In a gritty world that prizes physical and elemental power—a world where helmets and armor are extensions of the self, straight arrows are flung from impossibly tight bows, where a loom woven and unwoven determines fate, and water and shadow move with the strength of a Greek army—it is the intangible Zeus’s law that remains paramount to Christopher Nolan’s huge new film The Odyssey. Unwritten but as integral to Greek society as the very belief in gods themselves, Zeus’s law requires a host to offer shelter and a meal to any who cross their threshold—even if your guests are terrible suitors who harass you while you seek your missing war general husband on the horizon. Any stranger who crosses the threshold could be a god in disguise, so one best act accordingly. Step wrong, and you might regret it.

While Zeus’s law is as constant as Helios charioting the sun across the sky, another word kept pressing on my brain during The Odyssey: godliness. One possible tenet (casual Nolan film reference for the win; watch me seamlessly work in Memento in a second) of godliness involves realizing that the interference of the gods is a foundational cornerstone in the lives of these characters. The gods are real; the stakes are paramount. If Zeus’s law is what steers the ship of narrative, the gods’ inescapable presence is the wind powering the entire vessel.

The more urgent definition of godliness within this essay, though, is the becoming or striving to emulate a god. If one is godly, are they also a hero? Perhaps being a hero comes with certain expectations of morality, but perhaps not. These questions find ripe soil to bloom in the field of Odysseus. While I can think of several actors who could have been able (literally and figuratively) to captain the ship, Matt Damon might have been the best choice of them all. I was consistently impressed, and maybe even surprised, by his ability to lead the movie with such a steady hand. He’s handsome, but not too handsome (by the end, his face looked as weathered as you’d expect of a man Going Through It™ for twenty years). Imperfect, yet someone you’d follow into battle. A Good Dude. A machine of war who is possessed of a heart that ticks with honor, a memento courtesy of his years as king and dutiful obeisance to the gods back home.

Yet, Odysseus’ home is in disarray, for something is rotten in the state of Ithaca. Telemachus and Penelope—Odysseus’s son and wife, the former played by a good Tom Holland and the latter by Anne Hathaway, blistering in her tenacity—live in a palace where the vibes can only be called shambolic. Led by a bratty, excellent Robert Pattinson, a horde of rude, drunken men have taken advantage of the king’s long absence and essentially taken over the place. Penelope and Telemachus mourn Odysseus even as they look for his arrival on the horizon. Prolonged years of such liminal hope does not a stable kingdom make. Mother and son feel their world closing in around them, egged on by suitors growing more bold by the day with little word from abroad. “All we know of the world is from travelers’ tales,” Penelope tells Telemachus, ergo every traveler who crosses their door is greeted with respect, a seat at the table, and a plea for any news that can be spared: Zeus’s law writ large across the kingdom, despite its crisis.

The film makes it clear society is on the brink of collapse—though dialogue surrounding this is clunky; there’s a line about the Bronze Age that made me recoil. My kingdom for Christopher Nolan to consider hiring a writers room!—even after a victorious war in Troy. And what a war it was. The film opens on a massive wooden horse marqueed across the screen, skewing wildly with hooves raised, half-buried in the sandy shore. We know what this is, even though we’re not yet given a look at what we know to be inside. Out on the beach waits a confused but loyal Sinon. The performance is a sensitive one by Elliot Page, rising full of youthful optimism before hammering down with a wallop of an emotional scene halfway through the film.

It’s not until later in the movie that we return to the horse in the sand and finally see the Greek warriors inside. The thrilling battle sequence after the horse is brought into Troy leads to Greek victory and widespread songs sung in honor of Odysseus the clever, the canny. The hero. When he pulled off one of the niftiest bits of battle trickery the world had ever seen, it was not glory that lingered in the aftermath, but shame. Odysseus had trespassed Zeus’s law in the most criminal way imaginable. Zeus’s law is not just about hospitality. It is survival, kinship, and connection. It is the one safe guarantee in a world where the handle of death’s dagger swings far too easily. Obeying such a law is not only seen as respectful, but sacred. It is treating men like they are gods, and in doing so, displaying godliness oneself. Breaching Zeus’s law transcends error: It is sin.

Contemporary eyes tend to see the Trojan horse as the final boss of wartime cunning. Odysseus shamelessly pwning the Trojans is what I expected from Nolan, whose explosions-go-boom tendency towards bombast has been well established for as many years as Odysseus’s journey. What I did not expect to see was regret as deep and swirling as Charybdis’s maw. His guilt is present in Homer’s poem, but I was not expecting the film to showcase it so thoroughly. The sirens sing that he is too ashamed to go home, and Athena, played by a compassionate Zendaya, haunts his every step. For Nolan’s Odysseus, the Trojan horse was an act so unthinkable that he languished with Calypso (a weak portrayal by Charlize Theron, though in fairness, she doesn’t have much to do) and the lotus flowers for years, so unwilling was he to face the full implications of what he had done in authoring the war’s final act of violence. The man of twists and turns holds one more twist.

The Trojan horse Trojan horsed us, and the movie is all the better for the subversion.

