America

by George Gordon Byron

THE NAME of Commonwealth is past and gone,
Over three fractions of the groaning globe:—
Venice is crushed, and Holland deigns to own
A sceptre, and endures a purple robe:
If the free Switzer yet bestrides alone
His chainless mountains, ‘t is but for a time;
For tyranny of late has cunning grown,
And, in its own good season, tramples down
The sparkles of our ashes. One great clime,
Whose vigorous offspring by dividing ocean
Are kept apart, and nursed in the devotion
Of Freedom, which their fathers fought for, and
Bequeathed,—a heritage of heart and hand,
And proud distinction from each other land,
Whose sons must bow them at a monarch’s motion,
As if his senseless sceptre were a wand
Full of the magic of exploded science,—
Still one great clime, in full and free defiance,
Yet rears her crest, unconquered and sublime,
Above the far Atlantic! She has taught
Her Esau-brethren that the haughty flag,
The floating fence of Albion’s feebler crag,
May strike to those whose red right hands have bought
Rights cheaply earned with blood. Still, still, forever
Better, though each man’s life-blood were a river
That it should flow and overflow, than creep
Through thousand lazy channels in our veins,
Dammed, like the dull canal, with locks and chains,
And moving, as a sick man in his sleep,
Three paces, and then faltering: better be
Where the extinguished Spartans still are free,
In their proud charnel of Thermopylae—
Than stagnate in our marsh; or o’er the deep
Fly, and one current to the ocean add,
One spirit to the souls our fathers had,
One freeman more, America, to thee!

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), known as Lord Byron, was an English poet.

Liberty Tree

By Thomas Paine

In a chariot of light from the regions of day,
The Goddess of Liberty came;
Ten thousand celestials directed the way
And hither conducted the dame.
A fair budding branch from the gardens above,
Where millions with millions agree,
She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love,
And the plant she named Liberty Tree.

The celestial exotic struck deep in the ground,
Like a native it flourished and bore;
The fame of its fruit drew the nations around,
To seek out this peaceable shore.
Unmindful of names or distinction they came,
For freemen like brothers agree;
With one spirit endued, they one friendship pursued,
And their temple was Liberty Tree.

Beneath this fair tree, like the patriarchs of old,
Their bread in contentment they ate,
Unvexed with the troubles of silver and gold,
The cares of the grand and the great.
With timber and tar they Old England supplied,
And supported her power on the sea;
Her battles they fought, without getting a groat,
For the honor of Liberty Tree.

But hear, O ye swains, ‘tis a tale most profane,
How all the tyrannical powers,
Kings, Commons, and Lords, are uniting amain
To cut down this guardian of ours;
From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms
Through the land let the sound of it flee,
Let the far and the near, all unite with a cheer,
In defence of our Liberty Tree.

Thomas Paine (1736–1809) was an English-born American Founding Father, inventor, political philosopher, and statesman best known for writing the pamphlet “Common Sense.”

The New Colossus

By Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) was an American author, poet, translator, and Jewish activist.

America

By Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,|
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Walter Whitman Jr (1819–1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and novelist.

America for Me

By Henry Van Dyke

‘Tis fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings,—
But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things.

So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.

I like the German fir-woods, in green battalions drilled;
I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing fountains filled;
But, oh, to take your hand, my dear, and ramble for a day
In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her way!

I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack:
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free,—
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.

Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) was an American author, educator, and clergyman, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands.

Betsy’s Battle Flag

By Minna Irving

From dusk till dawn the livelong night
She kept the tallow dips alight,
And fast her nimble fingers flew
To sew the stars upon the blue.
With weary eyes and aching head
She stitched the stripes of white and red,
And when the day came up the stair
Complete across a carven chair
Hung Betsy’s battle flag.

Like shadows in the evening gray
The Continentals filed away,
With broken boots and ragged coats,
But hoarse defiance in their throats;
They bore the marks of want and cold,
And some were lame and some were old,
And some with wounds untended bled,
But floating bravely overhead
Was Betsy’s battle flag.

When fell the battle’s leaden rain,
The soldier hushed his moans of pain
And raised his dying head to see
King George’s troopers turn and flee.
Their charging column reeled and broke,
And vanished in the rolling smoke,
Before the glory of the stars,
The snowy stripes, and scarlet bars
Of Betsy’s battle flag.

The simple stone of Betsy Ross
Is covered now with mold and moss,
But still her deathless banner flies,
And keeps the color of the skies.
A nation thrills, a nation bleeds,
A nation follows where it leads,
And every man is proud to yield
His life upon a crimson field
For Betsy’s battle flag!

Minna Irving (1864–1940) was an American writer and poet.

Liberty Bell at the World’s Fair

By Charles Eugene Banks

Grand old bell, thy earlier mission but to voice on Sabbath morning —
As an angel’s fingers pressed thee,
As an angel’s wings caressed thee,
Softly chiming from the steeple,
“Rest ye, rest ye, O my people!”
In mellifluous tones and tender with an undertone of warning, —
Changed thy speech, as all men know.
On that morning long ago.
When thy stern majestic ring
Bade defiance to a king.

In the streets are gathered thousands waiting for the message grand
That shall loose their bonds and make them freemen in a freeman’s land, —
That shall by a single motion
Send defiance o’er the ocean,
Signal ships are outward pointed,
Signal ships that homeward run,
That a prince by priest anointed
Is but man when all is done.

Brave men breathless stand below thee, pale of cheek but stern of brow,
Praying for th’ proclamation—moments are as hours now.
See! the hand uplifted wavers,
Falls — the bellman straining there,
Sends the song on rhythmic quavers
Out upon the dancing air,
“They have signed it, O my people!”
Cries the bell from out the steeple,
“Independence! Independence! Liberty is newly crowned!”
Chorus all the waiting thousands till the old bell’s voice is drowned.

But that glorious proclamation.
Swiftly everywhere it ran
And demanded of each nation
Equal rights for every man.
How the spirit of Columbia into every heart has grown
Best is told by yon White City — symbolizing all that’s good.
East and West are come together — there is neither pole nor zone,
There is neither slave nor monarch; but where late the willow stood.
Stands the wonder of the ages. Stroke the old bell’s rusty side,
Right has triumphed and before her cowers Tyranny and Pride.

Charles Eugene Banks (1852–1932) was an American journalist, author, poet, historian, and orator.

Free America

ascribed to Dr. Joseph Warren, 1774

That seat of Science, Athens,
And earth’s proud mistress, Rome;
Where now are all their glories?
We scarce can find a tomb.
Then guard your rights, Americans,
Nor stoop to lawless sway;
Oppose, oppose, oppose, oppose,
For North America.

We led fair Freedom hither,
And lo, the desert smiled!
A paradise of pleasure
Was opened in the wild!
Your harvest, bold Americans,
No power shall snatch away!
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

Torn from a world of tyrants,
Beneath this western sky,
We formed a new dominion,
A land of liberty:
The world shall own we’re masters here;
Then hasten on the day:
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

Proud Albion bowed to Cæsar,
And numerous lords before;
To Picts, to Danes, to Normans,
And many masters more:
But we can boast, Americans,
We’ve never fallen a prey;
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

God bless this maiden climate,
And through its vast domain
May hosts of heroes cluster,
Who scorn to wear a chain:
And blast the venal sycophant
That dares our rights betray;
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

Lift up your hands, ye heroes,
And swear with proud disdain,
The wretch that would ensnare you,
Shall lay his snares in vain:
Should Europe empty all her force,
We’ll meet her in array,
And fight and shout, and shout and fight
For North America.

Some future day shall crown us,
The masters of the main,
Our fleets shall speak in thunder
To England, France, and Spain;
And the nations over the ocean spread
Shall tremble and obey
The sons, the sons, the sons, the sons
Of brave America.

Dr. Joseph Warren (1741–1775) was an American physician and one of the most important members of the Boston Patriot movement.

On Independence

By Jonathan Mitchell Sewall

Come all you brave soldiers, both valiant and free,
It’s for Independence we all now agree;
Let us gird on our swords and prepare to defend
Our liberty, property, ourselves and our friends.

In a cause that’s so righteous, come let us agree,
And from hostile invaders set America free,
The cause is so glorious we need not to fear
But from merciless tyrants we’ll set ourselves clear.

Heaven’s blessing attending us, no tyrant shall say
That Americans e’er to such monsters gave way,
But fighting we’ll die in America’s cause
Before we’ll submit to tyrannical laws.

George the Third, of Great Britain, no more shall he reign,
With unlimited sway o’er these free States again;
Lord North, nor old Bute, nor none of their clan,
Shall ever be honor’d by an American.

May Heaven’s blessing descend on our United States,
And grant that the union may never abate;
May love, peace, and harmony ever be found,
For to go hand in hand America round.

Upon our grand Congress may Heaven bestow
Both wisdom and skill our good to pursue;
On Heaven alone dependent we’ll be.
But from all earthly tyrants we mean to be free.

Unto our brave Generals may Heaven give skill
Our armies to guide, and the sword for to wield,
May their hands taught to war, and their fingers to fight,
Be able to put British armies to flight.

And now, brave Americans, since it is so,
That we are independent, we’ll have them to know
That united we are, and united we’ll be,
And from all British tyrants we’ll try to keep free.

May Heaven smile on us in all our endeavors,
Safe guard our seaports, our towns, and our rivers,
Keep us from invaders by land and by sea,
And from all who’d deprive us of our liberty.

Jonathan Mitchell Sewall (1748–1808) was an American lawyer and poet.

America the Beautiful

By Katharine Lee Bates

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood|
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929) was an American author and poet. She wrote three versions of “America. A Poem for July 4” in 1893, 1904, and 1911. It was set to music composed by Samual A. Ward and retitled “America the Beautiful.” The 1911 version is printed above.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015
176 pp. $9.90 (paperback).

