tag:world.hey.com,2005:/horses/feedRory2024-03-17T15:30:54Ztag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/359572024-03-17T15:30:54Z2024-03-17T15:30:54ZSome thoughts about Dune that are not really thoughts about Dune, except for the ones that are of course about Dune<div class="trix-content">
<div>In preparation for seeing <em>Dune 2</em> in theaters, at the recommendation of approximately seven thousand people, I watched the first three-fifths of the first <em>Dune</em> film, slowly pretending to be increasingly absorbed with my phone despite nothing happening on my phone, before turning it off, apologizing to my girlfriend, and asking her whether she'd at least liked the meal. I think that, if I'd turned it off approximately twenty minutes earlier, I'd have escaped the whole experience feeling less agitated; something about waiting from the moment it was clear Denis Villeneuve was doing the whole Leto assassination sequence to the bit where Paul and Jessica are captive on the ornithopter moved me from "aghast" to "seeing red."<br><br>I don't like not liking things. I started seeing my first adult therapist after a fairly devastating break-up, one that came less than a year after the dissolution of a genuinely toxic and abusive relationship, and I <em>still</em> found myself focusing, within a matter of weeks, less on romance or sex or intimacy than on what happens when I don't like a thing that other people like. I am not a <em>fun</em> hater; I don't <em>enjoy</em> hating. I dislike the way that my dislike often registers to me as a kind of emotional betrayal, as if the people who made or did the thing that I dislike were specifically setting out to dismiss some of my most deeply-held beliefs. I hate how nasty my agitation tends to make me, how defensive and borderline-paranoid I get, how I somehow find myself in fight-or-flight mode in ways that make me feel legitimately deranged. I hate how I find myself wondering whether they're something wrong with me for not resonating with a piece of media that leaves other people feel like they've just seen the face of God. And I hate how acutely I can anticipate the reactions of other people, and how oddly terrified I am of their reactions—of the part where they try to <em>unpack</em> my dislike; of the part where they encourage me to <em>just give it another try; </em>where they reassure me that <em>it actually gets better if you keep going; </em>where they start to dismiss things about my tastes or thoughts or identity because a thing didn't do a thing for me; where I "have" to see the shock and bewilderment and injury on their faces when I finally express the thing I <em>feel</em> rather than just my careful interpretation of my own feelings.<br><br>I'm no stranger to having to interpret myself for others. Autistic peers of mine nod when I describe this part of myself, because "masking" is such a known autistic phenomenon, but that word never felt particularly right to me. What I do, more than anything, is <em>translate</em> myself, <em>adapt</em> myself, as if I were a particularly strange and off-putting science fiction novel who most people were convinced couldn't be successfully brought to the screen. Sure, when I was younger, there was that autistic-cliche experience of neither knowing how to comprehend other people's behaviors or how to put my own feelings into words... and it turned out that people weren't that difficult to understand, and expressing myself wasn't particularly difficult either, and the <em>real</em> struggle is just that I've got a tremendous amount of unformed, unchecked energy that refuses to make itself immediately convenient for me or anybody else. I've got jokes where jokes oughtn't be; I've got half an hour's worth of thoughts on things nobody wants to spend half an hour with; I can be mean and sharp and cutting and combine five different strains of thought into a single vicious quip; I can be frustrated or brooding or ebullient with theatricality and viscerality, and what's more, packing all of my feelings into a single burst of intense expression happens to be the most soothing, most <em>natural</em> way of exorcising my emotions. <br><br>Many of these things, for many different reasons, prove to be Too Much for most people, and most of the time that's fine. I learned, early on, that it's my responsibility to be courteous to others. If I'm being self-aggrandizing and kind of obnoxious about it, I'll think to myself that I'm <em>blessed</em> to have a full gourmet kitchen's worth of Me in me, and shouldn't get all high-and-mighty when someone's just looking for a bowl of Cheerios. We could unpack that—is "courtesy" my rationalization of a lot of childhood trauma that taught me it wasn't safe to be openly myself? Or I rationalizing the other way around, and getting pissy at the AUDACITY of some people to find me boring or upsetting or inappropriate <em>just because I'm being all of those things?</em>—but honestly, we don't have to. I've gone down those roads, like a spice-addled Mentat computing possible futures. The important thing is that I fundamentally think we <em>all</em> translate ourselves for others, or at the very least we are all translated <em>by</em> others, and the only differences between us are whether we're aware that this happens and whether we care to handle that translation ourselves. <br><br>And art and media serve a profound role in this "translation," for most of us. Take memes and emoji. Because text is such a cripplingly limited medium, because <em>words</em> are too abstract and too finicky to really serve most of us well, we construct scaffolding for our expressions with whatever tools we have on hand. Animated GIFs, recyclable meme templates, and specific cartoon faces that mean specific cartoon things all give us quick-and-easy ways to articulate parts of us that we otherwise couldn't. Likewise, our favorite emo band or Broadway musical helps us express our feelings that are <em>so crazy intense!! </em>Our favorite workplace sitcom lets us see that we are all, in our ways, staring into the camera whenever our silly coworkers (we are <em>not</em> the silly coworker) do that silly thing they do. Our favorite South Park episode provides us with a half-baked political analysis that we <em>know</em> is so, so true, because its conclusion is that we should do the thing we wanted to do anyway, i.e. sneer at other people's opinions and asking who the fuck cares. <br><br>If I had to differentiate between "media" and "art," here—though I don't—I'd say that media is part of the permeable membrane that allows us to share a sense of collective self, literally functioning <em>as the medium</em> for social exchange, whereas art reaches us in a way that makes us more aware of a part of <em>ourselves</em>. At times, art permits us to think and feel and <em>perceive</em> in ways that we didn't realize were either possible or allowed, often by bringing out something in us that was too ephemeral, or too rarely expressed or acknowledged, for us to trust. It is <em>maddening</em> to experience something, to see something, to <em>feel</em> something, without any recognition from society at large. It's the root of alienation, in many ways—to intuit that a part of you exists, but to receive no hint that such a part of you <em>can</em> exist, to the extent that you wonder whether you're losing your mind for thinking that it's there at all, and fear exactly what would happen, exactly what looks you would receive, if you tried to make that part of you known. Especially since, in its nascent and barely-understood state, you'd doubtless fumble your words as you tried to express it; people would misinterpret you, then insist to your face that their interpretation is truer than your interpretation of yourself; they would get impatient and irritated with your attempting to birth this strange little thing; and if you dared put any real feeling into it, that feeling would be <em>very, very risky</em>, because it might be the <em>wrong</em> feeling, it might be <em>unwanted</em>, it might even <em>hurt</em> people. Art is a missive from a stranger you never knew, a stranger you will likely never meet, possibly a stranger from another part of human history altogether, telling you that you are seen, loving you for who you are, and telling you that you're not wrong for daring to think that you exist, or that you matter, or those unplanted seeds within you could grow into something wonderful, something beautiful, something <em>alive.</em><br><br>Depending on your relationship to it, the Mass-Media Event can either be heavenly or hellish. On the one hand, there's the concert where you hear words aimed directly at your soul... then look around to see a hundred thousand people <em>all feeling the same way you do</em>. On the other hand, there's the same mass gathering, only you're the only one disconnected, the only one not feeling it, as if society has concentrated as a whole to tell you once and for all that <em>you do not belong.</em> The joy on other people's faces feels like a whip to the face. They speak to you intimately, but they are speaking to <em>someone who doesn't exist,</em> and they are speaking as if that non-existent stranger has more of a right than you do to wear your own face. If you dare to admit that you don't feel the same connection in this moment that they do, they may feel betrayed and hurt. They may, in the name of love, attempt to explain to you that you <em>do</em> feel this connection, or that you <em>ought</em> to, or that your life won't be worth living if you don't devote it to making this connection happen. They might take your <em>not</em> feeling it as an attack on the fact that they <em>do</em> feel it, as if you're telling them that <em>their</em> feelings are the invalid ones for once. (And they might, secure in the numbers being on their side, form a posse to <em>beat the shit out of you</em> while they can still eradicate this enemy in their midst.)<br><br>This phenomenon isn't unique to media, and didn't <em>start</em> with media—and "mass media" wasn't really a thing until the last century or so anyway. But you can find it in religious communities, both mainstream and cultish; you can find it in nationalism, and in other political ideologies that lead to some cathartic sense of self. The stakes, if anything, have gotten smaller, which is probably a good thing, in the same way that the bloodthirstiness of football is probably preferable to the bloodthirstiness of war. In any event, it always makes me think of Don DeLillo's parable, in <em>White Noise</em>, of "the most photographed barn in America," where tourists visit a barn to take the same picture of the barn that everybody else has taken, and the experience is less of the barn than of the act of photographing it. There is the objective Thing, and then there is the subjective Experience, and then there is the mass assumption that the Experience <em>is</em> the Thing, that the Experience is in fact objective, that nobody could encounter this objective reality <em>without</em> having this subjective reaction. To use a medical term, there is <em>syndactyly:</em> the actual work and the reaction to the work fuse into one, becoming inseparable, until the reaction to the work <em>becomes</em> the work, and the work disappears, because the work could only have ever been whatever Thing engendered this Experience, and you're connecting not with something real but with something perceived, engaging not with an object but with all the other people who've engaged with it before you. You're engaging with a <em>tradition</em>, if you will, even if that tradition was only born moments ago. The actual event is a chalice of sorts, in that it <em>holds</em> its own reaction, <em>shapes</em> it, but is not, itself, it. God doesn't speak in-person at every prayer service—yet the function of the service is to share, with others, the experience and the agreement of having just heard God.<br><br>I can't begrudge people who, during any given Media Event, get to see the light. I've partaken in plenty myself—and they weren't just orgiastic, they were genuinely revelatory. I won't pretend like I've never been the enthusiast who gets <em>a little too enthusiastic</em>, just like I won't pretend that I haven't had lengthy gushy conversations with groups of people about things that we loved while one or two individuals shifted, uncomfortably, praying for <em>anything</em> else to take that conversation's place. And I am careful with who I introduce my most beloved artists to, because I know that I'm not just handing over a part of <em>my</em> soul when I do so—I'm also putting <em>their</em> soul in a place to be judged and potentially condemned. At times, I take this to somewhat silly places: I'm reticent about speaking the names of my two favorite bands out loud, because nothing is easier to casually peruse nowadays than a band's catalogue, and I don't <em>want</em> people to hear their names, get curious, and idly play a thing or two, half-listening as they do. Nothing that precious to me should be available on Spotify, for the same reason that your Tinder profile shouldn't mention the time you went down for a snack at midnight and caught your father fucking your dog.<br><br>There's a place for art and there's a place for media, and I think both are lovely in their ways, but the ongoing devaluation of art to media, and then of media to "content," continually disturbs me. About a decade ago, I started describing the kind of music I find agitating to listen to as "wallpaper:" the kind of thing that exists to exist, that fills a void that only exists because we decided that musiclessness is a kind of void, and that <em>is</em> a void because it's been purposefully drained of all the non-algorithmic meaning that music gets to have. I recently reread <a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/screwer-and-screwed-oyler">Lauren Oyler's essay about Helen DeWitt</a>, which opens with Helen saying this...<br><br></div><blockquote>Books come along, and I open them in bookstores, and you see something sort of respectably done, it’s not like it’s badly done, but it makes me want to cut my throat.