When situating The Odyssey next to Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer (maybe you’ve heard of it?) one suddenly finds a duo of men grappling with the horrors they unleashed upon the world. Less grandiosity, more guilt. Forget the specially licensed Trojan horse popcorn bucket, remorse is on the menu! Does Odysseus veer closer to godliness with his guilt, or to humanity?

A particular moment in the film might give us the answer. Calypso offers Odysseus salvation on her island, where he would see immortality in drugged nirvana. It would also represent forsaking his family and royal responsibility, and bar him from traveling to the unknown west to honor his fallen comrades. Instead of accepting Calypso’s godliness, Odysseus is determined to remain mortal. His rapsheet is leagues long, and choking guilt doesn’t exactly make the highlight reel of happy human moments, yet he builds his creaky raft and floats off at the mercy of the gods all the same. In doing so, he sheds not only the sails and oars of his previous vessel but also the hubris which had him believing he could control what the gods had in store for him. He’s done defying the gods, as he once told Circe (played by an utterly magnificent Samantha Morton and featuring a scene that is instantly one of the best of the year, horrifying in its beauty) in her hut, and has learned his lesson in a fascinating subversion of expectation: In choosing humanity, he is closer to the gods than ever.

A hero he must certainly be, right? Maybe. Nolan makes it clear that our idea of heroism stands on shaky ground and can shift as easily as the sands on Calypso’s shore. Heroism is a type of godliness. Curiously, revenge might be, as well. The suitors trespass Zeus’s law by overstaying their welcome at Penelope’s; therefore, the gods enact their divine retribution through Odysseus’s murderous actions. The film’s third act is one long Kill Bill-esque revenge fantasy, and is all the better for it.

At the very least, revenge seems to be the prize bestowed upon Odysseus when he passes the test of his journey and finally lands at Ithaca’s shores. That single twang after he strings the bow alone is worth the price of admission (it’s like a firework; you’ll feel it in your chest.) The word “prize” provokes, however: Taking his revenge might not be a prize, but it is finally a choice he can make on his own. It’s not rewarded either, because when the dust has settled, Telemachus is crowned king and Odysseus is exiled (perhaps people found it problematic that their revenant king murdered a significant portion of Ithaca’s eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds?) Exile is fine: After an epic amount of justifying the abandonment of his killed men, he is finally going to honor them by sailing into the unknown west with Penelope. It is another step towards casting off Troy’s long shadow, in what we might imagine will be a lifelong process for Odysseus. For somebody who lived and nearly died by the will of the gods, turning from godliness towards something a little more mortal is as welcome as an arrow shot cleanly through twelve axes, hitting its mark.

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Shayla Frandsen (she/her) is a writer, runner, reader, and mother of three. A proud Newsies apologist, she will watch Cher in anything, compel you to read romantasy, and can quote Back to the Future 3 verbatim. When she was a kid, she started doing the Jabba the Hut laugh as a joke but it’s...kind of just her laugh now?

Trad wife discourse is everywhere. (If you haven’t been caught up in it, could you make some space for me under the rock where you’ve been hiding? But just in case—a “trad wife,” short for “traditional wife,” is a woman who follows traditional gender roles, often through homemaking, having many children, and submitting to her husband. And, increasingly, posting about it on social media.) The publishing world has capitalized on the trope with books about the polished influencer hiding a secret—she’s living a double life, or she’s murdered someone, or she’s made a deal with the devil, or she’s a zombie who plans to livestream herself eating her husband’s brain.1

None, however, have had quite the reach of Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear. The book sold for six figures and was optioned for film by Anne Hathaway’s production company before its April 2026 release. The premise is compelling: Homesteader and Instagrammer Natalie Heller Mills, mother of soon-to-be six children and expert sourdough maker, wakes up in 18552 and must live the lifestyle she’s been romanticizing online. But most compelling for me were the parallels to Mormon influencers. In a media moment where Mormon women are being sensationalized, vilified, or flattened but rarely portrayed faithfully, I was curious to see how the author would handle a character from my faith background.

Natalie announces her persona almost immediately: “My name is Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.”3 But of course, Natalie’s life is not the curated tableau she displays online. Yesteryear Ranch is staffed with dozens of behind-the-scenes helpers. Natalie’s marriage is loveless. She doesn’t recognize her youngest child because she spends so little time with her. And her presidential candidate father-in-law, who funded the ranch, is pressuring Natalie to birth even more children, to guide her hapless husband, and to maintain the illusion that the Heller Mills family is the Platonic ideal of the American Christian family.

Natalie comes to see herself as split in two—her online persona and the real woman she represses. As an unreliable narrator, her character seems to be in costume, too. She looks and talks like a religious person, and she cites religion as a motive, but she doesn’t seem to have an active spiritual life in spite of her constant communication with the Lord, who feels like a stiff, angry idol rather than a loving being guiding her towards goodness. The tenets of Natalie’s personal doctrine are following traditional gender roles and faking perfection for an audience—her insatiable followers, but also a God whose main role is observing her like his personal reality show.