Mother Courage and Her Children is widely regarded as a brilliant, clinical dissection of wartime economies and as the pinnacle of epic theater.1 Yet its precise theme masks a profound dramatic failure. By taking away the titular character’s power to choose and using her merely to prove a point, playwright Bertolt Brecht denies her the moral realization that gives tragedy its meaning. What might have been a profound human drama instead becomes a political demonstration—one that replaces the struggle of a person capable of moral choices with the static passivity of an ideological illustration.

Critics praise the play’s intellectual ambition, structural innovation, and use of the “alienation effect,” a technique intended to discourage audiences from becoming emotionally absorbed in the drama and to instead encourage them to analyze the effects of the material conditions at work on stage.2

Mother Courage and Her Children takes place during the Thirty Years’ War and follows Anna Fierling (known as Mother Courage) as she travels across Europe with a wagon selling food, alcohol, and supplies to soldiers. War enables her livelihood; over the course of the play, however, the conflict that sustains her business gradually destroys her family.

At first glance, the structure of the play appears ideally suited to tragedy: A parent attempts to survive within a brutal social environment only to discover that the system she depends on exacts a terrible personal price. In classical tragedy, such suffering leads to recognition; the protagonist comes to understand the moral meaning of her own actions. Aristotle called this moment anagnorisis: a realization that transforms misfortune into insight and gives the tragedy its emotional and philosophic resolution.3 Brecht, however, deliberately denies us this moment. As he argued: “it is not the business of the playwright to arm Mother Courage with insight. . . she is a merchant, and her business is her ruin.”4

His thesis is that war is an economic system that rewards and destroys its participants simultaneously. To underscore the inescapable nature of this system, Brecht ensures that Mother Courage never learns.5 By denying her a moment of realization, he attempts to demonstrate that, once one is profit-bound to the machinery of war, there is no exit. She never confronts the lethal connection between her livelihood and her losses—she simply continues to pull the wagon and so remains a prisoner of her own choices.

This lack of development is a direct result of Brecht’s theory of epic theater. He does not want us to feel empathy for Mother Courage—he wants us to judge her. This distancing effect is established in the very first scene, when the cold logic of the wartime economy is laid bare. A recruiter challenges Mother Courage, singing “Like the war to nourish you? / Have to feed it something too” (13).

With this line, Brecht begins to reveal Mother Courage’s role not as a developing human soul but as a figure driven by the mercenary logic of the battlefield. She acts as a small entrepreneur seeking to profit from the slaughter, attempting the impossible task of remaining morally detached from the very violence that sustains her livelihood.

Nothing illustrates Brecht’s subordination of drama to ideology more chillingly than the death of her grown son Swiss Cheese in scene three.6 When Mother Courage learns that a bribe of two hundred florins can save him, her immediate reaction is not a mother’s desperation but a merchant’s calculation. She pivots quickly to haggling: “Two hundred’s too much for me . . . tell them I’ll pay hundred and twenty florins, else it’s all off” (40–42).

This moment is the structural heart of Brecht’s demonstration. Even with her son’s life on the line, Mother Courage fails to earn her nickname. She attempts to justify her hesitation by claiming that she must “keep a bit back” to ensure that she isn’t shoved into a ditch by the next “Tom, Dick and Harry.” She is so focused on her startup capital for a new life—calculating that, with eighty florins, she could “fill a pack with goods and start again”—that she explicitly allows the murder of her own son. The cost of this economic hesitation is exactly: “Eleven bullets they gave him, that’s all” (40–44).

The scene concludes with a moment that strips the protagonist of her last vestige of humanity. She denies her own son, driven by the belief that her survival and business depend on it. As a sergeant shows her the body and asks “Know him?”, she simply shakes her head. In Brecht’s view, this is the ultimate evidence that the wartime system destroys the human soul. But from a dramatic standpoint, it feels like the conclusion of a mathematical proof. Brecht ensures that the “haggling,” as an army chaplain later describes her cold negotiation, leads to death so that the audience will learn the lesson. By doing so, he succeeds in making a political point, but he fails to allow Mother Courage the moral recognition that would help the audience understand the intellectual point by making them feel the tragedy of her story—which is the entire point of fiction.

Brecht’s ideological point is clear: Mother Courage has become so corrupted that even the life of her child is subject to a financial cost-benefit analysis. But from a dramatic perspective, this scene reveals Brecht’s fundamental misunderstanding of the basic purpose of fiction. The way in which Brecht has his protagonist prioritize her wagon over her son’s life doesn’t explore the depths of human grief or the complexity of a mother’s soul—it is economic soapboxing. He denies her the visceral, desperate response we expect from a parent, ensuring instead that she remains a hollow vessel for his critique of war as the ultimate “capitalist” enterprise.

The reason lies in his theory of epic theater.7 Unlike genuine drama, which gives the audience reasons to identify emotionally with the characters, Brecht seeks in his plays to maintain distance between audience and performance. Songs interrupt scenes rather than adding to or connecting them, as they would in a musical or with a classical chorus. Additionally, narratively fragmented episodes replace continuous narrative development, and characters often function less as psychologically complex individuals than as archetypes of social roles.

These techniques are intended to provoke analysis rather than empathy and are predicated on the false dichotomy that the two are necessarily opposed. Brecht operates on the belief that, for the audience to observe the mechanisms of war and society objectively, such mechanisms must be stripped of emotional weight. However, this rigid separation ignores the possibility that empathizing with Mother Courage could actually deepen the viewer’s understanding of her context. Instead, Brecht asks his audience to judge the system, assuming that one cannot—or should not—both feel and think simultaneously.

Within this framework, Mother Courage becomes a figure illustrating a broader social dynamic: the small entrepreneur who attempts to profit from war while convincing herself that she can remain morally detached from its consequences. Brecht’s point is clear: War does not merely destroy lives directly—it also encourages individuals to participate in systems that ultimately destroy them. Yet the method Brecht employs to deliver his message comes at a cost.

As the play progresses, Mother Courage suffers a series of devastating losses. However, these are not mere accidents of war—they are tragedies in which Courage is deeply complicit. Each child’s death is a direct consequence of her prioritizing the “business of war” over the child’s safety. Her son Eilif is recruited while Mother Courage is distracted by a potential sale, a choice that exposes a moral vacuum created by his mother’s priorities. While her daughter Kattrin chooses to trade her life for the safety of a city, Courage is elsewhere, attempting to profit from the city’s impending destruction. Courage’s complicity lies not in pulling the trigger but in her absence; by prioritizing the “logic of the wagon” over her presence as a mother, she invites the tragedy she claims to be working to prevent.

These moments could provide opportunities for psychological transformation if she were to reconsider the ruthless assumptions that govern her life.8 Instead, the play systematically prevents such development.

At the conclusion of the drama, after losing all of her children, Mother Courage does not undergo a change of character. She does not abandon the behaviors that destroyed her family. She does not reach a moment of moral clarity. Instead, she straps herself to the wagon and continues following the army.

From Brecht’s perspective, this ending is essential. If Mother Courage were to learn from her experience, the audience might leave the theater with a sense of emotional resolution. Brecht wishes to deny that resolution—not as an end in itself but as a means to focus the audience’s attention on the system that traps her.9

The problem with this approach is that it transforms Mother Courage from a dramatic protagonist into a didactic device. Her suffering illustrates Brecht’s thesis, but it does not produce a fully realized human journey. Instead of witnessing a person grappling with moral consequences, the audience observes a deterministic demonstration of Brecht’s economic views. Any work that seeks to demonstrate a truth about the human experience while denying its characters humanity necessarily undermines itself.

Great drama emerges from the tension between individuals (or within the same individual) over differing ideas. Great characters embody philosophic or sociological principles, but they also challenge them through their actions and choices. When a playwright removes that tension from the story instead of letting the characters resolve it, the drama loses its human center.

To be fair, Mother Courage contains moments of undeniable theatrical power. The recurring image of Mother Courage pulling her wagon across a devastated landscape is one of the most haunting symbols in modern theater. The wagon represents survival, commerce, stubbornness, and tragic blindness all at once. The play also captures an uncomfortable truth about human behavior in times of conflict: Individuals frequently adapt to destructive systems rather than resist them. They rationalize participation in those systems even when the consequences become increasingly catastrophic. Brecht portrays this dynamic with remarkable precision.

The true tragedy of Mother Courage and Her Children is not that the protagonist loses everything but that she learns nothing. In the final moments of scene twelve, after burying her last child, Mother Courage performs an act that is both physically and symbolically devastating: She harnesses herself to the cart (86–88). This stage direction is the culmination of Brecht’s ideological trap. Throughout the play, her children were the ones who pulled the wagon; they were the motors of her business. With them dead, she does not abandon the trade that killed them. Instead, she replaces them, declaring “Hope I can pull cart all right by meself . . . Got to get back in business again.” By the time the offstage chorus begins the final song, the play’s thesis has been fully realized. The lyrics remind us that “The war is dragging on a bit / Another hundred years or longer,” and that although “the dead remain,” life—or rather, the machine of war—simply “staggers to its feet again.” Courage’s decision to shout “Take me along!” to the passing regiment is not a sign of resilience—it is a sign of total moral capitulation (88). She has devolved from a hopeful opportunist into a perpetuator of the very wartime economy she once sought to exploit.

Nearly a century after its creation, Brecht’s critically acclaimed play continues to provoke admiration for its intellectual rigor. He succeeded brilliantly in showing us how people can hollow out their own souls. However, by removing the tension central to fiction, Brecht sacrificed the human center of his drama.