</blockquote><div><br>...and I realize that she's describing the same subtle degradation, the same reduction of function to form, the same substitution of <em>interior soul</em>—whether of a work of art or of the person engaging with it—to <em>externalized experience</em>. Books become "literary events," if they're lucky. (Otherwise, they just become adaptations.) And the Event itself, as an ontological (sorry!) category, is a kind of reduction in and of itself: the replacement of something which speaks to people so deeply that it becomes an unexpected phenomenon, an accidental revolution, to something that's as predictable as weather patterns, to be emulated and replicated and otherwise <em>engineered</em>. <br><br>I have nothing against Events, and am a fan of both showmanship and the surprisingly-subtle art of working out just what will have legions of people up in arms; it just bothers me, more than a little, that our emphasis on Events is slowly eroding everything quieter, all those strange little moments of unexpected recognition, that made me such a reader when I was younger, because to this day books give me that sense of revelatory connection more reliably than any other medium possibly can. Not <em>catharsis</em>, not <em>catalysis</em>, but that almost-colorless sense of a seed finding itself planted in the soft, infinite earth.<br><br>Is any of this fair to put on Denis Villeneuve's shoulders? I could point out, facetiously, that the last director who opened himself to <em>Dune</em> was so moved by it that he abandoned science fiction forever and instead decided to create <em>Blue Velvet</em>. And you could point out, fairly, that I'm only <em>pretending</em> that that's facetious, and that I will go full-blown Fremen and start slitting throats the moment David Lynch tells me to. Because it really isn't a matter of what's <em>fair</em>. I'll say that there's a reason I avoided seeing the first <em>Dune</em> movie in theaters, and it's the same reason I avoided all of Villeneuve's other movies up to date, even as people were gushing about what a brilliant director of science fiction he is. And I'll say that one of my least favorite movies of all time was the <em>original Blade Runner</em>, the one Villeneuve liked so much he made a sequel to it, and I'll say that I disliked it for taking one of the strangest authors of science fiction ever devised and reducing it to cinematic sensationalism, no matter how "brilliantly" it managed to do so. You might go so far as to say that I was convinced I should never touch a work of science fiction by anybody who'd cite <em>Blade Runner</em> as a favorite without a handful of immediate disclaimers, and that I was also put off by the idea of someone adapting a Ted Chiang short story before that, or by the various ways that people told me <em>Arrival</em> in fact <em>improved</em> upon "Story of your Life." <br><br>I said, out loud, <em>the day that I watched three-fifths of Dune</em>, that I was probably an idiot for putting it on, and that I would probably wind up getting really agitated about its existence, and that I was putting myself at risk of getting actively mad at people who liked <em>Dune</em>. I said all those things... and then I listened to that little voice of either insecurity or doubt, the one which either keeps me from being a pompous ass or keeps me from trusting my own sense of well-being, and decided that I didn't want to obstinately miss a masterpiece based on one of my three favorite childhood works of science fiction, and<br><br>I mean<br><br>You don't have to see it this way. I saw enough of <em>Dune</em> to see all the things that people laud Villeneuve for. Given a choice between Villeneuve, Zack Snyder, and the MCU, I will take Villeneuve without hesitating, in the same way that I'd rather cough up blood than <strong>[COMPARATIVELY WORSE IMAGERY OMITTED]</strong>. I can say, mildly and breezily, that "it's not really my kind of thing!!!!" and leave it at that. Nobody really <em>wants</em> my other feelings, not even me. Nobody, least of all myself, likes how ugly those feelings get, and how trivial the thing that sparked them was.<br><br><em>Dune</em> as a book series is infamously psychedelic. The third book out of six takes place thirty years after the original, and child star Paul Chalamet is a blind old man. The fourth book skips ahead ten thousand years; the fifth book skips ahead another ten thousand years after that. Each book gets progressively harder and weirder to read, and I loved that as a child; I haven't reread them all as an adult. It's the first book that has that "blockbuster" quality that led some critic, once, to call it "science fiction's <em>Lord of the Rings," </em>an epithet that's only true inasmuch as J. R. R. Tolkien was <em>also</em> way weirder than you can possibly commit to movie form. But <em>The Lord of the Rings</em> is a blockbuster that makes for a good blockbuster, because its narrative and its themes are grandiose and broad. <em>Dune</em> takes place almost entirely inside people's heads, like is <em>explicitly</em> a book about the insides of people's heads, which is why the Lynch <em>Dune</em> consists of nonstop voiceovers and virtually no adherence to the book's plot. The outside stuff looks and feels archetypal, in part because the plot consists of Paul intentionally exploiting cultural archetypes in order to overthrow an empire, but the archetypes aren't even an <em>inversion</em> so much as they're an outright deconstruction. <br><br>Frank Herberts saw politics, psychology, and psychedelia as more-or-less the same phenomenon; he saw ecology as a way of treating planets and people as synecdochical. The richness of <em>Dune's</em> fictitious empire and the richness of <em>Dune's</em> conspiracies and the richness of <em>Dune's</em> visions of how individual human minds might mutate and evolve are all one and the same; the action in <em>Dune</em> isn't a chess game, in which people exploit the pieces available to them, so much as it's a contest to see who most fully understands the labyrinths of the human psyche. The tragedy of <em>Dune</em> isn't just that Paul brings about a jihad in order to secure his place as emperor: it's that Paul sees this jihad as the single <em>least</em> bloody path forward, that he's capable of contending with the whole of human suffering for the first time in history, and that this essentially destroys him. And the tragedy as the series goes on is that Paul finds he's too cowardly to see his vision all the way through, because no matter how hard he tries he's <em>just too human...</em> and that his son, both figuratively and literally, isn't. <br><br>I can't talk about Villeneuve's <em>Dune</em> because it doesn't exist. There's no <em>Dune</em> in it, not really, the way there's no Jesus in that one extremely white and famous painting of Jesus. People say that it's more about the <em>visual</em> evocation of <em>Dune,</em> but it wasn't that either. I was prepared to find the reveal of Baron Harkonnen thrilling, and took interest in the choice to compose him in Dutch angles without ever revealing the whole of his face, but—I don't know how to say this without feeling snide, <em>but</em>—is any single composition in a <em>Dune</em> movie ever going to compare to a single painting by Zdzisław Beksiński? Will anything in a movie that's got Dave Bautista in it ever feel as desolate, as grotesque, as alien, as one of Beksiński's evocations? Villeneuve has said in interviews that he hates the use of words in movies, and thinks that film should be sheer visual evocation rather than do something that you could do in plays... but you can easily turn that around and say that it's pointless to try and make film be visual in ways that will never rival great paintings. You'll never be able to film something as surreal as a Francis Bacon painting—you can only translate the experience of a Francis Bacon painting to a new medium. <br><br>(Renowned painter David Lynch, one of Bacon's biggest fans, taught me this. And Lynch's <em>Dune, </em>crude as it is, comes a lot closer to Beksińsky than what I saw of Villeneuve's ever did.)<br><br>It was the assassination of Leto that made me realize, instantly, that this movie hadn't been made for the sake of the <em>Dune</em> that I care about. Up until then, I hadn't quite been sure. I'd noticed certain irregularities, certain too-broad strokes, but I'm not sure <em>Dune</em> can be <em>Dune</em> without Hawat drunkenly calling Jessica a witch to her face, and I'm not sure that it can be <em>Dune</em> without the tense political dinner where Leto attempts to sniff out Harkonnen spies. The science-fiction spectacle that followed—space ships! exploding! <em>in the air!!</em>—felt like five minutes' worth of potential air sucked out into a great vacuum, and the <em>phenomenal</em> misread of the Harkonnen ornithopter situation cemented for me that I Should Not Be Watching This Movie, but the bigger issue is that the first half of <em>Dune</em> sets up the real warring forces that proceed to dominate Herbert's vision. Not the Atreides, not the Fremen, and certainly not the Harkonnens, but the different understandings of others that underlie the political players, the saboteurs, the psychological manipulators, the mental deductors, and the spiritual believers.<br><br>Nowhere is this clearer than in Villeneuve's handling of "the Voice." To misrepresent the Bene Gesserit as having mind-control superpowers doesn't just undermine the text of the original book, it <em>actively posits </em>the thing that the book's Bene Gesserit-haters superstitiously claim. The Bene Gesserit are manipulators, not only of <em>psychology, </em>but of <em>sociology</em>. They understand the ways that people are shaped by social phenomena, and manipulate circumstances, not by plumbing the depths of specific individuals, but by positioning themselves as fulcrums within specific social dynamics. In the one instance where Jessica uses the Voice on Hawat and makes him snap immediately to attention—the moment that is endlessly misinterpreted as "mind control"—Herbert stresses that the sudden shift in her voice is <em>regal</em> in nature. That is, she speaks to the part of Hawat <em>that serves a Duke.</em> He responds instantaneously, not to some deep-seated human need to submit, but <em>to the social order he already belongs to. </em>That's "the weirding way:" for Bene Gesserit to subvert societal expectation in ways that others don't think are possible, exploiting blind spots in their perception to make them follow habitual scripts <em>that shouldn't be in play</em>. <br><br>When Jessica and Paul escape the Harkonnens, it's not by brainwashing one into slitting the other's throat: it's by enacting a juvenile sequence of male possessiveness, convincing three soldiers to fight over a woman, and positioning Paul as a helpless child watching these soldiers do sadistic, erotic soldier-y things to his mother. It works because <em>nobody recognizes it as implausible</em>, because it is absolutely a social dynamic that <em>could</em> exist in that given place and time, and because the soldiers are too loose (too "animal") in their dedication to their own purpose to recognize their own malleability.<br><br>In other words, it's not just that Villeneuve's depiction is corny and stupid, although it absolutely is—even when he still had my trust, his early scene with Paul using the Voice on Jessica had me rolling my eyes. It's that to get the Voice wrong in this particular way is to misidentify the central tensions and conflicts in <em>Dune</em>, in which "animal vs human" has less to do with strength of will than with <em>recognition of context.</em> The animal gnaws off its own leg to escape a trap, not because it's weak, but because it recognizes only the immediacy of a situation; the human, as Mohiam says, stays in the trap not because of their willpower but because they recognize the trapper must return. Humans are defined by <em>cunning</em>, not by strength, and cunning is really just a byproduct of <em>perception</em>. The most powerful person in a situation is the one who perceives it the most clearly, which is how <em>Dune's</em> narrative of unplugging from social confines and its vision of The One led pretty directly to the philosophy of <em>The Matrix</em>. <em>Dune</em>, like <em>The Matrix</em>, throws in some neat kung fu to keep us interested, but—also like <em>The Matrix</em>—its interest is far more in <em>what people are</em>. Just as <em>The Matrix's</em> combat sequences are invariably showdowns between people with different perspectives on who they (and who others) are, <em>Dune</em>'s climactic brawls have nothing to do with combat elegance and everything to do with different combatants' senses of self.<br><br>That ambassadorial dinner is one of the paradoxes of adapting <em>Dune</em>, I suspect: it's a multidimensional game of intrigue played mostly between factions we've never met before and will never meet again, <em>and it doesn't affect the outcome of the narrative</em>, because the Harkonnens and Corrinos are playing a broader game than Leto realizes. Leto is fucked, Leto has no way of getting unfucked, and while Leto realizes this on one level, he doesn't understand <em>how or why</em> he's fucked. (Paradoxically, the fact that he's aware of this is precisely <em>why</em> he knows he's doomed: he's a savvy enough player to know that unawareness is fatal.) The scene exists, not for the sake of palace intrigue, but to establish the nature of father and son: it's the central moment where we see Paul from Leto's eyes, and see Leto processing Paul's recognition of dynamics <em>and</em> Paul's approach to navigating them. Furthermore, it delineates the sociological game of the Bene Gesserit from the political game of the Empire. <br><br>Sociological manipulation involves people playing roles they don't realize they're playing, a premise that Herbert lifted directly from Asimov's <em>Foundation. </em>(The Bene Gesserit are essentially Asimov's Second Foundation with a women-under-patriarchal-rule twist. One of Herbert's strokes of genius was to recognize that the empathic and social awarenesses that define the Second Foundation would go hand-in-hand with describing how women have historically wielded power in chauvinist societies—and to see how similar the paranoia towards the Second Foundation was to the paranoia aimed at women whose social toolkits were unfamiliar to men, and therefore regarded with superstition.) In Asimov's psychohistory, the outcomes of cultural crises are only predictable <em>if</em> the general population doesn't know the predicted outcome; in Herbert's world, the Bene Gesserit can only use their "powers" to the extent that other people don't know what those powers are. When Jessica reveals her hand to Hawat, she intends it as an act of vulnerability, because it robs her of her power even as it displays it. (And the tragic irony is that, while Hawat on some level recognizes this moment of vulnerability for what it is, his supremely rational ass can't overcome that superstition, paranoia, and sexism.)