Everyone Gets To Live in Twin Peaks
Someone once told JB Minton that Twin Peaks fans worship at the altar of child abuse. This essay takes that accusation seriously enough to answer it: rewatching Laura Palmer's suffering every year isn't worship of the crime, any more than the Stations of the Cross is worship of the crucifixion. The ritual isn't reverence for the wound — it's compassion, practiced on a loop, for the person who carried it.
Coming Out of the Shadow of David Foster Wallace’s Suicide
David Foster Wallace wrote the book that promised Generation X you could make demanding art and still be heard — and twelve years later, he was gone. JB Minton uses The End of the Tour, and the confession buried inside its late-night hotel-room scene, to ask what Infinite Jest actually warned us about, and why the warning outlived the man who wrote it. This is an essay about attention, fame, and the cost of being right too early.
We Live In Time (2024)
We Live In Time asks a question that shouldn't have a good answer: can you make a happy movie about a woman dying of cancer? JB Minton argues yes, if you understand what the film actually reveals through its scrambled timeline — that Almut's secrets, not her diagnosis, are what threaten to run out her time. The truth she's most afraid to say out loud isn't that she's dying. It's that she doesn't want to be forgotten.
Why Gen X Is the Perfect Generation to Adopt AI As Artists & Professionals
Generation X learned the world through card catalogs and rotary phones, then spent every year since teaching itself the next machine — dial-up, cloud, now the ones that write back. That amphibian training, not any credential, is the real argument here: it's why Gen X is positioned to lead AI adoption without either worshipping the tool or refusing it. The essay works through what that leadership looks like in creative practice, and in the unglamorous, unavoidable work of getting a company's data honest before any of it can be automated.
Life is Fate and Chance Is Choice
Joseph Campbell called it the hand of a supreme author — the sense, looking back, that a life's chance meetings were written for us. JB Minton's argument here is more exacting than that: fate is the door appearing, and choice is which of us walks through it, one decision compounding into the next until it looks, in hindsight, like destiny. The proof text is R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry, felled onstage in Switzerland by a brain aneurysm in 1995 and saved by a hospital two miles away that happened to hold the one surgeon on earth built for that exact injury — fate, and then, choice after choice, survival.
Fill Up Your Wheelbarrow!
The wheelbarrow is your life, the pebbles are everything the world throws at you, and the hill doesn't get gentler because you're tired. JB Minton's parable is blunt about what happens if you never stop to empty the barrow — it's not metaphorical exhaustion, it's the depression, the addiction, the divorce, the disease that pressure left unmanaged actually produces. His prescription is equally blunt: meditate twenty minutes, twice a day, on purpose, or keep pushing uphill until you tip.
The Gorge (2025)
The Gorge succeeds by refusing to pick a genre — romantic fairytale, spy thriller, horror movie, and superhero story all running at once — and it earns that sprawl because the two central assassins are actually built as people. One never had a country because they never had unconditional love; the other stayed loyal to a country precisely because they'd never trusted a parent enough to love anything smaller. JB Minton's read: both characters have only ever known duty, and duty always betrays — the real argument underneath all that genre-hopping, and why he's watching it again.
A Complete Unknown (2024)
A Complete Unknown isn't really an argument for who Bob Dylan was — JB Minton's thesis is that nobody's there, that Dylan has always been a vessel for the art rather than a man you can pin down, and everyone who loves him ends up telling their own origin story instead of his. His is thirty years long: a Time-Life box set bought sick with pneumonia at nineteen, a Time Out of Mind CD that wrecked him sideways, a burned-out bartender who made him promise to go back and start with Freewheelin'. The film, he argues, is worth what it opens up in you, not what it claims to explain.
FIGHT THE EMPIRE! - Why 'Andor Is The Most Important Story in 'Star Wars
Andor isn't the most important Star Wars story because of its politics or its craft, though it has both — it's the root system underneath everything else in the mythology, the story that turns Alderaan and Order 66 from spectacle into the genocide a billion children already understood as wrong. JB Minton's real argument is the distinction between a rebellion and a revolution: a rebellion is people finally standing up, but a revolution is what happens when that anger gets organized into something that can actually replace what it's fighting. Everything that ends in a Death Star exploding starts here, with a prison break, a funeral, and Maarva Andor's holographic order to a planet that's been asleep too long: fight.
The Last Dragon (1985)
The Last Dragon looks like a kung-fu movie, plays like a music video, and ends like nothing you expected — a romantic hero's journey where mastery is measured in devotion, not victory. I watched it fifty times as an eleven-year-old and didn't understand what it was teaching me until decades later, when I needed to know it.