In a genuine tragedy, the protagonist’s suffering leads to a transformative insight that gives the loss meaning. In Mother Courage, there is no such insight—only the endless, circular motion of the wagon. Brecht wanted the audience to learn the lesson that his character could not. But in his attempt, he turned what could have been a profound human journey into a cold political demonstration. The audience leaves the theater with a clear thesis, but the character remains trapped in a loop of blindness. In the end, Brecht’s ideological commitment is so absolute that it denies Mother Courage the one thing she needed to become truly tragic: the agency to understand her own story.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Written by John Logan
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Starring Jaafar Jackson, Nia Long, Colman Domingo
Distributed by Lionsgate Films (United States)
Running time: 127 minutes
Rated PG-13 for language and brief violence

In February 2020, I published an in-depth critical analysis of the child abuse allegations against Michael Jackson that took nearly one thousand hours to research and write. I concluded decisively that Jackson was innocent and that his acquittal was entirely just; every single accusation of child abuse made against him was either proven to be impossible, completely unsubstantiated, or in a few rare cases, “supported” only by the most threadbare wisps of circumstantial evidence (and even that is debatable). When Michael, a musical biopic about the King of Pop, was announced, I was eager to gauge both its factual accuracy and its artistic merit.

The film opens in 1966, when Jackson was eight years old. By then, the Jackson 5 already had been practicing and performing small gigs for at least three years. Jackson’s abusive father Joe (Colman Domingo) drills the five boys relentlessly and beats them—Jackson in particular—for trivial mistakes. Within the first few minutes, we are treated to an unexpectedly skilled re-creation of young Jackson’s (Juliano Krue Valdi) singing voice. Valdi, who was just nine years old during filming, is an incredible singer with nearly perfect pitch, and his performance foreshadows a level of craftsmanship rarely seen today—one that the film’s musical numbers maintain throughout its duration.

For a biopic about a man who was unquestionably one of the most skilled singers and dancers of all time, singing and dancing that are merely “good” would not do. Jackson’s real-life nephew, Jaafar, portrays the adult version of his uncle with uncanny accuracy; his dance moves, his singing voice, his speaking voice, and even his subtly nervous facial expressions are so dead-on that, at times, one forgets that it’s not Jackson on screen.

Although Jackson’s unique style and flawless precision on stage can never be replicated exactly, Jaafar comes as close as anyone could. In most dancing scenes, Jaafar—not a stunt double or professional dancer—mirrors Jackson’s extremely difficult repertoire with undeniable artistry of his own. His vocal performances, though, are not entirely his. In most of the a cappella numbers, Jaafar really is singing, and his voice is not edited beyond normal audio mixing. In most of the other musical scenes, Jaafar’s vocals are digitally blended with Jackson’s for a number of reasons, one being the sheer infeasibility of asking him to do justice to his uncle’s singing while dancing at the same level, which would be vastly harder than most people realize.1 Jaafar deserves thunderous applause for achieving the nigh-impossible task of filling Jackson’s shoes, and overall, his performance is excellent, especially for a first-time actor. Domingo also deserves special praise for his chillingly faithful portrayal of Jackson’s sinister and psychologically broken father.

Clearly, one of the filmmakers’ overarching intentions is to humanize Jackson by providing context for some of his more questionable decisions. Importantly, the film does not seek to justify or rationalize any of Jackson’s choices—only to explain them. At this, it largely succeeds, if inelegantly at times. For instance, in one scene, a thirteen-year-old Jackson protests when his mother initially denies his request for a pet llama: “[These animals] aren’t my pets, mom. They’re my friends. No one else gets me, but they do.”2 Rather than trusting the audience to infer that Jackson’s proclivity for animals over people stemmed in part from the fact that nearly every person in his life wanted to ride his coattails, the writers chose to have Valdi exposit this in a somewhat ham-fisted way. In another, better scene, Jackson examines his own body without saying a word, and his subtle facial expressions reveal his growing discomfort with what he sees. We then cut to a shot of him in a medical exam room, and when the doctor enters carrying a marker, we understand without exposition: This is a plastic surgery consult.

The plastic surgery scenes are among several that show Jackson as he really was in psychological terms: a benevolent and good man whose questionable decisions were heavily influenced by severe, unresolved childhood trauma. Jackson’s obsession with plastic surgery was not motivated by vanity, as many believe; rather, it was tied to much deeper self-esteem problems that were not his fault.

In this area, as in many others, Jackson was a complex and conflicted man. In certain respects, his self-esteem was apparently healthy; in one scene in the film, he acknowledges his own musical genius in an endearingly matter-of-fact way but refuses to release an eponymous album because it would be “too egocentric.” In other respects, his self-esteem is clearly damaged in ways that are shown to be rooted in his relationship with his father. Joe demands flawless excellence of his children and flies off the handle over the most trivial mistakes or acts of disobedience, and as a result, the boys—Jackson in particular—internalize a deep-seated intolerance for imperfection. When Jackson first begins to show symptoms of vitiligo in his late teens, he sees it not as a harmless cosmetic quirk but as something wrong with him. His nose, like most people’s noses, is ever so slightly asymmetrical, and here, too, he sees not normal human variance but an inexcusable defect. In his mind, stars with perfect pitch and perfect dance moves must also look perfect—and unlike the vast majority of entertainers, Jackson actually was a grandmaster of his craft. Whereas many celebrities seek plastic surgery in an attempt to compensate for their deficiencies of skill or character, Jackson sought integration of his appearance and his earned mastery. This is a telling and extremely important aspect of his psychology that helps rational, attentive viewers properly contextualize some of his other odd choices.

Like a great many movies released in the past decade, Michael is adored by audiences and largely panned by critics. As of this writing, the movie holds a 97 percent “fresh” audience rating compared to a 37 percent “rotten” critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where many critics are complaining that no period of Jackson’s life is explored exhaustively and that this makes the film “shallow.” Another common and related complaint is that the film is inaccurate or misleading because it changes certain minor details, such as showing the Jackson 5 performing “Never Can Say Goodbye” in 1968 (the song was written in 1970). This was most likely an intentional choice on the filmmakers’ part, not an oversight, and in the context of biopics, such choices are legitimate and well-reasoned more often than not. Perhaps a licensing issue limited the choice of songs that could be used in this way, or perhaps it was an easier song for the actors to learn and perform on a tight filming schedule. Whatever the reason, it’s simply false to say that altering minor details is misleading. (If altering a given detail would lead a reasonable person to a substantively different conclusion, then the alteration is, by definition, not minor.)

Even more critics are taking issue with what they call, in varying terms, Michael’s “overly sanitized” presentation of Jackson’s life, claiming that ending the film before the abuse allegations constitutes dishonesty. One “verified” critic (whatever that means) writes “Michael’s disingenuously airbrushed style is directly related to the material [the Jackson estate] can’t and likely never will put on-screen; they’ve found their voice and have the resources to amplify it in Dolby Atmos.”3 Another writes “Failing the honesty test, Michael fails the ‘portrait of the artist’ test as well.”4 Given the nature and purpose of the film, complaints about it being shallow are invalid, as are those about its supposed dishonesty; let’s take each kind of complaint in turn.

A biopic, like all forms and genres of film, is a specific thing with a specific scope and purpose. A biopic is a dramatized portrayal of the most important parts of its subject’s life—or only a portion of his life—and its purpose is to present a detailed but necessarily incomplete sketch of that person that is broadly accurate and faithful to his character. A biopic is not a perfectly accurate retelling of the real story in its entirety—and it isn’t supposed to be. An entirely factual film about a real person is a different kind of film: a documentary (and even a documentary is not obligated by its nature to exhaustively cover every major aspect of its subject’s life; in fact, most don’t).

One reason to choose to make a biopic over another kind of film is to gain a modest degree of creative liberty, which is honest and valid so long as no major and contextually relevant facts are misrepresented or omitted from the span of time that the filmmakers choose to cover.5 Another reason is to make it possible to condense decades of the subject’s life into a two-hour runtime; sometimes, filmmakers simply can’t portray the exact chronology or form of certain events as they occurred in real life because doing so would require devoting an unjustifiable amount of screen time to minor details. Those who criticize Michael for not being a documentary are simply holding it to the wrong standard; those who criticize it for not covering every major aspect of his life are holding it to an impossible standard.

The elephant in the room is, of course, the child abuse allegations, which are not mentioned in the film. Like many (if not most) of the people who believe that Jackson was guilty of child abuse, those who criticize the film on this point are dropping critical context. Michael deliberately ends in 1988 (the year in which the alleged abuse began), but the filmmakers did not make this choice as a way of avoiding controversy. In fact, their original plan was to engage the controversy directly, and they acted on that plan until external factors required them to change it. A previous version of the script opened in 1993 with Jackson being investigated by police in relation to the Jordan Chandler case, and the filmmakers shot “a tremendous amount” of footage related to that part of Jackson’s life.6 However, after principal photography was completed, a clause was discovered in Jackson’s real-life legal settlement with the Chandler family that forbids any mention or depiction of Jordan in any movie produced by the Jackson estate. The filmmakers then had to rewrite the script almost entirely and shoot hundreds of hours of new footage; all in all, the rewrites and reshoots cost $15–$20 million, according to sources who worked on the film.7

Even if the original script had not dealt with any of the abuse allegations, that still would not constitute a dishonest decision because the final film ends before any of the alleged abuse took place. Honesty doesn’t require filmmakers to deal with the abuse allegations in every film about Jackson as a blanket policy regardless of context, just as it doesn’t require any other artist or biographer to cover every controversy in every work about any other subject. Honesty is the refusal to fake reality—the refusal to pretend that facts aren’t facts or that falsehoods are facts. It also includes the refusal to pretend that contextually relevant facts are irrelevant or vice versa. “Contextual relevance” is the key criterion here; virtually all facts are relevant in certain contexts and not others.

