three masks

materialist-scumbag

So the thing to understand about Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is that IMAX has 41 screens in the world that can run 70mm film, and last summer Universal sold out every seat on all of them a full year before the movie existed as a finished object. July 17, 2025, tickets went on sale for July 17, 2026 showings, and by that evening scalpers were flipping them for three and four hundred dollars. For a movie nobody had seen. For a movie that was, at that moment, still shooting.

The scalpers were pricing the projector. Oppenheimer grossed $975 million and made over $190 million of that from IMAX screens alone, off a base of only 30 film-capable locations, and everyone in the industry looked at that number the way a prospector looks at a nugget in a streambed. IMAX built eleven more 70mm installations specifically ahead of this release. Kodak got an order for over two million feet of 65mm stock. The $250 million budget, the biggest of Nolan's career, is partly what it costs to shoot an entire feature on cameras that until this production were too loud to record dialogue near.

And you have to price in the institution that is Christopher Nolan, because at this point he's less a director than a vertically integrated heritage-technology concern. Same wife-producer since the 90s, Emma Thomas, running Syncopy. Same cinematographer since Interstellar, Hoyte van Hoytema, who co-developed the new quieter IMAX cameras for this shoot. Same editor since Tenet, same composer since Tenet. A repertory bench of actors who come back film after film — Elliot Page was his Inception architect, Himesh Patel his Tenet fixer, Bill Irwin his Interstellar robot, all recalled for duty here. When Warner Bros put its 2021 slate on HBO Max day-and-date, Nolan denounced them in the trades and walked, and the deal he extracted from Universal for Oppenheimer — final cut, a cut of first-dollar gross, a guaranteed 100-day theatrical window, a marketing commitment, and a blackout period where Universal wouldn't open competing films — is the closest thing a working director has had to the old studio-founder terms since the United Artists days.

Every studio in town bid. He is, functionally, the last person for whom the theatrical system will reorganize itself, and the year-early ticket sales were the system demonstrating that it knows it.

And nobody built the scarcity on purpose, which is the funny part. IMAX spent the 2000s and 2010s trying to kill 15/70 film — the "LieMAX" digital retrofits, the corporate exit from a format they'd judged commercially dead — and the projectors that survived are museum pieces requiring trained operators who mostly aged out of the workforce when everything went digital, so there's now a small revival trade in men who know how to thread a platter system. Nolan is the reason the remnant exists at all; he was one of the directors who lobbied the studios into propping up Kodak's film stock production back in 2014, when Kodak was in bankruptcy and ready to shut the coating lines, which at the time looked like sentimental preservationism and now looks like a man quietly securing his own supply chain. So Universal inherited a scarcity nobody planned, and then monetized it like they'd planned it: premium formats took 53% of the domestic opening, 58% of the second weekend, and the 25 US theaters running actual 70mm film pulled $29.6 million of a $123.5 million opening frame. A version of the movie that physically cannot be replicated at home or, mostly, in your own city, and airline-pricing logic doing the rest.

People drove across state lines. The meme economy around "seeing it in the right format" did more marketing than the trailers did.

Second weekend came in at $84.5 million, down only 32%, the best second frame Nolan's ever had, better than The Dark Knight, and the analysts who predicted a 60% drop because presales had "burned" the core audience were wrong for an instructive reason: they modeled it as a movie, and it was behaving like a pilgrimage site with limited capacity.

Now, where the movie was made. Troy is Aït Benhaddou, the fortified ksar outside Ouarzazate that has been renting itself out as Everywhere Ancient since Lawrence of Arabia — Gladiator shot there, The Mummy shot there, Game of Thrones shot there. The production added sixty temporary structures including a pillared Temple of Athena and covered two and a half acres, then burned the city down with carefully contained real flames supplemented by banks of portable LEDs. There's a whole Moroccan regional economy, Ouarzazate as "Ouallywood," built on the fact that pre-industrial Mediterranean architecture survives better in the Atlas foothills than in the actual Mediterranean, where people kept living in their cities and renovating them. Ithaca is Favignana, off western Sicily, plus a fifteenth-century castle on a mountaintop that required the crew to climb 900 feet every day for two weeks while helicopters shuttled the equipment. The underworld is Icelandic black sand. The Cyclops lives in a cave in the Peloponnese. A Viking longship replica called the Draken, built in Norway for entirely different heritage-tourism purposes, played the hero boats, with reshoots in the Falls Lake tank at Universal Studios Hollywood, the same tank everything water-related has shot in since the studio system.

(Draken, as in dragon. Which, I dunno, itself feels like a callback to the theory that the Trojan horse was a boat that had the classification "horse.")

And yes, the tax credits: Morocco rebates 30% of qualifying spend, Italy runs one of Europe's most generous production incentives at up to 40%, Greece offers 40% cash back and has been openly advertising itself as a filming destination on the strength of it, Iceland is at 35% for large productions. The itinerary of Odysseus's wanderings, as realized in 2025, is a map of Mediterranean-adjacent states competing to subsidize Hollywood location work. Homer's geography was shaped by Bronze Age trade routes; Nolan's is shaped by finance-ministry rebate schedules. Same sea, same logic, different paperwork.

