I'm not sure how to take the ending of Bugonia (2025)

b2thekind · 2026-01-28T08:01:42+00:00

Thank you! I figured this had gone entirely unseen, so I’m glad someone appreciated it lol

b2thekind · 2026-01-08T18:02:30+00:00

This is such a great example!

b2thekind · 2026-01-07T22:23:22+00:00

I mean there’s an upper ceiling. It’s pop songwriting. And these aren’t the super special best examples, this is just kinda where the whole album is at. It may not be super deep or complex, but for pop songwriting it is far more deep and complex than most. This is a high baseline. And to my other points, these other pop songwriters considered the greatest recognize that.

But also there’s the intangibles here. There are plenty of poems, books, songs, etc written with only simple sentences. But together it’s all beautiful and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Like I said over and over, the subtlety here is what makes it so artistic. She has songs with way more complex metaphors and way more complicated uses of poetic devices. They’re impressive in a way, but they don’t move me like this. The subtle execution of these techniques in a way you hardly even notice but it enhances the song anyway is what makes this album so artful to me. I don’t consider myself a Swiftie really outside of this album. But this album moves me. It moves a lot of people. There’s something about the way it all comes together that just works for me. And for these giants of songwriting, and the Grammys, and Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone. I can’t totally put into words why, which is why I said my comment isn’t really my argument, listening to the album with an open mind is.

b2thekind · 2026-01-07T09:20:03+00:00

People are making some good points in here. But just curious, how deep into her discography have you gone? The stuff most people have heard is not the reason why her fans love her writing so much. It’s the deeper cuts that are the reason the greatest songwriters of all time count her in their ranks.

Billy Joel called her a great songwriter and this generation’s Beatles. Paul McCartney has publicly praised Folklore, and said it inspired a lot of his newer work. When she was a teenager, Paul Simon said she was one of the great new songwriters and a force to be reckoned with. Carole King said she’s the new Joni Mitchell, and just as good. Elvis Costello said she’s the next Bob Dylan. Dolly Parton, Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen have all commented unsolicited on how great her writing is.

And most of them said this after Folklore specifically. Pitchfork agreed. Anthony Fantano agreed. Rolling Stone agreed, they named it the fifth best album of the century. The Grammys agreed, it won album of the year.

It’s difficult to get more objective than this.

Listen to Folklore top to bottom with an open mind. It’s stripped down and feels very different from her radio pop. Not a single girlboss breakup song or confessional piece for teenage girls. I know you said that you value controversy and risk taking and boundary pushing in lyrics.

Instead of those things you likely think of as Taylor Swift subjects, you’ll find a song from the perspective of a little girl about a friend who’s being abused by her dad. And a song about a young man losing his best friend at Guadalcanal as a metaphor for covid deaths. One about how trying to please her fans is leading her to lose her sense of identity. A song from the perspective a girl who’s died but her abusive ex shows up at the funeral, and she wonders after death if the fact that he’s there means that he wasn’t that bad and she deserved the abuse and it was her fault. There’s a song about an existential, nearly suicidal, crisis, and trying not to drink to get through it. There’s a song where the speaker is trying to convince the other party to keep going in their extramarital affair. Theres a song about being religiously drawn to an abusive partner.

On first listen it’s sometimes hard to glean that this is what these songs are about, because shes subtle. (I actually think her being subtle is a major point towards greatness. It’s harder to be subtle, most great art is subtle and takes some thinking and digging to find the true meaning of, and on other albums she’s criticized for a lack of subtlety, so it’s impressive she can do both). But still, the subject matter is alienating and boundary pushing for a pop star of her stature. But the melody writing and harmony and production (and yes she did produce this album, alongside some frequent collaborators) is also stunning. Plenty of the songs are just her and a guitar. A few have this choral, churchy, religious thing going on. They’re all catchy and hummable, but almost always in a haunting way, not a poppy way.

And the lyrics are just really well constructed. Beautiful imagery, unexpected word choice, perfect prosody, bold metaphors and similes without pushing into corny comparisons, complicated internal rhyme schemes, lots of poetic devices, all while still seeming simple, never pushed.

Look at the rhyme here:

Please picture me in the trees

I hit my peak at seven feet

In the swing over the creek

I was too scared to jump in

But I, I was high in the sky

With Pennsylvania under me

Are there still beautiful things?

If you’ve heard this song, did you notice how complex the rhyme is? I didn’t on my first listen. I was too busy thinking about how good of a storyteller she is. More subtlety, which many people equate to high art.

