The Take
This is the Take. It's where you come to understand more about your favorite movies, shows and culture. Our video essays make the story worlds you enter richer and deeper. Think: Endings Explained, Character Studies, Hidden Messages and Symbols Revealed, Actor and Director Profiles, and more.
We want to share our love of visual culture with the world. So here's our Take.
426
The Matrix Ending Explained: A Guide to Freeing...
The Matrix is far more than a sci-fi action classic - it's a practical guide to freeing your mind and fulfilling your potential, to becoming "The One" yourself. The Wachowskis ground-breaker - now celebrating its 20th anniversary - shows us how to follow the 7 steps of Neo's journey to Enlightenment.
26 min
427
And Just Like That - What It Got Wrong (And Wha...
While And Just Like That faltered early on, it ultimately got its groove back, and left us with the classic Sex And The City takeaway that it’s the ever-evolving relationship you have with yourself that matters most.
22 min
428
Pam Beesly - The Perils of Being Normal
Pam Beesly is the "normal" one in The Office. Is that actually a good thing? Here's our take and find out how being normal is both the strength and the downfall of our favorite "Girl Next Desk."
22 min
429
How I Met Your Mother - The Mother Deserved Better
How I Met Your Mother's Tracy was the perfect love interest viewers spent 9 seasons waiting for... and then the finale undercut the romantic ideals at the show's core and underestimated it's audience by treating the Mother as disposable.
22 min
430
The Little Mermaid as a Queer Allegory, Explained
Is The Little Mermaid actually a story about realizing you’re queer and the world you’ve grown up in can’t accept you as you really are? If it is - it suggests that there's a lot of pain, sacrifice, and compromise ahead of anyone who wishes to come out.
17 min
431
The Smart Girl Trope, Explained
She's a Smart Girl, and it's never been cooler to be one, to be proud of what you know and what you can achieve. So how has this archetype evolved, and what does it really mean to be a smart girl today?
17 min
432
The Rise of The “Cool Mom” 2.0 Today
The unexpected life of the new Cool Mom both onscreen & in real life is defined by enlightened parenting philosophies, mom hacks, & venting sessions over wine with other Cool Moms. But can she really exist?
22 min
433
Clueless - Cher, Master of the Argument
How do you win an argument? Learn from the master of rhetoric: Cher Horowitz, star of Clueless. The Alicia Silverstone character may be remembered as a 90s fashion icon, but she's in fact most impressive for the debate skills she puts to use in all aspects of her life. She teaches us a few things about how to make our case so that people will listen.
21 min
434
The "Disabled Villain" Trope Is Medieval - Why ...
While strides are being made around disability representation on screen, disabled characters are still often reduced to monsters, bridges to the supernatural, or bad guys.
19 min
435
Sex and the City - Why Carrie Should Have Chose...
In Sex and The City, growing old with Aidan would have made more sense for Carrie if marriage was what she truly wanted – but secretly, it seems like she really prefers to be alone.
21 min
436
The "Dyed Hair" Girl - How She Stopped Being Edgy
Dyed hair was once a visual shorthand to convey a character’s “edginess” or "alternativeness.” It even came across to some as scary, unsettling, a threatening challenge to the social status quo. Today, though, it's almost the norm. So what changed?
18 min
437
Don't Look Up's Real Message and Ending, Explained
Don’t Look Up is an eerily accurate echo of how we continue to mine our world for non-renewable resources instead of investing in green energy, even though burning fossil fuels is explicitly causing our downfall.
20 min
438
The Pretty Girl Trope - The Pitfalls of "Pretty...
We’re told to worship (or try to be) the "Pretty Girl," but that pursuit can erode a deeper sense of self. When people see you as the "Pretty Girl" type, they’re really seeing preconceived, culturally entrenched notions of what your beauty represents.
21 min
439
Gossip Girl - Why Chuck and Blair Deserve Each ...
Much of Gossip Girl focuses on Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf’s endlessly destructive love affair. Why are viewers so compelled by their toxic love, and why does it make so much sense that they end up together?
18 min
440
Tangled - How Girls Get Gaslit
In Tangled, Rapunzel’s mental imprisonment and her desire to take the agency to see the world herself speak generally to how young girls need to free themselves from damaging longstanding cultural myths.
21 min
441
Friends’ Emily - The Tragedy of the Runner-Up L...
Friends' Emily is the Runner-Up Love Interest, a character who serves as a transition to the show's one true pairing. Let's take a look at what we can learn from her side of this story.
20 min
442
The Pandemic Onscreen - How Film & TV Does Covid
How much do we want to see the Covid-19 pandemic reflected in our Films and TV shows – should stories be helping us process, or just letting us enjoy a much-needed escape?
22 min
443
How the Madonna-Whore Complex Still Reigns
Many of the labels we still put on women - good girls and bad girls, wifeys and femme fatales – come from Madonna-Whore dichotomy. Here’s how to spot these archetypes on-screen.
21 min
444
Why Ted is the Villain of How I Met Your Mother
Is How I Met Your Mother’s Ted Mosby the good guy he claims to be? Or is his romantic journey more self indulgent and sometimes sinister than he claims it is? What if he's the bad guy?
23 min
445
Bridesmaids: Why Helen Has No Friends
Helen is that woman you hate -- but also want to be. What's the problem of the Bridesmaids antagonist? Why is she incapable of getting what she really wants: friends?
20 min
446
The Matrix 4, Ending Explained - "Fixing" Trini...
The Matrix Resurrections is an interrogation of the original film and its legacy, asking whether anything has improved as a result of the Matrix’s message to free your mind, or if the mind-control in our actual world has just gotten worse.
22 min
447
The Pick Me Girl - Reflecting Our Insecurities ...
Today's "Pick Me Girl" often manifests like the traditional "Good Girl Wifey” who judges single women. She can can even be an antifeminist who disavows women’s rights. But she is truly defined by her lack of time or respect for other women.
21 min
448
Janet Jackson, Taking Back Control
Janet Jackson's early music tackled the body insecurities she’d dealt with throughout her early life as a child performer. Now, she's taking back control once again with her own 2022 documentary. So let's celebrate her legacy of centering female bodily agency in pop.
15 min
449
The Girlboss Villain Is Everywhere - It's Enoug...
The Girlboss Villain is everywhere -- but are these stories about toxic female bosses incisive capitalist critiques, or are they actually kind of misogynistic, suggesting their desire for power is unwomanly or unnatural?
21 min
450
Grey’s Anatomy - Why McDreamy Isn’t That Dreamy
The less dreamy traits of Grey's Anatomy's Derek Shepherd have been the topic of discussion since the seemingly charming doctor was written out of the show. So what can we learn from his lack of growth?
17 min