There was one properly old-fashioned imperial note: some scenes shot in Dakhla, in Western Sahara, which the UN classifies as non-self-governing territory under Moroccan administration, and an open letter signed by Javier Bardem and Pedro Almodóvar among others called for those scenes to be cut as whitewashing the occupation.

They weren't cut. The Trojan War movie has its own small annexation subplot in the credits.

On the movie itself — and I'll cop to this being outside my usual beat, but the material reading and the textual reading converge here in a way I find funny. Nolan cut the "Nobody" trick. The single most famous verbal maneuver in Western literature, the pun that's the whole point of the Cyclops episode, gone. Odysseus gets three ships instead of twelve. Sinon, the liar who talks Troy into taking the horse, is played by Elliot Page as a true believer who doesn't know the horse is full of men, gets betrayed by the commanders he worshipped, and dies, and Damon's Odysseus spends the rest of the film wrecked about it. He watches a girl beheaded in the sack of Troy and hallucinates her for ten years as visions of Athena. The civilizational dread running under everything is the "sea peoples" who sack cities — which the film eventually shows you is the Greeks themselves, is Troy, is the thing Odysseus did. Calypso's seven years become trauma convalescence. Charlize Theron as a residential treatment program with a beach.

Every one of those changes is the same change. Homer's Odysseus suffers because gods are capricious and the sea is big; his cleverness is morally neutral, admired the way you'd admire a good knife. Nolan's Odysseus suffers because of what he did, and the voyage is expiation, and the visions are guilt, and homecoming is contingent on working through it. That's a Christian architecture — sin, penance, absolution — poured into a pagan mold, and before anyone acts scandalized, this is a hundred-year-old renovation project and Nolan just installed the final fixture. Kazantzakis published a 33,333-line Odyssey sequel in 1938 that turns the hero into a spiritual pilgrim. Walcott moved the whole apparatus to a Caribbean fishing village. Louise Glück ran it through a divorce. Madeline Miller gave Circe an interior life and a bestseller, and Emily Wilson's translation was marketed largely on its moral reappraisal of what the poem does to women and slaves. Every generation since the Victorians has caught Odysseus, sat him down, and made him answer for himself, and the people currently shocked at Nolan's guilt-ridden penitent — whether they're mad about it from the classics side or the culture-war side — are a century late to a process that was already finished. What Nolan adds is the current dialect: the trauma plot, which is the secular penance plot, therapy-speak being what confession sounds like after the metaphysics got repossessed. Nolan needed a version of the story a 2026 mass audience would read as morally serious, and "clever man outwits monsters" doesn't scan as serious anymore, and "man destroys a city and cannot forgive himself" does.

The sea peoples reveal is my favorite piece of this, for reasons regular readers can guess. I wrote a whole thing (https://materialist-scumbag.tumblr.com/post/816876109489684480/the-sea-peoples-late-bronze-age-eastern) about how the "Sea Peoples" are basically Ramesses III's press release — a set of uncoordinated symptoms of systems collapse that one Egyptian victory monument bundled into a single barbarian coalition, which we've been citing as a report ever since. Nolan's film does the twentieth century's move in reverse: where Egyptology spent decades mistaking propaganda for an external enemy, the movie makes the external enemy explicitly a projection — the sea peoples the characters dread turn out to be the Greeks themselves, the sack of Troy, the thing Odysseus did. Which is closer to the actual historiography than the textbook version, honestly, the raiders as symptom of what the civilized parties were already doing to themselves. But the film gets there by routing it through one man's conscience. The Bronze Age collapse, an actual cascading failure of trade networks and climate and palace economies, gets conscripted as a metaphor for the protagonist's guilt. Even the fall of civilizations is interior now.

The audience skewed male, 56% overall and over three-quarters of ticket buyers above 25, half the crowd between 18 and 34 — the demographic that's supposedly unreachable for three-hour literary adaptations, out in force for one, provided it was framed as a technical event and a masculinity story. Jon Bernthal's Menelaus, playing the old warrior as a rage case in a marriage that's a live grenade, is by most accounts walking off with the picture, which fits: he's the one character permitted to be what the epic's characters all originally were, a man wholly unembarrassed by violence. The film needs one of those around so the rest of it has something to repent.

The worst thing in it, and there's some consensus forming here, is the climactic fight. Two hours and fifteen minutes of tactile, sun-scoured, shot-on-actual-rocks filmmaking, and then the finale plays like a Marvel third act with Damon's face composited onto the choreography — the weightless blocking, the churned coverage, violence as content. Which has its own material explanation: the fight-scene supply chain is now a global standardized industry, the same previz houses, the same stunt coordination pipelines, the same second-unit grammar servicing every studio tentpole, and a director can control his lenses and his locations and his film stock and still end up buying his climax from the same vendor as everyone else. Nolan spent a quarter billion dollars escaping the digital default in every department except the one where the industry keeps its muscle memory. The suitors die like henchmen.

Panama and Colombia and the United States each have their own reason to want the corridor closed (narcotics, foot-and-mouth disease, migration), and all three have quietly vetoed completion for fifty years, which means the "impassable jungle" everyone pictures is really a policy holding the shape of a wilderness.

