My perspective on the world at this point is that everything that happens, I look behind it to descry the genocidal intentions of our overlords.

TESS POLLOK: Were you a c-section or a natural birth?

NICK PINKERTON: Natural birth. I was born November 5, 1980, in Cincinnati's Christ Hospital – perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing hospital in the city, sitting beacon-like on top of Mt. Auburn. My mother, Maura Lohman, was waiting tables at the time, and my father, Ronald Stanley Pinkerton, was a construction estimator at the time. My mother later became a public school teacher and my father went into the sheet metal roofing industry, where he co-founded the legendary Metal Panel Systems Incorporated.

POLLOK: Absolutely legendary.

PINKERTON: Easily one of the top 30 sheet metal roofing companies in Southwest Ohio. I spent the first few years of my life in the suburbs of Forest Park before moving down to Wyoming, Ohio, which is an old streetcar suburb just outside of Cincinnati proper. The large inducement for people to live there is that it has a very well-rated public school system, in which I matriculated without great distinction. It's also the alma mater of Otto Warmbier, the kid who got stockaded in South Korea and came home a vegetable. That more or less gives you my curriculum vitae. There were a few other incidents, but none of great distinction.

POLLOK: Incidents? Were you bullied?

PINKERTON: No, quite the opposite.

POLLOK: You were bullying?

PINKERTON: Somewhere in the middle, I like to think.

POLLOK: When did you get into movies? What were some of the first films that affected you?

PINKERTON: I don't have any conscious recollection of turning decisively towards film. I'd always been a movie watcher but even when I was young I gravitated towards things that were a bit strange for a 9-year-old to be watching: Laurel and Hardy, Hal Roach comedies… Most of the signature movies of the 1980s childhood mean nothing to me whatsoever. I've never seen Goonies or The NeverEnding Story. All of those points of reference are totally lost on me. One of the nice things about taking an interest in film as opposed to some plastic art is that it's all theoretical – certainly where I was there was no access whatsoever to the tools of filmmaking, so I could develop an interest in film with the tacit assumption that I was a genius and that eventually I'd show the world when given the access to the proper resources. Funnily enough, by the time I was 13 or 14, there was still a functioning repertory cinema in downtown Cincinnati, The Real Movies, where I spent a great deal of time. When my mother remarried she moved to the Washington, D.C. area, so when I would be out there I would go into Georgetown, where there were two rep theaters in operation, The Key and The Biograph. I was also very interested in music but didn't have the self-discipline to sit down and play scales and do the other things that would be required of me to become a guitar god. Gradually, movies just became the thing that I was most interested in. They were the path of least resistance.

POLLOK: “The path of least resistance.” It's funny to hear filmmaking described that way when any artistic undertaking without resources is never the path of least resistance. What was it like exploring art and film in the 80s? How did you develop your taste?

PINKERTON: I have to scrape around and seek things out, like anyone. I think access to all kinds of esoterica is easier now than it was then, but you still have to figure out what the good stuff is before you can find it. In the world of my youth, it was easier to stumble across things – you could go to the video store and start digging through the bins and you'd find something unfamiliar, check it out, and branch out from there. Whereas in today's world of the filter bubble and algorithmically determined recommendations, I suspect having these initial chance encounters is more difficult. To take another example, when I was younger there was an organization called the Cincinnati Film Society that would host experimental screenings at the old Natural History Museum building, and you could come across word of those screenings in a free weekly and go check them out, even if you didn't have any background in art or film whatsoever. So, I certainly wasn't able to just hop on a laptop and download an entire hard drive of obscure Tamil cinema, but I at least had the advantage of those things being somewhat in the atmosphere. As opposed to today, when you don't run into these occult things unless you've already developed a predilection for them and know where to look.

POLLOK: Your writing seems as interested in investigating filmmaking and movies as it is in the movie-going experience – how people encounter movies, what motivates people to watch them. Do you feel like the way people engage with movies as a medium has changed? Are you happier for people today than you are for your younger self?

PINKERTON: Definitely not. My friend John Magary made a comment about this on Twitter and got totally jumped on, but he was dead right; If you have the experience of being on a long flight and you look around and everyone you're seeing is staring dead-eyed at Black Widow… What is a 48-year-old man with an office job and a mortgage and ailing parents thinking about when he watches Black Widow? How does he relate it to his life? Is he thinking at all? It's really fucking depressing.

POLLOK: Would you say you're in the “Marvel is ruining everything” wheelhouse?

PINKERTON: There's no single culprit here, but I'm pretty disengaged from whatever could be considered contemporary and popular cinema now. To me, the remaining pleasures of multiplex movie-going are in the rare mid-budget genre stuff. Orphan: First Kill, for example, as opposed to these two hundred million dollar tentpoles. On that economy of scale you practically can't produce anything of interest.

POLLOK: What do you like about Orphan?

PINKERTON: At the end of Orphan there's a scene where Esther has plunged through the frozen-over surface of a pond and grabs Vera Farmiglia by the ankle. Realizing what a terrible predicament she's in, Esther starts acting the role of the little girl again, tugging on Vera's heartstrings to get herself off this precipice of eternity, calling her “Mommy,” and Vera goes, “I'm not your fucking Mommy” and kicks Esther in the face, sending her back into the icy depths. When I watched it at the late, lamented Regal UA Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, the whole audience went completely buck wild. It was such an amazing, wonderful, communal experience, and recalling it fills me with such joy. That's the kind of demotic dumbfuck movie-going that, for whatever other elevated interests I may have, was my bread and butter growing up. Semiotext(e) just put out the first volume of the collected writings of the French critic Serge Daney in translation, and the first volume starts with a 1977 interview with Bill Krohn, then Hollywood correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma. One of the things that Daney talks about in that interview is that one of the impetuses behind his cinephilia is a reaction against theater – the dressing up, the bourgeois pageantry, the assigned seating, the exorbitant prices… But that's always been a huge part of the draw of cinema for me; that filmmaking is not yet a calcified upper-crusty art form, although there are lost of vested interests that want to see it move in that direction. Even now, what other communal cultural activities are available to poor people? Can they even go to a baseball game anymore?