Natalie has one experience that suggests actual spiritual communion—she is baptized shortly before leaving for Harvard, and for a few moments, she is engulfed in fear: “Then I dropped beneath the water, and the fear fell away, and the warmth—the love—came tunneling through.”4 But Natalie never refers to the love of God again; for a short period of time, she thinks God is pleased with her for acting like a good frontier wife despite her disorientation, a sense of correctness that fills her with sexual pleasure, but she never again speaks of love. When Natalie’s empire starts falling apart before she wakes up in 1855, her mother, who has recently left the strict church of Natalie’s childhood for a more progressive denomination, shouts, “You think kindness is some silly frivolous side virtue, when it is in fact the whole damn thing!” Rather than listening, Natalie fixates on her mother’s wrongdoing: “I’d never heard her say a curse word in her life.”5

To Natalie, the “whole damn thing” is performance. As readers, we never learn much about her home church other than brief descriptions of how its members act (wearing prairie dresses and braids, rejecting divorce, etc.), so we don’t know its central doctrines. Natalie’s obsession with performance is crystallized by a conversation with her mother. Postpartum and struggling to reconcile her illusions about motherhood with reality, Natalie asks her mom how she managed, and her mother says, “I would imagine I was being watched. . . It felt a little less lonely when I pretended I had a little audience sitting on the couch with me.” When Natalie questions her mother about whether this pretense is okay in the Lord’s eyes, her mother says, “Who is our Lord and Savior, if not the original audience member for our lives?”6 Natalie draws her own conclusions: “Motherhood is its own kind of curation. Which is to say: every woman I know lied to me about what it would be like, before I became one myself.”7 Rather than moving toward authenticity to prevent other women feeling duped like Natalie does, she chooses to lie, too, by presenting her life as idyllic and enviable.

Some of Natalie’s obsession with performance may stem from rejection: Her father leaves their family; at Harvard she’s a religious oddity. When taking an online influencer course, the group tells Natalie she comes across as unlikable and unrelatable. “It looks like you’re pretending,” they tell her and recommend she practice smiling in the mirror. More than once, I wondered if she was neurodivergent. Masking, or disguising traits to fit in socially, can feel like a performance. Natalie constantly tells herself how to be more likable: “Too sharp. Too high. Lower your voice.”8 Natalie’s drive to become what she believes she should be makes her difficult to pin down; the real woman is elusive, obscured by increasing extremes as she strives to keep her kingdom from toppling. Polishing her castle walls becomes the purpose of Natalie’s life, but it’s a Disneyland facade.

But fair or not, I wanted Natalie to perform religious womanhood better. Anyone who has spent time in the trad wife space can see that the women she’s loosely inspired by are Mormon, but I didn’t recognize myself in Natalie. I don’t really recognize myself in women like Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, either: She’s a mother of nine, births her children at home, and competed in the Mrs. World pageant at twelve days postpartum. But the author’s avowal that she’d interviewed Mormon women had me hoping that the story would feel like it could have been mine, even if it wasn’t told from a sympathetic point of view. I wanted accuracy. I wanted to see myself in the story, even if it was in an unflattering light. As Mormon culture writer Rebbie Brassfield put it in her review, “I want it either to be about me or not be about me.”9

Of course, authors are not beholden to the expectations of their readers. I wanted a complex portrait of a Mormon woman (and believed, based on pre-publication chatter, that the character would be, if not complex, Mormon), but instead I received a character standing in for a whole spectrum of vaguely religious women who purport to be apolitical, but whose lives are twisted to support political narratives. Natalie’s ideologies are likewise fuzzy; her priority is maintaining the illusion of perfection. Her page is used by YouTubers and her politician father-in-law as propaganda for what good wives should look like, but Natalie never explicitly stands for anything. Political and religious beliefs are just additional layers of makeup.

According to the author, this was intentional. “Her relationship to religion kind of moves in and out,” Caro Claire Burke said in an interview with The New York Times. “Her relationship is very transactional.”10 Mormon religion writer Jana Riess agrees with Burke’s choice to make Natalie’s religion vague: “The novel accurately depicts how shallow American religion has actually become. . . . Political identities have become oddly fixed, while religious ones are only sparsely grounded in actual religion.”11

Fair enough. Burke’s intent was never to tell a Mormon woman’s story—rather, it was to look at the performance of a fantasy of womanhood and how it can be weaponized to promote ideologies. But as someone who makes up part of the composite of religious womanhood Burke nips and tucks into her polarizing protagonist, the book feels like a dissonant chord that just won’t resolve. Maybe that’s because, as Burke said in her NYT interview about her decision to only interview women with “one foot out” of religion, “If you’re still in it, I don’t think you have the distance to be able to help someone like me with the project [Yesteryear].”12

Maybe I am too close to the source material to see it with perspective. Yesteryear was written to challenge readers, and if the online discourse is any indication, it succeeded. But I wish the author had gotten closer to the source material she mined and then frankensteined together. Yesteryear could have been more than a shocking exposé of a disturbed woman posing for the camera. Written with more specificity, I believe Natalie could have been more impactful and believable—perhaps even a character I could root for. Maybe this wish proves the author’s point that demanding feminine palatability creates the conditions for a character like Natalie to emerge. But I don’t want an easy character; I just want one that feels real: flawed but nuanced, unflinching in living out both the bright and dark facets of religious womanhood. She wasn’t in the pages of Yesteryear, but I’m hoping one day I’ll open a book and meet her.