The standard explanation, the one you'll get in a *National Geographic* feature or a documentary about migrants crossing it, is environmental, the Darién is one of the most biodiverse rainforest regions in the Americas, the indigenous Emberá and Wounaan and Guna populations live in it, building a road would devastate the ecosystem, etc. All of this is true, and sitting alongside it is a further reason the gap is still a gap.

The reason the gap is still a gap is that *Panama wants the gap*. Specifically: Panama has decided, consistently across multiple governments since the 1970s, that an unbroken road connection to South America would import all of South America's problems, narcotics trafficking from Colombia, livestock disease (specifically foot-and-mouth, which had been eradicated from North America by 1929 and which the U.S. Department of Agriculture spends enormous resources keeping out), economic migration, eventually political refugees, and that the costs of these imports to Panama would substantially exceed the benefits of completing the highway.

Colombia, separately, has been ambivalent, Colombian commercial interests have periodically lobbied for the connection, but Colombian governments have generally not pushed it because the gap also serves a Colombian interest in containing FARC and ELN operations on the Colombian side without those operations spilling over into Panama. The U.S. government, which would notionally benefit from the connection, has actually opposed completing the gap on multiple occasions specifically because of the foot-and-mouth disease concern, a fully connected highway would create a corridor along which infected livestock could move, and the U.S. cattle industry has been a powerful constituency for keeping the corridor closed.

So you have a situation where three governments, Panama, Colombia, and the United States, have differing reasons for wanting the gap maintained, and all three have de facto vetoed road-completion proposals at various points, with the result that the gap has acquired an institutional permanence that goes well beyond the engineering difficulties (which are real but not insurmountable; if there were political will to build the road, the road could be built) and that has shaped the entire migration economy of the western hemisphere in particular and weird ways.

Because the gap is a gap, and because there is a steady flow of migrants from South America who want to reach the United States, the gap has become a *foot-traffic* corridor. People walk it. They walk it through one of the most physically hostile environments in the Americas, primary jungle with no roads, river crossings without bridges, terrain that is essentially impassable in the rainy season and merely brutal in the dry season, with venomous snakes, dangerous wildlife, and an indigenous population whose relationship to the migrant flow is complicated.

The gap has, since roughly 2010, become a major transit corridor for migrants from outside the Americas as well, Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, but also Africans, South Asians, Chinese, who fly into Brazil or Ecuador (which have lighter visa requirements), travel overland to Colombia, and then cross the Darién on foot to reach Panama and continue north toward the U.S. border. The numbers have been remarkable, peaks of over half a million crossings in 2023, down somewhat in 2024-25 but still in the hundreds of thousands annually.

And the "impassable jungle" framing has, at this point, been overtaken by events on the ground that make it actively misleading. The crossing is now a cartel-managed logistics corridor. The Clan del Golfo and affiliated organizations charge fixed per-migrant prices — reportedly $300 to $500 per person as of 2024 — and operate waystation infrastructure along established routes, with guides, rest points, and a crude but functional triage system that sorts migrants by ability to pay. The jungle is still brutal. People still die. But calling it "ungoverned" is no longer accurate; it is governed, by organizations whose business model depends on a predictable flow of paying customers through a corridor that the formal governments have decided not to pave.

The road, meanwhile, faces a legal obstacle that rarely appears in the engineering-difficulty narrative: the Darién is a UNESCO World Heritage site (Los Katíos National Park on the Colombian side, Darién National Park on the Panamanian side), and building a highway through it would constitute a violation of the World Heritage Convention, an international treaty obligation that neither government is eager to breach publicly. The gap is held in place not only by domestic policy choices but by a layer of international law that makes reopening the question diplomatically expensive in ways the cattle-disease argument never was.

There's a further layer the discourse mostly handles badly, because the discourse treats the Darién migration as either a humanitarian crisis (which it is) or a security threat (which it partially is) and rarely as what it also is, which is the visible artifact of a *policy choice* by multiple governments to maintain a particular kind of friction in the migration system.

The friction filters migration, with the appearance of prevention sitting on top as a surface gloss. The people who can pay for an airline ticket to Brazil and a coyote to guide them through the gap are a different population than the people who can't, and the gap is, in effect, a means-test on whether you have enough resources to attempt the crossing. The U.S. immigration system processes those who survive the crossing and arrive at the southern border, with whatever asylum or other procedure the current administration has established. The Darién serves, in effect, as the offshore filter that determines who gets to attempt the procedure.

This is the operational outcome of the cumulative policy choices, not coincidence and not anyone's stated policy, and it has been observably stable across multiple American administrations, multiple Panamanian governments, multiple Colombian governments. The gap stays a gap. The crossing remains brutal.

The annual death toll in the Darién is variously estimated at hundreds, possibly more, the numbers are unreliable because there is no centralized record-keeping and the geography conceals bodies, and the migrants who don't die emerge into Panama with the trauma of the crossing intact and with limited capacity to challenge whatever processing they encounter on the U.S. side.

The historical depth of this is worth being precise about. The Pan-American Highway project was conceived in the 1920s as a U.S.-led continental infrastructure program intended to bind the Americas together economically, the same vision that produced the Pan American Union in 1910 and that would later produce the OAS in 1948.