Michael’s decision to omit the abuse allegations would be dishonest only if the filmmakers had claimed or implied that the film covers Jackson’s entire life or otherwise is meant to be a comprehensive overview of every significant event therein. They did neither; they presented the film as a biopic limited to one half of Jackson’s life and as a tribute to his legacy, and it clearly is both of those things.

Michael does, however, strongly imply a sequel: A title card before the ending credits reads “His story continues.” Lionsgate executive Adam Fogelson told The Hollywood Reporter in 2025: “While we’re not yet ready to confirm plans for a second film, I can tell you that the creative team is hard at work making sure that we’re in a position to deliver more Michael soon after we release the first film.”8 Assuming that such a sequel biopic does come to fruition, and assuming that it covers the second half of Jackson’s life (it almost inevitably would have to), then, in that context, that film must honestly address the abuse allegations. To omit or downplay the allegations in such a context would be dishonest because they massively impacted Jackson and hundreds of other people throughout that part of his life, and it’s not possible to form an objective opinion about Jackson without an account of the allegations that is both factual and fair.

Knowing as much about Jackson as I do, I can say without reservation that Michael fulfills its goal of honoring his legacy without distortion. It would be incomplete without a sequel—but the absence of a sequel would not retroactively render it dishonest. Dramatically, it’s one of the best films of 2026 to date, and technically, it’s one of the best films of the decade, especially for those who know enough about singing and dancing to fully understand just how good Jackson was (and Jaafar is). Like Jackson himself, Michael has both adoring fans and apoplectic critics—and like Jackson, the film is something that everyone should experience at least once.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

London: Icon Books, 2017
337 pp., $12.04

If you think of Jane Austen novels as light, fluffy romances—think again. Through her happy endings, she imparted essential moral themes, such as the fact that happiness requires knowing when to trust your own judgment (Persuasion) and acting on principle (Mansfield Park).

Such lessons are useful on their own, but many Janeites like to point out that Austen was also a social commentator, mocking and subtly criticizing certain norms and institutions of her day. However, few Austen fans have gone as far into understanding and explaining the substance and mechanisms of that criticism as Helena Kelly, author of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. Kelly begins by observing two relevant facts about Austen’s life: 1) We don’t know much about it, because few letters or other documentary evidence remain, and the family reports are unreliable (the most famous was written by her nephew four decades after her death); and 2) for most of Austen’s life, Britain was at war.

Most Janeites point out these facts as a matter of mere curiosity or perhaps to highlight a few details of how soldiers and navy men play a role in certain Austen novels. But Kelly homes in on a particular effect of this context: Due to the wars, the British government increased censorship. She explains:

Treason was redefined. It was no longer limited to actively conspiring to overthrow and to kill; it included thinking, writing, printing, reading. Prosecutions were directed not just against avowedly political figures, such as Paine, the radical politician Horne Tooke, or the theologian Gilbert Wakefield, but against their publishers. . . . There can hardly have been a thinking person in Britain who didn’t understand what was intended—to terrify writers and publishers into policing themselves. (22–23)

For this reason, Kelly argues, readers ought to look very closely at the text and at the historical context it was written in, because criticism would have had to be subtle to be allowed at that time. For example, Austen doesn’t criticize the Church of England outright—but nearly all the clergymen she depicts in her works are lazy, gluttonous, pompous, or straight-up ridiculous. The self-important Mr. Collins, for instance, provides excellent comic relief in Pride and Prejudice—but no serious Christian would want him as his pastor. Kelly argues that this context alone justifies a closer look at the text and also quotes Austen’s letter to her sister in which she declared, “I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves” (124).1^[1] Austen wanted her readers to be thoughtful and focused enough to take in the layers of meaning she offered, and Kelly aims to show what such focus, combined with some contextual knowledge, can yield.

The Secret Radical’s key strength is its clearly presented, well-researched analysis of the political elements of Austen’s works, based on Kelly’s thorough understanding of the debates and economic policies of the day, relevant British history, textual evidence from the novels, contemporary reviews, and the few remaining letters from Austen herself. Kelly examines each of Austen’s six full-length novels—Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion—in this way, aiming to work through them in the order Austen wrote them to provide a rough sketch of Austen’s intellectual development as well as to keep the history chronological. (Kelly acknowledges difficulty in dating with certainty when Austen wrote certain novels and explains her reasons for taking them in the order that she does.) In the best cases, the interpretation she offers enables readers to appreciate the work under discussion on a deeper level.

For example, Kelly argues that Pride and Prejudice should not be seen as only an interpersonal drama with lessons for individual behavior but also as a pattern for how people of different classes at the time should behave toward each other in order to reform society without violent revolution. “Elizabeth and Darcy,” she writes, “were written to be not just characters, but symbols as well” (167). Mr. Darcy, the wealthy nobleman, shows himself to be ready to learn, even from those of lower status than himself, and to correct his manners when necessary. He also symbolically removes the military presence and its associated potential for conflict at the end by arranging a position far away for Mr. Wickham, a militiaman.

Likewise, Elizabeth, a gentleman’s daughter, is willing to speak her mind and learns to judge people only on firm evidence of their character. Mr. Bingley is a straightforwardly sympathetic character who earned his money through trade, a point modern readers may not question or even notice. In the early nineteenth century, the nouveau riche were by no means accepted in many social circles. By showing him not only in a positive light but as being sought after by the Bennet girls and befriended by Darcy, Austen was encouraging the acceptance of such self-made men. Kelly’s interpretation not only integrates with the novel’s central theme (that one shouldn’t allow emotions to distort one’s rational, evidence-based judgment)—it adds a layer of complexity to it. One’s emotions, and especially one’s initial reaction to a situation, are often shaped by the attitudes one has been taught—one’s prejudices (according to some accounts, Austen considered naming the novel First Impressions). Austen encouraged her readers to consider carefully whether that immediate reaction is justified, taking into account not only one’s vanity but one’s social context.

Kelly deals significantly with the political context in which Austen lived and wrote. Politics necessarily affects individuals’ lives and thus often is present in fiction to some degree. But it is one thing to identify these aspects of the background, another to trace how they affect various characters’ motivations, and a much different task to interpret their degree of relevance to the theme of the work. In this last endeavor, Kelly occasionally errs by overemphasizing the relevance of politics to Austen’s themes. For example, she claims that Emma is about poverty created by a rapidly expanding population and worsened (at least in the short term) by enclosure, the controversial practice of landowners getting permission from Parliament to build fences and hedges to stop poor people from gathering firewood, roots, and so on from the land they or their families had been granted by the government. Kelly cites many lines and scenes that refer to enclosure and its effects, such as gypsies being camped in an unexpected place leading to an unsuspecting young woman being accosted by them and twisting her ankle in her attempt to get away. However, Kelly fails to establish that enclosure is anything more than a background force in the novel. Emma is primarily about a young woman learning to better weigh the evidence she has around people’s emotions and not to interfere in others’ affairs of the heart—that each person must choose what is best for herself. This is an important theme that stands alone. Knowledge of enclosure is not necessary to grasp this theme, though such knowledge helps to set up certain aspects of the plot.

Similarly, Kelly’s discussion of Sense and Sensibility focuses on the unfairness of primogeniture, the legally enshrined practice in which, in the vast majority of cases, the oldest son inherited everything when a man died, and any other children and his widow were dependent on that son. Once again, this is extremely relevant to the setup, as it explains how the Dashwood ladies find themselves in the situation they are in—once Mr. Dashwood dies, they depend on the charity of a distant relative to find a decent place to live and must learn to live frugally. They also cannot depend on large dowries to help with their marriage prospects. But the bulk of the action is about the eldest two sisters learning to harmonize their reason and their emotions, one having tended toward self-indulgent emotionalism and the other toward stoic rationalism. Primogeniture, though certainly a target of Austen’s criticism, is not the theme of the novel.

Despite this occasional overemphasis on politics, the context Kelly provides is remarkably useful in enabling readers of Austen to avoid being a “dull Elf” and thus to better enjoy her timeless works. The book is written in clear, accessible language but is scholarly in the way it synthesizes a vast quantity of information from a wide variety of sources. In addition, although it assumes familiarity with all of Austen’s novels, a thoughtful reader with that knowledge will benefit from the demonstration of how to apply historical and political context combined with careful reading to better understand the satire and social commentary in other novels. Readers can certainly enjoy Austen’s works without Kelly’s additional context that enables wider integrations, but it is very helpful.

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical opened my eyes to the interesting, often subtle ways in which this influential author challenged the premises of the world around her. For those who want to get more out of literature, it’s well worth the time.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

As an avid music fan, I’m constantly searching for good music. But I only find exceptional bands—the kind that blow my mind and join my all-time favorites—once or twice a decade.

Recently, one band—The Protomen—excelled beyond anything I’ve heard in the past fifteen years or so. To try to describe this band in terms of genres is somewhat futile. Their sound fuses elements of country, hard rock, electronica, progressive rock, blues, and several other genres. They took influence from Queen—a band they started their career by covering—by focusing on expressing their own artistic ideas rather than trying to fit into a particular genre. “Queen was independent in that they didn’t care about genre, they just wrote good songs,” said a band member in one interview. “In the end, no matter what genre or how you play the song, it’s still gonna sound like you.”1

The more useful way to describe what The Protomen make would be something like “story rock” or “rock opera.” Their three main albums are as much works of fiction as works of music; The Protomen (Act I), Act II: The Father of Death, and Act III: This City Made Us together form a grand dystopian story that can only be fully appreciated on repeat listenings while reading the lyrics. The band included passages of prose among the lyrics (found in the CD liner notes or online)—these are designed to be read during the instrumental and soundscape sections of the albums, moving the story along between the lyrical sections.

