Metropolitan boomerang.
It suddenly occurred to me, what it was that’s been niggling at the back of my brain, as I’m reading about the 150-year-olds drawing Social Security, and the Are You Alive project, the blithe destruction of unutterably necessary public goods, laboriously built over painstaking generations, depended upon by hundreds of millions, including, yes, themselves—even that bedrock gospel of revanchists, that all the fierce resistance they’re (finally) facing, now that they’ve taken their masks off, in the town halls, outside all those Tesla dealerships, that all of it must be astroturfed, fake, bought and paid for with bottomless Soros funds, how could there possibly, after all, we won! We finally won! We have a mandate! The mandate! —What’s been bugging me, trying to surface itself in and amongst all this, turns out to have been the memory of something it was that Donald Rumsfeld, long may he burn, once said, on the occasion of our second Bush-led invasion of Iraq:
The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”
If one saves a single life, it’s as if one saves an entire world, as the mishnah goes, but the worlds of the lives of these right-wingers, these Dogists, these Trumpists and Seven-Mountaineers, these Republicans, they’re so bounded, so ruthlessly efficient so as to maximize the return on their investments, so thereby solipsistically incurious, and thus so very, very small, that there’s just no room left in them to contemplate the notion at all of the possibility of three hundred and forty-one million, five hundred and thirty-eight thousand, three hundred and fifty-nine others, each their own entire utterly other world—despite the fact the tools they now have at their disposal allow them to reach out and wreck each and every one, at scale.
The neat thing about cryptographic government (which is actually much easier than it sounds—we’re talking a few thousand lines of code, max) is that it can be connected directly to the sovcorp’s second line of defense: a cryptographically-controlled military.
A few thousand lines of code. —My goodness, are there that many people? Is it possible there are that many people in the whole country?
One ought always to play to one’s audience.
“This is not the grousing of a verse-writer; publishers are generous to verse, apparently because it looks well in the catalogue, and it gets a good deal of space in reviews, apparently because people who don’t read poetry still like talk about poetry, and there are always corners needing to be filled in the magazines. But of the people I come across and like, I doubt if anybody reads much modern verse who doesn’t write it. You could pick out in Conquistador a series of authors who had been borrowed from and used, and I felt rather critical about this at first, but of course if you have a public to write for it is an excellent thing to use the existing tools (compare the Elizabethans). The English poet of any merit takes, I think, a much more clinical view of his own products. The first or only certain reason for writing verse is to clear your own mind and fix your own feelings, and for this purpose it would be stupid to borrow from people, and for this purpose you want to be as concentrated as possible. Mr. Eliot said somewhere that a poet ought to practice his art at least once a week, and some years ago I was able to ask the oracle whether he thought this really necessary, a question on which much seemed to hang. After brooding and avoiding traffic for a while he answered with the full weight of his impressiveness, and I am sure without irony, that he had been thinking of someone else when he wrote that, and in such a case as my own the great effort of the poet must be to write as little as possible.” —William Empson
Doppelgäng agley.
Ego-surfing, as one does (forgive me; my name makes it all too easy, you see), I tripped into one of those grey-flannel rabbitholes, an uncanny corner filled with dollops of AI slop about hole after hole in the wall joints, locally famous diners, rib joints you want to put miles on your odometer for, steakhouses that bring them from Rehoboth Beach all the way out or down or over to Hockessin, a trip that I or at least a Kip Manley once made, to take a photo of the sort of golden walls and white tablecloths and warm lighting that create that rare atmosphere where you instantly know you’re in for something special. Needless to say, I’ve never been to the Little Italy neighborhood of Wilmington—I’m still not entirely convinced that the entire state of Delaware isn’t entirely a fiction, only as real as the thousands of corporate headquarters that each somehow manage to fit precisely within the confines of a post-office box, I did drive through it once, or was driven, the particulars of the trip escape me, it was some time ago, and very, very late at night, or early in the morning, and we needed to cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel for some reason, going from New York or New Jersey to points south, again, I don’t remember why, maybe, probably, on our way to drop Charles and/or Sarah off in North Carolina, maybe, or to pick one or both of them up, though I think Sarah was there, or maybe it was Emily, not that Emily, but why were the rest of us? Where were we going? But: that’s the second time I’ve crossed the Chesapeake Bay by that disconcerting route; the first time I did so is one of my very earliest memories (wait—we’re going to drive? Underwater? and my father grinning like a genial madman, oh, oh yeah, and are you sure this is safe? I wanted to know, and he shrugged, let’s find out, I’m embellishing here, I don’t really actually remember what was said, precisely, or even at this point any exact or precise details, I’m constructing the scene around the vibe that remains, that’s summoned when I call it up, of bright light on endless water, a ruthlessly improbable stretch of pavement laid over nothing at all, over air, the sudden darknesses that