When the marines of Echo Company 2nd Battalion 8th Regiment enter Afghanistan in 2009, they’re told they’ll be enacting a “new” counter-insurgency strategy. Their commander names their essential contradictions. “Every interaction you have with the people is crucial,” he says, “We have to develop trust in them.” Strapping on gear and loading weapons, they are plainly “experts in the application of violence,” but they’re less equipped for developing “trust.” Within moments, these ideals are dismantled: a marine is badly injured, his buddies run him along a road, the camera jogging behind them. When the corporal dies, 26-year-old Sergeant Nathan Harris steps up. He will be injured too, and Hell and Back Again, airing on PBS on 28 May, follows him home to North Carolina, where he struggles to find sense in what he’s done and how it plagues him. The film cuts back and forth, between the footage photographer-turned-filmmaker Danfung Dennis shot in Afghanistan over months and the diaristic scenes he shoots of Nathan home, talking to the camera, his wife Ashley, and his doctors. In pain and on medication, Nathan seems to be remembering what you see, but the documentary doesn’t pretend to know what he’s feeling. Instead, it observes and draws connections, scenes that show battles or Harris and his team breaking down doors or not quite conversing with Afghan locals, or more plainly showing the effects of action. These involve Ashley as much as Nathan: as she describes their journey as “to hell and back again,” you realize how they’ve paid, again and again.

See PopMatters’ review.

Klinger: It’s certainly no surprise to me why critics would be so taken with the Stooges, and Fun House in particular. As the decade changed hands from the 1960s to the ‘70s, rock still felt like it was very much in a state of flux. And it may well have seemed that one of the casualties of that changeover was the concept of the rock band as a bunch of blue collar buddies loading up on beer and using guitars and drumsticks as cudgels to pound their hormonal angst into crude representations of music. The initial wave of “garage rock” had given way to considerably more noodly blues experimentation, and the likes of James Taylor and Elton John were looming large on the horizon. Even if that first wave of rock writers were longing for a time that never technically existed, Iggy Pop, the Asheton brothers, and Dave Alexander were more than able to fill the Kingsmen-shaped hole in those critics’ hearts.

It’s also not too surprising that this second album nosed out the others in the mathematical race to the top of the Great List. Although it’s in a virtual tie with 1973’s Raw Power, Fun House certainly has the edge over their debut LP. Tipping the balance away from the Stooges’ primal basheriffics (and trading in the 10-minute psychedelic dreamery of “We Will Fall” for the freaked out babble-jazz of “L.A. Blues”—which only sounds like it’s 10 minutes long), Fun House presents a group that’s doing something quite nearly inimitable—not that loads of bands haven’t tried in the ensuing decades. Your thoughts, Mendelsohn?

Fair or not, a couple films had targets on their back coming into Cannes this year. Depending on who you ask spoke with, either Walter Salles’ On the Road or Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy were ripe for disaster. Indeed, I was skeptical enough of the latter to skip it entirely (I opted for sleep—a lot of it. Which is why this dispatch arrives a little later than planned). Unlike most, however, I had no expectations whatsoever for On the Road, Jose Rivera’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s cult coming-of-age novel and one of many texts posited as “unfilmmable”. I’m not sure if I’d go that far, since the rough skeleton of a good film is evidenced sporadically in Salles’ version; but he and Rivera would have done well to to fortify the structure of their film, which goes all-in with the episodic nature of the novel. Yet in their resignation to it’s wandering gait, they’ve lapsed on cinematic translation, which may have, amongst other things, condensed the prose into more potent, less repetitive stop-overs.

There’s a lot of bad exposition in games. Exposition itself isn’t a bad thing, sometimes it’s helpful and even necessary, but video games—with their need to create entire new worlds—constantly fall back on the bad habits of lazy execution: characters explaining things that they already understand or going off on a whole history lesson with the slightest provocation, purely for the sake of the player. It feels forced and leads to bad dialogue, since it’s hard to make an encyclopedia article sound like anything other than an encyclopedia article.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings ends with a massive exposition dump between the protagonist Geralt and his antagonist Letho. This political thriller fantasy game involves dozens of character, all with their own motivations and secret plots, interacting with each other, playing off each other, using each other, and betraying each other. One conspiracy mastermind might just be a pawn in someone else’s larger conspiracy. It’s an incredibly complex web of character relations, and it’s all laid bare in the final conversation of the game: a climactic Q&A session. Some of it is forced—and horribly so—but for the most part The Witcher 2 excels at doling out large doses of information in a very short time. It does the exposition dump right.

I really love Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Not least of all for his introduction to that book, the seductively titled “When Ideas Have Sex”. Ridley himself does a really good of explaining the introduction in his 2010 TEDtalk. But the broad strokes of the argument goes something like this.

Sex is really great (well, yeah) for a species, since it allows for an individual draw on the genetic anomalies as such as dominant genetic tradition. Those rare few who seemed to have a natural immunity to HIV (for real, hit Google for this one), need not be isolated and eventually rendered extinct. Instead their genetic material can form part of the greater human genome.

Then Ridley poses a shocking question. One of those questions that are obvious, or should be obvious, but you really have no idea why you’ve never asked it before. Ridley’s question is simply, how is it human beings came to be so successful a species? How successful, you may well ask if you failed to notice homo sapiens sapiens’ domination of the biosphere. Well, as successful as this. Human beings are the only species, the only species…to demonstrate an increase in prosperity even as there’s an increase in population size.

So the question for Ridley is this: is sex a useful metaphor for understanding cultural growth and success? And if so, what’s the cultural analog for sex? Ridley reckons it’s exchange. Because exchange always renders specialization. And specialization always signals the production of technological complexity well beyond the scope of individual capacities.