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Mei’s mom discovers her notebook full of drawings of a cute boy in Turning Red.

Like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Turning Red is an immigrant story. Mei’s mother Ming is the daughter of Chinese-Canadian immigrants, and the dramatic crux of the film involves Mei realizing that her mother has been repressing even greater emotions than Mei has. In the name of pleasing her own mother, Ming tamped down her own red panda, which is the size of an enormous kaiju. Yet the end of the film features Ming realizing that if Mei wishes to keep her panda around, she should be allowed, even if that’s not the right choice for Ming. Mother and daughter understand each other just a little bit better.

Stories about parents realizing they’ve failed their children and should apologize before it’s too late were not invented in the last couple of years. One of my favorite examples, for instance, is the 1952 film The Holly and the Ivy, in which a reverend realizes over a family Christmas celebration that his grown children are terrified to tell him about their problems because they’re worried he’ll be disappointed in them. He becomes aware of the ways in which he has hurt them, and he comes to them to make amends, rather than the reverse.

What defines this recent crop of films, I would argue, is their focus on how the basic tropes of this story intersect with identity, particularly when it comes to the immigrant experience and queer identities, and their focus on the ways trauma, toxicity, and abuse cycle through generations. The fantasy here is not just that a parent will apologize to their child (though that is key) but also that said apology will snap the cycle of abuse so it no longer perpetuates itself. And that’s a fantasy that has appeal to the parent and the child.

What good is an apology anyway?

One question I have about these recent releases is: Why now? What is suddenly prompting millennial filmmakers to tackle this subject, in incredibly similar ways? And considering the production cycles for these movies, it would be impossible for them to have influenced each other. They were all being made simultaneously.

The easy answer is that plenty of millennials are now having children of their own, and having children of your own is a natural time to start thinking about the way your parents raised you. And in an era when the internet and pop culture have widely disseminated knowledge about, say, the nature and weight of intergenerational trauma, it’s much easier than it once was to look into your own family history and see the ways your parents were impacted by their parents and so on.

These movies also serve as reminders of how good parenting can easily curdle into recalcitrance if parents aren’t careful. The ways in which one watches out for a toddler become overbearing when watching out for a teenager, but it’s hard for any parent to make that shift in how they see their child. And what’s more, every parent screws up in one way or another, and it’s hard for anyone to admit when they’ve screwed up. Once you add the burden of a parent-child relationship onto that natural, stubborn inclination, bad things can follow.

The aspects involving identity are also important to the recent rise of this subgenre. Queer millennials especially have lived through a rapid shift in social acceptance where queer identities have become much more common in the mainstream, when the opposite was true when we were born. And often, our parents haven’t been as good at making that shift as we might have liked, which has led to conflict. So many of these stories involve queer characters for a reason: Coming out as queer is one of the times when parental acceptance is most desired and most likely not to be offered.

The Mitchell family tries to outrun the machines in their trusty station wagon. Netflix
The Mitchells vs. the Machines is a madcap road movie with a queer woman hero.

Even when stories about queer characters seem to feature accepting parents, the subtext can tell a different story. The Mitchells vs. the Machines features a queer woman who has a girlfriend by the film’s end as its hero, a rarity in animated films aimed at families. Ostensibly, the father she struggles to win the acceptance of is totally fine with her attraction to women; his issue is that she’s a would-be filmmaker and a weirdo iconoclast. “Artsy, weirdo iconoclast” is subtextually coded as a queer character, especially in family films (numerous queer women have found solace in Turning Red’s artsy weirdo Mei, for instance), the film’s use of subtext to beef up its queer text, without turning the dad into an outright homophobe, ends up being a neat way for the film to have its “struggles queer kids face” cake while quietly eating it under the table where many cishet people won’t notice.

When I describe this subgenre as a “fantasy,” I worry that it suggests that the very idea of parents apologizing to their kids is fantastical or that all of these stories take place in heightened realities where the rules of science fiction or fantasy are the norm. Instead, I think the fantasy inherent to this genre stems from these stories’ argument that an apology will eventually clear up any degree of parental toxicity. Stories, after all, require some sort of dramatic climax, and in the parental apology fantasy, the emotional climax usually involves that very apology. But in a movie, the story ends shortly after the climax. Not so in reality. And in reality, there are many sins that can’t be so easily solved with an apology.