swallowed the car entire, my wonder, my anxious terror)—but it’s possible to cross the Bridge-Tunnel without ever setting foot or tire in Delaware, so that later exhausted midnight ride is the only chance I’ve ever had to verify the existence of the First State of this great country, but I blew it; we were on our way to somewhere else, and didn’t have the time, we didn’t have the cash, either, for the toll, as it seemed like it was going to turn out, until we doubled back to a rest stop or a gas station parking lot and a frantic search turned up change enough from the back seat of one of our cars. —Maybe it’s the same Kip Manley I’ve bumped into before, who’s left Yelp reviews of Sherwin-Williams joints in New Jersey, who really enjoyed that luau in Maui, maybe he really does exist; maybe he did enjoy a steak once, in Wilmington, or something else, one of the meals under twenty-two dollars, maybe, the burger, that gave him the opportunity to snap that photo, which, granted, looks real enough, an actual if digital record of real photons bouncing about a definite space in that precise moment of time, early in the sitting, maybe, nobody else in that corner yet, all those empty tables and booths waiting patiently for the plates to come, the wine glass, there, on his table, the sort a good joint leaves out for show and maybe fills with prepradial ice-water as you’re sitting down, I don’t know, is Delaware conserving water these days? Do you have to ask for it? Is that more a West Coast thing?—but if you were to order wine with your steak, that glass would be discreetly swept away and replaced with an actual wine glass, shaped properly to properly shape the nose of whatever varietal you’d ordered, Tempranillos are trendy with steaks these days, aren’t they? I don’t know, I never go to steakhouses. —Maybe he did, is the point, this other me, the website’s looking for photographers, it says, and writers, too, they list an impressive roster, but I have to imagine if anyone did take up their offer, and actually yourself typed up the 40,000 words a month they expect of their contributors, you’d wither away into a single AI-generated JPEG of yourself to join all the others LLMing away in there, one hardly imagines they’d pay for anything more than what they already get. —Why does every paragraph generated by a chatbot read like an introductory paragraph? Every sentence a thesis statement. —They just keep starting, kicking off over and over until they just stop, never developing, never following through, nothing but ceaseless sizzle. It’s one of their most glaring tells.
A Critique of Pure Tolerance.
This, then, is their target; this their priority; this is what terrifies them, beyond all reason:
West Ada School District administrators have instructed a teacher that she must remove two signs from her classroom out of concern that they “inadvertently create division or controversy,” the district told the Idaho Statesman.
[…]
Inama told the Statesman that she was particularly confused because administrators had hung signs across the school with a similar message that read, “Welcome others and embrace diversity.”
When discussing the “Everyone is welcome here” sign, the district told the Statesman that it was not the message that was at issue, but rather the hands of different skin tones on the poster.
It’s—impressive?—that, in their eagerness to justify such an unjustifiable position, the district eagerly trips into full-throated racism (they actually said, “While ‘Everyone is welcome here’ is a general statement of being welcoming, concerns arose around the specific visual presentation of the signs in question and whether they aligned with district policies on classroom displays,” but look at that poster up there: the only thing specific as to the visual presentation is, in fact, those differing skin tones; the Oregonian drew the correct inference)—
but look at the other poster they demanded be torn down, over there: what, specifically, is there, visually, to take issue with, about the presentation of that?
It’s not the presentation at all. It’s the message. —There are those in this world who do not believe that everyone is welcome here, or important, or accepted, or respected, or valued, or equal; seeing posters every day that insist otherwise is, if not an open insult, then at least a constant irritation; such individuals will, ironically enough, not feel welcome in a room displaying messages of such a universal welcome; their anodyne naïveté, rendered logically impossible, becomes offensive, and so must be removed.
This ineluctable logic has proven implacably useful to revanchist griefers: we can all agree that everyone should be welcome (thing about what’s anodyne? Everyone likes it); therefore, anything that might make anyone feel unwelcome ought to be minimized, ostracized, erased: anything, then, that might make, say, someone invested in the notion that this nation was once great, someone who might, perhaps, be distressed, by the notion that such greatness depended on horrible crimes and terrible wrongs, such a one must never be confronted with any evidence to the contrary, lest they feel themselves unwelcome, and so. And it works the other way, as well: any inkling that the world might be however slightly improved, made even an inch more great than it is at this moment, now, here, is a notion that this world is not already great, is not already good, thus risking the discomfort of those who think it was, it is, it always must have been, and since that would make them feel unwelcome—well. Minimize. Ostracize. Erase. —This dynamic explains so much of what’s happening, of late, from the destruction of science to the demolition of libraries to the denial of vaccinations: to suggest this world might somehow be improved is to deny it’s not already, has not always been, in how it’s arranged and disposed, is not yet great, has never been the best of all possible, which would make those so invested feel—unwelcome. And so.
