Scorpio Rising

I loved this because this is the perfect example of ‘show don’t tell’ filmmaking, such a fun watch for some reason. I also can’t believe David Lynch found this weird. The songs are fitting for every single scene, the obsession the men have with cultivating a cult of personality akin to the ones their idols have is palpable (James Dean, Hitler, Jesus). There’s also the self-aggrandizing masculinity—where the men fashion themselves to be crusaders on motorcycles, where James Dean is the quintessence of all that constitutes what a man should be, where violence is the language they all speak. They want to become the symbols they worship. The iconography as a mode of storytelling/characterization was just sublime here.