Purpose
Purpose is easy to admire from a distance. Up close it looks like obsession, and nothing in this project will tell you which of the two you are watching. Five works, five people who named the thing they were for and paid for it, and an essay at the end that refuses to hand you a verdict.
The series itself lives on glennabraas.com. What sits here is the background — the part that normally stays in a folder on my machine. Where each work came from, what the people who made it say they were doing, and what the research actually says about the kind of devotion they are all circling.
I am reading these as made things, not as history. That matters and it changes what counts as evidence. When Whiplash tells you a story about Charlie Parker and a cymbal, the question I am asking is not did that happen but why did Chazelle need it to. When The Apprentice stages a scene, I am not grading it against the record, I am asking what Ali Abbasi built and why. The films are arguments, and an argument is answerable on its own terms.
The five
- Marty Supreme — Josh Safdie, 2025. A hustler’s memoir became a fictional character, and the real man behind it lost everything to a piece of foam rubber.
- Whiplash — Damien Chazelle, 2014. Built from his own high-school band room, and resting on a pedagogy the research does not support.
- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — Kanye West, 2010. Made in exile in Hawaii, under house rules, in three studio rooms booked around the clock.
- Oppenheimer — Christopher Nolan, 2023. Adapted from a biography whose title is already a verdict.
- The Apprentice — Ali Abbasi, 2024. A film whose production history is the same story as its plot.
And the two underneath
- What Purpose Even Means — where “work-life balance” came from, why the ikigai diagram everyone shares is not Japanese, and the definition of purpose that cuts against this whole project.
- Is It Worth It — moral luck, Gauguin, and the one framework that separates the vitality of devotion from its pathology.
A note on the sourcing
Everything here has a source and you can follow it. What you will not find is a citation in the middle of a sentence — the links sit at the foot of each entry, under Where this comes from, so the prose stays readable.
You will also find me saying “this is contested” more than once. Three ideas that turn up constantly in writing about ambition have been checked and do not hold: that suffering makes the art, that grit is a separate thing from conscientiousness, and that trauma reliably produces growth. I have left them out rather than repeat them, and where it matters I say why.