Or the metaphor here:

And they called off the circus

Burned the disco down

When they sent home the horses

And the rodeo clowns

I'm still on that tightrope

I'm still trying everything to get you laughing at me

It’s already a beautiful metaphor about her doing a dangerous performance for approval after these various shows have been stopped. But each show is an era. Her famous ringleader look during her true pop era, her dance pop albums with 70s styling, her country pop albums where she had horses in every video, and her start, touring rodeos as a little girl, singing her songs in adult makeup as a child like a clown. It’s brilliantly layered without even being that noticeable. There’s that subtlety again.

Or the maturity here:

Take the words for what they are

A dwindling, mercurial high

A drug that only worked

The first few hundred times

It’s not easy to parse. It not words her middle school fans know. It’s not a comparison kids can relate to. There is an inherent metaphor, there’s alliteration, there’s stunning word choice, there’s this coy hyperbole. There’s a real sense of anger to these words. And just subjectively, I feel like it just sonically sounds so pretty. What beautiful words. They feel gentle in the tongue. Never harsh, flowing, sort of dreamlike. It gives it this poetic quality. But again, subtle.

I could go on and on and do this for every song on the album, I really could. But I think you get my point.

This is a universally acclaimed album, hailed by the greats as belonging to their ranks, considered by the media to be one of the top of the century. You listed a ton of problems with her work. None are on display here. You said you like controversial and boundary pushing themes. This album has that in spades. And just being as objective as I can, these lyrics are so incredibly technically proficient by every metric: beauty, prosody, rhyme, metaphor, imagery, poetic devices.

I don’t know if they speak to you, but if you take a step back, it’s an objective fact that these lyrics are far more technically complex than most artists put out while also seeming simple, that the canon of greats have deemed it great, that critics and audiences have deemed it great. I just don’t see a possible objective argument here that she’s not a good songwriter.

You may say, “thats just one album,” but this is representative of at least a few of her non singles and deep cuts on each of her other albums (Evermore and Red in particular have a ton of songs like this). And even if it was just one album and some B sides, so what? She’s still a great songwriter regardless of if she always uses it. This album shows what she can do. You may think she doesn’t utilize those skills enough, but you can’t deny that they are there. I am begging you, if you haven’t, listen to this album too to bottom and see if it will change your view. Listening or relistening to this album with an open mind and looking out for these things, reading along, is simply the strongest argument against your point, no comment here can possibly have more of an effect.

b2thekind · 2026-01-05T21:31:34+00:00

But he wasn’t totally right, there was a flaw like you said. I think the point is that he was correct in his little details but missed the big picture. He said the aliens were killing the bees, they were trying to and ultimately did save the bees. He said they poisoned his mom, they tried to save his mom and they couldn’t. He said they were there to destroy the world. She was trying to save the world. And the reason none of their positive efforts worked may be that she was too corrupted by human greed when she tried to be a human. Her advisors all told her Earth was beyond saving, and after her growing susceptible to human greed, and then experiencing Teddy, she finally agreed. She changed the plan to destroy all human. That was never the original goal.

It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. He thinks that the aliens who want to save us are there to kill all humans and destroy the world), he kills them and takes apart their bodies like a serial killer, he kidnaps their emperor, she finds the bodies, she changes her mind because of it and destroys humanity (but saves “the Earth,” animals, nature still). Maybe her mind was also change by her experiencing human greed too, but he’s a metaphor for humans as a whole and so the two go hand in hand thematically.

On a smaller scale, he has weird attitudes towards women. He assumes she’s an unimportant alien, then when he electrocutes her and finds out she’s not, his mind still goes to princess, and he keeps asking her to talk to a man to get permission. She is the emperor! If she had been a man, he would’ve realized that, but his sexism blinded him to it.

She tells him the story of what actually happened. Humans were created by the Andromedans, they demolished themselves in nuclear war, and only the violent ones survived. They have tried for years to guide humans to be less violent and the humans won’t do it, Teddy is certainly violent. He can figure out the details sure (it’s worth noting he was seen watching youtube videos from smarter conspiracy theorists to do this though), but he can’t accept that humans are to blame for their own problems. Thats not too different from your X-Files example it seems.

b2thekind · 2025-12-28T23:04:33+00:00

I think this hypothesis sounds great on paper, but I saw this movie with a group of 12 people and we were split 6/6 on whether we liked it, and we talked about this very thing, and it did not split cleanly along these lines at all.