The project's official inauguration was at the Fifth International Conference of American States in Santiago in 1923, with the United States providing most of the technical assistance and a substantial portion of the financing. By 1940, the highway was substantially complete from the U.S.-Mexico border to Panama, and was substantially under construction from Colombia southward. The Darién segment was always the technically hardest, but it was also recognized, even in the 1930s and 1940s, as the segment that nobody quite wanted to finish.

The 1971 Inter-American Development Bank study on the Darién segment is a fascinating document, it lays out the engineering specifications, the cost estimates, the route alternatives, and then notes, in a kind of policy-analytic deadpan, that the *cattle disease* implications of completing the route would create costs in the U.S. and Mexican livestock industries that would substantially exceed the projected economic benefits of the highway connection. The study stopped short of formally recommending against completion. It produced numbers that made completion impossible to justify. The U.S. Department of Agriculture funded a follow-up study in 1976 that reached the same conclusion through different methodology. The Carter administration declined to advance the project. The Reagan administration declined to advance the project. The Clinton administration declined to advance the project. The matter has not been seriously revisited at the U.S. policy level since the 1970s.

And the gap stays a gap.

There's a parallel between the Darién Gap and the Saharan crossing in West Africa, both of which are deserts (one tropical-jungle, one actual desert) that function as filters in major migration corridors, both of which are maintained as filters by the cumulative policy choices of multiple governments on either side, and both of which produce migrant deaths at a scale that is large enough to be a humanitarian issue but diffuse enough to avoid being a political issue. The Mediterranean crossing from Libya to Italy is a third instance of the same pattern. The Sonoran Desert crossing from Mexico to the United States is a fourth.

In each case, you have a hostile-terrain segment of a migration corridor that is being maintained as hostile by the policy choices of the destination country (and the transit countries), and that is producing migrant deaths and migrant filtering as an emergent property of the policy environment, rather than as an explicit policy goal.

The intellectual move that the policy discourse tends to make at this point is to argue that since the deaths are not explicitly intended, the responsibility falls outside the policy-makers. The counter-argument, which I think is correct, is that the deaths are *foreseeable consequences of policy choices that have been repeatedly affirmed across multiple governments and multiple decades*, and the foreseeability of the consequences makes them, in any meaningful sense, the consequences of the policy. The policy stops short of *wanting* the migrants to die. The policy *has decided that the deaths are an acceptable cost* of maintaining the friction that is filtering the migration. These two formulations differ, and the difference is smaller than the policy-makers like to pretend.

The Darién, in this analysis, is a humanitarian *outcome* wearing the surface vocabulary of humanitarian failure. The outcome has been stable for fifty years. The outcome will continue to be stable, because the policy logic that produced it has not changed and is unlikely to change. The road won't be built. The gap won't be closed. The migrants will keep coming, and a percentage of them will keep dying, and the bodies will keep being absorbed into the rainforest at a rate the rainforest can handle without anyone outside the migrant communities and a small number of NGOs and journalists having to count them precisely.

A familiar pattern, which in this case is a phrase the indigenous Emberá and Wounaan would have a particular reading of, since they have been living in the Darién for considerably longer than any of the relevant national governments have existed, and have watched the various waves of outsider activity (Spanish gold-prospecting expeditions in the sixteenth century, scientific expeditions in the nineteenth, military presence in the twentieth, migrant crossings in the twenty-first) wash through their territory without ever quite establishing the kind of permanent infrastructure that would make the place legible to the outside states.

This is a kind of filmmaking that has its own genre traditions, the docu-fiction, the participant-as-actor mode that runs from Italian neorealism through Chloé Zhao's *The Rider* (2017) and *Nomadland* (2020), the recent Sean Baker films (*Tangerine*, *The Florida Project*, *Anora*) that all rely on non-professional or semi-professional actors playing variations of themselves, and *East of Wall* is most directly in conversation with the Zhao films, both of which were shot in roughly the same part of the country (Pine Ridge, just south of the Badlands; western South Dakota's white-rancher cousin culture, just north) and with the same essential aesthetic logic.

That the actual human in front of the camera who has lived this life carries a kind of presence that no trained actor can synthesize, and the film's job is to construct enough narrative scaffolding around that presence to give it a shape.

The reason this kind of film keeps getting made in the rural West is partly that the rural West provides the right combination of conditions, cheap labor, photogenic landscape, a population of working-class people whose actual lives are dramatically interesting, a culture of self-presentation that doesn't fall apart on camera the way some other American working-class subcultures do, and partly that the academic-festival-distribution circuit has decided, around 2015 or so, that this is what serious American independent filmmaking looks like.

The economic logic is downstream of the cultural logic. A24 has made a brand out of films that look like *East of Wall*. The Lincoln Center programmers and the IndieWire critics who decide which films get the festival slots and the prestige reviews are operating with a coherent aesthetic preference that has shaped what gets greenlit. *East of Wall* fits the pattern almost perfectly. It would have been very surprising if Sundance had not picked it up.

