The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
"Beautiful things don't ask for attention."
The short story? Naw, this is something new.
A masterclass in how to marry a soundtrack to jaw-dropping cinematography. What gem is this film and why is it not a model for Hollywood?
“Ground control to Major Tom…”
Our daydreamer hero saves no one but himself. Quintessence—what a beautiful word.
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About the Creator
Mackenzie Davis
Most stories are reverted to Drafts, but will keep up resources & posts that hold community significance. May drop in for tips or updates.
My love & gratitude to you all.
It's time to pivot.
Boycott ALL A.I. \ Copyright Mackenzie Davis
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More stories from Mackenzie Davis and writers in Critique and other communities.
Pride & Prejudice (2005)
It’s always that lake scene but I fell for MacFadyen’s eyes. (“There’s something pleasant about his mouth when he speaks…”). Thibaudet’s music fills my soul with dawn light, the cinematography's a perfected craft, every action a fluid dance.
By Mackenzie Davis2 years ago in Critique
Longitude of Power
Article review Longitude of Power: The Lesson from Star Wars, Dune and Foundation is an ambitious, hybrid text that tries to do three things at once: build a general theory of temporal politics through popular mythology, diagnose the institutional failure of the Jedi through a psychological lens that reframes the saga’s moral architecture, and then fold the entire argument back onto the material history of Hollywood by treating Lucas, Spielberg, and Coppola as living evidence of the very mechanism the myths describe. The article’s central wager is that time is not a neutral backdrop to power but its most corrosive agent, and that the deepest political danger is not invasion or even corruption in the ordinary sense, but permanence: the slow transformation of an originally adaptive authority into a self-preserving machine. This wager is not merely asserted; it is staged repeatedly through a braided method that moves between fictional empires, historical republics, and contemporary cultural institutions. The effect is a kind of “comparative mythology of decline” in which Star Wars, Dune, and Foundation function less as entertainment texts than as laboratories for thinking about authority’s dependence on duration. The strongest achievement of the article is that it does not treat these narratives as interchangeable allegories but as three distinct models of the same structural claim. Star Wars is presented as the cyclical model, where institutional rot and mythic legitimacy co-exist until a procedural surrender converts republic into empire. Dune becomes the prescient model, where the desire to eliminate uncertainty collapses the future into inevitability, and where the longest reign is not the triumph of wisdom but the apex of stagnation. Foundation becomes the statistical model, where collapse is not a moral drama but an actuarial conclusion: the empire is already dead, merely continuing its motions by inertia. Read together, these models allow the author to propose the Longitude of Power as a law-like principle: authority stretched across sufficient time and scale either mutates into tyranny or collapses into exhaustion, and the more it pursues total stability, the more it accelerates its own fragility. The phrase “longitude” is particularly effective because it shifts attention away from the usual spatial metaphors of power, centre and periphery, core and margins, and toward a temporal geometry: how long can a system remain itself before it becomes something else. That shift is not cosmetic. It gives the article a distinctive conceptual identity and helps it avoid the common trap of pop-culture political criticism, which often collapses into one-to-one comparisons between fictional tyrants and real leaders. Here, the argument is less about personalities and more about the slow physics of institutions. The article also benefits from a strong instinct for identifying where myth becomes diagnosis. The extended use of Yoda as a symbol of institutional longevity that turns into blindness is an example of how a character can be read not as a moral exemplar but as an institutional function. The claim that Yoda’s experience becomes “the wrong kind of knowledge” is a concise way of naming a sociological problem: expertise that is deeply conditioned by the past can become structurally unable to recognise novelty. The article’s best passages insist that the Jedi do not fail because they are secretly corrupt or because they lack ideals, but because they mistake endurance for truth and stability for moral health. The move from metaphysics to psychology, sharpened through the Rayencourt exchange in The Acolyte, is a second major strength. By placing emotional repression at the centre of Jedi decline, the text reorients the saga away from a purely theological conflict of light and dark and toward a political theory of affective governance. The Jedi are criticised not simply for being wrong about the Force but for designing an emotional regime that becomes pathological when paired with extraordinary authority. This is an important reframe because it allows the author to link institutional failure to a human mechanism, repression, accumulation, eruption, rather than to an external enemy. It also enables a more persuasive bridge to Dune and Foundation, both of which treat the management of human variability, unpredictability, desire, fear, as the true battleground of empire. The article’s diagnosis of hero worship as “anaesthesia” is likewise one of its most convincing political claims. It captures a recurring pattern in both fiction and history: oversight fails not because power is hidden but because it is revered, and legitimacy can function as a technology of exemption. In Star Wars terms, this helps explain why the Jedi could be simultaneously visible and unaccountable, why their errors could be interpreted as tragic exceptions rather than structural symptoms, and why the Senate could tolerate an extrajudicial force that it could not truly govern. The article’s argument becomes most compelling when it insists that collapse is often prepared by the attempt to avoid collapse, that a system obsessed with continuity