What I love about Everything Everywhere is how it understands the seductive power and the ultimate emptiness of the fantasy of the apology that fixes everything. It situates the bad behavior of Evelyn on a continuum going all the way from “struggling to accept her daughter as gay” to “destroying her daughter’s mind in the name of science.” One of these two things is worse than the other, but the emotional effect on the child is incredibly devastating either way. And if an apology wouldn’t be enough to fix severe parental abuse, then maybe it won’t be enough to fix seemingly less serious sins as well.

The final scene of Everything Everywhere All at Once involves an Evelyn and a Joy who have seen all the multiverse has to offer and chosen to be versions of themselves with very prosaic concerns, because those versions of themselves might be able to move past the worst of what they have done to each other (or, rather, the worst of what Evelyn has done to Joy). Yet as Evelyn attempts to go about her life, the chaos and noise of the multiverse crowds into her mental space. She’s seen the worst she is capable of, and she cannot entirely shut it out. And there is at least one version of herself who was incredibly abusive to her daughter.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the only movie listed here told from the point of view of the parent, not the child. And that turns out to be the key decision that gives the film an added boost. For as much as Jobu Tupaki might be searching the multiverse for a mom who’s only a little bit shitty, Evelyn is searching herself for a way to make it up to Joy with the minimum amount of work. As the movie ends, she’s accepted Joy’s girlfriend, but she remains overly critical of both younger women.

Evelyn can’t shut out the chaos of the multiverse because she is always trapped with the worst things she has been and has done. The fantasy of an apology that will forgive all sins is something the child wants, sure, but it’s something their parent wants even more. And such a thing is impossible to find, no matter how many universes you look for it in.

A Viking, half-naked and covered in blood, stands in the midst of a village. Courtesy of Focus Features

Skarsgård in The Northman.

A recent New Yorker profile delves into the meticulous research that Eggers — who was similarly attentive to historical accuracy in his earlier features, The Witch and The Lighthouse — engaged in to make The Northman. It stars an extremely ripped Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth alongside Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe, and Björk. Eggers, who co-wrote the film with the Icelandic poet Sjón, had historians of Icelandic and Viking history on speed-dial throughout production. The filmmakers integrated archaeological discoveries and ancient symbology into the film; they recreated the past so carefully that, as the New Yorker put it, this “might be the most accurate Viking movie ever made.” It’s far more intricate than your average layperson, or even your above-average layperson, would probably be able to recognize, even upon a dozen rewatches.

But for all its production-related fidelity to the era — at least as much as is possible for a story that takes place shortly before 930 AD, when Iceland’s parliament was established — The Northman’s story is more of a loose adaptation. That mixing and morphing of old stories, giving mythic characters new characteristics, is something Eggers enjoys; when I talked to him about The Lighthouse in 2019, he noted that “the classical authors did that all the time.”

So The Northman’s Amleth has a life quite different from the one in Saxo Grammaticus’s tale. He is a boy prince recently initiated by his father (Hawke) and their witch-priest (Dafoe) into his royal responsibilities, who sees his uncle Fjölnir (Bang) kill his father and carry away his mother, Queen Gudrún (Kidman). He flees the scene, and an adviser tells the new King Fjölnir that Amleth has drowned. Amleth vows to avenge his father, save his mother, and kill Fjölnir, and his vow turns to a kind of mantra as he grows to adulthood.

As a man, Amleth is a roving Viking, pillaging and murdering his way across Europe, when he catches wind that Fjölnir and Amleth’s family now live in Iceland, Fjölnir having lost his kingdom. Amleth poses as a slave, joining a group of captured Slavs in order to get close to his hated uncle. Among them is a seer (Taylor-Joy); the two plot to take his revenge, fully aware that his fate, to avenge his father no matter the cost, is always lurking.

So in The Northman there is feigning, but not of madness. There are many more twists and turns in Saxo Grammaticus’s account than in the film, including sojourns in England and Scotland and many brushes with death, but there’s no sign of The Northman’s seer. And in the film’s more straightforward telling, fate has other tricks up its sleeve, particularly in the case of Gudrún. The Northman, set in a world where dreams, supernatural forces, and magic are as real as mud and blood, emphasizes within Amleth’s story the Vikings’ deep-seated belief in the inescapability of fate. The core remains familiar, a tale of treachery and bravery and villainy, but this is a new spin on a very old story.

