A Spoke In The Wheel

"Just a spoke in the wheel."

It’s a line uttered in the operatic, multi-layered 2000 film Magnolia, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The words come from a barfly played with wry perfection by Henry Gibson. If you’re my age you remember Henry from the late-60s sketch comedy Laugh-In, where he played “The Poet,” reciting verse while holding a giant artificial flower. In Magnolia he appears as Thurston Howell — a name lifted from Gilligan’s Island — itself a nod to the absurd collisions of class and circumstance. That’s what Anderson’s film does too, only here it’s not castaways on a remote Pacific island, but lonely souls adrift in Los Angeles.

At the center of the film is a game show, "What Do Kids Know?" The answer the movie suggests is: far too much. Anderson shows us how children absorb more than we’d ever admit — the anger, shame, and regret of their parents. They inherit the fallout.

That’s why Gibson’s line stuck with me, especially when paired with something I heard this week from a dry-witted YouTuber who calls himself The Functional Melancholic. In a post titled "America Alone: How We Lost Connection", he observes, “This is what happens when you have 10,000 Instagram followers, and not a single person to pick you up at the airport.”

Magnolia is about connection. Family, society, love, hate, denial, reconciliation. It insists there’s no such thing as living independently. We’re bound together whether we acknowledge it or not — just as the past binds itself to the present and the future. Anderson hammers this home at the end of the film with a biblical plague of frogs falling on L.A., smashing through car windshields and rooftop skylights, the bloody slimy amphibian carcasses littering the pavement — a warning about the cost of refusing responsibility for each other. 

The movie was released at the dawn of the 21st century, before Facebook (2004), before the algorithms fully rewired us. Today the film almost feels quaint, even naïve, in how seriously it took human connection.

Anderson clearly had scripture in mind. The “spoke in the wheel” line echoes Ezekiel’s vision of a wheel in the sky, a symbol of divine presence and power. Wheels moved by cherubim, in a city named Los Angeles — the City of Angels. That’s why Gibson’s other line in the bar cuts so deep: “It’s dangerous to confuse children with angels.”

Our children are no angels, indeed. They’re not even spokes in the wheel these days. They’re test subjects in the largest uncontrolled social experiment ever attempted. And the results are plain: adolescent addicts, suicidal teens, isolated incels.

If only they were still just spokes in the wheel.

But the wheel is gone.