(Whether the pattern itself is fully honest is a different question. The form of the film, non-professional actor, real location, lightly fictionalized real story, implicitly claims a kind of documentary truthfulness that the actual film, with its scripted scenes and edited narrative arcs and acquired-rights tribal-land permissions, doesn't quite earn. Zhao caught some of this criticism with *Nomadland*, which was sold as a chronicle of working-class American precarity but was financed by Searchlight, distributed under Disney's Oscar campaign, and ended up being marketed in a way that made the actual nomads featured in it slightly uncomfortable about how their lives had been presented. The form is real and not innocent. *East of Wall* has not yet been criticized at that level but probably will be.)

The actual subject matter, Zimiga's ranch, her foster-system improvisations, the horses she trains, the local economy she's working within, is interesting on its own terms regardless of the film's aesthetics. The American foster-care system in rural counties is functionally non-existent in many places, and what exists is a network of informal arrangements where local women take in teenagers who would otherwise be sent hundreds of miles to group homes. It is unpaid, unregulated, often entangled with the foster mother's other businesses (in Zimiga's case, the horse-training and ranch-tour operation that funds the household), and it represents an ad-hoc social-services infrastructure that has emerged because the formal infrastructure cannot operate at the geographic density rural counties require.

The film treats this as a story about a woman raising teenagers, which it is, and the fact underneath is that a single horse trainer in western South Dakota is running the operation that a small county social-services department would be running in a more populous state, with no funding, no oversight, no support, and no acknowledgment except the thing the film is itself doing, which is to lift one specific operation into national visibility through the festival-distribution pipeline.

(Wall, South Dakota itself is worth a parenthetical. The town exists primarily because of Wall Drug Store, which is the most aggressively self-marketed roadside attraction in American history, with painted billboards advertising its free ice water from as far away as Minnesota and South Africa. The town's economy is the drugstore's tourist traffic plus the federal employees stationed at the nearby Air Force missile-control base plus a small ranching population. It is approximately the geographic and economic center of nowhere. The choice of Wall as a setting is an obvious wink, *east of* Wall is east of nowhere, and the film's title is doing work that the marketing materials don't push too hard on.)

The Badlands themselves are the photographic backbone of the production, in the way Monument Valley is the backbone of John Ford's westerns. Whether the cinematic use of the landscape contributes to or extracts from the actual political economy of the region is a question with no clean answer, the film does generate some location revenue, the location-tourism uplift after a successful festival film is real but small, and the broader effect of putting western South Dakota on the prestige-cinema map is the kind of thing that takes a decade to assess and that depends entirely on whether *East of Wall* turns out to be the first of a wave or a one-off.

A further interesting feature of *East of Wall* and the Zhao films and the small genre they sit within is that they function as a contemporary American equivalent of the European art-house tradition of the seventies and eighties, minimalist, location-shot, working-class-subject, slow-cinema-influenced, festival-circulated.

The reason the tradition has migrated to the American rural West is that the European art-house tradition no longer has a viable economic base in Europe (the state subsidies have been cut, the festival-distribution market has consolidated, the equivalent films are now harder to finance in France or Italy than they were in 1985), while the American film-festival apparatus has retained enough institutional memory of what serious art-house filmmaking is supposed to look like to keep funding films that follow the form.

*East of Wall* is, in that view, an Italian neorealist film with American horses, financed by the residual cultural prestige of the Italian neorealist tradition as filtered through Sundance and IndieWire and the A24 brand, shot on a ranch outside Wall, South Dakota by a first-time director who has identified the pattern correctly.

Whether the next Beecroft film is going to be in the same voice or whether she gets recruited into something larger is the question, *Nomadland* was Zhao's last film in this mode before she got pulled into Marvel, and the built-in pull of the American film industry on first-time directors who make a successful indie debut is essentially gravitational. The chances that *East of Wall* is the first of a long Beecroft-on-South-Dakota body of work are lower than the chances that she's directing a Disney IP property by 2028. A familiar pattern, the system extracts the talent from the form that revealed the talent, and the form depends on a steady supply of new directors arriving with the previous director's hard-won technique already absorbed.

There's the Baum Building. 1910. Somebody in a town barely two decades off the open prairie looked at the Doge's Palace in Venice, that pink Gothic wedding cake on the lagoon, and decided yes, that, here, in the cattle and the oil. Terra-cotta lace. Stone cupolas at the corners. A building with no business existing in Oklahoma, put up anyway out of pure boomtown nerve.

There's the Criterion Theater. 1921. Nineteen hundred seats, crystal chandeliers in the dark, a pipe organ the size of a locomotive, so that when the lights went down the whole room shook with sound coming out of the walls. Where a farmer's kid from past the county line saw his first moving picture, in a palace, thirty years after his grandfather rode in on the run.

There's the Biltmore. 1932, built in the teeth of the Depression: twenty-six stories, six hundred rooms, the address that meant you'd arrived. There's the Huckins. The Roberts, ten stories of 1927. The Tivoli Inn, eight stories, 1923. There's the Hales Building, whose owners loved it enough to fight the city in court for the better part of a decade rather than watch it come down.

And there's a stretch of Northeast Second Street the postcards never printed, because the people on it were Black. They called it Deep Deuce. Barbershops, doctors, a drugstore, a movie house, a cab company, the offices of the Black Dispatch, where Roscoe Dunjee ran one of the fiercest civil-rights papers in the country. Ralph Ellison grew up there before he wrote Invisible Man. Charlie Christian worked out half of modern jazz guitar in its clubs; Jimmy Rushing sang in them. A whole city inside the city, thick with money and music, that most laments for "beautiful lost downtown OKC" forget to grieve at all.