creates the conditions for an internal takeover because it becomes incapable of perceiving adaptive threats. This line of thought is particularly strong in the analysis of Palpatine as a political virus, an internal parasite that exploits institutional procedure rather than confronting it directly. That reading fits the article’s broader thesis: enemies are less dangerous than duration, and the most successful threats are those that move through the channels of a fatigued system rather than against it. Where the text becomes more risky, though also more generative, is in its extension of the Longitude argument into bloodlines, dynastic continuity, and the claim that the deepest ideology of governance is not how to rule but how long to rule. This is rhetorically powerful, and it fits the thematic logic of Dune and Foundation, where breeding programmes and cloned emperors are explicit mechanisms for stabilising rule across centuries. It also resonates with Star Wars’ own fascination with lineage. Yet here the article flirts with two hazards. The first is explanatory overreach. Bloodlines are a potent mythic and narrative device, but in political theory they can quickly become a totalising explanation that risks flattening other mechanisms, institutions, class, bureaucracy, ideology, technology, into a single hereditary logic. The second hazard is interpretative slippage between fiction, cultural myth, and actual historical sociology. The text gestures to European bloodlines, dynastic returns, secret genealogies, and long continuity as “the ultimate secret of power,” and while this is thematically coherent within the mythic frame, it requires careful calibration if the article is to maintain its strongest intellectual posture, which is structural rather than conspiratorial. The article’s best material emphasises how power migrates into systems, markets, and infrastructures when it is not embodied in a ruler. That argument is already sufficient and persuasive, and it aligns well with the text’s later insistence on finance, debt, and “follow the money” as the true locus of rule. If the hereditary thread becomes too dominant, it can inadvertently pull the argument back toward a romantic anthropology of kingship rather than the more modern, and arguably more valuable, thesis the article also advances: that power survives by converting itself into administrative, financial, and technical arrangements that outlive individual rulers. In other words, the article is at its strongest when it insists that power is conserved and changes hosts, and that modern thrones are often balance sheets, contracts, and infrastructures. It is somewhat less secure when it treats bloodline continuity as the final key rather than one mechanism among others. Relatedly, the Highlander and Jesus passages are bold and imaginative, but they introduce a different register that sometimes strains the essay’s coherence. The Highlander example frames immortality as a “natural law” that should culminate in rule, with Duncan’s refusal interpreted as existential emptiness rather than ethical choice. This is rhetorically striking because it dramatizes the temptation of longevity as legitimacy, which the article elsewhere criticises. Yet the framing is ambiguous: at times it sounds as if the article is endorsing the idea that the longest-living entity should rule, only to later condemn that idea as a trap of permanence. The essay would benefit from making explicit that this is a mythic temptation, a seduction that empires and dynasties project, not a principle the author accepts. The Jesus passage likewise raises the issue of “who rules materially” when spiritual kingship refuses earthly sovereignty. This is an old political-theological question and can be productive here, especially if the article aims to show how vacuums of authority are quickly filled by competing regimes of coercion. But again, the text must be careful not to imply that love and restraint are intrinsically childish because they do not seize the throne. In the article’s own terms, the problem is not that compassion fails because it refuses violence; the problem is that compassion without institutional design is vulnerable to capture. That distinction matters. The piece is generally aiming at a structural critique of how vacuums are filled by systems, which is a strong insight. It becomes less stable if the rhetoric appears to celebrate “iron rule” as the only adult realism. The most intellectually fertile way to keep this passage inside the Longitude framework is to insist that moral commitments need institutional scaffolding, otherwise they are outlasted by more durable architectures of power. That would preserve the article’s realism without sliding into the romanticisation of domination. The Hollywood meta-argument is arguably the most original part of the abstract you provide, and it deserves the prominence it receives. Reading Lucas, Spielberg, and Coppola as a real-world enactment of the political mythology they helped build is a compelling inversion: the artists become characters within the very narrative structure of rebellion becoming empire. The claim that New Hollywood’s success produced “rebellion into infrastructure” is incisive. It captures how an insurgent aesthetic can become a repeatable industrial format once it is proven profitable, and how corporate systems learn from artistic breakthroughs how to standardise and monetise imagination. The Lucas-to-Disney moment is an especially effective analogue to the Senate’s applause, not because it implies Lucas is Palpatine, but because it shows how fatigue, optimisation, and the desire for stability can lead to surrender without malice. That is precisely the kind of temporal mechanism the Longitude concept is designed to capture. The Coppola argument, that chosen failure can function as resistance when success is indistinguishable from incorporation, is also persuasive, particularly when framed through the “art of failure” logic you bring in elsewhere. In an environment of total optimisation, a project that risks real loss, financial, reputational, and aesthetic, can indeed become a political gesture, because it refuses the safety conditions that keep the industrial machine stable. However, this part of the article also invites a careful objection. Failure is not