Sketches of Sadness in Seth Worley’s Restorative SKETCH

I recently made this my Gmail signature:

This message written without AI-assist by Chris White.

Intended as a wry protest against the tsunami of ChatGPT-consolidated prose that muddies my inbox, text threads, and social media feeds these days, the fact that this is an automated reply to every single email I get is not lost on me. I reserve the right to non-ironically curate my own battles, thank you very much.

My new email signature is a barbaric yawp of simmering, low-key grief as I witness the loss of interpersonal writing and expression as an intolerable time suck. Y’all. This is the actual apocalypse. The proverbial sky really is falling. Standing athwart the sidelining of the American mind is a hill worth dying on!

But part of me worries that it comes off snide and judgy to friends and colleagues who appreciate the productivity hack that AI-driven writing tools deliver. A different part of me thinks not my circus, not my monkeys!

(That last part was an A.I.-suggested alternative to an R-rated idiom in my first draft.)

***

The summer of 2025 has found my mind and heart surging with surprise-grief and protest. AI dread is a biggie. But there are other dreads — existential and otherwise.

ENTER: Seth Worley’s Spielbergian suspense thriller SKETCH, a VHS clamshell classic of a film that offers solace for the grieving — be they maternal orphans, widowers, or angst-ridden Me.

SKETCH is a throwback to so many of the movies we grew up with. Movies we watched with parents, brothers, sisters, friends. This is the kind of movie you’d see in a suburban multiplex the weekend it came out. A movie that’d be checked out for weeks as soon as it hit the “New Releases” wall at Blockbuster. People will say SKETCH is a film with a lot of heart. I don’t disagree. But it’s more than that. It’s the first movie with the guts to be sincerely smart and profoundly weird since Inside Out. I loved it.

The Wyatt family has lost its mother/wife. Dad Taylor (Tony Hale) and two kids Amber (Bianca Belle) and Jack (Kue Lawrence) are trying to cope as best they can, while Aunt Liz (D’Arcy Carden) is trying to put the family’s modest home on the market … a change of scenery that seems best for all.

Dad deals with his unbearable grief by removing all traces of mom. Almost like she never existed. Jack copes with the loss of his mother by veneration and, ultimately, a secret plan for her resurrection. But it is daughter Amber who incites the events of our story. A sullen child who has taken to drawing dark, violent cartoons as a way of expressing her sadness, Amber’s righteous indignation and her suffocating grief have been Sharpied onto her forearms: long, black tentacles of rage. Art weaponized.

This is a movie about a family in mourning, but SKETCH isn’t a sad movie. It’s a blast! Especially when it shifts into a cathartic adventure ride as Amber’s sketchy sketches fall into a mysterious pond in the nearby woods and, well, all hell breaks loose.

Grief, it turns out, can be quite the homewrecker.

Seeing SKETCH, which is only screening in cinemas right now, has set off a new grief frontier I’m still not sure how to respond to. The Movies are going away. Not just cinemas or great kid movies … not just watching movies with your parents (i.e., family fun). The Movies — a hundred years of moving picture stories with friends and neighbors at scale … that pop-culture practice that defined “water-cooler talk” … quoting funny lines with your friends and reaching some cathartic agreement about the way things work out for the best … all of that, it’s going away.

I think a robust Hollywood helped keep us together, on the same page. But as art media has been commodified and slipped into our pockets, as we’ve surrendered our attention spans to the infinite scroll, we’ve let that common cultural language (the monoculture as some have called it) pass away.

In its place, so many of us are walking around with sketchbooks overflowing with fear, anger, simmering grief. And it’s all spilling out now, wrecking our world.

***

Star Tony Hale and director Seth Worley have been crafting SKETCH for years. The result is a screenplay that crackles with love and wit and weirdness. This is a film that would fit well in the late Pixar canon: family-themed entertainment run through the therapist’s steady hand. That Gen X storytellers have come to this synthesis of therapeutic wisdom and outsider art is no small miracle. The fabled latchkey kids have worked through some stuff, and they want their kids and grandkids to know about it.

SKETCH gives us three familiar pathways for grieving and offers a surprising prescription: it’s the loud ones, the mad ones, the wailing and violent fantasists — the profane — who are doing it right.

Those of us who are inclined to tamp down all these bad feelings, those who would make an idol of their wounds, the film forces a crayon into our clenched fists: draw me a picture, tell me about it.

***

Fine. Here it goes:

I’ve seen, from a front-row seat inside American megachurch Christianity, how long-harbored feelings of cultural anxiety became populist politics. We used to talk about the “Lost” all the freakin’ time: How will we reach the Lost? How will we win them to the faith?  Now it’s all about purging the Woke. I am devastated that so many of those big-box worship centers now host God and country political rallies, that “evangelical” has become synonymous with MAGA politics. I’m in a white-hot rage about it. It is a palpable grief that colors my life. One that, like Hale’s Taylor, I’ve gone quiet on.

I am sick in my soul about how nearly everyone I know is using ChatGPT to write their work emails, cover letters, speeches and toasts, eulogies …  Like, literally everything we used to have to do to think about what we think and how we feel and how best to communicate that to other humans … all of that; it’s gone. Seducing a partner, getting the meeting, telling the congregation what they really need to understand about your dad who just died of an invisible illness … all that has suddenly become a prompt, a suggestion.

Why were the humanities the first thing the AI evangelists came for? If they had cured diseases, ended poverty, solved the housing crisis or food deserts or mental illness … okay. They would have earned the right to ask for our brains, our art, our minds. But they started their world-changing project with the things that make us most human. How dare they? 

I’m getting old. Christopher Neil White, born Wednesday, 20 May 1970 at Knoxville’s Presbyterian Hospital to Joseph S. White Jr. and Linda Ann White (née Friel) of Chattanooga has run slap out of time to achieve the level of career success he craves, the financial standing he longs for, the immortality he’d come to believe was his due.

But I’m not just crushed because I’m running out of time to achieve, I’m wrecked because everyone I love will be lost to me, too. And that occupies way more of my thoughts than it should, given the fact I am a relatively successful, healthy, and happy person.

***

Okay.

Felt good to get that off my chest.

Please understand those rants are merely sketches in my grief notebook. Will you give me your covenant that you won’t tell anyone? Will you? Do you even know what covenant means?

Last week I saw The Swell Season play live in my hometown, and it was sublime. Two hours of pure catharsis, radical empathy, soaring harmonies and love sweet love. I’m not sure what exactly happened that night, or how it happened … but I do know I wasn’t sad. I felt restored. Nobody was bickering, all of us brought into a community of songs and stories. I think there’s something important going on when we gather for music and theatre and dance … and even watching a movie like SKETCH in a theater with all your people.

Some things are made from better stuff. SKETCH is a gift.

This article was written without AI-assist by Chris White, a screenwriter and director living in Greenville, South Carolina.