Nearly every bit of it is gone. The Authority's contractors took down 447 buildings; private owners knocked over another 75. The Biltmore came down in a 1977 implosion in front of a crowd, the largest steel building demolished in the country to that point. The Baum, the Criterion, the Tivoli, the Roberts. Deep Deuce hollowed out and then cut open by the Centennial Expressway. If you only ever hear the usual version, you hear it right here, at the dust cloud, with a tidy moral attached: the philistines didn't know what they had. Barbarians on the prairie, blind to Venetian cupolas.

That moral flatters everyone who repeats it. The men who blew up the Biltmore did not hate the Biltmore. Nobody leveled that skyline over a question of taste. To find what actually swung the wrecking ball you have to leave 1977 and go back to a farm bill.

The Homestead Act of 1862. One man, one plow, a hundred and sixty acres; live on it five years and the title is yours. A law with exactly one idea of what land is for, and that idea is agriculture. It was never built to lay out a city.

They laid out a city with it anyway. The ground under downtown Oklahoma City was the Unassigned Lands, two million acres promised to tribes and then taken back, dirt sworn away twice over before a settler ever touched it. In 1889 a congressman named Springer bolts an amendment onto the Indian Appropriations Bill, Harrison proclaims the tract open, and the whole opening runs under Homestead rules. So the city took its shape from a footrace instead of a survey. Noon, April 22, 1889, a pistol and a cannon at Fort Reno, eleven thousand claims into the ground in one afternoon. The first train reaches Guthrie at 1:25 that same day to find the place already mobbed by people who beat it there on horseback. Townsite companies sold overlapping lots off the back of a wagon. The winning size of a downtown parcel became whatever one man could stake and hold before dark: narrow, standard, cut off a farm template by footspeed.

The run wasn't honest either. Cross the line early and your claim was void, which is what the word Sooner actually means: the men who snuck across ahead of the gun and hid in a creekbed to jump the honest claimants at noon. A fraud category, later laundered into a football mascot. It threw hundreds of contested titles into the land office for years. That disputed footrace, run on a farm law with a good share of the winners cheating, is the parcel map under every block in your photo.

Let it sit seventy-five years and watch the lot pattern strangle the city grown on top of it. By the early 1960s fifty-three downtown retailers have closed or run to the suburbs. On paper the complaint is parking, only 14,300 spaces. Underneath, the trouble is that you cannot build a modern store or tower on a map a sprinting homesteader drew. Assembling one modern site means buying out forty small owners, any one of whom can hold you up, which is the Hales Building fighting condemnation for a decade out of spite. The land run froze the lots; the frozen lots choke the boom that grew on them. The Baum Building's cupolas had nothing to do with why it died. It died sitting on a small 1889 lot.

Cutting that knot costs more than the city has, so Washington pays. Two things are wanted: a legal weapon and a respectable face. The weapon is federal urban-renewal money, which lets a city swing eminent domain like a wrecking ball, condemn and clear and re-plat 528 acres on the taxpayer's dime. The face is a name most people outside architecture have never heard: I.M. Pei.

If it means nothing to you, here he is. Pei was no local. By the early sixties he was already an international star, the architect a city hires when it wants the world to believe it has a future; decades later he would set the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre. That is the caliber of name a dusty oil town reached clear across the country to buy. And who did the reaching tells you whose city it was. Not a vote. Three men. Dean McGee of Kerr-McGee, oil. Stanley Draper, the Chamber booster. E.K. Gaylord, who owned the paper. Oil, boosterism, and the press stood up an Urban Renewal Authority, seeded it out of their own pockets, and bought a celebrity architect, for the reason you buy a celebrity lawyer: you are about to do something drastic, and you want a name on it that reads as vision.

What Pei drew was superblocks. Take the confetti of small 1889 lots and fuse it into modern parcels by clearing everything standing on top. The 1964 model is gorgeous: a new one-way grid, a covered shopping arcade, a convention center, a Copenhagen-style garden, office and residential towers, a gleaming retail Galleria. Under the renderings it is a machine for dissolving property lines, a federally funded solvent poured over a survey that a footrace fossilized in 1889. The demolition was the plan; the towers were the promise printed on the box. Adopted 1965. Wrecking balls swinging by 1967 on Johnson's grants.

Okay, so the money. The convenient line is that it "dried up," some accident of history that stranded the city mid-swing. Nothing snuck up on anybody. Jane Jacobs had gutted the whole urban-renewal religion in print in 1961. The backlash ran loud and public all through the sixties. Nixon slapped a moratorium on HUD's subsidy programs in January 1973. The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 folded urban renewal into block grants and ended it as a standalone program. The spigot was visibly, nationally closing for a decade before the Biltmore came down in 1977.

So the three men kept demolishing into a collapse they could watch approaching. Call the result an accident of history if you like; it was a wager. They bet the federal money would outlast their wrecking crews and that the oil boom would cover whatever Washington didn't. Both calls went bad at once. The grants ended, then Penn Square Bank blew up in 1982 and took the oil economy down with it. The arcade never got built. The Galleria never got built. The towers never got built. The men who placed the bet lost it, and a downtown was the chip.