<br><br>Politics, on the other hand, is a game played between people who all <em>know</em> the game they're playing. It's played with full acknowledgment that, essentially, the game exists but must not be acknowledged. Leto describes the act of walking into a trap knowing that it's a trap; politics, in Herbert's vision, works the same way. <em>Dune's</em> politicians operate with a level of awareness that keeps the items in the Bene Gesserit toolkit from working, in part because the rules of politics dictate that certain things <em>must</em> be said and done. There is to be no deviation from the script, no matter how clear it becomes that the script conceals horrors, because to deviate is to immediately forfeit. (At the ambassadorial dinner, Leto is still reeling over the assassination attempt on his son; he's tormented, not just by anger or grief, but by his awareness that he can't act on a single one of his feelings without guaranteeing a worse fate for them all.)<br><br>One of the clever sleights-of-hand in Herbert's writing is that we repeatedly see Paul from the eyes of other people: scenes are written more from other people's perspectives than from his. We get intimate senses of each of their worlds, one by one, and see how differently each perceives theirs; we also seeou them perceive Paul, and each finds themselves impressed by what they find. What they <em>don't</em> see, and <em>can't</em> see, is that Paul, by existing so satisfactorily in so many overlapping worlds, extends beyond any one of their senses of reality, which sets up the moment where he erupts into his first moment of uneasy prescience, calling himself a freak in front of his increasingly-panicked mother, before setting himself on a journey through an arid wasteland that reflects the comparative infertility of humans that aren't him. <br><br>Ultimately, Paul is a human <em>navigator</em>, able to spot potential outcomes that nobody else can; like his father, his fundamental powerlessness is political in nature. He can operate like a social fulcrum, as his mother taught him, as the Bene Gesserit are convinced is the key to creating ending human suffering, but he can't escape political reality, in which people will be people, and you can't convince them to be otherwise—all you can do is position yourself within their shifting sands, like the muad'dib from whom Paul takes his Fremen name. The saga of <em>Dune</em> as a whole is one in which different profound visions of humanity contend with one another; the thrill of <em>Dune</em>, for me, has always been that it pits different ideas of what "genius" might look like against each other, and investigates the fallacies of each and every one. <br><br>(There's a reason why the Emperor, in <em>Dune</em>, is barely present: his imperial might is defined by the implacable political reality of the universe, but in no other way can he be said to meaningfully exist. He's Paul's foil, in that he rules everything and therefore has no human potential; he rules because he is the ruler this present universe can imagine, and he can't be anything <em>but</em> that ruler without losing all of his power. Paul, on the other hand, represents an almost infinite potential, but realizes that the only way to replace Shaddam's empire with his own is by making the same fundamental sacrifice.)<br><br>Herbert's writing style gets criticized a great deal, but I've never been able to see his prose as bad. His vaguenesses always strike me as intentional; his longform delves into various thought processes don't feel like meaningless tangents, <em>they feel like the novel</em>. There's a reason why the Harkonnens are described in the vaguest and most elusive ways: their horrors matter less than the role they fulfill in Herbert's society, namely that they're the "human animals" who the Reverend Mother cautions Paul about. Whereas Leto feels trapped by politics, Baron Harkonnen is liberated by them: he is a clever and vicious political player precisely because he cares for nothing but his own gain. Feyd-Rautha is a borderline-parodic take on an "alpha male" archetype, flawless according to all societal definitions but utterly lacking in the feminine energies that Jessica cultivates in Paul. (Hence the farce at the end of the book, where Paul defeats Feyd by essentially bellowing that he won't cheat his way to victory and Feyd is so surprised by this, so taken aback by the reveal that Paul could have easily killed him and chose not to, that he accidentally lets Paul kill him anyway.) Piter de Vries, such an indelible character given how shockingly little space he takes up, isn't just an amoral schemer, he takes active delight in the transgressive cruelties of his brilliant strategies. It's important that the Harkonnens are extraordinarily intelligent, in the specific ways that they are, because Herbert's project is to repeatedly examine different visions of strong and brilliant people to underscore, not just their immorality, but their <em>insufficiency</em>.<br><br>And it's this, in the end, that defines the scope of Herbert's writing. The nightmare of humans <em>as they are </em>is contrasted with the dream of humans <em>as they could be</em>—and then Herbert takes those dreams, again and again, and shows how quickly they unravel, how <em>insufficient</em> they wind up being, how much horror they birth when taken to their extremes. <em>Dune</em> is about Paul recognizing the beauty of Fremen society, despite the arid world it comes from; it's also about how the Fremen undo their own society, as they dare to dream for something better. It isn't just that Paul unleashes a terrifying genocide—it's that, ten thousand years later, the Fremen have successfully made a temperate paradise out of Arrakis, and only Duncan Idaho and Leto II realize that <em>this paradise is more barren than the original Arrakis was.</em> It's depressing when a dream turns out to be impossible, but despair-inducing to realize that the dream, fully-realized, <em>wasn't enough</em>. In <em>Dune</em>, only one possible path has anything other than the most predictable possible end.<br><br>(This mimics the evolution of <em>Foundation</em>, in which successive visions of a future Empire gradually give way to visions of even <em>less</em> doomed ones. Asimov seemingly revisited his series only when he'd come up with a more ingenious solution to the question of human utopia. Herbert, in a somewhat-meta way, made his entire series <em>about</em> that inevitable series of revisions.)<br><br>How do you take that—<em>any</em> of that—and put it up on a screen? Maybe the pessimists were right to say that you can't. Maybe only a TV series could have a shot in hell of condensing <em>Dune</em> down. But I'd rather see an <em>attempt, </em>however futile, than see no attempt at all.<br><br>The elephant in the room, when considering a <em>Dune</em> adaptation, is <em>Lawrence of Arabia</em>, which was released three years before <em>Dune's</em> publication and is rightly considered one of the most visually spectacular films ever made. <em>Lawrence, </em>too, concerns itself with a very white man ingratiating himself with a very non-white society, coming to be seen as a military leader, and essentially prophesying his own downfall. (That man, perhaps-not-coincidentally, has the most piercing blue eyes ever committed to film.) Unlike Villeneuve's <em>Dune</em>, the movie's politics are intensely sophisticated, as is its consideration of how T. E. Lawrence's entanglement with the dual societies belongs to eventually guarantees his downfall. While it's a long movie—only an hour shorter than <em>Dunes</em> 1 and 2 combined!—it manages to tell a marvelously intricate story without sacrificing visual grandeur. And it does so using a cinematic technique called...<br><br>*checks notes*<br><br>..."good writing and direction that trusts its actors to deliver."<br><br>Obviously, I'm basing this off of an incomplete viewing of Villeneuve's work. But I'm also, at the same time, basing this off of <em>ninety minutes' worth of movie</em>. I watched the entire runtime of <em>Cléo from 5 to 7</em>'s worth of <em>Dune</em> movie. By the time you watch ninety minutes of <em>Lawrence of Arabia</em>, you're in truly extraordinary territory. So I guess what I'm saying is that I trust you could convey something of <em>Dune'</em>s genuine complexity in an actual movie because I've... watched other movies before, ever. Like, ones that are good. Ones that aren't <em>Blade Runner,</em> even. IDK.<br><br>What I'm criticizing here isn't Villeneuve's skill or talent or intelligence. He clearly has all three in spades. By his definition of a <em>Dune</em> movie, he clearly made about as good a <em>Dune</em> movie as it's possible to make (although the Voice shit was still unforgivably lame). For people who were comfortable with his definition of a <em>Dune</em> movie, I'm sure the experience was magical, even if I can't imagine it being quite as magical as <em>Lawrence of Arabia</em>, or <em>Avatar 2: The Way of Water</em> (2022). <br><br>The thing I take issue with is his vision. I won't even say his <em>ambitions</em>, because he's clearly an ambitious guy: it's more a matter of where he's directing those ambitions, what ends he intends to realize. Ironically, there's a book about how important it is to have a powerful vision, about how no amount of skill or talent or intelligence will save you if your vision fails to go far enough, and about how it sometimes isn't enough to pull off the miracle of bringing fecundity to a previously-arid wasteland. I loved it a lot as a kid. I still love it, last I checked.<br><br>The other thing that bothers me, and this isn't Villeneuve's fault, is that we live in a day and age where epic science fiction movies can't be attempted unless they're going to be Events. It guarantees that the directors who rise to enough prominence to be allowed to attempt ambitious things are the ones who most Event-ify their own work. It makes adaptations increasingly appealing for movie studios, which is why there's also a <em>Foundation</em> TV series that I've been smart enough not to watch, and why, for some godforsaken reason, the future of queer cinema is apparently a filmed adaptation of the plot of <em>The Last of Us. <br><br></em>We've replaced spirituality with fandoms, and the result is a decadent and stagnating empire that feels poised to be torn apart by a horde of bloodthirsty fanatics. <del>The one person who can save us, perhaps, is a young man who once knowingly walked into a trap, had a messy and astonishing prescient vision, and has ever since walked a strange and meandering path towards humanity's salvation. A man who saw Paul Atreides, and dreamt instead of Dale Cooper.</del> sorry i know this bit is stale as hell, sorry everybody, im so sorry<br><br>Leto II had a vision of humanity splintering off in so many directions that it could never again succumb to the stale decadence of sociological predictability. I guess that, in my way, I wish for the same thing, in the form of us either re-discovering Art beneath the decaying carcass of Media, Events, and Content, or at the very least generating enough Media that I don't have to be inundated with people talking about the same goddamn movie for a month and a half at a time. Or perhaps the sleeper will awaken, and I'll just finally stop spending time listening to strangers gab on the internet. Stranger things have happened.<br><br>Anyway, if any of this strikes you as wrong-footed, just keep in mind that I also can't stand the <em>Howl's Moving Castle</em> adaptation, for reasons involving similar deep emotional investments in Diana Wynne Jones. And that one was done by Hiyao Miyazaki, a director who makes Villeneuve look like a Zack Snyder porno by comparison. Nothing I say should ever be construed as meaningful, important, or correct. Have a lovely day.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/351112024-02-10T02:40:45Z2024-02-10T02:40:46ZThe Sight and Sound 100: an incomplete series of capsule reviews<div class="trix-content">
<div>In late 2022, <em>Sight and Sound</em> released its once-a-decade list of the greatest films of all time. The list is voted on by slightly under 2,000 film critics, making it a <em>somewhat </em>more rigorous survey than most, and this decade's was a doozy: thanks, in part, to the inclusion of significantly more women and non-white critics, rankings were shaken up more than they've been in the last eighty years of the list's existence, including the controversial toppling of both Alfred Hitchcock's <em>Vertigo</em> and Orson Welles' <em>Citizen Kane</em> as Top Movie Ever by Chantal Akerman's <em>Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles</em>, a three-and-a-half-hour-long film about three days in the life of a widowed housewife. <br><br>The Philadelphia Film Society made the bold, somewhat-nuts choice to screen the entire 100-film series this year; upon learning this, I made the bold, somewhat-nuts choice to try and watch the entire series in theaters. SPOILER ALERT: this did not happen!! But the dozens I <em>did</em> see were frequently, <em>relentlessly</em>, staggering experiences. I've lost track of how many times I left a theater with my mind absolutely reeling; my entire conception of cinema as a medium has been torn apart, stitched back together, and torn apart again, more times than I can count. <br><br>I've long been a fan of <em>certain directors</em>, and have studied film enough to call myself a movie <em>enthusiast</em>, but I wouldn't say I've ever loved film itself. This year has changed that for me. I've never been as awestruck by the potential of cinema as a medium, or as deeply aware of cinema as a specifically <em>twentieth-century </em>invention, as I've become over this year. The history of film is inextricably entwined with the history of the 1900s: it marked the birth of mass media and pop culture, grappled with the horrors of both World Wars and the Holocaust, and played an integral part in the evolution of international capitalism as we know it today. The world which now feels inevitable to us had barely been born at the start of cinema; over the century, film commented on it, wondered about it, and reacted with hope and dread as a new kind of human existence took shape. It reflects upon what was and what is; at its best, it suggests possibilities for <em>what might still become.