—I mean, it’s also the racism, and the misogyny, the viciously violent, hideous hate. But note the nasty illogic demanded, the repellant claims that must be made, the futures that are foreclosed, whole worlds of possibility destroyed, unmade, to satisfy these terrible, stupid demands.
Bubbles of Earths.
There were good reasons to disregard the technological details involved in delineating intercommunication between Terra the Fair and our terrible Antiterra. His knowledge of physics, mechanicalism and that sort of stuff had remained limited to the scratch of a prep-school blackboard. He consoled himself with the thought that no censor in America or Great Britain would pass the slightest reference to “magnetic” gewgaws. Quietly, he borrowed what his greatest forerunners (Counterstone, for example) had imagined in the way of a manned capsule’s propulsion, including the clever idea of an initial speed of a few thousand miles per hour increasing, under the influence of a Counterstonian type of intermediate environment between sibling galaxies, to several trillions of light-years per second, before dwindling harmlessly to a parachute’s indolent descent. Elaborating anew, in irrational fabrications, all that Cyraniana and “physics fiction” would have been not only a bore but an absurdity, for nobody knew how far Terra, or other innumerable planets with cottages and cows, might be situated in outer or inner space: “inner,” because why not assume their microcosmic presence in the golden globules ascending quick-quick in this flute of Moët or in the corpuscles of my, Van Veen’s—
(or my, Ada Veen’s)—bloodstream, or in the pus of a Mr. Nekto’s ripe boil newly lanced in Nektor or Neckton.
It’s a terribly little thing, not even most of a sentence, and hardly the most unique of images: a world, a cosmos, this particular scheme of things entire, pinpricked in a tiny bubble, in the wine—but it’s such a specific image, specifically deployed (then heightened, and parodically degraded, in carbonated blood, and liquor puris), that now I can’t help but imagine the master excursing the hills above the Montreux Palace Hotel, a butterfly net in his hands, and a Barbara Remington painting reproduced on the cover of the paperback tucked away in his pocket.
“By all accounts, ’twas to give him line only,” said Amaury; “and if King Mezentius had lived, would have been war between them this summer. Then he should have been boiled in his own syrup; and ’tis like danger now, though smaller, to cope the son. You do forget your judgement, I think, in this single thing, save which I could swear you are perfect in all things.”
Lessingham made no answer. He was gazing with a strange intentness into the wine which brimmed the crystal goblet in his right hand. He held it up for the bunch of candles that stood in the middle of the table to shine through, turning the endless stream of bubbles into bubbles of golden fire. Amaury, half facing him on his right, watched him. Lessingham set down the goblet and looked round at him with the look of a man awaked from sleep.
The stakes is high.
The camps were pitched long ago, human joy and possibility set against terrified segregationists and eugenicists, but they’ve gone and anted up: anyone who needs medication to get through this thing called life, we’re told, is “a dire threat to the American people and our way of life.” Add them, then, to the lists of anyone trans, queer, not what we’re calling white at the moment, heck, that’s just about me & you & everyone we know. —This won’t end easy. It will take a lot to shame them into hiding away their hate again. Deny this unhumaning; defend yourself, ourselves, our way of life; depose these neo-Nazis, these Christian nationalists, these Republicans, into their fated ditches.
#nodads jokes.
The thing, about Elon Musk’s inability to effectively deploy, or even, seemingly, to enjoy, humor:
He’s not trying to be funny, per se. It’s a show of power, not unlike stupidity: I can say anything, anything at all, he’s saying, and so long as it’s approximately humor-shaped, so long as it appears to be somewhere in the vague neighborhood of a joke, thousands upon thousands of people will laugh, because it was said by me.
This, of course, would be the actual function, the purpose, of dad jokes: because I am the patriarch, my jokes do not actually have to be funny to get you to react to them. But the thing about dad jokes is they’re almost always told with an awareness of and even an embarrassment at that purpose, even if it never manages to be articulated as such—there’s almost always an ironic detachment in the telling of them, and a knowing, groaning performance of disgust in the response.
But of course, Musk is a genius of this brave new age, and has no time for such niceties as reflection, or self-consciousness. Say the thing; bask. Open. Brazen. Naked. Ding an sich.