So the cleared blocks sat. And empty dirt doesn't turn into parking on its own. Somebody chooses asphalt over a park, over housing, over leaving the lot alone. That choice sat inside Pei's plan from the first sketch, which was always a car's idea of a city: one-way arterials, parking structures, suburban retail you drive to. The land run explains why the lots were small. The federal money explains why the buildings fell. Only the car explains why the hole became parking and stayed parking, block after block, until MAPS built a different downtown in the nineties. Both machines were running the whole time. Pin it all on the farm law and you've just swapped one tidy villain for another.

You know who paid the ground rent for that parking? The ornate white downtown lost its cupolas. Deep Deuce lost a community. Urban renewal earned its national nickname, "Negro removal," the honest way, and in Oklahoma City the same machinery of clearance that took the Baum Building also took Ellison's street and Charlie Christian's clubs and Dunjee's newsroom, this time with a highway. Three rich white men re-platting the ground, and a heavy share of the ground they cleared had belonged to people who were never once in the room.

Fly over it now. A farm statute set the lot size with a gun in 1889; the frozen lots choked the market for seventy-five years; three men borrowed federal power to erase the lots and gambled the money would hold; it didn't, the oil didn't, and the car decided what to do with the empty ground. Be radicalized by that, sure. Just not at the pavement, which is only the receipt, still legible, for a bet somebody made and lost with other people's neighborhoods.

They'll tell you Oklahoma City demolished its soul. It didn't have a soul to demolish. It had a lot pattern from a gun-start footrace, a parking shortage, and a federal check that bounced. The soul is the cloth. Pull it off and it's just freight — land you could grab, money you could get, both of them running out at exactly the wrong moment.

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SOURCES — "did oklahoma city demolish a lot of buildings" (materialist-scumbag post) Fact-check pass, 2026-07-14. Each claim in the post, the source that backs it, and confidence.

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DEMOLITION SCALE

Claim: URA contractors demolished 447 buildings; private owners another 75; roughly eight blocks cleared. Source: Meador Manor, "OKC 1970s Urban Renewal: A Myriad of Issues" https://meador.org/2025/01/01/okc-1970s-urban-renewal-a-myriad-of-issues/ Confidence: CONFIDENT (single detailed secondary source; figure is specific and consistently cited).

Claim: Pei Plan targeted 528-acre central business district; "hundreds" of structures razed; demolition began 1967 on federal (Johnson-era) grants. Source: Pei Plan — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pei_Plan Confidence: CONFIDENT.

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INDIVIDUAL BUILDINGS

Baum Building — 1910, modeled on the Doge's Palace (Venetian Gothic), cupolas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baum_Building (opened May 1910; Layton & Smith; Doge's Palace model) https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=287646 (Baum Building Cupola historical marker — confirms cupolas) NOTE: Wikipedia says razed July–Aug 1972 (not 1973), and that it was FIVE stories. The post does not state Baum's height or demolition year, so no conflict. CONFIDENT on 1910 + Doge's Palace.

Criterion Theater — 1921, 1,900 seats, crystal chandeliers, pipe organ; demolished 1973. https://theclio.com/entry/154230 Confidence: CONFIDENT (all specifics confirmed; demolished for Sheraton/Century City Mall).

Biltmore Hotel — 1932, 26 stories, 600 rooms; imploded 1977; "largest steel structure demolished at the time"; site became Myriad Gardens. https://theclio.com/entry/156744 https://gateway.okhistory.org/ark:/67531/metadc2528887/ (news photo file: demolition 10/16/77, ~1:30pm, spectators) Confidence: CONFIDENT on year/stories/rooms/implosion/Myriad Gardens and "largest steel structure." CAVEAT: exact date varies by source (Clio Oct 19; OK Historical photo file Oct 16). The post gives only the year. "Live television / evening news" could NOT be hard-confirmed, so the post was changed to "a 1977 implosion in front of a crowd" (crowds are documented; a broadcast likely existed — see the "Lost Audio of 1977 Implosion" archive entry — but I could not verify live-TV, so I did not assert it).

Roberts Hotel (10 stories, 1927), Tivoli Inn (8 stories, 1923), Huckins Hotel, Hales Building (owners fought condemnation ~a decade). https://meador.org/2025/01/01/okc-1970s-urban-renewal-a-myriad-of-issues/ (Roberts, Tivoli specifics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pei_Plan (Huckins named; Hales condemnation fight) Confidence: PROBABLE on Roberts/Tivoli exact stories+years (single source, Meador); CONFIDENT on Hales.

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DEEP DEUCE / NE SECOND STREET (Black district)

Claim: Black business + entertainment district; barbershops, doctors, drugstore, movie house, cab company; Black Dispatch newspaper (Roscoe Dunjee, editor, 324 NE Second); Ralph Ellison raised there; Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing / the Blue Devils played the clubs. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=SE004 (Second Street; businesses; Dunjee/Black Dispatch at 324 NE Second; Ellison; Rushing; Christian; Blue Devils) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Deuce (Ellison raised there; Christian; Rushing; Blue Devils) https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=280569 (Roscoe Dunjee historical marker) Confidence: CONFIDENT.