</em><br><br>You can view the full list <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time">here</a>. I'm offering it because I don't have the discipline to include write-ups of what each film is, when it was made, and <em>where</em> it was made. A hundred movies is a lot, even if I <em>did</em> miss half of them. And I'm not offering my takes on them as definitive, or even as the final say on what <em>I</em> think about each movie. My impression of each one was informed by the happenings of my year; I was more prepared for some than I was for others. These are meditations more than reviews: I hope that, in the writing of these, I wind up expressing something more than I consciously know how to. <em>Much like the act of filmmaking itself</em> jfc ok lets get started shall we<br><br></div><h1>#100: Get Out</h1><div>DNW, though I've seen it half a dozen times already. This one's inclusion on the list feels more like recency bias than anything: I deeply enjoy it, but I'd be surprised if it was still on the list a decade from now. I wouldn't mind if I was wrong, though!<br><br><br></div><h1>#99: The General</h1><div>DNW, because I didn't learn about the PFS series until after it had screened. I was very sad about this, because Buster Keaton is brilliant, <em>The General</em> is a goddamned delight, and I would have loved to see this with an audience. I'm sad that this ranked as low as it did.<br><br><br></div><h1>#98: Black Girl</h1><div>DNW (see above)<br><br><br></div><h1>#97: Tropical Malady</h1><div>I rushed to theaters to catch this one about two hours after I discovered what PFS was doing. I knew absolutely nothing about it going in; I left convinced that I <em>needed</em> to see as many of these films as I humanly could, that to miss a single one might be to miss an opportunity, and an experience, that I couldn't possibly fathom going in. I preferred the alternate title of this movie, <em>Strange Beast</em>, because it is a literal chimera: half an almost ambient exploration of the tender, budding relationship between two shy, quiet men, and half a far more savage and magical story of the wilderness in which they get lost. The moments I remember most vividly are the kinds of tiny moments that movies rarely capture, yet which immediately felt almost like memories: the slow way that one person finds his head in another's lap; a singer performing against a cheap, garish backdrop. For the first time out of many, I found myself in what now feels like the most crucial state of mind for any kind of moviegoing: a sheer wonder at <em>what could possibly come next.</em><br><br><br></div><h1>#96: Once Upon a Time in the West</h1><div>DNW. I think I missed every last Western this year, completely by accident.<br><br><br></div><h1>#95: A Man Escaped</h1><div>DNW<br><br><br></div><h1>#94: The Earrings of Madame de...</h1><div>A recurring theme this year, for me, was being taken aback by just how <em>goddamn delightful</em> black-and-white movies could be—and by how unexpectedly poignant their emotional depths often were. What starts out feeling almost like a magic trick—a pair of earrings bounces from owner to owner, slowly drawing them all together in almost clockwork ways—slowly turns into a tragedy, one that's somehow equally tragic for every participant involved. I was struck by the madame's husband, an aristocratic military general who is possessive and controlling of her almost by default, but who is shockingly self-aware and gracious—at times, taking a joke played at his expense and extending it without anyone else realizing, and at other times, plaintive as he tries to point out how trapped by circumstance everybody seems to be, unable to control his own destiny, and trying to get everyone <em>else</em> to recognize how inescapable their fates will be, one way or the other.<br><br><br></div><h1>#93: The Leopard</h1><div>The extended party sequence at the end of this historical drama later inspired the opening of <em>The Godfather</em>, among other films. I knew of the sequence going in, but was still caught off-guard by how my heart stopped almost the moment the party began. A movie about the end of aristocracy and the beginning of democracy as seen from an aging duke's point of view, the film takes pains to show the duke's graciousness, his awareness that his era is over, that a new world is taking place. He is determined to make the transition from old world to new as painless as he knows how. Yet he is unprepared for the moment when, all at once, the world leaves him behind; the present belongs to the youth, as foolish and cruel as they can be, and what he thought was a noble mission—to record the wisdom of a now-gone era, to help his descendants learn from his mistakes—is abruptly revealed as horrible folly. The new generation will leave the old to rot, an act which would be vicious if it wasn't so absentminded. The duke recognizes this, too, and with his final moments of relevance, acts not to forgive but to at least endure his own suffering, to make his pain his own rather than bequeath it on those yet to come.<br><br><br></div><h1>#92: Ugetsu</h1><div>DNW. I think it was on the same day as <em>The Leopard</em>, and <em>The Leopard</em> was very long.<br><br><br></div><h1>#91: Yi Yi</h1><div>This three-hour slice of life left me almost entirely unmoved, but I felt bad about it. I wasn't sure whether I just wasn't in the mood to appreciate it on its own terms, or whether the things it was doing were things I'd seen done better in books or even in television. I still don't know. I attempted to rewatch it the next day, and enjoyed the first hour of it quite a bit; then life called, and I put it down, and I never picked it back up.<br><br><br></div><h1>#90: Parasite</h1><div>I watched this at home with my girlfriend, snuggled up on the couch, a couple of weeks before its official screening; the PFS showed it in black-and-white, and I'd have loved to catch it there. An absolute delight of a movie, even on third-or-fourth watch. Its messages about class warfare and capitalism are there, but first and foremost it's simply a deeply enjoyable movie, equal parts heist and satire, family drama and thriller. It's genius that its ending <em>only</em> works if you take the deeper messages into account—a message about the state of the world becomes, instead, a story about how ostensibly well-meaning people can nonetheless inflict horrible suffering upon their "lessers" out of sheer obliviousness, and about how a horrible crime can, through a certain lens, be seen instead as an inevitable act of almost-justice.<br><br><br></div><h1>#89: Chungking Express</h1><div>I don't think I understood how much sheer <em>fun</em> Wong Kar-wai is, but he seems determined to make every shot and every cut as dynamic and playful and surprising as it possibly can be. I'd compare him to Edgar Wright, which would be high praise in and of itself, but Kar-wai's work is more transcendent, less focused on mere entertainment than on <em>sensation</em>. The moral of this movie, as far as I can tell, is that if you love somebody, it is indelibly your right to sneak into their home and to blast "California Dreamin'" as loudly and as many times as you can get away with; and if somebody blasts this song at you, you had better take the fucking hint.<br><br><br></div><h1>#88: The Shining</h1><div>DNW, though I've seen it enough times before to last a lifetime. I just do not enjoy Stanley Kubrick, with maybe one exception (and it isn't this). Later in the year, I watched my first Andrei Tarkovsky film, knowing that Tarkovsky was both frequently compared to Kubrick as a filmmaker <em>and</em> that Tarkovsky hated Kubrick's guts, and... Tarkovsky had a point imo, sorry Stanley<br><br><br></div><h1>#87: Histoire(s) du cinéma</h1><div>Jean-Luc Godard was the biggest revelation for me all year long, which is funny, because his first movie on the list was this: a 4.5-hour long documentary series that is almost a self-parody of avant-garde French pretension. Yet I was blown away. Godard's narrative is at once oblique and simple: it feels like he's talking circles 'round what he really wants to say, but partly that's because he seems to want to state certain straightforward theses, not out loud, but by demonstrating their truth. Even at his most antagonistic, he understands how to be fun on levels that even the <em>fun</em> Great Directors barely seem to touch; his message weaves through the futility of cinema wanting to stand against the horrors of the Holocaust, through declarations that Alfred Hitchcock may have been a more powerful man than Adolf Hitler, and ends on such a shockingly tender and personal note that I found myself in tears, and deeply confused as to why. I'm going to tell myself I intend to rewatch this again right away, and I'll forget to do so for another 4 or 5 years, and then I'll finally rewatch it and beat myself up for not <em>immediately</em> returning to it the day after. It feels like a part of myself changed that day, and like I've spent the rest of the year rediscovering who and what I am.<br><br><br></div><h1>#86: Pierrot le fou</h1><div>The first movie this year that made me wonder whether I'd just discovered my new all-time favorite film. I'll be abusing the word "delightful" in this write-up, no doubt, but seriously: this film was more inventive and fun than I knew it was possible to be outside of cartoons. It's a perfect coincidence that the film Godard wrote and shot during his divorce to its lead actress ranked <em>just</em> above his documentary series, made decades later, about his belief that art's most fundamental purpose was to convert deep feeling into sheer style: this is as sexy and classy and 60s and French as sexy, classy 60s French cinema can be, yet all that feels like a counterpoint to the underlying sorrow of its story, which is told in as amusing a fashion as a sad story can be told. Absurdity will be our downfall; sincerity will be our downfall too. It's hard to decide whether this film <em>is</em> chauvinist or is <em>about</em> a chauvinist, because it's both—it's a movie about Godard getting his heart broken, and it's a movie acknowledging that he probably deserved it, and in between he tosses out gags so inspired that a single scene alone seems to have been the inspiration for Mel Brooks' entire career.<br><br><br></div><h1>#85: The Spirit of the Beehive</h1><div>It goes without saying that the Sight and Sound 100 contains an awful lot of gorgeous cinematography, yet this might have been the single most beautiful film of the year: everything about it is stunningly eerie, as if an oil painting had come to life and drawn you into its strange, unsettling depths. It's a war story told from the fringes of the war, where two children are young enough to confuse genuine bloodshed with Frankenstein. Either way, the world seems wondrous to them; either way, they aren't grown up enough to understand the way the world "does" work, which means that they find themselves believing in fiction on the one hand, and are all-too-ready to accept disturbing non-fictions on the other. Truth be told, I don't remember its exact plot: I mostly remember the way its oils seeped into my skin, staining me in ways that can't be washed away.<br><br><br></div><h1>#84: Blue Velvet</h1><div>I talk about David Lynch being my favorite director more than anybody should ever talk about anything, but at the same time, I have a curious tendency to remember his movies as being cheaper and worse than they are until I rewatch them. No amount of viewings helps me remember just how profound of a filmmaker he is, in part because he has an unparalleled genius in capturing the intricate, minute shifts in people's faces; his scripts can seem broad and hokey on their surface, but he can pack an essay's worth of variation into the way somebody says a single line, capturing a person's deepest, strangest feelings even if they'll never quite know what they meant to say out loud. He's the only director whose depiction of eros I have ever found interesting, but the <em>real</em> fun of watching a Lynch film in theaters is seeing how randomly any given audience seems to laugh at certain moments and not others. In this showing of <em>Blue Velvet</em>, a scene that I've always found excruciatingly upsetting got maybe the biggest laugh of the movie... and the horrifying thing is, as disturbing as that scene still was, I also knew exactly why everybody seemed to find it so damn funny. (Yet another facet of Lynch's virtuosity is: he understands exactly why such horrifying things could make a person want to laugh.)<br><br><br></div><h1>#83: Céline and Julie Go Boating</h1><div>There's a whole subcategory of films in this series that might just be described as: Witchy Shit™. This movie is a great depiction of young women being friends, and it's a just-as-great depiction of never-quite-consummated desire and love between said women, but beyond that, it is simply <em>occult as hell</em>, and I was fucking <em>here </em>for it. Even before the real Witchy Shit started to happen, every aspect of how Julie and Céline communicate feels like they're performing a ritual neither of them fully understand; later, they find themselves seemingly transported into the plot of another movie, which they alternate between laughing at, trying to decipher, and trying to alter altogether. If I watch this movie enough times, it too might become my favorite film ever—and I somewhat regret that I've only seen it sober.<br><br><br></div><h1>#82: A Matter of Life and Death</h1><div>Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger—better known as The Archers—feel like the kind of lost-gem filmmakers that I wish I'd discovered as a young kid. Their movies are simultaneously campy, silly, serious, and stirring: everything about them is batshit, in a way that makes them feel weirdly modern. This movie opens with a downed fighter pilot contacting a woman via radio and seemingly falling in love with her mid-crash; that the movie then shifts to one of the silliest, fruitiest depictions of an afterlife I've ever seen feels almost like a bonus. I feel like Douglas Adams knew this movie very well: it feels like his exact kind of heartfelt nonsense. The world needs more of this joy in it, idk.<br><br><br></div><h1>#81: Modern Times</h1><div>DNW. Somehow, I missed every single Chaplin movie this year, which leaves me in a funny place: I <em>know</em> I've seen at least three Charlie Chaplin movies in my lifetime, but I can't remember which they were. Nonetheless, my real takeaway remains this: Buster Keaton was robbed.