Each album has a distinct style and tells a separate chapter of the overall story, so it’s worth looking at each in turn to get a sense of the richness, musically and philosophically, that The Protomen offer.

The Protomen (Act I) (2005)

The first album throws us into a dystopian world loosely based on that depicted in the Mega Man video games. But whereas the games follow the titular superhero as he battles the robot army of the evil Dr. Wily in an effort to restore peace to an embattled world, The Protomen establishes a much darker setting—a city in which the population has given up on freedom. The opening narration sets the scene over an accelerating beat:

No one was left who could remember how it had happened
How the world had fallen under darkness
At least no one who would do anything
No one who would oppose the robots
No one who would challenge their power
Or so Dr. Wily believed . . .

That sets off the opening track, “Hope Rides Alone,” in which we meet Wily’s former associate Dr. Light, “an eccentric and brilliant man . . . a loner, a thinker, a man of ideas—ideas forbidden in Wily’s society.” Light creates the part-man, part-machine Protoman, a hero “hell-bent on destroying every evil standing between man and freedom” to save the city from Wily’s robotic tyranny.

Toward the end of the song, the core theme of the album starts to come through. Light wants to save the city, but the people don’t want saving—they are too apathetic and dejected to fight for freedom. They stand by and watch Protoman get pummeled by Wily’s robots, and the song ends with a crowd chanting “We are the dead”—a direct reference to George Orwell’s 1984—as they look upon the beaten hero who could have saved them.

In the third track, “Unrest in the House of Light,” we follow a grief-stricken Light as he sings about his previous “son”—Protoman’s forerunner, Mega Man—who suffered much the same fate. Light tries to dissuade Protoman, who wants to continue the fight:

For if you leave now, you will be fighting
For a people that refuse to comprehend
They have chosen their own end

Unlike the opening two tracks, which have a lo-fi, almost industrial sound symbolizing the mechanistic inhumanity of Wily’s regime, the third track is a gently swinging country song with the sombreness befitting Light’s dismay at the people’s continued lack of appetite for freedom and his remorse at his part in creating this society (detailed in Act II). Throughout the rest of the album, the style continues to change, although generally returning to an alt-rock sound reminiscent of early Muse. Also adding to the variety are the different singing and speaking voices that the band members use to capture the characters of Wily, Light, Protoman, and Mega Man, who often exchange dialogue during the songs.

Thematically, the album continues to explore the questions of whether a hero should fight for people who don’t want saving and whether a few voices for freedom can overcome a mass who willfully live at the feet of a dictator. Those people rouse, not at the appearance of a hero, but at the regime’s broadcast chant of “We have control, We keep you safe, We are your hope.” All three albums are, in their own ways, tragedies, and the tragedy of the first album is that Light is trying to use technology—Protoman—to solve a philosophic problem: the apathy of the city’s population.

Act II: The Father of Death (2009)

With Act I depicting a society clearly unready for change, one might expect its sequel to progress the story to a later stage, but instead Act II is a prequel, showing how Wily’s society came to be in the first place. After a short instrumental, it opens with “The Good Doctor,” a far cleaner track than any on the first album that signals this album’s higher fidelity production. The song is a slow, melancholy ballad backed up by a somber string section that follows a conversation between Light and Wily, both inventors looking to change a society in which many (including Light’s father) work to their deaths in toxic mines. They design robots capable of replacing men in the mines and extracting far more of the resources the city needs, but whereas Light is content with this, Wily wants to turn the robots into tools for controlling people and achieving his vision of an orderly, centrally planned society.

The first chorus is sung by Light, but the second features Wily responding to him—an example of a technique The Protomen often use called “overlapping polyphony” in which two voices deliver the same section at the same time, offset enough that each can be understood but with some overlap as though the two voices are competing to dominate the song:

They’ve waited so long for this day
(They’ve waited so long for this day)
Someone to take the death away
(There is no price they wouldn’t pay)
No son would ever have to say
(For someone else to lead them)
My father worked into his grave

As the song concludes, the two characters get to the root of their philosophic disagreement—their differing views of human nature:

I only want to help . . .
(You are a fool!)
You underestimate the character of man
(They are weaker than you think!)
You think that they’ll surrender
If you bind their working hands
But they are strong!
(Just wait and see . . .)
We will build cities in a day
(Men would cower at the sight!)
We will build towers to the heavens
(Man was not built for such a height!)
We will be heroes!
(We will BUILD heroes!)

The two singers “playing” the two characters imbue them with different qualities, helping accentuate their differences. Raul Panther III (all Protomen members use stage names) gives Light a deep, reflective, Johnny Cash-esque voice whereas Turbo Lover gives Wily a shrill, barely controlled style in which his madness regularly breaks through. This album also introduces Gambler Kirkdouglas, who not only adds a female voice (voicing Light’s girlfriend and Wily’s heartthrob Emily) but brings a more operatic style to the mix, her vocals soaring above the male voices at times while bringing a raspy, hard-rock energy to other parts. Her character’s inclusion personalizes the human cost of Wily’s regime and of Light’s efforts to oppose it, which place her in the line of fire. Later in the album, the two men’s conflict becomes as much about her as about the city itself.

With this album, the band’s Nashville roots come through strongly. In place of the first album’s industrial sound, this one features more acoustic guitar, piano, and slide guitar, giving it a much more Southern sound that also drifts into Ennio Morricone-esque Western territory at times. As the story progresses, more styles come into play, often capturing the spirit of the character each song is focusing on. “The Hounds” (focusing on the increasingly maddened Wily) features circus-like trumpets blasting over a danceable, pulsing rhythm, after which “The State Vs. Thomas Light” returns to a thoughtful, orchestral sound. Later, as the conflict between Light and Wily intensifies, the songs get faster and adopt more of a 1980s-inspired synthwave style, exemplified best in the songs “Break Out” and “Light Up the Night.” This sound points the way to the band’s third album, for which fans—aside from a tantalizing preview in the form of the 2022 stand-alone single “The Fight”—would have to wait seventeen years.

Act III: This City Made Us (2026)

Act III is the culmination of The Protomen’s story—not just of the literal story that the three albums tell but also of the band’s musical growth. Here, they perfectly realize their fusion of upbeat hard rock and expansive, synthwave electronica. Taking place some years after the events of Act I, it introduces a new, unnamed character: a budding revolutionary (also voiced by Gambler) who, much like Light before her, is determined to bring about a change for which the passive masses aren’t prepared to fight.

The story kicks off with “Hold Back the Night,” a galloping revolutionary anthem driven as much by Gambler’s energetic, soaring vocals as by the driving guitars, synths, and percussion. After each verse describing her struggle to survive in Wily’s world, she opens each chorus by bellowing “But I know a hero will come!” This refers to the aging Light, whose distant figure she has seen observing the increasing disorder as some of the young people start to oppose Wily’s control. Eventually, after she finds Light during a slowed-down instrumental interlude, he bursts into the song with a counterpoint to her optimistic choruses, driven by his deep regret over his part in creating Wily’s world:

But all of your heroes are gone
And the blood that they spilled is on my hands
A darkness will block out the sun
Not a thing can be done with so few men
That a hero couldn’t do!

She responds to his guilt with an appeal to his sense of responsibility:

When the voice from the shadows calls you
When the wind whips past your ears
Will you stand when the weight is upon you
Or will you go to your knees in fear?

There’s a chance, though I know it’s a long shot
And the city’s out of time
All for naught if your heart stops beating
’cause you’re the only one that keeps it alive
God, keep it alive!

Then, in the final chorus, the two voices debate in another instance of overlapping polyphony, driving the song to a powerful release of energy in its conclusion.

Following the example of “Hold Back the Night,” most of the album is brighter and more upbeat than its predecessors. Whereas the previous albums focused heavily on the consequences of widespread apathy about freedom, this album focuses more on the fact that hope endures as long as some are willing to fight.

With fifteen tracks, This City Made Us is a rock opera in its own right, taking us on a whole journey of a grassroots revolution and a state’s efforts to suppress it. This is The Protomen at their most Orwellian (a descriptor the band readily embraces), with the full apparatus of Wily’s regime directed at not merely suppressing the dissidents but also turning the masses against them with false-flag attacks and incessant, inescapable propaganda.

The dramatic story that The Protomen tell across their three-album series is a tale of individuals with a vision of freedom fighting against collective apathy. In a recent interview, the band members expressed their sadness that real events have paralleled the story they set out to tell in 2005, demonstrating the difficulty of motivating people to stand up for important values in a society driven by groupthink and emotionalism:

Our storyline that we’ve been writing all these years is happening all around us now. . . . As a human being in the year 2026, I didn’t know that I could get more jaded with society than in 2005.

Our first record is very much about the failure of mankind as a whole to rise to heroism or to rise to the place that they needed to be—the lowest level of making an effort. So we started out from that place and I think as we’ve gone through the acts, we try to keep hope alive. Even if it perhaps gets more and more difficult to do it, it’s still there. You have to search for the hope. That’s really what it comes down to.2

The Protomen’s rock opera series is a musical voyage exploring responsibility for one’s choices, the human cost of tyranny, and the nature of heroism. It ultimately conveys the theme that whatever physical strength a hero may possess, freedom depends on a substantial number of people understanding its importance. On the surface, it’s a riveting story told through colorful, complex, emotionally charged music. On a deeper level, it’s a warning to stand up for freedom and human life before it’s too late.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

The musical landscape of the 1970s was filled with artistic rule breakers, and singer-songwriter Lowell George was certainly one of them. His dynamic approach, a sort of controlled chaos, produced melodies and musical works that are still being performed and covered today. His devotion to creative freedom shaped his entire body of work and produced one of rock ’n’ roll’s most innovative, original bands. George’s career path was harder than most because of his uncompromising mindset. His wife, Elizabeth, alluded to the fact that for him the road less traveled was inevitable. “There was nothing regular about the guy,” she said while reflecting on his lasting legacy.^[1]

His group was called Little Feat, but George’s fusion of genres from folk to funk was anything but. He created momentous songs by pulling inspiration out of everyday experiences, including such classics as the band’s breakout single, “Willin.’” Trips to New Orleans were catalysts for George’s stylistic innovation, reaching a peak with the landmark album Feats Don’t Fail Me Now. Even lesser-known tracks from his repertoire show an artist determined to scale a musical summit of his own making. His enigmatic artistry spanned genres, and his label struggled to put his music in a mainstream stylistic box, making it harder to sell records. But dedicated listeners who showed up in droves to his shows with Little Feat helped him become one of rock’s unsung heroes. And his discography, showcasing melodic ingenuity, emotional depth, and artistic passion, made him one of rock’s most skilled explorers.