POLLOK: You can, but the beer is cost prohibitive.

PINKERTON: I remember going to Shea Stadium when I first arrived in New York, and compare that to what a Citi Field ticket costs now…

POLLOK: I'm going to directly attack your point here. I just went to a Yankees games with my friends and we had decent seats that were only $35. But I ended up spending over $100 on beer.

PINKERTON: $35? I used to see the Reds play at Shea Stadium for $16.

POLLOK: You're old. With inflation it's about the same.

PINKERTON: I'm 41.

POLLOK: What about reading a good book?

PINKERTON: I'm talking about a social, communal experience. Mixing with the hoi polloi. Incidentally, have you been to the new Patrick Moynihan terminal at Penn Station? I was catching a train there awhile back and wanted to get a beer before boarding and there were all these ice cream places, cupcake places… At the proper Penn Station, you'd have proper dives, like the sublime Tracks.

POLLOK: I've been. There was one really abused Dunkin' with a single flickering light.

PINKERTON: Exactly. They're trying to wean us off booze and onto snacks, aren't they? You must understand that my perspective on the world at this point is that everything that happens, I look behind it to descry the genocidal intentions of our overlords.

POLLOK: Who are our overlords in that sentence?

PINKERTON: Those who are gradually making obsolescent large swathes of our population. Many of them are centered in Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, various other tech hubs – finding new ways to turn us into human beanbag chairs fatted on Doordash. The insane fucking agoraphobes who are attempting to remake the world in their image, or in a way that suits their predilections, and their predilections are for the elimination of all interpersonal human interaction, because they're all shut-ins and nerds and freaks. So, every time I see the physical world changing around me, my immediate response is, “Okay, how are they trying to kill us now?” Because it's well-established that they want us dead.

POLLOK: Did you ever listen to the podcast What's Left with Aimee Terese?

PINKERTON: No. I know of it, but I've never listened to a podcast.

POLLOK: They have a really interesting episode with Joel Kotkin, author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, where he talks about social and economic conditions in Seattle after Amazon moved in, how birth rates have gone down, how it's become impossible to own a home. He basically argues that by any meaningful statistical measure the social structure there most closely resembles medieval Europe and a return to serfdom.

PINKERTON: We are rapidly rushing towards a feudal system that no one wants, excepting a few agoraphobic sociopaths who code at the top. You used to at least see the elite somewhat out in the shared social world, and there'd be a sense of their civic responsibility that came with being in a community, even if it was bred out of fear of peasant uprisings. Now? There's a Gore Vidal quote that I'm going to badly butcher, but he said something to the effect of, “They're all on islands now.” It's true. You don't even see these motherfuckers anymore. They're in a world of their own.

POLLOK: How does the state of things affect the movies we make? Are you opposed to the intrusion of new technologies into filmmaking?

PINKERTON: I'm not opposed to it. Do you know the Romanian director Radu Jude? Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn?

POLLOK: I haven't seen it, but I know it won the Golden Bear at Berlin International Film Festival.

PINKERTON: I like him. He's a really bright guy and he's willing to throw some Hail Marys in a way that not a lot of filmmakers working the festival circuit are. I did a talk with him a couple of years ago in Belgium and he was really excited about TikTok and said that cinema's got to catch up to TikTok. I like that he's excited about it, I think that's great. I think new technology can and should be incorporated into the language of cinema. My friend Eugene Kotlyarenko is good with this.

POLLOK: How do you feel about Kotlyarenko's movies?

PINKERTON: I like them very much, not uniformly, but he knows this. I'm not a big Spree fan, but overall I think he's fantastic. He's the real deal. He's never running away from the contemporary world and always figuring out how to integrate aspects of the internet into film language in very ingenious ways.

We are rapidly rushing towards a feudal system that no one wants, excepting a few agoraphobic sociopaths who code at the top.

POLLOK: You have your own movie that you wrote coming out, The Sweet East. Do you want to talk about that?

PINKERTON: It's directed by Sean Price Williams – my pal, my collaborator, light of my life, fire of my loins. I wrote it and he directed it. We wrapped principal photography at the end of May 2022. The events of the film actually take place over the course of a full year, and it was really freakish of us to do this, but we did actually shoot in such a way that we'd get the seasons. We shot our Fall/Winter section in October and November of 2021, last year, and our Spring/Summer section last year.

POLLOK: Do you want to talk about the story or themes at all?

PINKERTON: No. But I think it's a ripping yarn.

POLLOK: Well, that's good. That about wraps us up. One last question: does it feel intimidating to be making art as a critic?

PINKERTON: Fuck no. You have no idea how little respect I have for the opinions of most of my colleagues. Though I hasten to add that some of them are terrific.

POLLOK: It's awesome to make it to this point and not give a shit. Do you ever feel pressured to care?

PINKERTON: It's been a while since I've cared about my professional standing. I like what I do. I like digging around in obscure sub-basements of film history. If some people don't dig my “practice” or whatever, it causes me no pain.

Nick Pinkerton is a film critic and screenwriter. His first produced screenplay, The Sweet East, debuts at IFC Center on December 1, 2023.

Tess Pollok is a writer and the editor-in-chief of Animal Blood.