That isn’t to say it’s a modern spin. Thank goodness.

Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy in The Northman. Courtesy of Focus Features

Fate comes for us all.

Amleth is not a modern man dropped into the Vikings’ world; he doesn’t really think or act like us. There’s no sense here of defending his individual honor. Though he talks of reclaiming what’s been taken from him, it’s his sense of being woven into a broader history, a history that needs straightening out, that drives him. He’s the rightful king, but not of some great nation-state; he stands to gain very little if he regains that position. And the few things that seem to make him happy, like his love, are of very little consequence to him in the face of fate. He’s fascinating, but you don’t really want to emulate him. Braveheart this is not.

His choices make little sense to us. They aren’t really supposed to. He isn’t chasing fame or glory or salvation or some kind of patriotic duty, in the manner of the tales of heroism Hollywood movies often tell. His incantation-like drive to avenge, save, and kill turns out to be built on shaky foundations. And in the end, it all feels a little futile. He’s just on the path set out for him by the inexorable will of fate, a force that’s more like gravity than anything we’ve seen.

That means that, among recent films set in medieval eras, The Northman is a lot closer to the weird, spooky, somewhat inexplicable The Green Knight than The Last Duel, which is populated by people who seem like they’re basically us but really regressive and mean. It also makes it a bit more inscrutable and a lot less “satisfying,” if we measure film- watching satisfaction in terms of catharsis. We modern moviegoers want a swell of triumph, even if our hero dies.

The marketing team for The Northman seems to know this, spinning up a trailer that makes it feel more like a chilly, wet Gladiator than what it really is: something very weird and gnarly and bombastic and explosive. The poster’s tagline is “Conquer Your Fate,” which is exactly what Amleth doesn’t do. He doesn’t even think he can do it. He is a hero, of a sort, and a tragic one. We’re still telling his story.

If you can extract a modern message from The Northman — that “toxic masculinity” has been destroying men for literal eons, that women have been granted limited agency to push back — it’s really not the point of this retelling of Saxo Grammaticus’s already retold tale. Eggers recreated, with obsessive accuracy, the world of the medievals in order to lower us into a myth that feels primordial and strange, as if it’s tapping into something in the back of our minds that we’ve always known but half forgotten. Today we assume we have agency, that we’re the captains of our own ships. But thousands of years ago, the assumption was different. They might have known something we don’t.

The Northman is playing in theaters.

That’s left what had been a unified group of nations adrift in a critical time for the Arctic: Climate change is quickly altering the Arctic landscape, creating new economic opportunities, more headaches for infrastructure on land, and new friction points between countries. The confluence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and climate change stand to alter balance of trade and security in the Arctic irrevocably, and a region that once avoided the troubles of the rest of the world is now being confronted by them.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fractured the delicate peace in the Arctic

Despite the recent tensions, countries in the far north have long aspired for “Arctic exceptionalism,” the idea that the region would remain immune from political wrangling and conflicts brewing in other parts of the world.

“The Soviet Union is in favor of a radical lowering of the level of military confrontation in the region,” said Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in a speech in 1987. “Let the North of the globe, the Arctic, become a zone of peace. Let the North Pole be a pole of peace.”

Since then, Arctic exceptionalism has largely held, with countries in the region trying to work together and overlook their differences in other areas. In 1996, Arctic nations founded the Arctic Council. Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it was composed of eight states: Canada, Denmark (via Greenland), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States. The council also includes six permanent groups representing Indigenous people in the Arctic.

Over the years, the group established agreements on scientific research, protecting fisheries, conducting search and rescue operations, developing environmental rules, and defending the rights of Indigenous people. The council, however, explicitly does not deal with military issues.

Countries have also pursued their own economic interests in the Arctic outside of the council. Russia, the country with the longest Arctic coastline, has vastly expanded its footprint in the Arctic in recent decades, building roads, airports, power plants, and nuclear-powered ice breakers, leaning into fossil fuel extraction to boost its economy. Oil and gas provide 40 percent of Russia’s federal budget and account for 60 percent of its exports. Overall, it generates about 20 percent of its gross domestic product above the Arctic Circle, mainly from oil and gas, but also from mining minerals and metals.