From Setback to Launch Point

In 1969, legend goes that George was fired by one of music’s most mysterious yet influential figures, Frank Zappa. George’s termination from Zappa’s group, The Mothers of Invention, was for good reason. Zappa thought the budding performer was too good to be in a supporting role in a band; he advised George to found one himself. And in the dawn of a 1970s Los Angeles music scene caught between the haze of the folk revival of the 1960s and the forthcoming progressive rock movement, George did exactly that. He teamed up with keyboardist Bill Payne, drummer Richie Hayward, and bassist Roy Estrada to form Little Feat.

In George’s own band, he encouraged and supported his bandmates’ creative experimentation with their instruments and musicianship as long as it stayed true to his overall genre-bending vision for soulful melodies and grooving rhythms. An excerpt from the Rock and Roll Doctor biography highlights Zappa’s influence:

George saw in Zappa’s management of the Mothers a model of how a band could be run. It was a model that worked, that was productive, and that allowed for individual creativity—but within the clear boundaries set by the bandleader. This idea of how things might be was to stay with him throughout his career.^[2]

By 1971, Little Feat released its debut self-titled album. It featured “Willin,’” an acoustic-based, easy-listening ballad about the adventures of a trucker and his perseverance and personal triumphs through the twists and turns of his journey. George came up with the idea for the song before forming his band. In his college days he often drummed up inspiration outside the classroom. “Willin’” was inspired by his time spent working as a gas station attendant, and it would become one of his signature songs.^[3]

George loved studying philosophy, and in interviews he sometimes quoted classical philosophers such as Socrates. For him, everything was interesting, and his insatiable curiosity made him a fount for songwriting and creative playing.

“Lowell quickly developed his own ‘sound’ which featured clean compressed notes played with precision and filled with sustain,” Gelinas writes:

Along with Lowell’s unique slide guitar, he was also developing a distinctive vocal style which employed the technique of melissima by which the singer melodically embellishes certain syllables within a [phrase]. This style of singing, much like Lowell’s slide guitar, would become a critical element of Little Feat’s musical identity.^[4]

After the group’s Sailin’ Shoes album in 1972, George especially wanted to expand the band’s artistic dimensions. Bandmate Bill Payne shared in an interview the talks he and George had when they first started playing together that reflected this creative desire:

We talked about the kind of band we wanted it to be. Should we have a horn section? What should the bass player play? Are we going to relegate ourselves to one style of music? We decided there shouldn’t be any limits to what we would do. If we wanted to play a waltz, great. If we wanted to play a straight-ahead song, fine.^[5]

By 1973, Little Feat’s third album, Dixie Chicken, featuring the popular title track and deep-cut-turned-cult-classic “Roll Um Easy,” marked the arrival of the sound that George had been experimenting with for years—a fresh integrated style he formed out of countless others. The album features an expanded sound (the band was now a six-piece) and boasted Cajun stylings, blues influences, and folk nuances, all with a classic rock ’n’ roll feel.

For a while, Little Feat averaged one album per year, made possible by George’s unrelenting work ethic. In a 1994 interview with Mojo, British musician Robert Palmer chatted about going on tour with Little Feat and how impressed he was with George’s commitment to his musical vision. “Lowell George was extremely bright, with a surreal sort of wit, and he was basically a workaholic. Day and night, all he did was make music.”^[6]

In 1974, Little Feat reached a peak with its critically acclaimed record, Feats Don’t Fail Me Now. The band hailed from California, but their sound was unmistakably southern-inspired. George took naturally to the stylings of New Orleans musicians when he and the band visited the bustling city. Present throughout each song were a horn section, syncopated rhythms common in Louisiana, and lyrical stories with equal parts glamor and grit.

Fearless Creative Approach

“We were very eclectic. We took a lot of chances,” George explained during an interview with Little Feat about his time.^[7] His penchant for creative risk-taking fostered the band’s innovative, wide-ranging sound. Journalist Elizabeth Nelson described his fearless approach to creativity: “Like a method actor, he had an eerie way of fully transforming himself into whatever a project required. Chamber music, blue-eyed soul, and avant-blues all came to him without inhibition.”^[8] Gelinas noted that the American musical landscape of the 1970s often featured “musical primitives with more enthusiasm than dexterity.”^[9]

But George possessed both, and for him, dexterity was more than a skill: it was a mindset, and he applied it to technology as much as his artistry. During the evolution of rock ’n’ roll in the 1970s, musicians embraced technological creativity while forging new sounds. Nowadays, digital audio interfaces make it easy to experiment with harmonies, instruments, and overdubbing—the process of recording different tracks over one another to create a layered final song. But when George was in the studio, he didn’t have any shortcuts. So, he helped pioneer a technique that became a defining recording tactic before digital recording software became available in the late 1980s—one he had begun toying around with during his days playing with Zappa. To layer tracks over one another, George physically altered the tapes he recorded onto by cutting sections with a razor blade and rearranging them with special adhesive. In a 1975 interview in zigzag magazine, George relayed his experimental approach with tape when he stated, “I use tape like someone would use manuscript paper.”^[10] Although this was time-consuming and costly, it was essential to his creative process. Tape splicing helped him come up with new ideas for songs and show bandmates how he wanted specific sections to be played. The editing technique helped add to Little Feat’s genre-blending, no-holds-barred style because it gave him ultimate control over the feel of the band’s sound, rather than experimenting for its own sake.

George was a skilled musician and audio engineer, but his artistic perspective was as influential to his studio sessions as his technical prowess. Little Feat’s sound gave listeners welcome surprises. One could never quite predict when George would cue a bass solo or a drum breakdown, and his lyrics and song narratives were anything but formulaic. He understood that this liveliness needed to be contrasted with steadiness. And that steadiness could be found in the silence he left between notes.

“Space is a place” was his studio motto.^[11] As rock music got busier, sometimes producing noise for noise’s sake, George’s compositions were guided by breathing room as much as the notes themselves, making for a dynamic listening experience no matter the album. Because of this motto, his slide guitar solos sang rather than screamed; they didn’t demand attention: they beckoned listeners, pulling them in.

His ingenuity didn’t stop at the studio. When performing, he often played slide guitar with a spark plug socket wrench rather than a traditional bottleneck slide, allowing him to sustain notes longer. His slide setup also gave his playing a distinct texture that evoked some of his heaviest blues influences.

The Inspiration of Howlin’ Wolf

No other musician influenced the California songwriter more than black Chicago blues vocalist Chester Burnett. Better known as Howlin’ Wolf, he remains one of America’s legendary bluesmen, releasing such enduring classics as “Smokestack Lightning.” During his heyday in the 1950s, yodeling was still popular among genres such as country, blues, and folk, but Howlin’ Wolf couldn’t yodel. Instead, when he sang in falsetto, he created a vocal slide up to a note, then held it, adding plenty of vibrato to give his vocal runs a melodic howl in place of yodeling (artists such as Adele use this technique often nowadays, but Howlin’ Wolf helped pioneer it). George followed in his footsteps in creatively overcoming musical limitations. Due to a hand injury sustained while working on model planes, it was hard for George to fully fret all six guitar strings with his left hand. So, he mastered slide guitar instead.

George was so taken with Howlin’ Wolf that he created a litmus test in his honor, which he used to decide with whom he wanted to work. If someone mentioned a player who wanted to collaborate with him, George would ask, “Is he versed in the ways of Chester Burnett?”^[12] If the player didn’t know that Chester Burnett was Howlin’ Wolf’s real name, George wasn’t interested.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was common for musicians who happened to be white to be influenced by the blues, a historically black genre. George covered Howlin’ Wolf live with such songs as “How Many More Years.” Some critics worried that these white artists were committing what some would now call “cultural appropriation,” the supposed co-opting of a “marginalized” culture by a “dominant” one. But in a 1967 interview, Howlin’ Wolf highlighted how foundational blues musicians could profit from their music becoming mainstream. When asked about the prevalence of musicians, including young, white musicians, recording blues music from the past, he responded by pointing out that music has the power to connect different musicians through the shared love of a melody. He explained, “It doesn’t matter no different who sang your song. They sang because of the way they feel.”^[13] Adopting an entrepreneurial mindset, he also remarked, “Well I’ll tell you, there’s nothing wrong with that. I want all of them to make my records, because I gets money out of it, see,” he said, referencing the royalty payments he would receive when someone covered his songs.^[14]

For George, Howlin’ Wolf’s catalog and the blues genre as a whole didn’t represent an opportunity for appropriation, but appreciation and innovation. In the blues he found artistic alignment and inspiration.

“What Is Success?”

Among their loyal following, the visionary rock group was known as a must-see live band for their energetic performances. While writing for Let It Rock magazine, journalist Mick Houghton highlighted the band’s tight-knit sound, a foundation that anchored performances through lengthy solos and various reimagined versions of their originals. “As musicians Little Feat are as compatible an outfit as you could hope to find,” he writes.^[15] But George also felt right at home in a recording studio.

