Preface: Re-teaching myself the new filmmaking pipeline, now with AI (netflix please notice me). co-written with Claude. NOW WITH AUDIO.

We started this section with learning about Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and how it poses the existential question regarding self-fulfilling prophecy, then three centuries later, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was wrestling with the same problem Calderón had dramatized — but in a Europe that had just lived through two world wars and the Holocaust, a Europe in which the comfortable certainties of religion, progress, and civilization had been catastrophically exposed as fictions. Sartre called the human condition one of radical freedom — we are, as he put it, condemned to be free. There is no God-given human nature, no predetermined purpose, no cosmic blueprint for what a person should be. We exist first, and then we define ourselves through our choices. This sounds liberating. It is also, Sartre understood, terrifying.

Because the terror of radical freedom is that it comes with radical responsibility. We cannot blame our nature, our upbringing, our circumstances for what we do. We are always choosing — even refusing to choose is itself a choice. And the most common human response to this unbearable burden is what Sartre called bad faith: the self-deception by which people pretend their freedom is less than it actually is. The connection between a 17th century Spanish play and 20th century French existentialism is not coincidental. Sartre, Camus, and Beckett were all heirs to a philosophical tradition shaped by the Romantic rediscovery of Calderón — and they were all asking, in the wreckage of postwar Europe, the same question the imprisoned prince had asked from his tower: how do you live when the ground cannot be trusted?

Waiting for Godot is the play that defines the Theater of the Absurd — and it is, in its bones, a dramatization of exactly the condition Calderón and Sartre had been mapping. Vladimir and Estragon cannot leave. They could, technically — nothing physically prevents them. But they don't. They wait. They fill the time with conversation, with bickering, with philosophical rumination, with the occasional distraction of other characters passing through. A boy comes each act to say that Godot won't come today but will surely come tomorrow. The second act repeats the first with minimal variation. The tree has grown a few leaves. Where Calderón's Segismundo breaks through paralysis into action — choosing justice even in a dream — Beckett's characters remain paralyzed. They are still waiting at the final curtain. The tree has leaves. Nothing else has changed. And yet the play does not feel like despair. It feels, strangely, like companionship — two people keeping each other company in an incomprehensible situation, which may be the most human thing there is.

What connects a Spanish prince in a tower, two men waiting by a tree in Paris, a French magician pointing a camera at a papier-mâché moon, a generation of writers persecuted for their politics, a mob boss in therapy on Sunday nights, and thousands of writers walking picket lines in Los Angeles? The same thing that has connected every chapter of this story since Aeschylus put a second actor on stage in Athens in the 5th century BCE: the conviction that storytelling matters. That the stories a culture tells about itself — about power and justice, about freedom and constraint, about what it costs to be human and what it means to choose — are not entertainment in any trivial sense but something closer to the way a civilization thinks out loud.

Calderón understood this when he dramatized the impossibility of certainty and the necessity of choosing anyway. Beckett understood this when he put two men by a tree and let them wait. Méliès understood this — in his own delighted, instinctive way — when he pointed a camera at an imaginary moon. The Hollywood Ten understood this when they went to prison rather than betray the people they worked with. David Chase understood this when he made a mob boss's therapy sessions into the most compelling drama on television. And the writers who walked the picket lines in 2023 understood this when they fought not just for better pay but for the right of human beings to remain at the center of human storytelling. ☀️