We don’t stop here.
Well, the way they pick teevee shows is, they make one show. That show’s called a pilot. Then they show that one show to the people who pick shows, and on the strength of that one show, they decide if they want to make more shows. Some get chosen, and become television programs. Some don’t, and become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing.
Mulholland Dr. was originally intended or devised or dreamt up or at least pitched as a television series, a serial along the lines in more ways than one of Twin Peaks (as a for instance)—the film we got was cut together from and with additions made to what had originally been a pilot: a show for the people who pick shows, to see if more such shows would at all be what they’d want.
Turns out, not so much.
But that original pilot is available via the Internet Archive:
The quality’s not stellar, but it’s worth watching. At an hour-and-a-half (just enough time for a two-hour movie premiere, with commercials), it’s an hour shy of the film’s runtime, but a large part of the story’s largely there, scenes playing out much as they do in the film, some cuts here, some extensions there, an extra scene with Robert Forster’s laconic anti-Cooper cop, a phone call with a procrastinating writer whose dog, Murph, is mysteriously menacing, there’s some different musical cues, perhaps the most notable difference: some brashly atonal percussive stings adjacent to the Castigliane brothers; the director, Adam, tools up to the corral at the top of Beachwood Canyon to the drum solo from “Take Five”; there’s a stab at a light-hearted theme for Betty, all tremulous strings and tinkling piano, best perhaps left behind—but, nonetheless, the basic beats play out as they do in the film, right up to the discovery of Diane Selwyn’s body, Rita’s attempt to cut her hair, “Let me do it,” and then the revelation of the blond wig in the mirror: “You look like someone else.” There’s no Club Silencio, and there’s no Winkie’s, though there is the dumpster behind the Winkie’s, and the figure behind the dumpster, far more melancholic, almost placid, than terrifying, sat there, waiting, as the pilot ends.
Not so different insofar as that goes, and yet completely different, because of the context, because of how it’s situated, because of the haunting expectations that cling to it, the mighta beens and what would theys. —A television show, a series, a serial, of which this might’ve been the first installment, it’s episodic, it continues, it’s therefore open-ended, expansive, not elusively claustrophobic, not hermetically sealed, not done-in-one, not—a film. We would have gotten more—but with the terrible foreclosure of the film’s ending, it’s tantalizingly impossible to make any kind of a guess as to much of what any of that more would’ve been.
More behind-the-scenery of the movie industry, sure; more to limn the shadowy armature of power stretching from Mr. Roque and the Cowboy through the Castigliane brothers, and all those unknown, unseen phone callers to the bumblingly competent Joe Messing; director Adam Kesher would’ve been more of a co-protagonist with Betty and Rita—but Rita probably wouldn’t’ve been Camilla, and Betty almost certainly wouldn’t’ve been Diane. The tension of that sort of doubling and reveal, that’s not a long-haul sort of mystery. There’s a necessary finality to it, that just doesn’t fit in a serial shape.
And I really don’t know how Naomi Watts’ incandescently saccharine performance would’ve worked in weekly installments, without that counterbalance. Her audition—closer to the end of the pilot, rather than the middle of the film—suggests a direction, of course, but the plucky kid detective, at once Laura Dern and Kyle McLachlan, becoming in her own way very much like the woman who stumbles, injured, from the woods, is a very different story than the one in which the pluck turns out already to have stumbled, on her own, and no detective anywhere in sight.
I like a continuing story. There’s something about a soap opera that’s fantastic because it just keeps going and going. Theoretically, you can get very deep in a story and you can go so deep and open up the world so beautifully, but it takes time to do that.
How the sausage gets made.
“The Passport Bros are one of those phenomena confected at the intersection of rumor and aspiration, lent substance on TikTok and Reddit, consolidated through T-shirts and stickers sold on Etsy, Redbubble, and Shopify, with e-books and conferences and paid consultations over Zoom, until finally they have become what we call a thing.” —Adrian Nathan West
The sin of empathy.
“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” he exhorts us, this mustachio’d Utahan; “This snake” (referring to a photograph of the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde)—
This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.
She is not merely deceived but is a deceiver. Your eye shall not pity.
