A century of machinery built to argue with fate — a Broadway certification chain, a Scottish psychiatrist with a tape loop, five sequels that explained a mystery to death, and two system-builders who crossed on Second Avenue in February 1917.
If destiny tastes of anathema
to the will you claim and the life you undertake,
compatibilism is already there—
not surrender, but a working peace
between the given and the chosen.
Hollywood will not take the treaty.
They do not seek an alternative.
They hunt the operative opposite of fate
and raise it as war.
War for the mind they would script,
the body they would recast,
the planet they would unmake.
Leon Trotsky is walking fast toward St. Mark's Place, where he edits a Russian daily nobody north of Fourteenth Street has heard of. Five weeks in the city. He lives on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx in an apartment with an elevator, a telephone, and a chute in the wall that swallows the garbage, and he will admit in print, years later, that the chute impressed him. He is thirty-seven. In eight months he will be running the Petrograd Soviet.
Stella Adler is fifteen and walking north from her father's theater, where he is the most famous actor in the Yiddish world. She has been on stage since she was four. She knows what it is to make a room feel something on command, and she knows that skill as a trade, the family trade, the way you'd know a joint or a stitch. She may be the last actor in America who will think of acting that way. The ones who come after her will describe acting as being taken over.
Leon Trotsky and Stella Adler almost certainly crossed paths. His office and her father's stage were a few blocks apart; he lectured in every hall on the Lower East Side that winter; the Adlers lived inside the same cafés and papers that were printing him. Ten weeks, twenty blocks, two people that public. What no one can supply is the glance.
So let them have it once. Both enter stage left. They cross at center, right shoulder to right shoulder, close enough to look and never touching, and the whole century is in it. He is carrying a plan to engineer a society from the outside in. She will spend her life engineering minds for actors, outside in. Two system-builders, different scale. Colleagues, unsuspecting or maybe even suspecting.
Believe it or not, this started with Hamilton, which is a bad musical. Not bad the way people say it about Brando or a leather jacket. Bad the way a meal is bad: overcooked, oversold, and somehow still on every table in the room.
We can drop the now-tiresome charade: eleven Tonys, a Pulitzer, a decade sold out, a cast album in houses that had never owned one. My small toe has a Tony. What is abundantly more interesting than a cringe rap musical is the distance between how bad it is and how loudly it was loved. That distance is what sent me looking for a mechanism.
The critics never met the show cold. It arrived pre-interpreted, and the interpretation stopped where the show doesn't.
The mechanism is a cascade. One institution certifies the show to the next; by the time a critic sits down there is nothing left to judge, only a verdict to ratify.
Certification chains have been engineered before, deliberately and by statute, and the engineered version shows you what the Broadway version is. Weimar Germany rated films for tax relief; Goebbels kept the ratings and added the stamps that mattered—state-politically valuable, artistically valuable, film of the nation—each one issued by a board before the premiere and each one carrying a tax break and a guaranteed booking.
A distributor who passed a stamped film along was safe. One who questioned it was making a statement about the ministry. In November 1936 the regime banned art criticism outright and replaced it with film reporting, so that a critic walking into a premiere was there to ratify a verdict already signed. Every link in that chain was held in place by fear.
The show itself is a war on destiny. Its hero writes like he's running out of time because he is, and the show scores the writing as the thing that makes him. Its second lead waits, and the waiting is the sin. Its finale hands the story to whoever outlives you, and the show treats that not as fate but as the last thing a man can fail to control. The culture that selected it heard the agency and cheered: you are not your birth, you can write your way in, the room where it happens has a chair for you. The line that got the biggest reaction every night was the one about immigrants getting the job done. Nobody stood up for Burr.
Look at who sings the line. Hamilton and Lafayette, at Yorktown, in a call and response the house waits for. Hamilton left Nevis for New York in 1772, one British possession for another, a move inside the empire with no border on it. Lafayette was a French aristocrat who arrived in 1777 to fight, never meant to stay, never applied to, and went home a French citizen. The only things he left with were reverence and a friendship, and he named his son George after the man. The only immigration in the number is the audience's, into a category that fits neither man — and the certification chain had likely supplied the word a year before anyone heard the song.
Atrocious cringe rap, and the institutions that choose our stories heard self-authorship, heard it right, and rewarded the text for the one thing it kills its hero with.
Nothing in Hollywood is destiny. Almost everything in it is alienation with the generational friction retuned for the decade. Not one of those films has a wall the hero can't see. They have parents.