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Lorren Lemmons is a mother of three living in Idaho. She loves spending too much money on special-edition vinyl records, reading excessively to avoid reality, and dropping Taylor Swift Easter eggs into her writing.

Circa 1989, the Clovis Third Ward youth took a trip to Los Angeles to do baptisms for the dead. There were too many of us kids to all serve in the baptistry at once, so they split us in half. While half one was in the LA Temple doing baptisms, the rest of us were shunted off to the visitors’ center. They put us in a theater and asked what we wanted to watch. They said they had everything. The right answer, of course, would have been something spiritually-minded like “The First Vision” (1976) or How Rare a Possession (1987), but I knew what I wanted to see and I spoke up first and everyone agreed. The good people of the visitors’ center knew conviction when they saw it, so they acquiesced and put on “The Phone Call” (1977).

If you were not young and impressionable the same time I was, perhaps you don’t remember as well or as fondly this classic out of BYU’s studios. You poor soul.

I recommend just watching it now, online, rather than waiting for the 4K restoration,

but if you can’t spare the twenty minutes (you can spare the twenty minutes) here’s a brief summary: Scott wants to call Pam on the phone and ask her out. He is terrified to do so. He is horribly awkward. His coworker, Becky, helps him out. Simultaneously, he helps her out.

Easily the most familiar face in “The Phone Call” is Mark McClure, who had appeared in Freaky Friday in 1976 and would appear in Superman in 1978. Between those iconic roles came his iconic role as Scott McCorvick. Yes, seen by only a sliver of the American population compared to Freaky Friday or (especially) Superman, but still, beloved by those of us who revere this stone cold classic.

Now look—Waypoints has only given me 800–1500 words to set “The Phone Call” alongside Napoleon Dynamite (2004), so let us take a few things as axiomatic:

One: The creators of Napoleon Dynamite were, intentionally or subconsciously, influenced by “The Phone Call.” Half the “Phone Call” comments on YouTube and Letterboxd make this argument and all of us twenty-something Mormons watching in 2004 accepted it as obvious. I was born in 1976. Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite’s writer/director) three years later; Jerusha Hess (writer) one year after him. Heck, even its actors are part of the Phone Call Generation: Jon Heder’s only one year off me and Aaron Ruell zero (and living in the same town as me at the time of my temple anecdote—QED). We, born-and-bred Saints all, were there together. We know Scott. We think Becky should drop Joe. We’re curious what weedkiller Pam uses. Long before Napoleon Dynamite, we had “The Phone Call.”

Two: Scott and Napoleon even style their hair with matching asymmetry. Ergo, for all their differences, there must be further connections to be made.

Three: Both “The Phone Call” and Napoleon Dynamite have no definite LDS tells. Those with conspiratorial tendencies will tell you otherwise, but aside from geography and maybe the cleanliness of language, there really aren’t.

And four: “The Phone Call’s” writer Jack Weyland and director Douglas G. Johnson love their characters just as Jared and Jerusha Hess love theirs. Someday I’ll write my book about this, but the Hesses’ love for their characters is the primary trait of their auteurial voice.

I’m not here to make any claims that the Hesses pored over “The Phone Call” while writing Napoleon Dynamite, and I think the differences between the films are as important as their similarities. But they operate in matching moral universes, and we will uncover meaningful resonance by noting similarities. Let’s begin today, by looking at both movies’ phone calls.

Each movie features five phone-call scenes. The primary difference between them is we never see the other side of Scott’s conversations but, with one brief exception (Uncle Rico getting a call and saying “Hello”), we see both speakers in Napoleon Dynamite. Let’s do a quick breakdown:

The phone calls of “The Phone Call”:

• Scene one: We see Scott poring through the phone book. He makes a call. He speaks with Pam, confidently asking her out. In response he hears, “Your money is safe at State Savings. The time, 5:41. The temperature, 82 degrees.” He hangs up and tries again. We hear, for the only time in the film, Pam’s voice as she answers the phone. Scott freezes. He hangs up.

• Scene two: To prepare for Pam, Scott takes Becky up on her offer and calls her instead. Scott is awkward. He roleplays Becky’s crummy boyfriend. It’s probably a jackass move, but Becky’s nice and knows Scott is nice and manages to hear what he’s saying. Though his inadvertent flirting leads to her hanging up, this is the beginning of better things for Becky.

• Scene three: Becky accompanies Scott to a phone booth to offer moral support. He introduces himself to Pam as her paperboy. After hanging up, having accomplished nothing, he tells Becky, “Maybe I’ll call her a couple times to break the ice.”

• Scene four: Together again at the phone booth, Becky takes Scott’s dime and dials the phone. Having reached Pamela Robinson of 1054 Riverside Drive, Scott McCorvick of 619 Riverside Drive talks dandelions.