“Russia is hell-bent on developing Arctic oil and gas resources because it has no other choice,” said Malte Humpert, founder and a senior fellow at the Arctic Institute think tank. “Purely from a logistical and technical aspect, what Russia has achieved in the Arctic is really, really impressive.”

Russia is establishing new shipping routes through the Arctic as well. And to protect all this economic development, Russia’s expanded its military presence in the region, with new bases, hardware, and troops. It’s also conducting long-range bomber flights. “Over the next 30 years, the Arctic will be critical for Russian economic survival,” according to a 2021 US Army strategic plan.

“The question has always been, where do legitimate security interests end and where does militarization of the Arctic begin?” Humpert said.

That question makes some other countries uneasy, particularly given that they have stakes in the Arctic too. China has become a major customer for Russian fuels from the Arctic and is now the second-largest shipper in the region. The US Army report said that Russia and China could “seek to use military and economic power to gain and maintain access to the region at the expense of US interests.”

Russian militarization, and its invasion, have spurred other countries to step up their military activities in the region. NATO forces are now conducting exercises in the Arctic, which Russia has warned could lead to “unintended incidents.” The US has deployed F-35 fighter jets to Alaska and is conducting its own drills in the area.

At the moment, all that’s happened are drills. But having so much military might in a place that was supposed to be “a zone of peace,” has some experts concerned. “We’re basically back to the Cold War in terms of level of activity,” said Robert Huebert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary.

The Arctic Council was never meant to delve into military matters. But the hope was that the cooperation it fostered in other areas would minimize the chances of aggression. However, the invasion may end up excluding Russia from the Arctic Council for good, according to Huebert.

For one thing, Russian President Vladimir Putin is looking to build a new polar organization with China. “If in fact he’s successful in doing this, I don’t see how the Russians can be brought back,” Huebert said.

Sweden and Finland are also considering joining NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as a result of Russia’s invasion. That could become a permanent wedge between Arctic nations. The prospect of NATO expanding its membership was a big reason why Russia invaded Ukraine to begin with. “The moment Finland and Sweden join NATO, I just don’t ever see the Russians coming back to the Arctic Council,” Huebert said.

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

Russian officers talk to each other at a base called the “Arctic Trefoil” on the island of Alexandra Land, Russia, on May 17, 2021. Once a desolate home mostly to polar bears, Russia’s northernmost military outpost is bristling with missiles and radar and its extended runway can handle all types of aircraft, including nuclear-capable strategic bombers.

Climate change is creating new opportunities and flashpoints in the Arctic

The Arctic itself is rapidly changing. It’s warming more than twice as fast as the global average, reshaping the icy ocean and the lands around it. Arctic sea ice is declining at its fastest rate in 1,500 years.

But while the Arctic is warming quickly, the effects are not equal across the region. “One of the things that climate change has really illustrated is that there’s more than one Arctic,” Huebert said. Rising temperatures play out differently depending on whether it’s on Alaskan permafrost, Finnish tundra, or Greenland’s ice sheet. Even within the Arctic, some places are heating up more than others.

Since 1900, the Arctic has warmed on average by 2 degrees Celsius, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, fueled by the heat- trapping gasses from burning fossil fuels. That’s playing out several key ways.

Fish stocks are moving further north as species like cod and redfish seek cold refuge from warming oceans. Many Arctic nations count on fishing, but right now, there is a moratorium on fishing in the Arctic for at least 15 years. After that, the waters could become a lot more crowded than they are now: “I think the boats will follow eventually if that moratorium is lifted,” said Mia Bennett, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Washington.

Shipping has already become easier. Arctic sea ice is not just retreating to record lows, but the ice that remains is also often thinner, allowing icebreakers to more readily guide vessels through frigid waters. In 2016, the Crystal Serenity became the first cruise ship to transit the Northwest Passage. Warming is also facilitating offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. The US Geological Survey estimated the Arctic holds 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of undiscovered natural gas.

But warming is also making life more difficult in other ways. “It’s actually getting much trickier on land to build stable terrestrial infrastructure,” Bennett said. Higher temperatures means the permafrost isn’t so permanent. The softer ground is causing roads to buckle and buildings to list. The Pentagon recently warned that US military installations in the Arctic are being damaged by the effects of warming. Onshore drillers have even had to chill the ground under their rigs in order to stabilize them and continue drilling.