As a bit of bait, his exhortation did the trick: ten thousand replies, ten thousand retweets, four point seven thousand likes, two and a half thousand bookmarks, twenty-one point nine million views, as of this morning, to the extent those numbers mean anything anymore. And certainly, I now know far more about Ben Garrett, Deacon, candidate for Elder, and podcast co-host, than I ever would’ve intended otherwise. Screenshots have washed up at Bluesky, racking up thousands of likes and retweets of their own; people will gawk at the Nazi bar’s grafitti. “Commit the sin of empathy,” these pass-alongs exhort in turn. “It’s actually the most important emotion of all.” “If your religion says ‘Do not commit the sin of empathy’ you chose the wrong religion.” “Google search ‘The Sin of Empathy’ and you’ll see Evangelicals using it unironically.” “Probably time to talk about fascism and moral inversion huh.” —Which, leaving aside for the moment the all-too-real shortcomings of dunk culture, is all well and good—fuck him up socrates, as Darryl once said—except, I mean, for one fundamental flaw—
Empathy is a sin.
Oh, not the way he means it, this aspiring patriarch, this amateur demonologist. He’s a misogynist fascist, lashing out at a woman in a position of traditionally male power, a woman who’d recently dared to embarrass his chosen Daddy-come-home figurehead by asking the President to have mercy. —It’s important to note that Deacon Garrett isn’t responding directly to anything the Right Reverend Budde said, with his exhortation not to commit the sin of empathy—she spoke of unity, dignity, honesty, humility, diversity, and of course and most controversially mercy, but said nothing of empathy: the closest she gets to that is compassion. —No; his interest in warding us off empathy is purely instrumental. He’s only here to gin up his outsourced two minutes of hate against a designated target. Empathy makes it harder to hate, and so it must be done away with. Your eye shall not pity.
When pressed on his echthroic ethic—how can empathy be a sin?—Garrett directs his audience to the writings of Dr. Joel Rigney, ex-president of a seminary and devotee of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. Rigney’s been a Main Character before, for precisely his writings on empathy, and compassion: cod-Letters from an ersatz Screwtape on how best to twist these supposed virtues from the Enemy’s loathsomely benevolent purpose. —Rigney posits empathy as a totalizing perversion of compassion, a complete immersion in the feelings of others that overwhelms one’s own judgment, one’s fundamental sense of right, and wrong, one’s very self, a feeling-with fusion that terrifies his puerilely pathetic individualism: thus, a sin.
He, of course, has it all completely and utterly backwards.
Namwali Serpell, writing about the shortfalls of empathy as a saving grace of literature, has much more interesting insights into what might be sinful about it all. She quotes a passage from Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, in which the narrator hires two black men to shoot at him with blanks, re-enacting the murder of a black man with which he’s become, shall we say, obsessed:
My two assassins took their time in killing me. The slowed-down pace at which they raised and fired their guns, the lack of concern or interest this seemed to imply, the total absence on my part of any attempt to escape although I had plenty of time to do so—all these made our actions passive. We weren’t doing them: they were being done. The guns were being fired, I was being hit, being returned to the ground. The ground’s surface was neutral—neither warm nor cold… When I let my head roll slightly back, a bollard hid all these words except for one of the two Escapes. Would my man have seen this, just before the life dribbled out of him towards the puddle? Escape?
and then uses it to question the utility, the very purpose of empathy:
The possessives, “my two assassins” and “my man”; the conscription into a willful passivity; the mechanical quality of the sequence, absent of concern or interest or survival instinct; the supposed neutrality of the usurped ground; the ironized “Escape”: Isn’t this creepy, fugue-like occupation of the dead a truer picture of contemporary empathy than the older cliché of walking a mile in another’s shoes?
The fact that it’s a rich white man taking a poor black man’s death for a spin is no coincidence. The empathy model of art can bleed too easily into the relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it. It’s a gateway drug to white saviorism, with its familiar blend of propaganda, pornography, and paternalism. It’s an emotional palliative that distracts us from real inequities, on the page and on screen, to say nothing of our actual lives. And it has imposed upon readers and viewers the idea that they can and ought to use art to inhabit others, especially the marginalized.
The sin of empathy, then, is not that one will lose oneself, and the crucially God-given sense of right and wrong one would impose on some other, by indulging the notion that one ought try to feel the feelings of that other—it’s that one’s imagined sense of those feelings, licensed by the indulgent term of empathy, risks overwriting the actual feelings and experiences of that other. —Unless tempered, by experience, by some of those other virtues mentioned above, humility, honesty, dignity, mercy, then empathy all too easily slips over the brink into something one might well call sin.
The there that is there.
This is precisely the sort of thing we like to see; more like that, please.