“Lowell George’s distinctive style of slide guitar and vocalizing,” writes Gelinas, “helped create a style of music that was a unique blend of second-line funk, gospel, Chicago blues, jazz and country balladry that still stands today as one of the most unique developments in American popular music during the 1970s.”^[16]

For George, music was all about exploration. But for his band’s label, Warner Bros. Records, music needed to be about replication. It was hard for a label to promote a band it struggled to define stylistically. George would not renounce his artistic vision for anyone or anything. He understood the importance of being a profitable act. But for the visionary musician, profit had to be married to passion no matter the project. “What is success?” he asked during an interview. “It certainly isn’t money,” he answered. He then clarified, “Money helps. But doing something that you really like doing as a profession is really success to me.”^[17] After album release days, George would visit various stores in person, only to find their new record wasn’t stocked.^[18] Instead of changing his band’s sound to a more mainstream rock to boost sales and please the label, he and his bandmates toured extensively to make up the difference. The pressures of being a band manager, frontman, producer, and songwriter wore on George over the group’s ten years together from 1969 to 1979. As Little Feat disbanded due to personal differences and professional fatigue, George set out on a solo career. In March 1979, he released his debut solo album, Thanks I’ll Eat It Here. But poor health and substance abuse caught up with the dedicated musician. In June 1979, George passed away from a heart attack at the age of thirty-four. Although he battled and sometimes succumbed to vices, his artistic virtue eclipsed them.

Little Feat’s heroic legacy is not that of record label darling or radio-friendly band but of a group revered by record label darlings and radio-friendly bands. Little Feat was a band’s band, and George was a musician’s musician. Led Zeppelin founder and lead guitarist Jimmy Page once called Little Feat his “favorite American group.”^[19] His bandmate, singer and frontman Robert Plant, once got a slap on the wrist for playing Little Feat records too loud in a hotel. Both modern blues icon Eric Clapton and one of rock’s most famous bands, Van Halen, covered George’s originals live and on records. Folk-rocker Jackson Browne was so taken with George’s magnetism that he called him “the Orson Welles of rock.”^[20]

At Little Feat’s helm was an imperfect but ingenious captain who navigated and explored the islands of musical genres and built from his discoveries a new melodic world—a world today’s musicians continue to mine for their own artistic gold.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

^[1] Mark Brend, Rock and Roll Doctor, Backbeat Books, 2002, 6, https://archive.org/details/rockrolldoctorlo0000bren/mode/2up.

^[2] J P Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection,” Furious magazine, August 2008, https://www.furious.com/perfect/lowellgeorge.html.

^[3] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[4] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[5] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[6] Paul Sexton, “Pursuing Atmosphere in Music: Robert Palmer in 20 Quotes,” udiscovermusic, 2006, https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/robert-palmer-in-20-quotes.

^[7] Earl Guthrie, “Lowell George Interview WXRT Chicago, June 15, 1979,”

.

^[8] Elizabeth Nelson, “Lowell George in Eight and a Half Songs, Oxford American, December 2021, https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-115-winter-2021/lowell-george-in-eight-and-a-half-songs.

^[9] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[10] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[11] “Lowell George: Feats First,” directed by Jon Storey, 2015, https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B078TNR4J9/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r.

^[12] Albert Corey, “Lowell George—Feats First,” Life since the Baby Boom, July 2023,

Life Since the Baby Boom

Lowell George - Feats First

IMDb page…

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3 years ago · 2 likes · Albert Cory

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^[13] Chris Stratchwitz, “Howlin’ Wolf Interview,” The Chris Stratchwitz Collection, Arhoolie Foundation, April 1967, https://arhoolie.org/howlin-wolf-interview-2/.

^[14] Stratchwitz, “Howlin’ Wolf Interview.”

^[15] Michael Houghton, “Little Feat Albums,” Let It Rock, March 1975, Rock’s Backpages, https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/little-feat-albums.

^[16] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[17] Guthrie, “Lowell George Interview WXRT Chicago.”

^[18] Jon Storey, “Lowell George: Feats First,” Pride Studios, 2015, Amazon.

^[19] Jackson Maxwell, “Eric Clapton and Van Halen Covered His Songs, and He Led Jimmy Page’s Favorite American Band: Watch Overlooked Guitar Genius Lowell George Demonstrate His Slide Technique on German TV,” Guitar World magazine, July 2023, https://www.guitarworld.com/features/lowell-george-slide-guitar-german-tv-1977.

^[20] Maxwell, “Watch Overlooked Guitar Genius Lowell George.”

Written and directed by Luc Besson
Starring Caleb Landry Jones, Zoë Bleu, Christoph Waltz
Distributed by SND (France)
Running time: 129 minutes
Rated R for graphic violence and brief nudity

Author’s note: This review essay contains major spoilers.

Dracula: A Love Tale (2025), arguably director Luc Besson’s most mature and ambitious film to date, elevates itself above most modern movies in two critically important ways: It engages deeply and sincerely with fundamental human values, and it respects its audience rather than lecturing them. It deserves meaningful praise on these grounds, but its reach ultimately exceeds its grasp because it tries to tell a love story without understanding what love is.

Sometime in the 15th century, Romanian prince Vladislav of Wallachia (a fictionalized version of Vlad the Impaler played by Caleb Landry Jones) leads a small army to victory against Ottoman invaders. He takes the field reluctantly; he would much rather be at home with his wife, Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu). They are in their mid-to-late thirties, but their relationship is passionate and youthful in its simplicity. They clearly adore one another, and their conversations imply that they would give up their political power in favor of a simpler life if they could.

While Vladislav is engaged in battle, a small band of Ottoman assassins hunts down Elisabeta, whom he believes has safely escaped the area. Vladislav rushes to her aid when he hears of the attack from a witness, but he is too late to save her.

Vladislav, enraged, confronts the local cardinal and accuses him of failing to “pray hard enough” for God to protect Elisabeta. When the cardinal protests that he is only God’s humble messenger and cannot force God to do anything, Vladislav responds, “Good. I have a message that I want you to deliver to him. Tell your God that, until he brings me back my wife, my life no longer belongs to him.” He then murders the cardinal and desecrates the chapel. For this transgression, God curses Vladislav with eternal unlife as the first vampire, Dracula. Over the next four centuries, Dracula scours the globe, searching tirelessly for Elisabeta, whom he is convinced eventually will be reincarnated.

Like countless stories throughout history, Dracula equates intense passion with love, but these are not the same thing. In the movie’s opening scenes, we see that Vladislav and Elisabeta have strong feelings for one another, but we never see where these feelings come from. Without knowing (or at least being able to reasonably infer) why they love one another, we cannot even say with any real confidence that the story we’re being told is a love story; we can, at best, only take the storyteller’s word for it.

Consider Bonnie and Clyde, who are almost always presented as having been deeply in love with one another. Together, they murdered at least twelve people, threatened and assaulted dozens of others, and stole around $2 million (in 2026 dollars). Both of them were evil—full stop. Does it make sense to say that evil people can experience true love? Most people can sense that something is deeply wrong with such a claim, even if they can’t articulate why.

Now consider Aragorn and Arwen from Lord of the Rings, arguably one of the best examples of romantic love in fiction. Both are exemplars of outstanding moral character, and both fight to shield Middle-Earth from Sauron’s relentless malice. They treat one another and their friends with sincere affection, respect, and kindness. They want nothing more than to live a peaceful life together, but both are willing to die, if necessary, in defense of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Undeniably, the love that Aragorn and Arwen share is romantic love in its purest form—its only real form, in fact. Does it make any sense to use the word “love” both in reference to them and to Bonnie and Clyde?

The essential (but not the only) element of romantic love is deep admiration of and respect for another person’s rational, life-serving values and character. Romantic love is a combination of such admiration and respect, and of physical (usually sexual) attraction.^[1] Without the former, the latter is nothing but infatuation or lust.

Throughout Dracula’s two-hour runtime, we see very little of Elisabeta’s moral character. In contrast, we learn a lot about Dracula’s character—and most of what we see is not good. He is driven by obsession bordering on lunacy, utterly indifferent to the hundreds of lives he destroys in pursuit of his goal. Realizing that finding the reincarnated Elisabeta on his own is impossible, he creates dozens of vampires to aid him in a worldwide search spanning centuries, condemning each of those people to the same eternal, unbearable curse from which he himself longs to be released. Perhaps Vladislav was a good person before Elisabeta’s death; we should concede that that is possible, and her love for him may initially have grown from genuine and legitimate admiration of his character. However, even if Vladislav were deserving of love before her death, he certainly is not afterward.

After four hundred years, Dracula’s search comes to an end when he meets Mina Murray, who looks identical to Elisabeta but is engaged to Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid). He inserts himself into Mina’s social life, carefully observing her mannerisms to ensure that she is indeed Elisabeta reincarnated. Once he is certain, he gives her a music box that he originally gifted to her before her death, and the melody reawakens her memories of her past life. When she learns what Dracula has become and of the atrocities he has committed in her name, she responds not with moral revulsion but with desperation: She begs him to turn her into a vampire so that they can be together forever.

Here, Dracula displays a glimmer of moral clarity for the first of only two times in the film. He initially refuses to turn her, saying “You have your whole life ahead of you, and I only offer death.” When she persists, he relents, condemning the woman he supposedly loves to the same endless pain he originally brought on himself and has since forced on so many others. It should go without saying that true love precludes inflicting horrendous, long-term suffering on one’s partner, no matter how great the immediate temptation or perceived short-term gain. True love requires thinking deeply and carefully about the long-term well-being of oneself and one’s partner, and about what is required to achieve and maintain the well-being of both partners in reality, in harmony with one another and without contradiction or rationalization. It requires taking all of this seriously and acting accordingly, consistently over time. True love is a profoundly emotional experience, but it is not solely an emotional experience; it depends on and requires rational thought. “Love” that defies reason—and thereby inevitably undermines or even destroys the well-being of either partner or of anyone else—is not love in any meaningful sense.

