It is 2026. It has always been 2026. It will always be 2026.

Our year is a Frankenstein-like assemblage of limbs and zombie spit, lurching along stupidly (like the monster of 1931 movie fame, and not the erudite humanoid of Mary Shelley’s book or Guillermo Del Toro’s 2025 adaptation). There is yet another Walking Dead spin-off on our doorstep, a sort of walking metaphor for itself.

As Sortilege said in Inherent Vice: “Does it ever end? Of course it does… It did.”

I’ll reserve judgment on whether the year of our Lord two-thousand twenty-six will, in fact, ever end. But the Earth moves under our feet even when nothing appears movable. The United States and Russia are bogged down in myopic, idiotic wars of feverish post-imperial dementia, to the ever-lasting and too-soon-ending pain of innocent civilians. Donald Trump continues his marathon career of lying, cheating, and stealing. The Democrats might take back Congress and some state offices, such as governorships, but to what end? More of the miserable minimum, more than likely.

In this sticky, staid moment, I think back to Victor Erice’s 1973 film The Spirit of the Beehive. The quintessence of a slow, arty European film (even at a spry 98 minutes!), the movie was a canary in the coal mine of Spain’s post-Franco renaissance, which classic Almodovar films such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) years later came to exemplify. Rather like Chen Kaige’s incredible Yellow Earth (1984), which quietly signaled a thaw in Deng’s post-Maoist China, Spirit of the Beehive hints at a new future and offers some cloudy social critique. Historians say that the movie flew beneath the radar of Francoist censors because it was so slow, boring, and oblique that they did not think it was worth suppressing. But generations of filmgoers and critics could see what was spelled out on the walls of kid sisters Ana and Isabel’s countryside manse.

Again, like Yellow Earth, the film is a tone-poem where little of significance actually happens. It’s a mood and a jam, as the kids say. As a story of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, it echoes in later classics such as Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). The Spirit of the Beehive never quite makes explicit its historical context, but it’s unmistakable. Through the deep brown eyes of six-year old Ana, we see what life is like in a remote rural part of Spain as the grip of fascism takes hold. The film is perhaps one of the finest explorations of childhood perceptions of a dark and confusing world. Ana and Isabel get up to ordinary sisterly hijinks, and a bookmobile-like delivery of a censored version of Frankenstein fires their worlds and imaginations. The older Isabel enjoys messing with her gullible little sis, saying that a monster has come to their village. When a wounded Republican soldier limps into an abandoned barn near their family’s estate, Ana, of course, assumes he is the famed enigma and tries to care for him.

Not to spoil anything, but you can imagine things do not work out great for the beleaguered partisan. Ana ends up running away, resulting in a massive manhunt (so to speak). She goes off on her own odyssey of discovery, to the consternation of her baffled family. Ana’s tiny frame is set against the vastness of the Spanish countryside, an individual of pure heart in a deepening morass of hopelessness and evil. In contrast, her poet father Fernando is preoccupied with his beekeeping — an oasis, perhaps, of order in a disorganized world. As James Lanternman perceptively put it:

The concept contains what Fernando dreads: a reflection of the authoritarian state and the collective action that put it in power and sustained it there. Monotonous, mindless, well-organised, busy and coordinated activity that enforces order on all. The beehive a highly-structured place of captivity, of existence within a strict hierarchy, where order is enforced at the expense of individual freedom.

Fernando’s fascination with the beehive gives it some metaphorical ambiguity. He does not reflect on the bees in emotional despair, but absorbed introspection.

Part of his fixation on them could be to remind himself of a key lesson from the war just lost: the need for a unified front working towards a single goal and outcome, in order to defeat existential threats of evil that are highly ordered and well-structured.

Again, this film came out before Franco’s felicitous death in 1975. But it pointed toward the world to come, even in its gnomic and allegorical way. The Spirit of the Beehive evoked, to me, another wonderfully devastating film, Grave of the Fireflies (1988), which also told of children surviving in the wake of war. It suggests that even something as seemingly fixed as a cruel, authoritarian regime could be as fleeting as childhood itself. As E.M. Forster wrote in 1910, in Howard’s End:

“Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,” [Margaret] said. “This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest upon the earth.”

Through the eyes of a child, a world can be misunderstood, mistranslated, misbegotten, but it can also be reborn. In our own dolorous moment, stories such as Spirit of the Beehive and Grave of the Fireflies remind us of what is not, and what can be, if we just have the fortitude to watch and wait.

In any case, here are our editors’ reading recommendations for the week!

• Neuroqueer expression and the limits of social tolerance (Aeon Essays)
• Prediction Market Betting Is Getting People Banned and Arrested (WIRED)
• Pentagon Refuses to Identify Staffer Tracking Democratic Socialists (New Republic)
• The Pennsylvania measles fight has come into churches, fire stations and homes (WaPo)
• Nvidia inks $13 billion deal to buy the AI startup that was hacked by OpenAI (CNN Business)
• Simon Weckert creates Digital Camouflage shirt to avoid AI video surveillance (Dezeen)
• The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead (Open AI)
• Lips Down on Dixie celebrates 25 years of Rocky Horror in Atlanta (ATL Mag)
• As Buckhead Studies Affordable Housing, Options Disappear (WABE)
• Wikipedia Workers Unionize for the First Time (WIRED)
• Woman who went on date with alleged 49ers fraudster says she saw through his claims: “Too good to be true” (CBS)
• The Rise and Rise of the Disaster Bisexual (BinaryThis)
• A hungry woman is easier to dismiss than a well-fed woman (Aeon Essays)
• Ellen Meiksins Wood: Some Personal Recollections (MR Online)
• The Spirit of the Beehive (1973): A Study of Trauma and a Very Clever Attack Against a Fascistic Regime (James Lanternman)
• Trump lauded low prices at Freedom Fuel. A supplier says some gas wasn’t paid for. (WaPo)
• Trump sued over service selling faster access to Truth Social posts (NPR)
• Hannah Einbinder opens up about sex, shame and ‘Camp Miasma’ (USA Today)
• On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA (Lobster)
• How Jeffrey Epstein ingratiated himself with top Microsoft executives (Japan Times)
• The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet review – the life of Barbara Cartland (Guardian)
• China Before the Infinite Camera Roll (Sixth Tone)
• Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s – how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brain (The Conversation)
• 2 hours a day, no late nights: How Meta’s settlement will change teen accounts (WaPo)
• The millennial optimism of the Obama-era sitcom set us up for failure (Uncle Herman)
• US economist Barry Eichengreen on how de-dollarisation could actually look (South China Morning Post)
• Mathematicians still don’t know the fastest way to multiply numbers (Scientific American)
• Looking Like a State by Mariana Mogilevich (n+1)
• Taking Alien Life Seriously: The Origins of Exobiology (JSTOR Daily)
• Luigi Mangione pleads guilty to federal stalking charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO (AP)
• Mountaintop Retreat with Maharishi Leaves Greenspan Obsessed With Rupee (Bloomberg)