Claim: Deep Deuce was hollowed out and then cut open by the Centennial Expressway (I-235). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Deuce ("Much of the neighborhood was bulldozed to make way for I-235 in the 1980s") NOTE: I-235 = the Centennial Expressway (same road). OK Historical notes decline began late 1950s with integration; the highway (1980s) finished the physical clearance. Post reflects this sequence. Confidence: CONFIDENT that I-235 bulldozed much of it; PROBABLE on framing it as one continuous clearance with the 1960s-70s renewal (different programs, adjacent in effect).

Claim: Urban renewal was nationally nicknamed "Negro removal." Well-documented phrase (popularized via James Baldwin, 1963). General historical record. Confidence: CONFIDENT (phrase); the OKC-specific application is the interpretive claim of the post.

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1889 LAND RUN / HOMESTEAD ACT

Homestead Act of 1862 — 160 acres, live+improve 5 years for title; agricultural statute. Unassigned Lands ~2 million acres; Springer amendment to the Indian Appropriations Bill (1889); Harrison proclamation; opened under Homestead rules; noon April 22 1889; cannon at Fort Reno; ~11,000 claims that day; first train to Guthrie 1:25 p.m.; townsite companies + overlapping surveys; "Sooner" = illegal early entrant (fraud category / contested claims). https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=LA014 (Land Run of 1889 — all of the above) Confidence: CONFIDENT.

Interpretive claim (the post's thesis, not a "fact"): 1889 lot pattern = small parcels that later blocked modern site assembly. This is the post's argument, supported by the parking/assembly problem below.

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THE 1960s PROBLEM + PEI + THE AUTHORITY

53 downtown retailers closed/left by 1962; only 14,300 parking spaces; small 1889 lots couldn't hold modern development. Urban Renewal Authority created 1962, seeded by local business leaders. Pei plan developed through 1964, adopted 1965; superblocks; new one-way grid; pedestrian shopping arcade; convention center (Myriad); Tivoli-style garden; office/residential towers; retail Galleria (never fully built). Parking capacity target 28,360 spaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pei_Plan Confidence: CONFIDENT.

I.M. Pei — internationally recognized by early 1960s (prior redesigns for Cleveland and Philadelphia); later designed the Louvre glass pyramid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pei_Plan (Cleveland/Philadelphia recognition; hired by McGee, Draper, Gaylord) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._M._Pei (career; Louvre Pyramid, completed 1989) Confidence: CONFIDENT.

Three decision-makers: Dean A. McGee (Kerr-McGee, oil); Stanley Draper (Chamber of Commerce); E.K. Gaylord (newspaper publisher). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pei_Plan ; https://meador.org/2025/01/01/okc-1970s-urban-renewal-a-myriad-of-issues/ Confidence: CONFIDENT.

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THE FUNDING COLLAPSE (the "bet" argument)

Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," published 1961 — landmark critique of urban renewal. General record. Confidence: CONFIDENT.

Nixon moratorium on HUD subsidy programs, January 1973. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Development_Block_Grant (CDBG "was a response to the Nixon administration's 1973 funding moratorium on many HUD programs") CAVEAT: sources confirm a Jan 1973 HUD moratorium but I could NOT confirm that URBAN RENEWAL specifically was frozen in that moratorium (it primarily hit subsidized-housing programs). The post was therefore worded as "a moratorium on HUD's subsidy programs," not "renewal subsidies." Confidence: CONFIDENT on the moratorium; the point that renewal money was clearly ending nationally rests on the 1974 Act below.

Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 — created CDBG, consolidated ~7 categorical programs (urban renewal among them) into block grants, ending urban renewal as a standalone program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Development_Block_Grant https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/2184/housing-and-community-development-hcd-act-of-1974/ Confidence: CONFIDENT that HCDA 1974 created CDBG and folded urban renewal in; PROBABLE on exact "7 programs" wording (Wikipedia says CDBG replaced seven programs but doesn't itemize on the page fetched).

Penn Square Bank failed July 1982; triggered regional oil-economy collapse. General record (well-documented). Confidence: CONFIDENT.

MAPS (Metropolitan Area Projects) sales tax, approved December 1993 — rebuilt downtown in the 1990s+. General record. Post says only "the nineties." Confidence: CONFIDENT.

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NET ASSESSMENT

No claim in the post was found false. Changes made during this pass:

Biltmore "live television / evening news" -> "a 1977 implosion in front of a crowd" (TV broadcast unverified).

"Nixon froze the housing and renewal subsidies" -> "a moratorium on HUD's subsidy programs" (renewal- specific inclusion in the 1973 freeze unverified; the 1974 Act carries the 'money was ending' point).

Deep Deuce "same highway dollars that took the Baum Building" -> "same machinery of clearance…this time with a highway" (Baum fell to renewal/street-widening in 1972; Deep Deuce to I-235 in the 1980s — different programs, so the causal wording was loosened to stay accurate).

Weakest remaining links (single-source or interpretive, flag before publishing if it matters):

Roberts/Tivoli exact stories+dates (Meador only).

Framing 1960s-70s renewal and 1980s I-235 as one continuous act against Deep Deuce (adjacent, not identical).