Shorter and warmer winters mean the ground doesn’t harden back up as much and rivers don’t freeze over, making it more difficult to maintain ice roads to bring in supplies. Wildfires have also ignited in the Arctic Circle as climate change has fueled heat waves and extended fire seasons.

Russia has faced some of the worst of it. Massive wildfires in Siberia blanketed the country in smoke in recent years. The fires this year are already spreading at an unprecedented rate. On June 20, 2020, the Russian town of Verkhoyansk recorded a temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle.

“All this is largely connected to the climate change — both global and in our country,” Putin said in August.

A very early start of 2022 wildfire season in Russia, with massive fires raging across vast spaces of Western, Central, Southern and Eastern Siberia. Video below is from Omsk region, Western Siberia #wildfires2022Russia pic.twitter.com/QYj8o5XQOI

— The Siberian Times (@siberian_times) April 19, 2022

While climate change is an omnipresent factor in the Arctic, Huebert cautioned that it’s not necessarily the “cause” of many of the recent developments in the region. Russia has faced strong economic pressure to exploit more of its natural resources and would likely be expanding its footprint even if the Arctic hadn’t warmed. And despite the changes in the climate seen so far, the Arctic remains a difficult place to work and live. “It’s being definitely facilitated by climate change, it’s making it easier, but it’s not making it easy,” Huebert said.

Still, climate change is acting as an accelerant for activity in the region. Those activities, particularly fossil fuel extraction, in turn are speeding up the transformation of the Arctic. And all this new bustle in a once frigid and desolate part of the world, coupled with climate change, could then spark more conflict.

The future of the Arctic is on thin ice

Intelligence agencies are now trying to anticipate future disruptions in the Arctic and have identified some potential ignition points.

“We assess that Arctic and non-Arctic states almost certainly will increase their competitive activities as the region becomes more accessible because of warming temperatures and reduced ice,” reads an October 2021 report from the National Intelligence Council. “Competition will be largely economic but the risk of miscalculation will increase modestly by 2040 as commercial and military activity grows and opportunities are more contested.”

One looming concern is how countries will claim territory in the newly revealed Arctic ocean. Countries currently control the water stretching 200 nautical miles from their shorelines as exclusive economic zones.

Claims beyond that maritime border depend on the boundaries of the continental shelf, where a country’s land mass extends out underwater before dropping off into the deep ocean. Arctic nations have been mapping their shelves underwater with tools like probes and submarines to establish their claims. However, some claims overlap, particularly between Canada, Russia, and Denmark, and with the suspension of the Arctic Council, they may not get resolved.

Map showing Arctic continental shelf claims Tolpa Studios/Arctic Institute
Canada, Denmark, and Russia have overlapping continental shelf claims in the Arctic

“That simply will be postponed,” Huebert said. If more than one country tries to claim these disputed regions, that could ignite a political — or even military — conflagration.

Friction may also build up around shipping. Russia is aiming to expand its shipping capacity to 80 million tons per year by 2024, up from just over 1 million tons today. “[T]he decreasing amount of sea ice will lead to new routes opening in the future and may become an area of contention as Arctic nations attempt to exert control over key sea lanes,” the US Army report warned.

And while Russia’s oil and gas could get hit with sanctions from Europe, it will likely still have plenty of other buyers, namely India and China. Mining and drilling can cost 50 to 100 percent more in the Arctic than they cost at lower latitudes, but with global fuel prices rising, there’s ample demand, so maritime traffic will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

On the US side, some are pushing for the country to establish a stronger diplomatic presence in the region, particularly as tensions rise.

“I have directly asked President Joe Biden to consider expanding America’s Arctic leadership across the executive branch, within both the State and Defense Departments, on the National Security Council and beyond,” wrote Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski last year in the Foreign Service Journal. “The United States is one of the only Arctic countries without an Arctic ambassador — a diplomatic post that even many non-Arctic countries have.”

Efforts to address climate change stand to suffer the greatest effects of Arctic instability. As the fastest warming region, it’s a critical area for scientific research. Changes in the Arctic can alter weather patterns around the world. And the 4 million people living in the Arctic Circle are on the front lines of some of the most radical shifts in ecosystems, from animal extinctions to emerging diseases.

Without collaboration at the North Pole, the world loses a window into a region with consequences for the whole planet, according to Humpert. “If we cannot cooperate in the Arctic with regards to climate change and the challenges that brings, then where can we?”

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