<br><br><br></div><h1>#80: A Brighter Summer Day</h1><div>Much to my shame, I had to walk out of this, the second movie on the list by Edward Yang (after <em>Yi Yi</em>, above). I simply could not stay awake, for reasons that was not entirely this film's fault. Yang is, weirdly, the director whose films I least responded to this year, yet feel most convinced that I ought to give more of a try. True greatness is defined, in part, by ineffability, and the fact that Yang feels so compelling to me despite my literal inability to be compelled seems of a piece with the rest of my year: whether I <em>liked</em> it doesn't affect whether it <em>stuck</em> with me, and the film-and-a-half I saw by Yang most certainly stuck.<br><br><br></div><h1>#79: Sátántangó</h1><div>One of the most infamous films of the year, due to its seven-and-a-half-hour(!) runtime—eight-and-a-half, once you factor in intermissions and a much-needed dinner break. I <em>trained</em> for this goddamn movie, the way that some people train for a marathon. Turns out I didn't need to: this was one of the most surprisingly watchable, enjoyable movies that I saw all year, even though it contains multiple real-time sequences of people walking slowly, silently down rainy, muddy streets. Its story feels like it should be simple, yet somehow it isn't: a village of impoverished people is robbed even blinder, somehow, and then its residents are betrayed worse than <em>that</em>. And the movie's length is used, not to embellish this story, but to ground it: these people aren't exactly fools, but the small world they know is the <em>only</em> thing they know, which makes the larger-scale atrocities of their place in time almost impossible to comprehend. The moment they leave their village behind, they are entirely at the mercies of those who better understand what's happening. And the triumph of the movie is that it manages to make those long, dreary walks in the rain feel like hope, because that road presents the possibility of a better world; you feel it, even when you know all-too-well that no hope lies at the end of it, even when you knew going in that this was a story about inevitable despair.<br><br><br></div><h1>#78: Sunset Boulevard</h1><div>The greatest classics have a deep weirdness to them—see what I said about ineffability, in #80 above—that keeps them from ever feeling like the tropes they've long since become. And <em>Sunset Boulevard</em> is genuinely great. I regret that I was on the verge of passing out when I saw this one: while the first half struck me as extraordinary, my tiredness meant that the second half flew by me as disappointingly inevitable. That's my fault, not this movie's. Luckily, better Billy Wilder movies were yet to come.<br><br><br></div><h1>#77: Sansho the Bailiff</h1><div>DNW. I think I was traveling.<br><br><br></div><h1>#76: Imitation of Life</h1><div>DNW, and I'm still beating myself up over it.<br><br><br></div><h1>#75: Spirited Away</h1><div>DNW, for the simple reason that I've seen it a dozen times. There's a reason why Hiyao Miyazaki is the only(?) animated director on this list, and why he's on it twice.<br><br><br></div><h1>#74: My Neighbor Totoro</h1><div>Somehow I'd never seen this movie until this year. It was a privilege and a joy to see it on the big screen. While the other movies I've seen of Miyazaki have at least the <em>trappings</em> of plot—conflict, antagonists, motive—<em>My Neighbor Totoro</em> has next to none, and its genius is that it doesn't need any. Its world is so wondrous, every moment spent within it such a marvel, that it earns your attention without seemingly asking for it: a triumph of sheer generosity. And in a world that often makes it feel as if you can only be worth others' attention by manipulating it out of them, that's a powerful message in and of itself. So is seeing a film that's primarily about children who freely give their attention to the world around them, because the world is inherently worth their minding.<br><br><br></div><h1>#73: Journey to Italy</h1><div>DNW, and feel bad about it, because Godard made such a big fuss about what an atypical and important director Roberto Rossellini is in <em>Histoire(s) du cinéma.</em> When I said that every missed movie this year felt like a serious loss, I meant it; I look forward to spending 2024 catching up.<br><br><br></div><h1>#72: L'avventura</h1><div>When I was in film school, I watched Michelangelo Antonioni's <em>Blow-Up, </em>and got next to nothing out of it. Now that I've seen <em>L'avventura</em>, I feel like there's maybe a bit of a trend. While this movie had some striking cinematography, and while it had a few moments that I think will really stay with me—nothing like realizing your friend is missing and hunting for them on the jagged cliffs overlooking a sea so turbulent that its roar never dies down—this was one of the only movies this year that really left me wanting to look at my watch, wondering when I'd earned the right to go home. (As a general rule, it feels like a lot of stuffy films by self-important men lost a lot of purchase on the S&S list this year; in 1962, it made it as high as #2, and now here it is, fighting for its life, after placing 21st in 2012. From the contemporary reviews I read of it, it seems a lot of critics were struck by its depiction of alienation in the early 60s; maybe now its message feels less original, or maybe it feels flat-out less <em>good.</em>)<br><br><br></div><h1>#71: Metropolis</h1><div>DNW, sadly, but isn't this movie's story such a miracle? When I first watched it, it was assumed that vast swathes of the movie were lost forever; nowadays, you can see it almost entirely as it was first composed. And it's still stylish as all hell.<br><br><br></div><h1>#70: The Gleaners and I</h1><div>DNW. How did I miss this one? Why am I such a disgrace?<br><br><br></div><h1>#69: The Red Shoes</h1><div>The Archers strike again! The ballet at the center of this movie is such a goddamn marvel that I completely forgot I knew the fairy tale this film's story comes from, and was somehow totally surprised at how it ended. Again, these are directors who I wish we focused on more nowadays: it feels delightful that this movie is such a masterwork in crowd-pleasing <em>and also</em> finds time to stage an absolutely breathtaking and surreal blend of virtuosic choreography and film-editing magic. (The real joy, I think, lies in how the genuinely-compelling dance means the movie trickery catches you off guard, and then the brilliant movie magic means you're ready to be ensnared by the stunning dance all over again. The theme of this list might as well have been "chimeras.")<br><br><br></div><h1>#68: La Jetée</h1><div>DNW; was shown as a double feature with #70.<br><br><br></div><h1>#67: Andrei Rublev</h1><div>I've been meaning to watch this film for over a decade, and was still shocked at how good it was. Tarkovsky is similar to Kubrick in how willing he is to let the camera act as a detached observer of human behavior; he is different from Kubrick in how much he enjoys writing genuinely compelling drama, and how often he makes reality seem almost like a fairy tale. Yet, like Kubrick, he shies away from letting his drama congeal into full-blown narrative: his striking dramatic tension has a way of ebbing and flowing, sometimes leaving an impression without a conclusion, and other times working as an almost moralist fable. I wasn't in the right state of mind to properly take this movie in, but even so left feeling delighted and awestruck—and that was <em>before</em> its final passages pulled some unexpected trickery that made me want to cackle and clap my hands like a tiny, overjoyed baby. Film critics talk about how meditative and thoughtful his movies are, but they should honestly talk more about what fantastic showmanship Tarkovsky's got, and also about how sexy his shit is. (I love that we never see Andrei do the painting that he's literally remembered for, but that Tarkovsky <em>did</em> focus on what really matters, i.e. making sure Andrei's got insanely fuckable cheekbones. What a historical <em>babe.)</em><br><br><br></div><h1>#66: Touki Bouki</h1><div>The further down we go on this list, the more upset I get at the movies I missed. DNW :(<br><br><br></div><h1>#65: Casablanca</h1><div>The funniest thing about this movie to me is how the opening crawl makes it seem like it's going to be the kind of film you need to know history and geography for, the kind of thing where complex geopolitical tensions shape the entire narrative of the film. Then literally anything else happens, and you realize that the crawl was there to get all the fiber out of the way so we could focus on the things that really matter: namely, sharp quips, hating Nazis, and pretty people with sad eyes. Umberto Eco was probably correct about all of the reasons why, on some levels, Casablanca is not exactly a profound or politically astute film; at the same time, this was a movie made in the literal middle of World War II, written and directed by people who had a lot of reasons to hate and fear Nazis, and that defiant sense of weary people coming together to do the right thing for goddamn once is still a heck of a drug. (One of the many takeaways from this year, for me, is that greatness is inherently contradictory: a lot of these movies were made by people who wrote manifestos arguing that the other people on this movie were dreadful and banal and probably kicked puppies, yet here all those people are, together despite their best efforts.)<br><br><br></div><h1>#64: The Third Man</h1><div>HOW DID I MISS THIS ONE<br>I mean, I've seen this movie before, but <em>man</em> I would have liked to see it in the context of, say, everything that I just wrote about <em>Casablanca</em>.<br><br><br></div><h1>#63: Goodfellas</h1><div>DNW. Somehow, I managed not to see <em>Goodfellas</em> until I was, like, 29, and I'm probably a healthier man for missing out on it till then. I missed every last Scorsese movie on this list, and that makes me pretty sad. But <em>Goodfellas</em> was not at <em>all </em>the film of his I most regret not catching.<br><br><br></div><h1>#62: Daughters of the Dust</h1><div>DNW. Idk, I think I just had a lot going on that month.<br><br><br></div><h1>#61: Moonlight</h1><div>DNW. True story: when I was still in high school, my drama teacher took our class on a field trip to see Tarell Alvin McCraney's early play <em>The Brothers Size,</em> where it left an indelible impression; teenagers, as a general rule, are not supposed to see theatre that good. So the fact that one of McCraney's play got adapted into a movie, and that that movie became one of the most popular and beloved movies of the <em>decade</em>, and that it also <em>won the Academy Award for Best Picture</em>, and that I nonetheless somehow haven't seen it yet... folks, it baffles me too. "I'm going to rectify that this year, at long last," I said to myself every week for the first half of this year, and then I didn't.<br><br><br></div><h1>#60: La Dolce Vita</h1><div>Fellini, along with Antonioni, is one of the self-important fellas whose movies slid precipitously down the Sight and Sound 100 this year; unlike Antonioni, I could at least see why Fellini had made it on the list in the first place. The movie's message certainly resonated; certain of its passages moved me. Anita Ekberg portrays maybe the sexiest woman-as-object-of-desire to ever grace a film, and my take on her was that her simple inability to care about the men trying to drip off her from all angles suggested that she was aware of the banal inadequacy of the celebrity-and-sex culture that surrounded her, and refused to take part. Later, I read other critics' take on her, and was surprised at how many of them seemed to think that <em>she</em>, not her paparazzi, was the banal one; still later, I saw Fellini's <em>8½,</em> and found myself wondering whether Fellini sided more with me than the critics. I'd have much rather seen a movie that followed her than Marcello; if it's not already self-evident how vacuous everything about his lifestyle is, I'm not sure that a 3-hour movie about his vacuity is going to help any.<br><br><br></div><h1>#59: Sans Soleil</h1><div>DNW. Seems like I'd have really liked it. Instead, I chose to watch Fellini. Blech.<br><br><br></div><h1>#58: Sherlock Jr.</h1><div>DNW. Here I am, loudly advocating for Buster Keaton, and I didn't even catch this one in theaters. Actually, I think I was in Maine while this one was playing. Don't @ me.<br><br><br></div><h1>#57: The Apartment</h1><div>DNW in theaters, but I rented it to watch on my own. Of all the Billy Wilder films this year, this one was by far my favorite: like <em>Madame de...</em>, it was such an inventive contraption that I was caught off-guard by the depths of its depression and melancholy, which felt altogether more contemporary than I was expecting. It's a movie about several kinds of alienation, all of which still feel relevant today. And its ending, in which all that is banished and love seems to take root, feels like a kind of hopefulness I'd love to see more of nowadays—in part because the way it depicts that love feels a lot more fun, a lot more like two people fondly and rightly giving each other shit, than the mawkish kind that endlessly persists.<br><br><br></div><h1>#56: Battleship Potemkin</h1><div>DNW; was still in Maine<br><br><br></div><h1>#55: Blade Runner</h1><div>DNW; I could say that I was recovering from my Maine trip, but the more-honest story is that (a) I have never once enjoyed a Ridley Scott movie, and (b) I saw this movie in high school and was so offended by how much <em>worse</em> it was than the original Philip K. Dick novel, how devoid it was of Dick's hall-of-mirrors ingenuity, that I went home trying to start a fight with my father, whose favorite movie is <em>Blade Runner</em>, only to be foiled by my father's endless love and generous compassion. <br><br><br></div><h1>#54: Le Mépris</h1><div>You know how I went on and on about Godard earlier? Well, this movie was screened by the PFS for <em>four times longer</em> than every other film on this list. And somehow, I <em>still</em> fucking missed it. I reminded myself multiple times <em>during its theater run</em> that it was currently in theaters, that I had to go see it, that I would beat myself up for <em>ages</em> if I missed it, and then... I dunno, my late summer and early-to-mid fall was just a lot.