• Scene five: Scott, accompanied by Becky but having dimed and dialed himself, stumbles through conversation and into success by asking Pam down to the drive-in, promising her a banana split.

Now the phone calls of Napoleon Dynamite:

• Scene one: From home, Napoleon calls his brother Kip because he doesn’t feel good. His lips hurt real bad. Kip does nothing to help.

• Scene two: Someone calls Uncle Rico as he’s out in a field, filming himself throwing a football. “Hello?”

• Scene three: Trisha, under duress (and engaging in Scott levels of awkwardness—albeit from a different motivation), calls Napoleon and agrees to go to the dance with him. After Napoleon hangs up, Pedro asks him who was on the phone. “My woman I’m taking to the dance.”

• Scene four: Uncle Rico has been inviting local teenaged girls to call him “when they’re ready,” if they “can use something.” Instead, Deb calls Napoleon, whom she attacks and dismisses as a shallow friend based on the information given her by Uncle Rico.

• Scene five: Napoleon calls Pedro to tell him Deb pretty much hates him by now. But he segues into proposing that Pedro finish his campaign by telling the student body that their “wildest dreams will come true if they vote for you.”

The only moment between those final two phone-calls scenes consists of Napoleon lying to Uncle Rico, claiming that Grandma called and wants him to leave and, if he won’t leave, he’ll call the cops. Neither of those phone-call scenes actually happens. Grandma had not called. Napoleon calls Pedro, not the cops.

After calling Pedro, Napoleon goes back to the window and looks at Uncle Rico. He sees a broken man, failing once more to capture past (and only imagined) glory.

He does not call the cops. He merely watches. And by watching, Napoleon comes to understand.

Scott’s phone-call–by–phone-call progress over his film is obvious. With Becky’s help, he gains the courage to speak to his crush. He goes from having no idea what a girl wants in a guy to thinking he might be just that. He begins to see worth in himself, just as he has always been able to see it in Pam and Becky.

Using only the phone call scenes to track Napoleon’s growth is more difficult. But when the film began, Napoleon was without friends his own age—talking to elementary-school kids on the bus and calling his brother for chapstick. By the end, Napoleon not only has friends, but he has complex relationships. One friend is mad at him. Can he save that relationship? Another is uncertain how to proceed. Whatever the quality of his advice, Napoleon is there for him.

Even those he’s not on the phone with he sees with fuller empathy. He may be mad at Uncle Rico, but also he recognizes the man’s tragedy. He’s no longer on the phone with Kip, but he can be satisfied and happy for his brother as Kip leaves Preston with his soulmate.

Napoleon Dynamite’s phone calls take us from Napoleon alone through Napoleon reaching out to the wrong person to Napoleon doing the work of being a friend.

Our two protags with their lopsided afros, subtle physical comedy, and awkward dialogue are not the same person and not on the same quest, but, together, they reveal subterranean metaconnections between Mormon films and how simple tools like a phone call can be used to craft characters. Young characters. Youth. Kids, really. Kids who discover that, like their hair, we all have more in common than we may have realized during the opening credits. This is what drove us eighties and nineties kids to want to watch “The Phone Call” whenever possible: It wasn’t just funny; it was a model of how to love yourself and how to see others. Instruction every thirteen-year-old craves.

Mormon wrote (I’m paraphrasing) that, since he was filled with charity, which is everlasting love, all children were alive to him. He saw them. This is what the filmmakers of “The Phone Call” and Napoleon Dynamite have in common. They love the children in their movies—these awkward young people trying to find themselves as they stumble adultward. They see them. They teach us, too, to love them.

And, more or less, this is what their heroes learn as well.

Charity in celluloid.

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Theric Jepson recently spent girls camp quarantined in a far-away, internetless bathroom, where he read Moby Dick and The Message and a 1924 humor collection, and listened to music he’d too-long neglected, including near-perfect albums by K’s Choice (Cocoon Crash), Kevin Montgomery (Fear Nothing), and Amy LaVere (Stranger Me).

“Movies That Made Us” is a recurring series where various contributors share brief reflections on a movie that shaped them in some meaningful way into the person they are today—morally, ethically, professionally, familially, aesthetically, or beyond.

While You Were Sleeping

Mallory Everton

Picking a single film that “made me” was harder than my first marathon, and I collapsed at the finish line covered in blood, so that’s really saying something. I decided to go with the delightful and deliciously nineties While You Were Sleeping, (starring Sandra Bullock, directed by Jon Turteltaub). I loved this movie so much as a kid. I loved the zany, dramatic pickle the main character gets herself into (which forces her to pose as the fiancée of an attractive stranger to his family while he’s in a coma). And I loved that, sure, it’s a romantic comedy, but the romance is really about Lucy falling for Peter’s entire family, not just his brother (the pickle gets picklier!). But my favorite thing about this movie is how downright lovable every last character is. Even Lucy’s creepy neighbor Joe Fusco Junior is portrayed with warmth and humor. As established in one of the best dinner scenes you’ll ever see in your life, each family member has their own quirks and comedic voice and their own connection with Lucy. When I’m at my very best, this is how I like to see the world too: as nothing but a bunch of lovable characters (whose faults are more likely to make me giggle than get a rise out of me) all talking over each other at Christmas dinner.