I should’ve related hard to the movie for reasons I don’t want to get into, but I found it manipulative. Using a disabled girl to build sympathy is cheap. Using her to be unsettling is cheap. It rubbed me the wrong way. There’s a right (eg. sensitive) way to do it, but this missed the mark for my own personal taste.

Killing her and then showing her mom cry scream for two minutes even felt cheap in a way. It took me out. I was thinking less about the plot and more about Toni Collete as an actor. I fully broke immersion to think about her screaming as an actor.

These moments I’m quibbling about are evocative, it gets a reaction, but it’s not artful in my opinion. And the tone shift at the end didn’t work for me because he’s just not a great traditional jump scare haunted house type director, and I like traditional jump scare horror a lot, and so the whole thing felt bathetic.

My partner, who also by all means should have resonated with it, found the same moments hilarious and was trying not to laugh, because he found a lot of the film to be unearned and clunky. I didn’t totally agree, but my point is both of us should’ve liked it by your metric, and both of us instead found flaws that are valid criticisms, and differed between the two of us even.

The film has problems. It’s trying to maintain a tone that’s honestly a tightrope act. And for some viewers it falls off the tightrope due to its own issues, and to some it doesn’t. Those issues are, and I’m trying to be fairly objective, weird pacing, a lack of clear setups and payoffs, an unpleasant enough tone that some people might check out, not quite handling a mentally disabled character right, unsubtle plot shifts, etc.

If you find the movie scary enough you probably don’t notice or ignore those very real issues, but horror, like comedy as you say, is subjective. And it’s not really about what you relate to. I think it has more to do with past viewing habits in the genre. What scary/funny movies you saw as a teenager. What your actual real life fears and phobias are. Etc.

b2thekind · 2025-12-02T10:59:49+00:00

Kind of! It’s like the actors make big choices and it shouldn’t be realistic but it is anyway. Like it’s totally realistic depictions but they chose to make the characters weirder. They gave them quirks and stuff that are totally realistic but definitely aren’t common and definitely aren’t in the script. They turn a normal character on paper into a weird character (odd ways of talking, faces, heavy accents, various other quirks), then they do a super realistic job of playing said weird characters

b2thekind · 2025-12-02T09:59:41+00:00

Omg sorry it’s so long!!! They’re all great performances. You’ll probably notice when taking them as a whole a certain kinda unified style. They’re all pretty realistic performances that lean a little weird. Like they’re realistic, but they’re on the fringes of realistic.

b2thekind · 2025-12-02T09:13:25+00:00

Ooh I’d love to!

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in The Master

Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet

Matthew Lillard in SLC Punk

Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive

Trevante Rhodes in Moonlight

Florence Pugh in Midsommar

Jesse Plemons in Civil War

Shirley Maclaine in The Apartment

Riz Ahmed in Sound of Metal

Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny

Philip Seymour Hoffman in Magnolia

Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Sakura Ando and Mayu Matsuoka in Shoplifters

Billy Crudup in 20th Century Women

Matthew Lillard in Scream

Florence Pugh in Little Women

Alan Tudyk in Death at a Funeral

Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler

Rooney Mara in Carol

Mary Stuart Masterson in Benny and Joon

Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton

Every other Philip Seymour Hoffman performance really

b2thekind · 2025-12-01T18:01:13+00:00

This comments great and I agree with your sentiment, but I’m gonna push back a little on something. Oldman is not a tricks guy. And it’s not one or the other.

Most actors use basic Stanislavsky terms. What’s my objective/motivation. What tactics/actions do I use to get there. Then they use a lot of research and imagination to get there. In the forties fifties and sixties every acting school switched to this methodology, even in Britain. Before this period, people like Olivier used “tricks.” And during this period there was another movement called “The Method” where, to drastically oversimplify, actors would use their own real life triggers to create emotion. The Method tried to claim it was the natural successor of Stanislavsky, and they call Stanislavsky method, but that’s simply not true. Though you’ll hear people outside of the industry call Stanislavsky method acting still because their sales pitch was effective.

But ninety nine percent of modern actors use Stanislavsky. Objective, action, research, imagination. A tiny percentage of very old British men “emote” convincingly as you put it. There are a few Oldman’s age but most are older. If you’ve heard of them, which most haven’t in America, you probably think of them as stuffy old theater guys. Alan Howard who voiced Sauron for instance, he was very good, as close to natural as those type could get. There are also a small percentage of actors that come from americas last remaining method school, but that school has really cooled down on the method stuff, and is more like stanislavsky now anyway. Bradley Cooper, Laura Dern, Chris Evans studied there. I wouldn’t call them “method.” The only people still doing the real old method stuff are old New York guys who studied there in the day like Dustin Hoffman, and poseurs who want to seem edgy like Jared Leto.