automatically resistance. Markets can tolerate failure. Systems can even domesticate it, turning the mythology of the “failed genius” into another brand category. The political force of Coppola’s gesture depends on whether his failure remains outside the franchising logic, whether it resists being reprocessed as content, and whether it opens an alternative institutional pathway rather than merely staging an individual martyrdom. The article implies this by contrasting “successful surrender” with “chosen failure,” but it could sharpen the difference by naming what is structurally at stake: the refusal of optimisation, the refusal of franchise logic, and the refusal of managerial coherence. In other words, Coppola’s act is politically meaningful if it interrupts the logic of scalable repetition, not merely because it loses money. This is a small but important refinement, because it keeps the article from appearing to romanticise loss for its own sake. The article’s prose is generally energetic and charged, which suits its mythic ambition. At the same time, it sometimes risks rhetorical inflation. Phrases such as “the ultimate secret of power” and “natural laws” can be powerful in a polemical register, but an academic review reader may want clearer markers of where the argument is metaphorical, where it is sociological, and where it is speculative. The article’s strongest conceptual contributions, the temporal model of decay, the distinction between stability and adaptability, the idea of power migrating into systems, would be strengthened by a slightly firmer separation between analytic claims and mythic provocation. That said, the mythic provocation is not a weakness in itself. It is part of the article’s identity. The key is to ensure that provocation serves diagnosis rather than becoming its own explanatory engine. Within the Star Wars-Dune-Foundation triangle, the article’s most persuasive synthesis is its insistence that attempts to control the future make systems fragile, and that resilience requires what you call adaptive entropy. This is a valuable term because it captures the paradox that survival depends on the willingness to lose structure. It resonates with Leto II’s Scattering, with Seldon’s acceptance of collapse, and with Star Wars’ cyclical return of empire when republic becomes complacent. It also helps articulate the meta-lesson of Hollywood: creative institutions that refuse to fragment, hand over, or evolve their structures eventually sell, consolidate, or stagnate. The article’s concluding claim that “power always survives, changing hosts, waiting patiently” is perhaps its most haunting line because it refuses sentimental resolution. The question becomes not whether power can be abolished, but whether its forms can be made accountable, perishable, and decentralised enough to prevent total capture. This is precisely where the article could achieve its strongest philosophical clarity. If power is conserved and migratory, then the political project is not to eliminate power, but to prevent it from becoming immortal. That is the real convergence of Star Wars, Dune, and Foundation as you present them. The Republic fails because it thinks stability is peace. The God Emperor teaches that total peace is extinction. Psychohistory implies that imperial longevity produces inertia. In each case, the enemy is not simply evil. The enemy is permanence. The article is therefore best read not as a story about villains, but as a theory of time. Institutions do not collapse only because they are attacked. They collapse because they last too long without learning how to die. If the essay continues to develop, one constructive direction would be to bring the money thesis into even closer contact with the longitude thesis. You already suggest that when no person lives long enough to rule, power migrates into institutions, markets, and infrastructures, and that the deepest power is financial. This is one of the most contemporary and convincing ways to modernise the empire theme, because it moves beyond crowns and dynasties into credit, liquidity, and administrative systems. It would also allow the article to sharpen its diagnosis of Washington, not as a simplistic empire analogy, but as an infrastructure of permanence where emergency powers, security systems, and financial capture become the long-lived substitutes for sovereign kings. That would integrate your strongest speculative passages into a clearer structural account. As it stands, the article already has a distinctive voice and a coherent thesis. Its main risk is not incoherence but abundance. It contains enough ideas to become a book-length argument. The review conclusion, then, is that Longitude of Power succeeds most when it treats popular mythology as a serious theoretical instrument for thinking about time, institutional decay, and the metamorphosis of rebellion into administration. Its most compelling claim is that the final form of power is not necessarily the throne but the system that survives the throne, and that the only serious alternative to imperial permanence is not naive moral purity but institutional designs that can fragment, fail, and renew without surrendering to total optimisation. In that sense, the article’s final gesture, that chosen failure may be the last form of rebellion in an age of consolidation, is not just a romantic flourish. It is a challenge: to design cultural and political practices that can afford loss without collapsing, and that can refuse immortality without surrendering to nihilism.
By Peter Ayolov7 days ago in Critique
Comments (7)
Oh, I really love how you did this critique! 😍 Honestly, it's kind of like poetry in a way. This inspired me not only to watch this movie, but to try out this critique challenge - I've been staying away from it because I've felt it's too out of my realm! Awesome job, Mackenzie! I will be back to catch up on more of your work soon! ☺️❤️
Mackenzie, what a phenomenal critique! You sold me. I want to see that movie.
Like Rachel, adding it to my ever expanding list, lol! Excellent review!
Great review. I agree with Hannah.
Adding it to my ever expanding list! Thanks 😁
I actually feel inspired to watch this again through your lens here.
Wonderful! I wondered if anyone still read his work...or saw that film! Great Lewis Carroll quote, too.