Dead Poets Society

Tyler Johnson

In Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams plays high school English teacher John Keating. Ethan Hawke plays Todd, a boy so quiet he has great difficulty speaking in front of friends, let alone in front of a crowd. About midway through the movie, Professor Keating assigns his boys to write a poem. Todd writes draft after draft but discards them each in turn as worthless. But the day of reckoning comes, and Professor Keating calls Todd in front of the class to read his poem. Todd protests that he didn’t write anything but Professor Keating sees through the ruse and calls him up anyway, has him close his eyes, and then walks in slow circles clockwise around Todd as he pulls the poem from his sub-conscious, line by line, as the camera circles counterclockwise, to mesmerizing effect. With fragments of the lines he had written but then discarded still available in his mind, and prompted by the expert step-by-step teaching of Professor Keating, Todd extemporaneously composes a poem about a “sweaty-toothed madman with a stare that pounds [his] brain,” rhapsodizing into a meditation about “truth” being like “a blanket” that will “never cover any of us” as we sojourn through this life and “cry, wail, and scream.” That scene sunk deep into my subconscious and has ever since informed my vision for what it would mean if I ever became a truly great teacher of anything.

The Neverending Story

Melissa Leilani Larson

When I was in the sixth grade, I badgered my dad into purchasing a VCR. I studied the manual and learned to record movies off the TV, particularly on Saturday or Sunday nights, when somewhat recent Hollywood releases would air on one of the three main networks. One summer Saturday, I recorded The Neverending Story.

I can’t tell you how often I watched and rewatched that movie that summer. I was obsessed. I loved the way it moved back and forth from reality to fantasy and the way the two worlds eventually collided. I can still conjure moments from it: a mountain of rock shifting and suddenly speaking. A kid soaring through the sky on the back of a furry dragon (perhaps Falcor was actually a dog?). The heartbreaking scene in the swamp when. . . Well, that’s a spoiler. But if you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about.

An avid reader, my eleven-year-old self gloried in the idea that reading a book could transport me to a magical place. That summer, sliding a VHS tape through a gleaming plastic door again and again, I learned firsthand that film could do the same.

Speed Racer

Conor B. Hilton

One cool, late spring night in 2008 at an Edwards 14 in south-eastern Idaho, Speed Racer, the Wachowskis’ follow-up to the Matrix trilogy, changed my life.

As the film shifts into its third act, there’s a confrontation between Pops Racer and his son, the titular Speed, as Speed has learned about some corruption in the racing world and wants to root it out. Pops says, “You think you can drive a car and change the world? It doesn’t work like that!” To which Speed replies, “Maybe not, but it’s all I know how to do and I gotta do somethin’.” This defiant fool’s hope is at the heart of the movie and, since that midnight premiere, has been in my heart too.

The film’s power lies in its relentless commitment to knowing exactly what it is and being that thing to the nth degree. In a lesser movie’s hands this dialogue would break the spell and induce groans. Yet, watching Speed Racer is a chance to see as a child again. That night, and every time I’ve watched it since, I grew giddier and giddier as the film progressed, overwhelmed with delight at the boundless sincerity on display, laughing out loud with pure, childlike joy during the climactic race sequence where Speed harnesses the power of hope, friendship, and family to race to victory.

Go, Speed Racer, go!

The Castle

Sarah Perkins Sabey

Is it embarrassing to admit that one of my favorite movies of all time is the Australian equivalent of Napoleon Dynamite? The Castle is a film at the unholy intersection of legal drama and America’s Funniest Home Videos. What it lacks in budget, it compensates for with painfully tacky home decor, specious legal arguments, and male center parts cut straight across the cowlick. The plot follows a working-class family fighting the compulsory acquisition of their home by the local airport. While the film drops subtle, profound nods toward Indigenous land claims, those insights are interspersed with a lawyer who can’t read Roman numerals, a mom bedazzling an ergonomic chair, and a fake chimney added purely for “charm.” It’s the movie I quote more than any other. It’s zany, heartfelt, and deeply endearing. I do feel obligated to flag a handful of F-bombs. However, I’ll flag my flag with another disclaimer: Every single one is delivered in a charming Australian accent. If that softens the blow, go watch The Castle. Then come tell me about it.

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Tyler Johnson lives in northern California. He doesn’t think much of most of Taylor Swift’s music but is all in for Folklore.

Mel is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter with a deep love for fish and chips. She enjoys travel, puzzles, nice paper, and nicer pens. Every December 16 Mel celebrates Jane Austen’s birthday by viewing Sense and Sensibility (1995).

Conor is a father of three, who loves to read Gothic novels, to watch everything Wes Anderson touches, and to dance to 90s ska-punk while doing the dishes.