When Dracula retreats to his castle with Elisabeta, Harker and an unnamed priest heavily implied to be Van Helsing (Christoph Waltz), who has been hunting Dracula for decades, gather a small army of Romanian soldiers and assault the castle. Dracula kills dozens and vows to kill all who come after him or his wife. When only Van Helsing is left standing, he and Dracula share the best dialogue in the film:

Dracula: So you are the priest who has chased my people for so many years.

Van Helsing: Yes—but rest assured, I didn’t come to fight you.

Dracula: Nor I. I fight God; I’m not interested in his servants.

Van Helsing: No. You’re not fighting God, my son. You’re fighting yourself.

Dracula: No. No, no. I fought and I killed in his name.

Van Helsing: We live and we breathe in his name. Why would he want us to destroy his creation? Man kills in his own name—and you’re doing it again.

Dracula: That is all just very fine words. God sent you here to kill me.

Van Helsing: God sent me here to save you.

Dracula: So God wants to save me now, after he denies me the right to die for centuries?

Van Helsing: But this is not a punishment. This is an opportunity. Repent, Dracula, for your salvation.

Dracula: She is my salvation.

Van Helsing: But you are her damnation.

They are interrupted when more soldiers arrive and renew the assault on the castle. Dracula, appearing to seriously consider Van Helsing’s words, kills more soldiers but ultimately surrenders when the priest corners him once more and says simply, “Save her.” Dracula allows Van Helsing to mortally wound him, which breaks the curse of vampirism and makes Elisabeta human once again, along with the other surviving victims of Dracula’s power.

As Dracula is dying, Elisabeta, beside herself with grief, asks why he would choose to leave her behind just as they finally have been reunited. His last words to her are: “Because I love you.”

Narratively, Dracula’s sudden change of heart doesn’t work because it’s unearned; it happens too quickly and with far too little internal struggle on his part. Such an extreme one-eighty does not believably transpire in a matter of minutes after four hundred years of single-minded obsession.

Rushed ending aside, Dracula does have something important to say, although its message has little to do with love. Dracula’s final act, morally speaking, is not nearly enough to redeem his past sins—but it’s not nothing, either. The film makes important points about free will, partial atonement, and imperfect justice, but it ultimately fails as a work of art because its actual theme diverges sharply from its intended theme. Its actual theme—the central idea that integrates and follows logically from the events of the plot when all the characters’ actions are considered in full context—is something along the lines of “Not all evil men are completely beyond redemption.”

The movie’s intended theme—something like “the power of love as a force for good”—could not have followed from the events of the plot nor been earned artistically, even under the best of circumstances, because Besson (who also wrote the screenplay) does not understand what love is and what it is not.^[2] Love—real love—is one of the highest and most precious values possible to man, and consistent moral virtue is the only foundation on which it can be built. A single act of sincere atonement at the end of a lifetime of wanton butchery is not morally worthless, but neither is it remotely akin to an act of real love.

Despite its fatal thematic flaw, Dracula is a well-acted and beautifully filmed tale of obsession, hope, regret, and justice (mostly with respect to Harker and Van Helsing in the latter case). It’s worth watching, and it’s one of the better films of 2025—it’s just not a love story. Even though it fails to show us what love is, it shows us with inadvertent clarity what love is not, and that, too, is a valuable lesson.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

^[1] Romantic love can exist without mutual sexual attraction, but this is exceedingly rare.

^[2] It’s possible that Besson understands what love is but nonetheless chose to fundamentally misrepresent it in his screenplay for some reason, but this seems highly unlikely.

The 1960s and ’70s were replete with glamorous spy shows and movies. Many, from the James Bond movies to Danger Man, focused more on style than substance, offering simple storylines that served primarily as vehicles for an escape into a world of suave spies, international intrigue, and indulgence in all manner of pleasures.

However, a few delivered richer stories interwoven with valuable ideas. A stand-out example of this is The Persuaders! (1971), a short-lived series telling the story of two wealthy hedonists who gradually discover the values of justice, purpose, and friendship.

At the start of the series, American street kid turned successful oil investor Danny Wilde (Tony Curtis) and British aristocrat Brett Sinclair (Roger Moore) are indulging in all the pleasures that the Côte d’Azur has to offer. After a chance meeting at Nice airport, the two clash like children, showing off to win over the same women, racing their sports cars along the Riviera, and even trashing a restaurant in a fistfight over how many olives should go in a drink. They are bailed out of jail by the retired Judge Fulton (Laurence Naismith) on the condition that they use their influence, wits, and resources to help him track down and expose a notorious criminal ringleader he was unable to put away during his legal career. In convincing them that the dangerous mission is preferable to sitting in a French prison, he admonishes the two men about their hedonistic lifestyles, delivering what doubles as a meta-critique of the playboy protagonists popular in spy shows of the time. Referencing Wilde’s past success in building his massive fortune from scratch, he remarks,

You were a nothing who became something. And now, you’re a nothing again. . . You have a remarkable talent. . . But what have you done with it? You just drift around the world, gambling and womanizing. . . Yours is the glib tongue at a hundred mindless parties. . . Two adult men, both with immense potential—and you fight over an olive!

Fulton talks them into using their connections, skills, and reputations to help him catch his target. Over the episodes that follow, Fulton regularly tasks Wilde and Sinclair with new missions as he works to settle his regrets about all the criminals who escaped justice during his time as a judge. As well as appealing to the two men’s egos, Fulton initially must remind them that he has the power to have them put away for their many legal transgressions in the pursuit of pleasure, but over time, they begin to savor their new sense of purpose. Eventually, they even begin some crime-fighting missions of their own, often motivated by the desire to rescue or protect an innocent person victimized by some kind of criminal operation.

Although this pursuit of justice drives the show’s action, the heart of its story lies in the friendship that develops between Wilde and Sinclair. Their relationship evolves from childish competitiveness and bravado into what in modern terms might be called a “bromance.” They continue to chide each other over everything from their backgrounds and dialects to their driving skills and drink choices, but that banter quickly shifts from derogatory to affectionate. Curtis and Moore excel at portraying a loving friendship hidden behind a veneer of masculine antics, making the two’s admiration and care for each other plainly visible even in interactions that otherwise would seem foolish and argumentative. The evolution of their relationship is a pleasure to watch, and it makes it natural and satisfying to see the two risk life and limb for each other when things get serious.

Wilde and Sinclair’s friendship, much like their crime-fighting escapades, fills their lives with purpose once again. This is what makes The Persuaders! such an extraordinary example among spy shows of its era: It’s really a story about discovering what’s important in life. At the same time, it’s a lighthearted adventure that oozes 1970s aesthetics—from cars to clothes and much more—and that revels in the more unrestrained attitudes of that time with its risqué humor, especially around Wilde and Sinclair’s constant attempts to woo the women they meet in the course of their exploits.

Like most classic spy shows, The Persuaders! is a fun opportunity to enjoy action, glamor, and intrigue—but unlike many, it has at its core a valuable message about why the pursuit of a life-serving purpose, not merely of pleasure, gives a man’s life meaning. Its fifty-fifth anniversary is a great time to revisit its short, twenty-four-episode run and enjoy how fun yet thoughtful TV shows once were.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a live talk and has been lightly edited. It retains the cadence and idiosyncrasies of an oral presentation.

If I were to ask you to name the greatest American entrepreneur of all time, you’d probably think of all the business titans, those some people call the “robber barons”; most people are going to think of …

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Starring Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, and Kali Reis
Written by Marco van Belle
Distributed by Amazon MGM Studios
Rated PG-13 for violence, bloody images, some strong language, drug content, and teen smoking.

Imagine that you are wrongly accused of murdering someone close to you. You don’t have an advocate to defend you or a jury to convince of your innoce…

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Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a live talk and has been lightly edited. It retains the cadence and idiosyncrasies of an oral presentation.

Many of us tend to think of fiction as primarily fun or entertaining. Good stories are fun, and we should enjoy them. However, we can also get other benefits from good stories that are less obvious but no…

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Rush’s “2112” is no ordinary rock song. Released in March 1976, it’s a twenty-one-minute epic composed of seven movements telling a complete story about the mind-destroying natures of tyranny and collectivism. It’s a song that wouldn’t exist if not for the band’s dogged dedication to their artistic integrity. If their record label had had its way, “2112…

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Thousands of people—entrepreneurs, scientists, activists, diplomats, even astronauts—thank one TV series for inspiring them to pursue those careers: Star Trek.^[1] I count myself among that number; Star Trek inspired …

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If you’re looking for rich, thought-provoking cinema, a James Bond movie is probably not what you’re going to watch. Both Ian Fleming’s original novels and most of the twenty-five 007 films convey a general theme of heroism and patriotism, focusing on the defense of Western freedom and the British way of life from the Soviets and other threats. Beyond t…

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With Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein adaptation recently hitting movie theaters and streaming services, it’s worth revisiting Mary Shelley’s classic gothic novel (originally published in 1818 as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus) and a persistent misunderstanding of the story’s meaning.^[1]

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Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro
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Running time: 150 minutes
Rated R for violence, gore, and brief nudity

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Few (if any) novels have been adapted and retold more than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. By 2025, almost no take on t…

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Human history is replete with social and political systems that sought to subjugate the individual to the supposed needs or will of the group. Communism, fascism, and direct democracy are all examples of such systems.

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Starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Joseph Quinn
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Rated PG-13 for action/violence and some language.

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