<br><br><br></div><h1>#53: News From Home</h1><div>Chantal Akerman blew everyone's minds by showing up at #1 with <em>Jeanne Dielman</em>. Ever since watching <em>Pierrot le fou</em>, I'd been anticipating Akerman, since the first thing I discovered after I walked out of the theaters <em>gleeful</em> over it was an interview where Akerman said that <em>Pierrot</em> was what made her realize she wanted to make film; "Aha," I thought, "a fellow pilgrim." Akerman's only other film on the list was this documentary, an almost somber film featuring shots of New York City that never really focus on individuals, mixed with voiceover letters from her mother, and it shook me to my core. One shot in it had my jaw slowly falling open, involuntarily, because I simply could not imagine how Akerman had caught it. I don't know how she caught <em>any</em> of it. And at the same time, I don't know how I'm so surprised, because none of the shots seem like they're trying to do anything remotely fancy; they are simply positioned in such intelligent, thoughtful ways that they capture exactly as much as they could possibly capture, in ways that make the entire movie feel... not spiritual, exactly, but <em>abundant in spirit</em>. You could watch this movie every week instead of attending religious services, and it wouldn't feel like blasphemy. <br><br><br></div><h1>#52: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul</h1><div>DNW, and I regret it. This isn't performative regret, FYI: I'm just over here feeling gently bad about myself.<br><br><br></div><h1>#51: The Piano</h1><div>DNW. How is <em>Under the Lake</em> the only Campion I've ever seen? The composer of this film even collaborated with my favorite musician at some point. <em>I should have seen this</em>—like, not just this year, but in general. What the hell.<br><br><br></div><h1>#50: The 400 Blows</h1><div>I deeply loved virtually every French New Wave film that I saw this year, almost as much as I came away from virtually every 60s Italian film unmoved. <em>The 400 Blows</em> felt intimate and personal in a way that Godard's movies don't; it's quieter in the way it rejects and invents film techniques, but nonetheless watching it felt like seeing the birth of a new kind of filmmaking, one that was more intimate and heartfelt than cinema before it ever seems. It's also a stunning instance of a bunch of child actors absolutely knocking it out of the park. I wanted to give Truffaut a hug; I was delighted to learn, reading up about this movie, that he seemed as generous and lovely a person as he was a filmmaker. Also, the opening sequence of <em>Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory</em> was totally just the filmmakers doing a pastiche of this movie, right? It's gotta be.<br><br><br></div><h1>#49: Wanda</h1><div>DNW, and I'm pissed off about it. It seems fun as <em>hell</em>.<br><br><br></div><h1>#48: Ordet</h1><div>DNW. I have no opinions on having not seen this movie.<br><br><br></div><h1>#47: North by Northwest</h1><div>One of the best times you can possibly have in a movie theater. One of the most thrilling sequences you can ever watch in a movie theater (the cornfield bit—if you know, you know). One of the most fun Bond villains ever written in a non-James Bond movie. Arguably the single funniest ending shot in film history.<br><br><br></div><h1>#46: The Battle of Algiers</h1><div>DNW. I remember loving it in film school, but time has eroded all memory of it. Letterboxd suggests it would have been a blast, though.<br><br><br></div><h1>#45: Barry Lyndon</h1><div>The frustrating thing about not being a Kubrick fan is that, on every conceivable level, his films are immaculate. I'd been meaning to see <em>Barry Lyndon</em> for a good decade before I finally caught it, and so many things about it stand out to me: the incredible way in which he gets tricked into fleeing his home, and the way that he gets robbed immediately after; the deadpan war scene, in which soldiers numbly march their way into bullets (after which Barry quietly decides he'd rather be a deserter, then gets caught by enemies and realizes that <em>actually</em> being a flat-out traitor is where it's at). It's visually tremendous; its character arcs are highly original; its social commentary is killer; it is very, very funny, in its straight-faced way. But none of it gets under my skin. I appreciate it on every technical and conceptual level, and I understand that I <em>should</em> be laughing, I <em>should</em> be moved. But I don't. And his movies are too long for me to sit still and politely appreciate; for that kind of investment, I want to feel more than I do. Maybe this one will grow on me, and I was tempted to see it a second time when it screened as part of a different series, but my experience with Kubrick is that I almost never know how to look past the trees to see the forest, and it's a real shame.<br><br><br></div><h1>#44: Killer of Sheep</h1><div>The one film that PFS didn't manage to screen this year. For once, I am blameless.<br><br><br></div><h1>#43: Stalker</h1><div>Why didn't this movie feel more pretentious? It's so goddamn <em>abstract</em>, and so much of it consists of people roaming through forests yelling about mystic elements that <em>might</em> exist, without the film's ever backing those elements up. Yet I <em>really</em> goddamn liked it. The opening bits set in a militarized zone were almost ballet-like in their portrayal of military movements set in opposition to the trespassers; the ending sequences were as close as I've ever seen in-color cinema get to German Expressionism. And the vagueness always felt <em>meticulous,</em> as if Tarkovsky knew exactly which ambiguities he meant to preserve at all times. Of the three films of his I saw this year, this was probably the one that stirred me the least, but the bar is so high that I still walked out of this movie and bought the book he wrote on filmmaking. I couldn't not. That man works on a higher plane than almost everybody, and on a <em>different</em> plane than <em>literally</em> everybody. It's a miracle that his movies are so fun despite being so weird.<br><br><br></div><h1>#42: Rashomon</h1><div>From one perspective, DNW. From another perspective, I watched this years and years ago, in a way that still means DNW. From a third perspective, I briefly found myself wondering whether I'd watched this this year, before recalling that I had not. There is no perspective from which I <em>did</em> in fact, see this movie this year, yet somehow the accounts all vary nonetheless.<br><br><br></div><h1>#41: Bicycle Thieves</h1><div>DNW. I remember liking this one in film school too. I'm also only just remembering that I got COVID in July, which is probably why I missed so many things.<br><br><br></div><h1>#40: Rear Window</h1><div>Funnily enough, I'd never found this movie compelling before! This time around, something about it finally landed: it's such a meticulously-constructed entertainment, and each of its pieces operates on a different register. What I'd never noticed before was how gradually the central mystery swims into view, because all of this movie's pieces are given an equal weight to that primary story; <em>that</em>, to me, feels like <em>Rear Window</em>'s masterstroke. (I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I was struck, this time, about the two-dimensionality of each window, belying depths deeper within: it's like a series of silent films in color, knitted together to reflect a story about their onlooker's life. And if that's not a fantastic metaphor for how our lives are entertained by the flotsam and jetsam of art and media and entertainment that we take in, partly intentionally and partly unwittingly, I don't know what is.)<br><br><br></div><h1>#39: Some Like It Hot</h1><div>I got to see this movie as a birthday present to myself. This time, I was caught up in how terrific all the early sequences are, <em>before</em> the central premise really takes off; when this movie still feels more-or-less like a very funny crime thriller, it holds up marvelously. Then men disguise themselves as women, the movie gets campy and gay, and Marilyn Monroe shows up in such a staggeringly funny performance that it reminds us how wasted she was as a sex icon. (This time, as always, I find myself less interested in her sexy song number than I am in literally everything else she does.) And one of Wilder's masterstrokes is that, once all that picks up, the crime bits are all but forgotten: the movie always feels like it ends half an hour earlier than I'm expecting, because it takes all the "obligatory" shit that modern movies would feel compelled to include, chortles, and throws it all out. If this is Wilder's highest-rated movie on this list, maybe that's why: not just the boldness of its inclusions, but the boldness of what it realizes it can omit.<br><br><br></div><h1>#38: Breathless</h1><div>To be honest, I wish this wasn't Godard's most famous film. It was his first feature film, and it's by far his most primitive, and its fame doesn't do him justice. At the same time, it's impossible for it <em>not</em> to be his most famous film, because it singlehandedly invented the language and tone of modern cinema. Simply put, this is the first movie that really feels like the kind of movie that still gets made today. And that's layered on top of what Pauline Kael identifies as the first film about people who... well... grew up watching film. Its main character isn't a cool, hardened criminal: he's a young man who's seen movies about cool, hardened criminals and wants nothing more in life than to emulate one. Well, he wants one thing more, and it's to be loved by the woman he loves—but he doesn't know how to find that, in part because his love for her is the same "love" he'd feel for a romantic lead in a movie he was watching, and in part because he doesn't really know how to drop the act. She, in turn, is the very image of sophistication—but is she sophisticated because she wants nothing and is amused by everything? Or is she sophisticated because she realizes how illusory, how make-believe, the world around her is? She betrays him because she wants to see whether it helps her feel for him, and she claims that the experiment is a success... but as she watches him die, she doesn't seem to feel a thing. Just desserts? Perhaps. In any event, it feels like a movie about realizing that movies <em>birth</em> culture, that they're too seductive <em>not</em> to birth it, and that film is precariously at risk of creating a generation of people who cannibalize themselves. (The surreal part about watching it now, of course, is realizing that there was a time before it when this <em>wasn't</em> the case. We're well through the looking glass now.)<br><br><br></div><h1>#37: M</h1><div>DNW; saw a decade ago, and don't remember it<br><br><br></div><h1>#36: City Lights</h1><div>DNW; either saw a decade ago, and don't remember it, or saw a different Chaplin film and don't remember <em>that</em><br><br><br></div><h1>#35: Pather Panchali</h1><div>DNW, I think because I was in North Carolina.<br><br><br></div><h1>#34: L'Atalante</h1><div>DNW; might have still been in North Carolina<br><br><br></div><h1>#33: Psycho</h1><div>DNW; still have never seen this; the only Hitchcock I somehow missed<br><br><br></div><h1>#32: Mirror</h1><div>I'll admit that, upon leaving the movie theater, I looked this one up and realized that I'd <em>completely missed </em>that actors were playing multiple roles within the same family, splayed across time. On some level, though, I'm glad that I didn't realize that: it bled into the movie's deeply surreal-yet-moving atmosphere. For its sheer spectacle alone, <em>Mirror</em> puts other films to shame: shot after shot feel like magic tricks, or like glimpses into a world more fantastic than our own. Yet it all revolves around a story of extraordinary intimacy: of the love between family who are too fragmented to fully connect to one another, let alone themselves. Husbands and wives, parents and sons, find themselves divided, time and again, by the pain they've had inflicted upon them and by the pain they inflict upon others. Everything reflects; everything echoes; the fantastic infinities of these broken worlds only serve to underscore an emptiness that seems so obvious, so simple, you think it would be mendable. Yet like ghosts in the mirror, or ghosts in our past, we reach out only to find ourselves alone. In the plainest and most commonspoken ways, Tarkovsky is profound. <br><br><br></div><h1>#31: 8½</h1><div>It was <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2021/03/il-maestro-federico-fellini-martin-scorsese/">Scorsese's stunning essay on Fellini</a> that made me determined to catch every Fellini film this year; I also remember when <em>8½</em> was frequently cited as a contender for Best Film Ever Made, next to <em>Citizen Kane</em> and <em>Vertigo</em>, before "ponderous men" took such a hit in the Sight and Sound rankings. Scorsese's feelings on <em>8½ </em>are so wondrous that I regret not being able to see or feel any of what he did, on first pass; the fact that it felt so obvious, so <em>blatant</em>, might mean that I missed everything that I should have been catching, or it might mean that this is one of those less-than-timeless classics that'll keep slipping lower on this list. Maybe I'll come back to it one day, but—Scorsese's passions aside—I struggle to bring myself to care.</div><div><em><br></em><br></div><h1><em>#30: </em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</h1><div>One of the best films ever made about: (1) portraits, (2) ladies, and (3) fire. I was really unsure of how I'd feel about this movie, since I'm wary of hype (and this movie was hyped-to-death on release) and tend not to love erotic cinema (and this movie is very definitely that). What I found was a stark and bizarre period piece, so stripped-down that it could have been a play save for how vitally important its environments are to establishing its lush, bleak mood. It captures love with a stiff, buttoned-up warmth that's appropriate for its era, and then in a ferocious, messy frenzy that's appropriate for passion itself, landing in something so intimate and familiar and natural that you feel shocked that <em>this</em> is what so many people work so hard fear and repress. And then it captures something more, because this is a period piece, after all. <br><br><br></div><h1>#29: Taxi Driver</h1><div>DNW; still mad about it. Easily my favorite Scorsese film and one of my favorite movies of all time. It captures the terrors of being a lonely man in a way that's painful in one way for lonely men, and painful in a very different way for everybody else.</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#28: Daisies</h1><div>DNW, and I regret it.