Sarah Perkins passionately believes that Charlotte’s Web is the greatest piece of children’s literature ever written, with A Sick Day for Amos McGee earning an honorable mention. She feels slightly embarrassed that she is always slightly embarrassed when people kiss in movies.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

Robert Frost

Forty years in and The Legend of Zelda keeps its secrets. Nietzsche tells us the Buddha’s shadow was visible on a cave wall centuries after he died, and the Zelda franchise summons the same shiver in the skin: the immanent sense of something gigantic which is invisible to the senses but indisputably in existence, a black hole you cannot see, except by what it warps.

By custom, and by the rites and laws which govern the modern enshittification of IP, the marrow of Hyrule’s mystery should have been sucked dry long ago. Our hearts should have been broken by this series. We should be drowning in extractive prequels that overexplain everything, shameless hustling tie-ins, maybe even “Zelda: High School” or “Li’l Ganon” YA novels. Every unanswered narrative question ought to have been annealed into canon. Key to Zelda‘s strangeness is this: A multibillion dollar franchise has resisted all attempts at unriddling. The right old sacred fire has no business burning this long.

Your humble author pauses here to suggest this four-decade inscrutability is no accident. It is baked into the saga: at first by necessity, then by design. The Legend of Zelda series are usually described as “action-adventure” games, which is about as accurate as calling Lionel Messi a useful biped. The word for Zelda is numinous.

Numinous is a religious-studies term. We tend to imagine the holy as something pure and morally perfect. But intense religious experience, the numinous, is beyond this. The numinous is the experience of a reality that feels wholly other, a mystery which awes even as it puzzles. I don’t mean the incidental spiritual window dressing—the temples, goddesses, glowing triangles. There’s something deeper at work here.

Part of the secret is that creators Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka built the games around emptiness and the silence of sacred places. The first game, The Legend of Zelda (1986), opens in a ruined post-human wilderness. On the starting screen you have the choice to enter the cave and receive a sword. Or not. Nothing has been explained. The game simply is, as the world is.

Hyrule feels inhabited by powers and principalities rather than by societies. There are no towns. No dialogue beyond gnomic text utterances by weird old hermits who live underground, received only when you clamber downwards into dark apertures, like Orpheus seeking a boon in the depths.1 When Link moves from one square of the map to another, the entire screen shifts—literally, it pans in the direction you’re walking. And there’s a moment, just a fleeting moment, when the new landscape is there, totally empty, and then, a lagging second of processing power later, it is peopled by omens and monsters. The emotion this summoned in child-me doesn’t have a name.

The liminal is omnipresent in Zelda. The healing fairy pools and whistle and haunting dungeon theme hint at an ancient contract you are not privy to. Hidden entrances are everywhere. You seek Triforce fragments, the bits of a shattered divinity that you do not understand and yet are, somehow, reassembling. Curiouser still, no new levels are added, because the relics you find (the candle, the ladder, the raft) simply make additional layers of the already-existing world legible. Reality doesn’t change; you do. You are a pilgrim, not a conqueror.

The climax of the game takes place atop Death Mountain, a sacred peak where reality is thin, like Sinai or Olympus, and the last lair, Level-9, hides beneath Spectacle Rock, two bizarre stones which make the final dungeon seem like an elaborate tomb. The monster at the end of all this is Ganon, an invisible demon visible when struck. You’re fighting a hostile presence more than a body. And how appropriate. In Hyrule, the numinous is not confined to magical items or graveyards, but suffuses everything. The game is even named for an absence: not “Link’s Quest” but The Legend of Zelda.

Really, put yourself back in 1986. Adults know video games are designed. Children aren’t so sure. The game, with its famous golden cartridge, seemed like an artifact to me. One can’t forget, now, can one, how little is said. Who is the old man? Why should I take this? What is Dodongo, and why does it dislike smoke? There is a narrative of four sentences in the opening screen, and there was a short manual included, but that is pretty much it. The protagonist, explicitly named Link, is a no-person, by design: much is projected upon him. This is the smile hiding behind Majora’s Mask, by the way: Link is already a mask, our mask. How can you put a mask on a mask? He is not psychologically elaborated because the hollow center is part of the spell, a little green absence moving across a mostly-empty map.

And that map matters. Early video games had severe constraints: memory, graphics, and processing were puny. Zelda used its limitations like judo. It had few choices, but it made them correctly. Out of poverty of information came ambiguity; out of technical constraint came emptiness; out of inability to explain everything came a world that felt older than explanation. The makers were less interested in creating a coherent fantasy narrative than in evoking the feeling that the Hyrule was permeated by a hidden significance, and creating this emotion is a matter of precision, not power. The reality of numinousness arose from the necessity of design.

This is why the original Zelda, and all Zeldas since, feel less like a narrative and more a ritual reenactment, like the ancient Greek mysteries or the experience a young hunter-gatherer might have had being initiated into adulthood: You go out, wander, find a meaningful item, descend into a symbolic underworld, return changed, and then do it again.

Modern games often live in fear of silence. Nothing is ambiguous, not for long. The player is treated as a customer and tourist, shepherded through with codices. There is an assumption that more meaning is always better. But play is very easy to lose in all this effort. Wonder needs space. The visceral pleasure of games is tied to the sustained pressure of challenge, and what greater challenge is there than the unanswered? Can you imagine the feedback if Zelda came out today? “Where is the helpful arrow telling me where to go?”