When you apply existential alienation and generational friction to Little Shop of Horrors, the campy B-movie facade completely melts away to reveal a surprisingly dark, system-driven tragedy. Seymour and Audrey do not just suffer from poverty; they suffer from a total sense of invisibility and worthlessness dictated by consumer capitalism. As an orphan taken in by Mushnik purely for cheap labor, Seymour views himself as a non-person. His alienation is so deep that he believes his only value to society—and his only shot at earning Audrey's love—is tied to what he can produce. When he discovers Audrey II, he immediately turns the plant into a commodity to buy his way into human relevance.
Audrey's disconnection is reflected in her acceptance of abuse from Orin Scrivello and her tragic fantasy song, "Somewhere That's Green." Her dream isn't grand; it is a completely sanitized, plastic, suburban reality straight out of a 1950s magazine advertisement. She is so alienated by the harshness of Skid Row that she literalizes her own worth through material possessions, blind to the human connection right in front of her. Meanwhile, Audrey II serves as the ultimate manifestation of the existential void. It is an insatiable, consumerist engine that explicitly tells Seymour to eat or be eaten, buy or be bought. To escape his alienation, Seymour must systematically commodify and destroy human lives.
This dynamic extends directly into the generational divide, which isn't about angsty teens screaming at their parents, but rather a transactional, predatory relationship where the older generation actively exploits the young. Mr. Mushnik represents the transactional rot of that older generation. For years, he treats Seymour like garbage, but the second Seymour achieves success, Mushnik manipulates him with a fake offer of family and adoption strictly to lock down the financial rights to the plant. There is no genuine paternal love—only economic survival and greed.
The friction peaks when Mushnik realizes Seymour is tied to a murder. Instead of acting as a protective elder or a moral guide, he uses the information to blackmail Seymour into giving up the shop's profits. Seymour feeding Mushnik to the plant is the ultimate, violent severing of the generational tie. At the end of the original Director's Cut, the older generation of slick, uptown suit-wearing businessmen arrive. They don't care about the deaths or the horror; they immediately mass-produce the baby Audrey IIs to sell to the public, literally packaging the youth's destruction and selling it back to them for profit.
Seymour and Audrey think the plant is their golden ticket out of Skid Row, but to feed it, Seymour has to sell his soul, commit murder, and sacrifice his humanity. The tool they use to break free becomes the very cage that eats them alive, trading the literal trash of Skid Row for the plastic, consumerist conformity of suburban mythology. Even if Seymour had said no, the corporate machine was already mass-marketing the plant, proving that individual choice is an illusion.
By the time the story ends, the characters haven't broken free of their alienation or resolved their generational trauma—they are completely consumed by the very monster they cultivated to escape it. The theatrical ending where Seymour and Audrey miraculously survive is a cheat code that contradicts the dark, Faustian warning of the whole story just to appease test audiences. The original tragic, world-ending finale is where the mathematics of the themes actually add up.
Restrained by something other than puppets, Frank Oz took that exact same obsession with transactional human nature and systemic fraud for his next effort, creating the brilliant 1988 comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels — a masterclass in cinematic restraint and a fitting love letter to the restrainers.
Highlander, 1986, is destiny. A man is born into something he did not choose. Nobody can tell him why. There is a Gathering; it will happen; there can be only one. He gets to make choices inside that order and no choices about it.
What followed raped and mutilated that answer. Five sequels, each one taking the mystery a little further apart, looks like a ritual: the same rite performed on the same body until the body stops moving. The truth is worse. The second film wasn't a ceremony; a completion-bond company seized it during an Argentine currency collapse and cut it themselves. Each sequel after was made by whoever held the rights, on whatever budget, with a new writer who felt obliged to answer the question the original had refused.
Dismantling is what happens when a mystery passes through a notes process, because notes demand causes, and destiny is by definition the thing without a cause. Why are they immortal? is a reasonable executive question, and answering it is fatal.
"Why does the sun come up? Or are the stars just pinholes in the curtain of night?"Ramirez, to Connor — the last unanswered question in the franchise
Hollywood was not the first to lambaste destiny. It began with Shakespeare — that he existed at all is a position I hold on evidence of its own, to be weighed on its own, and not here — in every Hamlet where the ghost is maybe in his head and every Macbeth where the witches are a symptom, and it is borrowed outright in the newest Odyssey, where Zeus never appears and the gods have been converted into trauma. Keep the plot, remove the physics.
