is a logic to our polarization. It has become a kind of loop. As the public has polarized, in part because of the behavior of political actors and institutions (including media), the actors and institutions respond by behaving in more polarized ways – which further polarizes the public, and so on and so on.”[11] What’s interesting, though, is that the beginning of this giant entropy spiral can be traced back to just before the first of the three cultural trends I discussed here. A couple months before his book came out, the online periodical Visual Capitalist published an article, based on a large Pew Research survey, titled “Charts: America’s Political Divide, 1994 – 2017.” The colored, motion graphic at the top depicts two mountains, one red and one, beginning so close together they are nearly one, with a large, dull purple overlap between them, and then pulling apart until the two peaks are distant from each other and the third color is almost flat. The author, Iman Ghosh, writes, “In 1994, the general public was more mixed in their allegiances, but a significant divergence started to occur from 2011 onward.”[12]

2011 is around when the WHAT IS REALITY? zeitgeist began to transition into the TWO OR MORE DISTINCT VERSIONS OF THIS WORLD one. Look the distrust in professionals (professional scientists, doctors, journalists, politicians) that has led to not just the popularity of QAnon, but also skepticism about Covid-19 data and even more basic facts, such as the planet’s spherical shape: The WHAT IS REALITY problem is still endemic in society, even as the other two cultural trends overtake and subsume it. The stage we are at now could augur an escape from all this, though, since the DOUBLE/MULTIPLE SELF STORIES zeitgeist represents intervention with oneself, a hard but necessary epiphany on the road to reconstituting a whole, healthy psyche.

I think of such a scene not in one of these recent pieces of entertainment, but from back in the first of these zeitgeists, when Christian Bale, the titular character in 2004’s The Machinist, stares into his bathroom mirror – effectively stretching ahead to the third zeitgeist by turning his reflection into a double – and intones over and over, with more and more sadness, “I know who you are!” It is then that all the pieces fall into place: the tragic death he caused, his guilt and repression of key memories, and the convoluted distortions of reality he’s arduously maintained to escape all that.

Logically talking to people who likely are suffering some kind of mental health imbalance does nothing to improve them. In many cases, yes, they need the aid of pharmaceuticals. Also, though, they need to have that looking in the mirror moment, and that’s not something others can easily bring about. On a grand scale, however, perhaps it’s more doable, especially when it’s less success with individuals we’re concerned with than steering society as a whole incrementally away from an iceberg in the distance that it’s failing to acknowledge. Arts and culture are about the only steering wheels and engine levers most of us have access to, as far as this goes, and, while it may seem like the pressure we each exert on the machinery of humanity is miniscule, taken all together the trends of what we create and which of others’ creations we glom onto can have a massive effect, not just in painting a delayed picture of what’s been going on in our collective subconscious, but also in nudging many of us in the moment toward the clear, calm waters where the best reflections and epiphanies occur.

[1] Wagstaff, Sheena, Ed., Edward Hopper (London, Tate Publishing), 2004, p. 71

[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/slavojiek/status/1025718235906408448?lang=en

[3] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsa043266

[4] https://www.ajmc.com/view/mental-health-issues-on-the-rise-among-adolescents-young-adults

[5] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness.shtml

[6] https://fpif.org/is-america-crazy/?fbclid=IwAR12jHC00N3CqyJ0lI0gp5pV42Ddi6UkfYw6Xv0OkRaKsm-23O5eZVh2bbo

[7] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/12/about-100-million-people-couldnt-be-bothered-to-vote-this-year/

[8] https://www.salon.com/2020/07/22/trumps-psychosis-has-infected-his-followers-heres-how-to-get-them-better_partner/

[9] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-qanon-followers-are-dangerous-cult-how-save-someone-ncna1239828

[10] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/books/review/why-were-polarized-ezra-klein.html

[11] ibid

[12] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charts-americas-political-divide-1994-2017/