To be or become light, shine, to be illuminated, to become lighted up, to give light, shine, to illumine, light up, to kindle, to make shine (of the face):
friend of the pier Rich Puchalsky has started the year with a lovely gesture, writing a brief monograph on the use, in the epic, of “owr” (the word, not the substance, though the substance is implicated by the word). I’m terribly fond of both the care and playfulness he brings to bear—this is how one wants to be read; I’d only add, as avenues of possible exploration for anyone so inclined, that the stuff from which the owr is derived is (usually) called “medhu”; that its appearance (viscous, milky, touched with just a hint of warm yellow gold) is based (in part) on childhood memories of the occasional tub of spun honey we’d get, as a treat, incomparably luxurious—but also (moreso), on this, and, yes: it is, indeed, a bodily fluid. To the extent that “body,” and “fluid,” make any sense at all, at this ontological level.
Eikositriophobia.
Eight thousand four hundred and one days ago, I riffed on an article I’d found on Plastic.com, about Gordon Sinclair’s device designed to fling a haggis across Calgary’s Bow River, turning it into a brief knock on the concept of patent trolls; thus, blogging. —Eight thousand, four hundred and one: twenty-three rounds of three hundred sixty-five, plus six February twenty-ninths: happy anniversary. Gifts of silver plate or imperial topaz are appropriate.
Twenty-three years, and Plastic.com has been dead and gone for twelve of them; it looks like that original news site link rotted away in 2006. But! The pier’s still here! If a bit quiet, over the twenty-second year of its existence: there was this little thing, which I still quite like, and I set down the definitive version of this bit of history, and, ah, I overthought a recent animated hit? —I mean, I also put out a book, but that’s over there, and what have I done for this, lately?
I mean, besides the complete refit and re-design. Since it went so well over at the city and all, I figured I’d tinker hereabouts, too; those who’ve been around a while might well remember what it is I’m nodding toward.
Eight thousand four hundred and one days past, and three days left to go, and then, I guess, we’ll see what we will see. Sláinte, tip your server, and please enjoy whatever it is you do enjoy.
How it’s going.
I’m trying not to borrow grief from the future, as the saying advises, but the terms are so damn attractive.
(still) Bringing blogging back.
Here’s a list of blog-shaped things to read, and keep reading, from Liz Henry, one of those people I’ve “known” online for what seems like forever, and I very much approve of the notion of information garden parties, seeing as how I’m very much for reasons feeling the scroll fatigue and leaning into and falling back on the notion of just saying what I can to those of a mind to hear, which statement, I must admit, rang out a little more definitely in my head that it does on the screen. —Thus, the nature of writing. —I’ll add a link to the shells Aaron Bady’s putting in an orange, for your consideration; I’ll also point you toward what Adam Kotsko had to say about the real meaning of time travel. As a couple of other folks I’ve “known” ditto.
Crass commercialism.
As you might’ve heard, I have a book coming out next week. —Since it’s volume four of a long-running serial, and as has been noted, sequel fatigue is a thing, let’s do what we can to help folks over that hurdle: from now until Tuesday, October 22nd, you can use the links below to purchase paperback copies of vols. 1, 2, and 3 for the rock-bottom price of twelve dollars each—but. Now that the date is passed, the links below can be used to purchase copies of vols. 1, 2, 3, and/or 4 for the still below-retail price of only sixteen dollars each. Go! Get yourself a city!
Rossumovi divoci roboti.
I found myself in a darkening theater last week, about to see a movie I’d been previously unaware of, based on a book I’d never heard of, which, as a practice, has a lot to recommend it. I’d figure out how to do it more often, maybe, the seats were comfortable, those new recliner-thingies they’re putting in, but wearing a mask for a couple-three hours is never fun, so I don’t know.
It’s not entirely true to say I knew nothing: we were there because the Kid and the Spouse and Barry, the Cartoonist, they all wanted to see the new Chris Sanders movie, and I’m adjacent enough to the fields of cartooning and animation to know that Chris Sanders co-designed an co-directed Lilo & Stitch and How to Train your Dragon, both of which I’ve quite enjoyed, but also that Harrison Ford Call of the Wild, which I haven’t seen, but yikes. —And of course I knew the title of what it was we were about to see: the Wild Robot.
And it’s a very very very pretty movie, and there are stirring and thrilling bits, and I will aver it’s the most #nodads film I can think of, recently, but nonetheless none of this happens to make it a terribly or even a rather good movie. (I should note I was in the minority among our viewing group with this particular take; Kid, Spouse, Barry all enjoyed it much more than yr. humble curmudgeon, grain of salt and all that.) —Thrilling and stirring moments happened because at this or that point in this sort of movie something thrilling or stirring is supposed to happen; convictions appear, but, lacking attention, much less courage, wander off; foundational metaphors are cracked, poorly mixed, introduced in a muddle and then abandoned, as plot or logistics require. It is, on the whole, a sumptuously gorgeous, thoroughly half-baked mess.