Nintendo realized what they had.2 Miraculously, later Zelda games preserved the feeling. Link to the Past has more story, yet remains obscure where it counts. Link’s Awakening almost says the quiet part aloud: Am I dreaming? Are you? Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom expand the good old emptiness into gorgeous vastness: abandoned technologies and the melancholy of a world after catastrophe. If Elden Ring impresses us with the feeling that Something Has Happened, Zelda got there first.

That is why the numinosity of Zelda makes one nostalgic for something that never was. It reminds us of the structure of childhood, of intuiting rules before anyone states them, of the lurking suspicion that all observant children eventually have: I am not being told the whole truth; the adults are keeping secrets from me. It shares something with the world’s great religions, where we are forced to reckon with a reality we have no explanation for—something unimaginably greater and older and stranger than ourselves. The Sacred Realm, the Master Sword, the Sages, all of it looks meaningful, but never in a way that fully submits to a system.3

The joke at the heart of the Zelda series is that the Princess is the subject, but not the owner, of the story. We ourselves are the enactors of the legend. I seem to recall being told rumors about Zelda at my elementary school: Play this whistle, push this stone. What if the entire saga is understood as the same fable recounted by different tellers? The first Legend is the story as told by a child. The Adventure of Link is a teenager’s narrative. Link’s Awakening is a version recounted by a sailor who once heard the details of Link in passing but forgot Ganon or the Princess. Majora’s Mask is told by an adult obsessed with the mutability of identity. And on, and on.

Maybe that’s the point. Zelda’s deepest act of design was to leave enough unmade for the player to complete it. Games become real, like the Velveteen Rabbit, through love and interface with a human, and we have loved Hyrule too well and too long to impoverish it with questions. Maybe one day Nintendo will be foolish enough to explain it all. But I’m confident the Legend and its sense of a great perhaps will endure. You can never empty Zelda with words. There is, always and forever, an iceberg feeling, as of a great bulk eternally out of sight below the waterline, and a voice whispering: It’s dangerous to go alone, take this . . .

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Jason is a writer from West Texas who now lives in Boston. He has been published by Salon, Paste Magazine, McSweeney’s, and the Comics Journal. Alan Moore once called him “mate.”

I sat transfixed as the credits rolled and John Williams’ rousing, celebratory score played. My dad turned to me and asked, “So, do you think that can really happen? Could Darth Vader repent and be forgiven for years of evil at the very end of his life? Does repentance and forgiveness work like that?” We talked over the question for what felt like hours. It was wonderful.

To this day, Return of the Jedi gives me hope that the promises of redemption and forgiveness inherent in the gospel can be realized, even for the worst of sinners. My dad’s question began my lifelong pursuit of seeking wisdom out of the best books, films, music, and every other artistic and cultural expression. In many ways, that question and the subsequent discussion is the seed that has grown and blossomed today into Waypoints, the home of Wayfare’s (pop) culture coverage.

Waypoints believes that we are here on earth to have joy and that movies, books, music, and any other form of art and (pop) culture is a part of how we experience joy. For me, that joy continues in the generous, thoughtful attention paid to works of art and culture. This joy is derived in part from the particular pleasure of coming to know and love something and in part by the ways that paying careful attention to works of art and culture reveals truth and helps us understand and interpret previously revealed truths.

I hope that Waypoints will bring a taste of that joy to you, dear reader. That we can capture the delight of long, meandering conversations basking in the light of your local cinema marquee, thrumming with the energy of just seeing something that changed you. That we can share the wonder and passion of being transported so thoroughly to another world and perspective that closing the book leaves you feeling a little alienated from your reality.

Over the next few weeks, explore a sample of what Waypoints hopes to offer you. Read Lorren Lemmons’ exploration of the interiority of a tradwife in the year’s most talked about novel, Yesteryear. Enjoy Theric Jepson’s insights into some surprising thematic connections between Napoleon Dynamite and the LDS-classic short film, “The Phone Call”. Get a glimpse of the numinous in Jason Rhode’s wandering through Zelda. Delight in a sampling platter of some of the “Movies that Made Us,” featuring Mallory Everton and others. And, enjoy Shayla Frandsen’s exploration of the epic journey through masculinity and heroism in the movie event of the summer, The Odyssey (coming soon to a screen near you!).

May these pieces be the beginnings of ongoing, generative, joyful conversations! Read, comment, share, chat with your coworkers, stop your neighbor, call up an old family friend, preach in a public square!

If you like what you read and have some thoughts of your own along these lines, check out our “About” page for more information, and bring any questions, pitches, comments, complaints, beefs, and all manner of communication in-between to me, Conor B. Hilton (conorbhilton@gmail.com), Editor of Waypoints.

Thanks for reading!

Conor

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Conor is a father of three, who loves to read Gothic novels, to watch everything Wes Anderson touches, and to dance to 90s ska-punk while doing the dishes.