</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#27: Shoah</h1><div>DNW, and... as a Jewish man who grew up going to Holocaust museums and listening to survivors speak, I can't bring myself to regret missing this one. </div><div><br><br></div><h1>#26: The Night of the Hunter</h1><div>DNW; looks fun as hell<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>#25: Au Hasard Balthazar</h1><div>DNW; I told myself I'd watch at least one Bresson movie this year, and then I proved myself a liar</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#24: Do the Right Thing</h1><div>What stunned me most about this, as someone who'd never seen it before, is that it's a movie about <em>local community:</em> about the different social pockets that, from afar, seem to constitute a single group of people, but up-close turns out to be deliriously colorful and entirely at odds with itself. Yet at the end of the day, it's a <em>community;</em> you understand their scorn towards the white couple that's moving in, not because that couple doesn't fit in but because they're oblivious to the idea that there's anything to "fit into." Tensions bubble over in three successive ways: first, as a conflict between community members; then as an intrusion by outsiders to that community; and finally as the community tearing itself open. The shock and tragedy of its final minutes only works, though, because of what a sheer <em>joy</em> the movie is—it's easily one of the most engaging and fun times I've ever had in a theater, up until it wasn't. I'd seen a handful of Spike Lee films before this one, but none of them could have prepared me for how good <em>this</em> one was.<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>#23: Playtime</h1><div>As with <em>Pierrot le fou,</em> I could call this my favorite movie of all time and not feel a tinge of dishonesty about it. It felt like a new flavor of physical comedy: slapstick handled in a more mature, sophisticated way than I've ever seen it handled before. Its set compositions are absolutely stunning, an alien near-future that's equal parts modern living, science fiction, and Doctor Seuss. But what it <em>does</em> with its sets—creating elaborate gags on every inch of the screen all at once, with almost no cues telling you where to look at when—is what truly sets it apart. I feel like I could watch this movie ten different times, look in ten different places, and see ten different things. And its last major scene, an endless sequence set in a newly-opened restaurant, is so dense with rhythm and motion that I think I'd <em>have</em> to watch it half a dozen times before piecing together the full incident. In some ways, it made me think of games like <em>The Incredible Machine</em>, though I've never played a game whose interlocking pieces were as intricate as <em>Playtime</em>. In other ways, it made me imagine a different future of entertainment, one in which films like this are put on at parties and by families, slowly drawing us <em>in</em> rather than leaping out to grab us by the throats, meditative and contemplative the ways that novels are but in a medium that lets them be properly social experiences. A man can dream of better worlds.</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#22: Last Spring</h1><div>DNW, though thankfully I caught another Ozu later on</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#21: The Passion of Joan of Arc</h1><div>DNW, though I did watch this one 15 years ago. To be honest, I just wasn't in the mood for a bummer.</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#20: Seven Samurai</h1><div>I didn't realize this movie was three-and-a-half hours long until I sat down in the theater. But it flew by. Has any movie ever been <em>this</em> entertaining <em>and</em> this socially and emotionally intricate? I can see how it spawned about a dozen different genres of movie, and three hundred different tropes; the difference between it and its imitators, and the reason that a single movie inspired so many different flavors of imitation, is that other films play these kinds of scenes as single notes, while <em>Seven Samurai</em> plays them as complex chords. Lowbrow entertainment, intricate character arcs, stunning and haunting visuals, and careful portraiture of a historic era all take place in lockstep—it's effortlessly engaging, its humor is broad and simple and delightful, its characters are memorable and compelling, and the depths of its story sneak up on you so quietly that, by the end, it's almost shocking that this film feels like the epic it is.<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>#19: Apocalypse Now: Final Cut</h1><div>First things first, I'm not sure that <em>any</em> movie has ever taken advantage of the sheer bombast of cinema the way that <em>Apocalypse Now</em> does; I can't think of a movie that <em>needs</em> to be seen in theaters like this one. Second things second, this is still one of the greatest depictions of the evils of war, and of the American military-industrial complex, ever made—regardless of how many jackasses watch it and completely miss the point. Third: the Final Cut is deeply frustrating, in that it adds extra length to Marlon Brando's scenes at the end that his character honestly needed to be done justice, but it also adds the French plantation sequence, which not only interrupts the otherwise-perfect flow of the movie but is so cheaply and tackily done that you instantly see how Coppola, who spent a decade directing some of the greatest movies ever made <em>back-to-back</em>, eventually wound up as a disappointing and depressing punchline of an artist. That there's no singularly perfect cut of <em>Apocalypse Now</em> could serve as a metaphor for Coppola himself, but really it just means that one of us is gonna have to put that cut together ourselves. (The man has done most of the work for us already.)<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>#18: Persona</h1><div>I feel a little blasphemous for saying this, but I think that <em>Persona </em>suffered for my having the rest of the movies on this list to compare it to. Next to Ingmar Bergman's other films, it's a daring avant-garde deep dive into a woman's psyche, in ways that ask disturbing existential questions about how we work as people—but that's, like, half the films on this list, and <em>Persona</em> felt a lot shallower than most of those. It's stunningly beautiful, in that artful Swedish magazine-ready kind of way, but I'm not sure its beauty particularly holds up to the rest of the films in this list either. Ironically, I think that more-or-less any other Bergman would have been a more enjoyable watch in this context. (And <em>Persona</em> probably holds up much better if you watch it in any other context than the one I saw it in, to be fair.)</div><div> <br><br></div><h1>#17: Close-Up</h1><div>The third of my "possibly instant all-time favorite" movies this year, and easily one of the strangest movies all year. An Iranian man pretends, on a whim, to be a film director that he isn't; the family that he lies to eventually takes him to court over it. A <em>different</em> filmmaker hears about this, and persuades the court to let him sit in on the proceedings, and to ask this man deeply personal questions about why he chose to do what he did. He also films reenactments of the incident in question, starring this man and this family and set in the family's actual home. As the man is given a chance to explain not only what he did but <em>who he is</em>, likely for the first time in his life, you see the subtle depths of his strange decision play out in his performance, as he's given a chance to play the role of a lifetime—which is to say, himself. And the miracle of the film is that he reveals himself to be an extraordinary actor, as his new director—half documentarian, half narrative filmmaker—gives him an opportunity to be seen by precisely the family he'd hoped would see him as anybody <em>but</em> himself. Without this movie, I'm not sure you get Charlie Kaufman or Nathan Fielder, but I'm not sure that Kaufman or Fielder have ever created anything <em>quite</em> this dazzling or this heartfelt (and that's a high fucking bar).</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#16: Meshes of the Afternoon</h1><div>It felt like an artsy student film. I'm informed that it's the <em>origin</em> of artsy student films, which explains a lot. I'm further informed that it was a huge influence on David Lynch, which makes sense, because I've seen Lynch's artsy student films too. As a former art-school student, I may have been prejudiced against this one. Or maybe I've just seen all of its images (which <em>are</em> terrific) appropriated by so many art students and music videos and aspirationally pretentious film directors that I couldn't appreciate them in their original context. It felt like the sort of thing I'd show a class after they'd read Freud's essay about the uncanny, if I was the kind of college professor who made <em>my</em> class read Freud's essay about the uncanny, but I fell asleep in that class multiple times, so I'd probably show 'em something like <em>Close-Up</em> instead.</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#15: The Searchers</h1><div>DNW (along with every other Western this year, completely by accident)<br><br><br></div><h1>#14: Cléo from 5 to 7</h1><div>The French New Wave films this year were among the most consistently delightful of the series, and I walked away with a massive new art-crush on Jean-Luc Godard, but I'm glad that Agnès Varda outranked every other New Wave director on this list. This is such a dazzlingly multilayered take on a young woman, portraying her first at her silliest and brattiest and most glamorous and then, with increasing deftness, unpacking the person who she is underneath, while slowly calling attention to the fact that her silliest, brattiest self is a byproduct of the casual disregard that nearly everyone in her life seems to show her. Every attempt she makes to be human gets batted down, fondly but definitely, with the exception of one close friend and one total stranger. And for all that I was prepared for this to be a merciless, satirical take on the ludicrous and unfeeling nature of modern society—French New Wave, y'all!—I was delighted that, in the end, it turned into one of the most touching and heartfelt romantic films I've ever seen, in less time than I'd ever have thought it would take. But its depiction of young romance is so plausible for the simple reason that, after a film's worth of people dismissively thinking they already know her, Cléo meets one man whose attraction to her is less that he knows who she is and more that he'd sure like to learn.<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>#13: The Rules of the Game</h1><div>It's preposterous that Jean Renoir was <em>this</em> good at making movies in 1939. I found it almost hard to believe that this movie was that old. At the same time, it's hard to believe that it could have been made any time later, not because it feels pre-modern but because it's <em>so</em> efficient at constructing an elaborate tale between a ridiculous number of characters that it seems like the kind of thing you only could have made before other movies gave you the impression that that kind of storytelling simply isn't possible with films. The film moves at an insane clip, establishing so many storylines so charmingly that you barely notice how much you're asked to keep track of. When all its characters converge in a single mansion, the movie begins to shuffle rapidly between combinations of characters, almost like a card trick, unfurling just the right details in just the right order, until you almost take it for granted that there'll be a major social or emotional shift every fifteen seconds or so. Yet it never feels exhausting, in part because of the movie's sheer charisma—again, think the showmanship of a magician—and in part because its cinematography is so inventive, so multilayered, so <em>fun</em>, that at times narrative beats are revealed as literal sight gags. The only director I know who tries to tell stories this rich is Robert Altman, but even Altman at his peak would <em>sweat</em> trying to match this movie's tempo (let alone its sheer panache). That it's also a masterful tale of wealth, corruption, and the kind of decadence that preceded the rise of fascism makes it feel disturbingly modern in 2023, and makes it beyond frustrating that it was more-or-less blacklisted for not being the kind of mindless propaganda that France thought its population needed.</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#12: The Godfather</h1><div>It's a cliché to call this movie monumental, but watching this series this year drove home just <em>how</em> monumental an achievement this movie is. You can see Coppola drawing on the virtuosic techniques of the directors who preceded him—taking <em>The Leopard</em> as inspiration for <em>The Godfather's</em> opening wedding, most obviously—and using them to elevate what could have been a potboiler thriller into something vastly more. Every line, every <em>shot</em>, is iconic; every actor is legendary. Like <em>Apocalypse Now</em>, this movie feels like cinema <em>fully realized</em>, magical in the way that only film can be, at once extraordinarily deep and instantly unforgettable. It presents a lurid, seedy world, a club whose secrets are too tantalizing <em>not</em> to want in on, even as it simultaneously shows us why we're better off staying far, far away. Criticize it all you want for being too seductive to serve as a proper cautionary tale: in a sense, it's a movie <em>about</em> that seductiveness, and maybe about the fact that seductiveness is the heart of cinema itself. After all, it's a tale about a man who knows all-too-well not to step into his family's business, and who never forgets it, even as he takes step after step deeper into that world, even as his aging father greets him with sorrow in his eyes. Yes, it's almost exclusively about men, and ends on a shot of Michael literally closing the door on his own wife; that, too, is a part of the movie's message. And if a lot of men watch this and take exactly the wrong message away—or if they watch it, take the <em>right</em> message, and move in the wrong direction regardless... well, this might be a film about why. You can call evil by its name, you can avert your eyes, but neither avoiding it nor naming it will protect you from its nature.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><h1>#11: Sunrise</h1><div>DNW, but can happily say that this is the last movie on this list that I've never once managed to see.