But here I am, thinking thoughts about it.
(As I’ve nibbled at this, it’s been pointed out to me that Film Crit Hulk went and made some cogent points, so go, read that, come back, I’ll talk about some other bits.)
So, yes: gorgeous, but that’s part of the problem. —There’s some cartoonish expressionism in the various animal-forms, especially when they start in with the talking (crossing the obscure limen from set-dressing impediment antagonist to CHARACTER); the backgrounds are rendered with flawlessly painterly art direction; but—the light, the air, the water, the weight, it all moves and shifts and changes with such unnoticeably uncanny verisimilitude that one is lulled, despite those expressionist touches. It’s quite a triumph.
And yet but also: there’s, at the start, a refreshingly clear eye toward animals, and danger, and death—the eponymous wild—things get eaten, and stay et, and what did the eating isn’t villainized, or even wrong, it just—is. Death is quotidian—
—but then there’s the swarm of raccoons that chases our protagonist, Roz, the eponymous robot, up a tree that bends, precipitously, with their combined weight, until our protagonist is able to lightly step from the bent-low tip-top of the tree, and the mass of raccoons, suddenly aware of their predicament, beg and plead as the weight shifts, lifts, lets go, the tree, suddenly unburdened, springs upright, and dozens of raccoons are flung across the island over a cliff into the crashing sea, and this is a classic Warner Bros. Tex Avery gag, right? Only, the waves crash, the stone’s weightily there, the afternoon light is perfect and the trees sway as they would (only excepting the one bent alarmingly low for the bit) and death, as we’ve noted, the wild, has a presence—all very much at odds with expressionistically classic Warner Bros. Tex Avery slapstick. Expectations and reactions must be constantly recalibrated, because mimesis and cartooning get in each other’s way, and the movie never bothers to realize it has to reconcile them.
Tonal disjunctions like this extend throughout the movie, catharses unfounded, as Hulk notes above: one of the (several) climaxes, say, hinges on the rescue of the animals on the island from an unprecedented winter storm, dragged whether they will or not to the shelter Roz had built for herself, piled cheek-by-jowl, predator with prey, a powder keg already sparked by this fight, that tussle, and Roz finds her (solar-powered) energy dangerously depleted—an unbearable tension resolved with an inspiring speech pulled from the ass of nowhere by our deuteragonist fox, Flick—a speech as cringe as Morgan Freeman’s astoundingly inadvertently hilarious “Be decent” speech from (the film version of) the Bonfire of the Vanities: the foundational basis of eat and get eaten overturned by a plea for common sense; wildness tamed, and thus, forgotten.
(I should’ve been—I was—clued in by an earlier, tossed-off joke, the opossum mother and her hilarious litter of tagalong infants, all pretending quite theatrically to die [“Meningitis takes time!” insists one], all to lampshade the importance of motherhood, or rather parenting, by pretending this role is thrust upon all of us equally, a thing to which to become inured, like the weather, never noticing, much less questioning, the labor demanded to reproduce what of ourselves is necessary for the labor. —“Here I am,” says the opossum mother, “with my seven children,” and there’s a bloodcurdling offscreen scream, “my six children,” she sighs, without missing a beat, and it’s bleak and it’s funny and it works in the moment, to be undone in the next: “I’m okay, Mom, I didn’t really die,” says the opossum kid, almost unseen—a suit’s note scribbled in the margins of the screenplay, realized as imperceptibly as possible, still managing to wreck the bit.)
And that’s not something they do to protect kids (i feel like it mostly makes kids feel weird and that feeling feelings is stupid). I think it’s something they do to protect adults.
As for #nodads, well. I mean. #nodads. —Fleeing a bear (don’t worry, they’re friends later), our protagonist robot falls, smashing a nest and its resident geese, and is left with an egg that soon enough hatches into the sole survivor, for which Roz takes responsibility: task oriented, she breaks this monstrous burden into three tidy, realizable goals: teach the gosling how to eat, how to swim, and how to fly, and inadvertently brings him up between and among what she does to set about fulfilling them. This isn’t coded as motherly, or mothering (Brightbill’s occasional modes of address notwithstanding); it’s just the work that needs to be done, when an infant is about. There’s no hint of authoritarian discipline, or patriarchal diktat, or any juvenile rebellion thereagainst. Other role models and caretakers abound among the animals on the island, all of them played by men, but not a one gets anywhere near striking distance of a father-figure: big brothers, tutors, mentors, rapscallions, nary a dad in the bunch.