Hollywood before the films that made the flower children had a relatively decent relationship with pirate narratives which lasted for about thirty years. Fairbanks, Flynn, Lancaster; the swashbuckler was the studio hero. Then, in the 1950s, the pirate died, and came back decades later only as a clown. The vampire went the other way. A monster in 1931, a lover by the time the Method generation was running the town: Rice in the seventies, the film in the nineties, the teenagers after that—a genre of the beautiful undead.
Hollywood invented the word. Vamp enters English through a studio publicity campaign for Theda Bara in 1915. The industry that gave contract players new names, new teeth, and new pasts told on itself early. The machine is incompatible with destiny, so it refuses it wholesale, retail, in any form whatsoever. The pirate dies in the decade the studio system collapses and a new way of making actors takes over. The vampire is what that way of making actors grows up to want.
Konstantin Alekseyev was born in 1863 into one of the richest textile families in Russia and took the name Stanislavski so his father wouldn't see it on a playbill. He was an amateur for years, a rich man's hobbyist with a private stage, and what he noticed as an amateur was the thing every actor notices and most accept: some nights it comes and some nights it doesn't, and nobody can say why. He decided that was intolerable.
The System, which he spent the rest of his life revising and never finished, is an attempt to take the thing that happens by grace and put it under procedure. In 1898 he and Nemirovich-Danchenko founded the Moscow Art Theatre and staged The Seagull, and in the years after 1906 he built the method out of Ribot's psychology, yoga breathing, and his own notebooks: relaxation, concentration, the magic if, emotional memory.
The Bolsheviks kept him. Lenin protected the theater, Stalin liked it, and the man who wanted to engineer a reliable actor spent the twenties as the house artist of the men who wanted to engineer a reliable citizen. He died in Moscow in 1938, having by then largely abandoned emotional memory for physical action — which is the part the Americans never heard.
They had heard the earlier part. The Moscow Art Theatre toured the United States in 1923 and 1924, and two of its actors, Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya, stayed behind and opened the American Laboratory Theatre in New York. Strasberg studied there. So did Adler. What they learned was the 1910s version of a system its author was already leaving, and they carried it downtown and split over it.
Under the vampire's contract, Strasberg drinks and Adler transfuses. It's still blood. What her school proves is only that you could get the result without feeding on the person, and that most of the money, for seventy years, chose to feed.
A Scottish-born psychiatrist was strapping patients into repeated electroshock and looped tape, trying to wipe a mind and write a new one. He failed. He produced wrecked people and no method.
When the program's files were subpoenaed in the seventies, most of them had already been destroyed on the director's order, and what survived was dragged out of the Agency by a Senate committee over its objections.
MK-Ultra is where our fear of influence goes to live. The program is lurid, declassified, and shaped exactly like what people already think mind control looks like: a lab, a drug, a victim in a chair. It is a decoy the way a bright light is a decoy for moths. It gives the fear a room, and the room is in the wrong building.
Look at the program as an endeavor rather than a scandal and it has none of the hallmarks of a serious one. No protocol anyone could hand to a stranger. No replication. Eighty institutions, a stage magician on retainer, drugs slipped to strangers in bars, and after twenty years and millions of dollars, not one result that survived its own room.
I do claim to know what it did, because the Agency told us what to call it. They labeled it mind control, and the label is wrong. Nothing in those files controls a mind; nothing in them even reliably damages one on purpose. When a program's only durable product is its name, the name is what it does. Not what anyone meant; what it does, sitting there in the archive fifty years later, still doing it.
It's the tail wagging the dog — a spectacle of mind control that makes the real thing unthinkable by making it look like a lab.
Method acting is mind control. Not only of the actor, though the actor goes first. The audience is amused; that's the charm, and that's the sale.
The Greeks had all three: a training method for actors, a chorus that could put a whole city in a state, and a machine for explaining — the oracle — that anyone could walk up to and consult. They did something else with the material.
Google will tell you the gods are supreme, man is proud, pride is punished, learn your place. The reading is wrong, and the wrongness is load-bearing, because the wrong reading is what lets a modern reader file the Greeks under fanatics and file destiny under superstition in the same motion.
A god was what you got when you looked hard at a force you could not command and gave it a name and a face so you could deal with it. Poseidon is the sea. Demeter is whether there is food. Apollo is boundary and clarity, the thing that draws the line, and also plague and the cure for plague, because the line cuts both ways. There was no Zeus in general. There was the Zeus of the oath, the Zeus of the guest at your door, the Zeus of the fence around your yard, each one a thing a man could not enforce alone and so had to swear by.
