The Academy
This page includes links to published work, including essays about Richard Linklater, Waking Life, The Handmaid’s Tale, Battlestar Galactica, and Zippy the Pinhead.
In this essay, available in the on line version of Philosophy Now, I juxtapose the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Zippy the Pinhead, who share a predilection for questioning our habitual approaches to everyday life. They suggest we abandon gestellen – the ways in which we tend to ‘enframe’, and consequently diminish, our experience.
In my essay, “When Being and Appearance Collide”, I look at the Battlestar Galactica series with a particular eye towards the Cylon’s appearance and its resonance for me with the thinking of Hannah Arendt. This book is available as a PDF if you click the link on the title above.
“The Holy Moment”
Part of a special look at Richard Linklater’s work, “The Holy Moment: Waking Life and Linklater’s Sublime Dream Time,” was published in the journal Film Quarterly, Vol. 68, Number 3, 2015 and is available to subscribers.
My essay, subtitled, The Optics of Dystopia, engages the stunning cinematography of Colin Watkinson. This book is available in bookstores and at Amazon, linked to the title above.
The Handmaid’s Tale: Under His Eye
This video essay makes visible the ways in which Colin Watkinson’s cinematography performs what we might imagine was the experience of Atwood’s Gilead. You can view the essay in the spring issue of Mise-en-scéne: The Journal of Film and Visual Narrative or on Youtube.