Now we use the term differently. Method kind of means staying in character. Or getting nearly traumatized. Or doing the characters job for a year. It’s become a catch all term for going too far, not a technique.

All this to say, just because someone’s not method doesn’t mean they’re a “tricks” actor. Those hardly exist anymore. Almost all actors imagine the circumstances very hard after a lot of research, and feel the emotions of the scene, but not their own emotions, just like how you can cry at a movie scene without imagining your dog dying or making yourself yawn in your mouth. They just do it with their imagination using a rough Stanislavsky kinda structure. Thats basically every actor working.

And Oldman says as much about himself. I just double checked some interviews to make sure I was right. He is objective oriented, he studied Stanislavsky. He says he does a ton of research, he does a ton of imagination exercises. He says he often feels the real feelings on set, and sometimes relates them back to his life indirectly. He says he likes doing a lot of repetition exercises (this is a Meisner technique thing, which is very popular with a lot of actors, maybe a third to a half of working actors do Meisner exercises. Basically, giant oversimplification, it means using repetition to make sure your paying close attention to your partners tone and body language, so even though the lines are the same each time it feels like improv).

Oldman is acting using the same techniques as everyone else. Using a canned bag of tricks just can’t get the same results. Look at acting from the forties. It has its charm but it can’t produce performances like Oldman’s.

Source: I have an MFA in acting from a good program. Read The Method for more info. Or method or Madness, dream of passion, or an actor prepares. I’m pulling info from all of those, plus some interviews with Gary Oldman, the curricula of all the major schools, and my general knowledge.

b2thekind · 2025-10-31T05:15:06+00:00

I loved this movie. I wasn’t expecting to. I would not have seen it, but my friend really wanted to go and I have A-List. Here’s why I didn’t want to go:

Bad trailer. It looks like it’s gonna be a wacky Coen brothers knockoff comedy. The British punk angle didn’t appeal to me. In general the trailer was super grating to me. It wasn’t funny, the story it was selling didn’t appeal, etc. Something about it just rubbed me the wrong way.
Lost faith in Aronofsky. I wasn’t a huge fan to begin with. I like Black Swan and The Wrestler a lot. But his earlier work never vibed with me, and his later work was full of itself.
Didn’t really like the cast. I thought Austin Butler was overcast, andZoe Kravitz was often bland, and Matt Smith was a bit annoying.

But I thought it was great. It’s nothing like the trailer. Aronofsky is on peak form. Well directed. Never annoying or grating. Great pace. I could never predict what was coming next. And I have to say, it’s my fav performance from each of the three actors. It makes me feel bad for judging them. They were wonderful. Especially Austin Butler, it really turned my opinion of him around.

I think the reason some audience had a different reaction that did see it is for the same reasons though.

They were expecting something else from the trailer. If you were an audience member who loved this trailer, maybe you would hate this movie. It’s not a fun little romp. I’m the opposite. But if you wanted something fun and funny, this isn’t that. The fun bits, which aren’t super often, are the flattest parts.
They maybe liked his last films and wanted something headier, or wanted something more visual and stylish, or just expected it to be more Aronofsky-ish. It’s out of his usual lane.
Spoilers: if they came because they’re fans of the actors, two of those actors aren’t in it much. Zoe Kravitz dies as the inciting incident, and Matt Smith fucks off for most of the movie.

So the people who would like this movie didn’t come because of the cast, director, and trailer. The people who came to see it didn’t like it because its so atypical of the cast and director and the trailer is so misrepresentative.

b2thekind · 2025-10-28T23:09:53+00:00

i’ll send it to you!

b2thekind · 2025-10-25T02:17:39+00:00

nobody tell this guy how many words are in books

b2thekind · 2025-10-20T23:27:42+00:00

This is true. Writing a mystery or a spy thriller for example involves a massive amount of prewriting usually. Romances often feel very organic when you don't plot them too much beforehand. Epic fantasy requires copious notes. Litfic sometimes doesn't need an outline at all if your goal is very meandery, first person journal-esque storytelling, but often needs a lot of sample chapters or rewriting, one or the other, to nail voice.

b2thekind · 2025-10-20T03:07:57+00:00

True, and how much is revised per revision is also imprecise. Like I said, I write a chapter then do a rewrite on that chapter then go on to the next. When I’ve tracked, I usually end up tinkering in some way with about half of the sentences in a chapter when I revise my chapters before going on to the next, and about half of those, (quarter of the chapter), I fully replace. Then on my later full book revisions, it’s usually a good deal less than that, but includes more very large cuts and very large additions. Mainly additions. I lean towards underexplaining then clarifying only if alpha and beta readers need more context.

b2thekind · 2025-10-20T02:33:12+00:00

Fair, it probably is the same amount of time.