But I can’t say the movie comes by its #nodads honestly: Roz, short for ROZZUM Unit 7134, is played by a woman, Lupita Nyong’o, and while there’s nothing remotely gendered or sexed about Roz’s design or presentation, femmebots are nonetheless very much a thing in the current imaginary: our AI assistants and helpful robots are coded as female far more often than not, clearly subservient, chipperly servile, selflessly available, and though Roz very much grows out of this role, the role is nonetheless there to grow out of. The movie can’t present a father-figure directly to Brightbill; it would throw Roz and that role into stark relief, and so what #nodads might be found isn’t by design; it’s at best an epiphenomenon of good intentions, a reflexive reaction to having slipped without thinking into another trope altogether (rather like the unfortunate echoes that ring in the only other roles played by women: the aforementioned opossum mother, and the slinkily manipulative third-act villain). It’s not anything the movie was trying to say; it’s what the movie didn’t realize it was saying, as it didn’t rise to the irony of stranding a soi-disant wild robot in such a domestically comedic situation.
But, that third-act villain—
The migration of the geese off the island and south, Brightbill in tow, was the first time since the opening, before the animals got verbose and the plot kicked in, that the movie took a breath and delivered some pure goshwow eyekicks. A shot of the weathered Golden Gate Bridge, deck aslosh with seawater, beautiful and wordlessly, terrifyingly implicative (that’s a 75-meter rise in sea levels): the movie cannily gives us a taste of what we hadn’t realized we’d wanted from it, in one of those moments thrilling, and stirring, but also earned. And the few-enough other hints we get, as to the state and condition of, well, us, in this world, ROZZUM robots crossing the oceans on container ships, headed for idyllic Syd Mead suburbs, the isolated and terribly compact farming outpost, that deploys a robot SWAT team to deal with an incursion of geese, the unindicated entity—Universal Dynamics? some nation-state, or city-state? an aggrieved, gunned-up farmers’ cooperative?—that sends an overpowered dropship with another robot SWAT team and the aforementioned slinky manipulator, all to fetch back a single stray ROZZUM unit: it would appear that human civilization, reeling from the ravages of a far more destructive warming of the globe than predicted, has retreated into heavily militarized enclaves, lashing out with overwhelming firepower to bigfoot the slightest hint of threat or variance. It’s not unrealistic when you put it like that, I suppose. But the movie does seem to present us with the first known example of solarpunk dystopia.
And yet, here’s the thing: all this tech? It all just, works. The various artificial intelligences, and Roz’s limitless power supply (unless the plot requires an outage), and the wingless levitation of the dropship and the villain, and the radio transponders (mostly), and the water-logged marketing decks, and, and, and I know, this isn’t what the movie is about, it’s all set-dressing and atmosphere and the occasional plot-point, it’s fine just to trust the tech as you let it enable you to tell the story you want to tell, but, but: that catastrophic sea-level rise, the isolated farm in the middle of a desert: isn’t just trusting the tech how we get to there?
Let’s face it: robots these days, in the current moment, are bartending mechanical Turks operated by untipped mixologists backstage at an Elon Musk launch party; artificial intelligence is a power-gobbling nonsense machine in some occulted service to the scammy shell games of ludicrously paper-wealthy fintech bros. They very clearly don’t just, y’know, work, not at all, and to a ruinous degree, and it’s not that every story with a robot in it has to address this fact, puncturing or at least punctuating the hubris of such tinpot Titans, but it’s nonetheless weird that a story so otherwise suffused with climate anxiety would, when it comes to the tech that’s shoving us into all this hot water, would just, y’know. Trust it?
It’s of a piece with the lashing out, sending a laser-powered SWAT team to take down a flock of geese: a default setting, unthinkingly assumed, a disjunction in the final work. So, when Roz sat herself down in a gorgeously rendered clearing to listen and observe the interactions of the animals about her, grinding away until she could learn how to talk to them, the better to sell herself and her services, all I could think of was the LLM she presumably depended on, hosted in some distant cloud-computing center, and all the power and water flowing to support it as it trained up on this vibrant new dataset. It was distracting. Exhausting, even. Dispiriting. —It’s all very pretty while it’s happening up on the screen, there. But.
As robot forces lay siege to the factory, Helena reveals she has burned the formula necessary to make new robots. The characters lament the end of humanity and defend their actions, despite the fact that their imminent deaths are a direct result of their choices. Busman is killed while attempting to negotiate a peace with the robots. The robots storm the factory and kill all the humans except for Alquist, the company’s Clerk of the Works (Head of Construction). The robots spare him because they recognize that “He works with his hands like a robot. He builds houses. He can work.”