And the temples are not what the Google version needs them to be. Nobody built one to say here is a house, don't hurt me. You built one when the harvest came in, out of what was left over, to show whose side had been good to you. Surplus, then temple. It's the same reason a city puts a trophy in the square.
Deification was applied to what was revered, and what was revered was whatever your life depended on. Devotion was function before it was piety. You ritualized your relationship to the harvest because the harvest did not care about you, and the ritual was the working interface, the way you ordered your conduct toward a thing that would not be ordered.
No one decides to ruin you. It is cause and effect, all of it, and no one is standing where all of it can be seen. None of it is aimed at you. You manage how it takes you, and fighting it moves you faster.
Laius and Oedipus don't sin against the oracle. They try to patch it. Each patch is a clever technical solution to a law of nature, and each is the mechanism by which the law completes itself. That is what happens when the smartest man in the play tries to engineer his way around a boundary using bad data.
Tragedy, then, was not a lesson in obedience. It was civic maintenance. The city gathered once a year and watched its best mind collide with a wall it could not see, and then watched him do the one thing the modern version never allows: locate the fault in himself, take it out of the city on his own back, and pay.
Oedipus does not get the Prize. He does not get explained. He is not rehabilitated by a sequel. He goes to Colonus, blind, and the paying is the point, and in the later play his grave becomes the thing that protects the city that took him in. The broken king is converted back into a function. Nobody has managed to ruin that story, though God knows they have tried, and every attempt makes one move: find the cause, name the trauma, give him a choice, hand him the child.
Hamilton writes like a man who can outrun that clause and dies in a duel that borrows Highlander's arithmetic, on a field where he has decided his honor and Burr's cannot both exist. His elimination doesn't erase him. Eliza puts herself back in the narrative and grants him what he could not secure.
The show fights destiny on purpose. Yorktown and the financial plan are shown as near-misses, the work of sleepless and manipulative men, not history arriving on schedule. And it fights compatibilism, the treaty in the poem up top. Hamilton's fall is not fate's twist. It is the Reynolds Pamphlet, the attacks on Adams, the letters about Burr: agency used as a weapon until it takes down the life it built. The institutions heard self-authorship and were right. What they didn't hear is that the play treats it as the cause of death.
Back on Second Avenue. Trotsky goes on to build a society on the American factory model and gets an ice axe for it in a suburb of Mexico City, delivered by the machine he helped design. Adler builds the other machine, the one that rewrites a self without eating it, and runs it for fifty years. They pass, right shoulder to right shoulder. She sees a foreigner in a hurry. He sees a child.
Martin Short lost a brother at twelve, his mother at seventeen, his father at twenty — more raw material than Strasberg ever got out of anyone — and he has spent sixty years declining to feed any of it to a room.
In 2012, on morning television, a host told him he had one of the great marriages in show business and asked how many years. Thirty-six, he said. Still in love? Madly, he said, madly. His wife had been dead for two years. He let her finish, told her at the break, and when she came back apologizing he had already gone. He didn't correct the river. He answered the question, and the answer was true.
He came up through Godspell in Toronto and Second City and SCTV, which is to say through a trade: sketch, the craft of the bit, the outside-in line that runs from the Yiddish stage to the Adler court to a man in a fat suit interviewing a celebrity who doesn't know what's about to happen to him.
In 2006 he brought a show to the Bernard B. Jacobs called Fame Becomes Me: a parody of what Broadway had started to sell in earnest — the confessional bio-musical, the star excavating his tragic childhood in front of paying strangers, the harvest set to music. Short played a version of himself and gave the version a fake tragic childhood, a fake breakdown, a fake redemption, a death, and a trip to heaven, and every night he pulled someone out of the audience and interviewed them as Jiminy Glick, a man with no inner life at all. The premise was that fame had happened to a small Canadian and there was nothing to be done about it. Destiny? Gloriously so.
By the authority of Almighty Zeus, I command Prometheus to unleash his stolen fire and reduce this collective integration of empathetic delegation to utter ash.
As for Moscow and its agents — the ones who astral-projected themselves into the Actors Studio — they have done considerable damage. The river still rages. Extreme whitewater does not forgive: a minor mistake becomes a severe emergency in an instant.