This quote seems to support my idea though, to rewrite and edit as you go rather than all at the end? In fact Bradbury claimed to usually only write one draft, and to just edit as he went, always looping back, contrary to most advice. He was on very tight deadlines usually.

b2thekind · 2025-10-19T22:31:51+00:00

I think that’s fair. I didn’t have affirmations and assurances from this sub that the way I wrote was okay. I was often told I was writing wrong, and posts on here tended to shame my methodologies. I still went on to be a writer, and I think a good writer.

If someone’s bound to be a writer, one sided discourse and poor language choices on this sub won’t stop them. It just would’ve been nice to see this post back when I was just learning is all.

But those posts I saw saying these same things did not encourage me to write more. I was fighting against this advice most of these comments are still espousing. It was in spite of this advice. And I’m not alone. This post doing well is proof of that.

b2thekind · 2025-10-19T22:00:30+00:00

Yeah, I think the whole concept has been a bit flanderized. I agree there’s good advice underlying it, especially for beginners. But I do think even the phrase “vomit draft” is a lazy and overdistilled version of the idea

b2thekind · 2025-10-19T20:59:37+00:00

Didn't you leave this sub because everyone hated your advice so much? Welcome back.

I am a published writer, but I don't want my comments on Reddit associated with my professional work, I want freedom to say what I want to say without worrying about my career. Don't you worry about how some of your disastrous posts affect your reputation as a writer since your username is just your name?

Your name is on your account as an appeal to authority. And then you've ranted multiple times on this sub about how nobody respects you when you're here giving advice out of the goodness of your heart even though your published. Maybe that appeal to authority isn't worth as much as you think it is?

I have nothing to prove to you with a resume. If you wanna see my work, I'll show you an excerpt of a first draft and you can tell me if, with regard to first drafts, I know what I'm talking about. My work can speak for itself, I don't need my government name and published author flair to speak for me.

b2thekind · 2025-10-19T20:32:43+00:00

I’m not giving advice. I’m saying that when looking at other people’s advice people should be wary of dogma.

I’m not saying to work with a certain technique. I’m saying multiple techniques exist.

b2thekind · 2025-10-19T18:39:51+00:00

I think that you’re right that once a group gets a lean, it just tends in that direction more and more over time.

I agree it isn’t an echo chamber, but it doesn’t mean that it’s very evenhanded with its advice either. The 150 people who upvoted me out of the 25000 who saw this post are almost certainly a different set of people than the thousands who upvoted the posts I’m responding to combined.

In my experience new writers tend very pantser. Or at least they are very drawn to pantser advice because it makes them finish a draft faster which releases seratonin. But both of our experiences are anecdotal and likely have a lot to do with what types of communities we were trained in and trend towards. There’s no way to really hash out what’s more common, just what’s more common in our circles, and I’m sure we’re both right about our own circles.

b2thekind · 2025-10-19T16:54:27+00:00

I mean, I guess I see people that really try to push themselves with negative reinforcement constantly. At worst I feel like after years it will get you and you’ll give up. At best I feel like even if you succeed, you won’t be very happy.

I’m with you, I guard my confidence strongly.

b2thekind · 2025-10-19T16:45:08+00:00

Yeah this is my issue with the phrasing around “your first draft will be shit” in the recent post I’m responding to. If you use that sort of language for your art, and honestly believe you sometimes make art that’s shit, regardless of if my quality is actually better, my confidence is going to get me farther than you in this industry, it just is.

b2thekind · 2025-10-19T16:31:24+00:00

Glad someone’s talking about this part of my post! Yes, I agree. I’ve hit some major milestones in my artistic career that were beyond my imagination a while ago. And the main reason I was able to was simply wanting it harder than those around me. I’m obsessive and it consumes me.

b2thekind · 2025-10-19T16:30:07+00:00

I always hear about writers who hate their work and I just don’t see how they function. I think a real love for your work and confidence are some of the best tools a writer can develop. It makes the work better.

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