Seth Harris

Movie Review – The Seed of the Sacred Fig

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2025)
Written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

Our perception of Iran in the West is not an accurate picture. How could it be, after decades of propaganda that have mixed truths about the fundamentalist government with lies meant to keep the country in a perpetually negative light? Too often, American media frames people in cartoon terms: good guys and bad guys; a reductive take, to say the least. Iranian cinema has grown tremendously since the late 1970s and often produces powerful works of art. Common elements include minimalism, which allows for ambiguity that can skirt censorship; children as moral lenses through which to view society; and a moral complexity that refuses easy simplification. Humanism is always more important than rigid ideology. All of this is true of The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Movie Review – Soundtrack to a Coup D’état

Soundtrack to a Coup D’état (2024)
Written and directed by John Grimonprez

Being a media-obsessed person for my whole life, I have come to a new understanding since my university days about the United States and the way it uses media as a weapon. Depending on how far along your understanding of the mass media’s purpose and how power becomes gained & is wielded, you might not see the reality just beneath the surface. As Michael Parenti said in his book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, “Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet. The essentially undemocratic nature of the mainstream media, like the other business-dominated institutions of society, must be hidden behind a neutralistic, voluntaristic, pluralistic facade.”

Movie Review – Hamnet

Hamnet (2025)
Written by Chloé Zhao & Maggie O’Farrell
Directed by Chloé Zhao

In 2025, I did a series on Shakespeare adaptations, which was a lot of fun because I got to introduce my wife to several of his stories. She was, of course, familiar with Romeo and Juliet and knew the names of several plays, just not the stories or characters. I got to introduce her to Hamlet, my favorite play, through Branagh’s adaptation and was happy to see her find pleasure in what a rich piece of art it is. Despite having been an English major and taking multiple Shakespeare classes, I didn’t really know much about the author himself. I don’t think that’s too dissimilar from most English majors’ experiences; he doesn’t get as much focus as his work does. And while this film is more fiction than fact, it attempts to bring a human face to someone who has become such a distant, iconic figure.

Movie Review – Plainclothes

Plainclothes (2025)
Written and directed by Carmen Emmi

Who determines what is and isn’t a crime? It feels strange to look back and realize that being queer in public was still criminalized in a variety of ways well into the 21st century in America. The specific crime highlighted in this film was known as “cottaging” in the UK and refers primarily to same-sex sexual encounters between men in public spaces like restrooms or parks. While I can understand the desire to prohibit public sex, since it involves people who have not consented to witness it, the laws were far more focused on marginalizing and punishing gay men for wanting intimacy. The reason so many men used these public spaces was because they were hiding their sexuality, and the reason for that was simple: if their homosexuality became common knowledge, they would be ostracized from society. This leads me to see these sorts of stings as little more than a way to further torment an already persecuted group of people.

Movie Review – Reflection in a Dead Diamond

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025)
Written and directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani

The married filmmaking duo of Cattet and Forzani first caught my eye with their 2009 feature debut, Amer, a postmodern homage to the uniquely Italian horror genre of giallo. In that film, they established their signature style: hyper-sensory hallucinations—fragmented, fetishistic collages of giallo, Eurospy, and grindhouse cinema. Narrative is secondary to texture, rhythm, and the ecstatic violence of the images. There is not much dialogue in their work, but you never feel lost because they maintain tight control in the editing room.

Movie Review – The Phoenician Scheme

The Phoenician Scheme (2005)
Written by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola
Directed by Wes Anderson

There was a time in the mid-to-late 2000s when I was tired of Wes Anderson. I look back on that now and realize I was simply out of sync with what he was doing. I discovered him via Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, and like so many young film fans, I thought a director I liked should keep making things for me. This is where so many of us misunderstand film, seeing it only as a product to be consumed. It seems obvious to me now that Anderson isn’t particularly concerned with making blockbuster movies; rather, he wants to compose images and explore ideas. He’s also the reason I finally sat down and watched Neon Genesis Evangelion after his episode of Le Club Vidéo.

Governing Through Kink: The Fetish Politics of American Power

“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”
— Karl Marx

The United States is governed not merely by laws or markets, but by the libidinal economy of its elite. The fantasies, kinks, and psychosexual obsessions of a narrow ruling class seep into everything from legislation to advertising, from architecture to warfare. This is not metaphor. It is the literal operating code of a late-capitalist order whose leaders rule not only through economics or violence, but through desire.

The Filtered World: Observations

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” — Steve Biko

To be raised in the United States is, in many ways, to grow up inside a carefully curated reality. The nation that prides itself on “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” maintains one of the most tightly managed flows of information among modern democracies. This is not through overt censorship, but through structural control, ideological gatekeeping, and algorithmic isolation. Americans do not live under a dictatorship of thought, but they do live inside a media ecosystem that selectively filters the world. Global events are not hidden. Instead, they are reshaped to align with American interests via decontextualizing & minimizing.

This is not merely a media issue. It is a cultural condition, a learned blindness, fostered by corporate consolidation, state influence, entertainment soft power, and educational neglect.

New Short Story

I made my first post on my fiction blog, PopFic.

Variations on a Life in Macaroni & Cheese

Movie Review – Dog Man

Note: I will be pausing the blog for a few months. I’ll certainly be back, but there are a lot of things Ariana and I are getting in order as we go through a big life change.

Dog Man (2025)
Written and directed by Peter Hastings

While making the Star Wars prequels, George Lucas was asked why so many elements seem directly lifted from the original trilogy of films. His response to this was, “It’s poetry. It rhymes.” I’ve come to find that life as a whole is like that. The older I get, the more connections and parallels I can draw between one event and another. In reality, these are just moments that happen to me, but the meaning I personally derive from them turns these interactions into a kind of poetry. I recently had a moment that reminded me of another from nearly four years ago.