<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>#10: Singin' in the Rain</h1><div>A pop-culture tribute to pop-culture; a film tribute to film; a musical tribute to musicals. Every last person in this movie has been trained to express nothing but sheer delight on their faces and through their bodies; every last person, likewise, is very clearly having an absolute blast (occasional IRL sicknesses be damned). Donald O'Connor's performance in "Make 'Em Laugh" is a marvel—such a virtuosic fusion of physical comedy and dance that it all-but-proves there's no distinction, past a point, between music and comedy; the two are born of the same thing. And poetry must come from the same place as comedy and music, and all three must come from the same place that love does, or else Gene Kelly could never move that way in the rain; his face could never light up that way as he sings; the song, and the dance, and the words, and the smile, could never mean all the things that they clearly do. The history of cinema is as much about this—about music, about dance, about the poppiest possible expressions of love—as it is about anything else. Isn't it extraordinary, after all, that love like that not only exists, but can be <em>sung</em> about, so simply and so catchily that 75 years later, the whole audience still knew exactly how to sing along? <br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>#9: Man With a Movie Camera</h1><div>Michael Nyman's score to this film is so extraordinary that I can't tell which of my feelings were about the film, and which were about the score. It really is a marvel that a single filmmaker devised so many different cinematographic and editing techniques as early as 1929; it's just as much a marvel that he captured so much of the world as it stood back then. My interest as I watched this wavered, fading in and out like a bad radio station—I blame that on the fact that the movie's narrative, as it is, is loosely formed at best. But when I tuned in, I was not only delighted but awed; I felt a sense of history, not only by my glimpses of the world as it stood a century ago, but by my realization that I was watching a man for whom everything I take for granted about the modern world was still fresh and new, a man who saw <em>unbelievable potential</em> and could do little more than express—in delirious, excitable, and incoherent ways—all the possibilities he himself barely understood. I watched him, and I realized how much the world has changed since then, and how little time has truly passed between his era and ours. All of a sudden, reality seemed mutable; the uncertain future seemed exciting and hopeful rather than simply ominous; I realized that, only a few generations from now, the world we mistakenly think of as granite and eternal will be absolutely foreign to us, forgotten even by those who lived it. I left the theater feeling keenly aware of my own heartbeat, as if it was one motor among many, as if the engine of the city I lived in and the country I was born in was still <em>under construction</em>, as if human nature itself had yet to be written. Again, though, I'm not sure how much of this was just the score.</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#8: Mulholland Dr.</h1><div>This has been my favorite film since I was 18; I fell in love with so many new movies this year, and some of that love was deeper than I've felt for a new movie in ages, but Lynch is still my wellspring in so, so many ways. I return to him, after every new artistic encounter, and find all of my new discoveries lying in his same old films. This was my second time seeing this one in a packed movie theater, and—as always with Lynch—I'm more grateful than anything just to see which lines got which reactions, as the audience burst out laughing at moments with such emotional ambiguity that they'd have been equally right to sit there frozen in terror. And for all that <em>Mulholland Dr.</em> is almost infamously pegged as a hard-to-understand artsy-fart movie, one of the biggest rediscoveries for me is always that Lynch is so fucking <em>funny</em>—and not just funny, but funny in such a broad, easy way that he puts broad, diverse audiences in stitches. This movie has several of the funniest scenes in movie history (the botched hit, the marital affair), several of the scariest (the alley behind Winkie's, Club Silencio), one of the sexiest (you know the one), and one of the greatest musical performances ever captured on film. And even after a year of watching peerless cinema, I can't think of a single other director who could have done <em>all</em> of this—all of this <em>at once</em>—and threaded it together to make a movie that, seen one way, is a fathomless enigma, and seen another way is as straightforward a narrative as can be. After all, its first scene sets up a mystery, and its last scene solves it. How much broader can a movie get?</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#7: Beau Travail</h1><div>I walked out of this movie literally speechless. I tried leaving a friend a message about it, only to helplessly open and close my mouth for minutes on end. <em>Beau Travail</em> is such visceral filmmaking, every scene bombarding the senses, every performance a <em>dance</em>. It's a movie about bodies, about the <em>miracle</em> of movement, about the physicality of existing in space, navigating that space, sharing that space, shaping that space with others. It's a movie about the tensions that exist between people forced into the same space; about the ways in which our joys are conditioned and restrained and transformed in the name of ideals which break and twist and destroy us. And I'd been told that "the dance scene at the end" might be the greatest ending in movie history—which I'd now argue that it is—but I wasn't prepared for <em>what</em> that scene was exactly, or for how abruptly and quickly it struck, or for the way that it resolved a film's worth of personal and sexual and societal and political tensions, not through storytelling or didacticism, but by cutting a Gordian knot and letting a man's body be... well... <em>everything</em>. I wish that watching this film was mandatory.<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>#6: 2001: A Space Odyssey</h1><div>DNW. I... really meant to see this one. I planned to watch it once sober and once stoned off my gourd, to give it the proper treatment. But at the end of the day, I needed <em>some </em>kind of break at the end, and Kubrick and I are just... well, we've decided to go our separate ways. Andrei and I just need more time alone.<br> <em> </em> T<br><br></div><h1>#5: In the Mood for Love</h1><div>After catching <em>Chungking Express</em> at the start of the year, I was <em>beyond</em> ready to see another Kar-Wai movie—especially this one, which I've heard talk of for literally decades. The first half of the film was absolutely dazzling: it <em>danced</em>, packing an insane amount of substance, mood, and flourish into every frame. And then... I dozed off. We'd tried to make a date night of it; there'd been tacos and tequila. It was late. I have no discipline. I do not appreciate beauty.</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#4: Tokyo Story</h1><div>Thirty minutes into this, I was strongly considering walking out. It didn't grab me; nothing about it had particularly stood out. But I stayed. And slowly, bit by bit, this movie stole me away, without seemingly trying. Everything about it is plainspoken, unpretentious, simple. With only one major exception, it felt like I could predict each scene before it happened. Yet towards the end, I was moved and devastated. Yasujirō Ozu is famous for pretty much exactly this, and I can see why so many artists find him so profoundly fascinating. It's all so basic, so obvious, that it's hard to tell exactly how it worked its magic. And perhaps "magic" is the wrong word for it: instead, it captures something like inevitability, showing the obvious facts of (semi-)modern life and the obvious facts of <em>all</em> life, full stop, letting the two snarl together with predictable, heartbreaking results. It's not trying to do anything: everything simply happens. Twenty years from now, I will either have never seen another Ozu film or I will <em>only</em> be watching Ozu films. Mark my words.</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#3: Citizen Kane</h1><div>There's something about seeing this film at the end of my year of film, after watching 20-30 years of the masterpieces that inspired it and 80 years of masterpieces that have followed in its wake. There are countless ways to make a movie, countless ways in which different countries and cultures have devised their own approaches to filmmaking, countless ways to define what makes a film a masterpiece. And through all that, <em>Citizen Kane</em> blazes through. Every aspect of it is cutting-edge, borderline-avant garde, moody, evocative, and absolutely lurid crowd-pleasing bombast. The sets are a virtuosic display of all the ways that space can shape the bodies in it. The camerawork pulls off magic trick after magic trick. The manner of acting, the manner of <em>scriptwriting</em>, feels breathtaking in its theatricality: it feels intimate as a small stage, its performers constantly speaking over each other and interrupting one another, chaotically and with perfect choreography. And at the center of it all is Welles, the larger-than-life man who seemed brilliant at everything, playing a man almost as brilliant as <em>he</em> is, documenting the ways in which that man's determination to master everything leaves him with nothing. In a decade where Great Male Artist films dropped in so many critics' esteem, <em>Citizen Kane </em>stands strong—partly because it's a film <em>about</em> the follies of male ego, and partly because Welles is having too much fucking fun.</div><div><br><br></div><h1>#2: Vertigo</h1><div>Above everything, it's wild how <em>weird</em> this movie is—Hitchcock, who often loves to play with tropes and classic archetypes, loads this one up with supernatural possession, doppelgangers, transmutations, and a film whose central focus shifts more times than feels plausible. Perhaps there's an element of vertigo there: the bottom drops out of the movie, the plot falls away, and suddenly all that's left is the woman at the center of it, a device used by men to manipulate other men who abruptly becomes more human than all that—and then, tragically, becomes a device once more. I was struck by how similar some of this film's plot beats are to E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story "The Sandman," which inspired Freud to write his original essay about the uncanny; I was also struck by how much Lynch's <em>Blue Velvet</em> and <em>Mulholland Drive</em> (really, his whole oeuvre) each feel like a direct response <em>to</em> <em>Vertigo</em>, on two completely different levels. The real possession, I think, is of Scottie Ferguson, who's paid to track a woman's steps, then finds he can't stop following her. Why? He's uncertain, even as he follows her through her death and beyond it. Why turn a woman into a perfect replica of one who he thinks is dead? Is it really just to bring her back to life, to make her stand in as his ideal? I'm not so sure—because even alive, she was nothing but mystery. The moment of their passionate embrace feels more ghostly than any other scene, and not just because he's holding someone who knows that she's a ghost. What lies beyond this moment, for the two of them? Where can he possibly go with her but down?<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>#1: <strong>Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles</strong></h1><div><em>Of course. </em>Of course this movie took the top slot. Of course this is perched right at the top of the list. Having seen it, nothing else feels remotely fitting. This is the future of cinema, as surely as <em>Citizen Kane</em> once was; the fact that it's 50 years old doesn't change that in the slightest. <br><br>After pondering Akerman's connection to Godard all year—wondering at how his whimsy and mania birthed her steadfast deliberation—I was struck by how much her calm, muted, static approach to filmmaking required the <em>staggering confidence </em>to know what she could do away with. The more she removes, the more she calls attention to what remains: the seconds slowly ticking by, the endless complications and permutations of a daily routine. Jeanne Dielman's son doesn't notice the passing of time any more than he notices his own mother: he distracts himself with anything and everything <em>but</em> what's right in front of him. Jeanne, though, is stuck in a purgatory wherein everything she does must go <em>perfectly</em>, from the ways she prepares food to the sex work she does to make money, because it's the only kind of work she can do without interrupting her chores. It takes an hour to observe what a day of her life looks like, another hour to watch what a single ruined potato does to the <em>rest</em> of her day, and a final hour to watch her struggle to make coffee, wholly convinced that she might murder the infant she's babysitting if the coffee comes out wrong. (Without any shift in cinematography, without any change in sound, without much visible change to Jeanne herself, a whole stretch of this film plays like a horror movie; one of its masterstrokes is how many different kinds of film it becomes without seemingly changing anything at all.)<br><br>I can't help but think of the temple of Moloch in <em>Metropolis</em>, all of those factory workers simultaneously transforming into a ravenous demon and feeding themselves to him. Jeanne is trapped in the clockwork of her own life: everything is obligatory, and nothing can be ignored. One of the many things that becomes obvious across the run of the film is just how little of her housework involves simple routine, just how little can be done without careful planning, just how much Jeanne must commit herself to every little thing she does. She turns it into a kind of dance, and one that's shockingly gripping—but it's clear that <em>she can't stop</em>, that she can <em>never</em> stop, that her world will completely shatter if she stops feeding herself to it at every moment of every day. The mounting tension of the film is that looming question: <em>what if she does?<br><br></em>It's impossible, by design, to separate the style of the film from its subject. This is a movie about a single mother doing housework; it focuses, painstakingly, on every last detail of every little chore, because there is no other way to make a movie about this woman. On some level, Akerman knew that she was making a movie, more-or-less, out of the scenes that get cut out of every other movie; there's a playfulness to just how aggressively she pushes that, removing every <em>hint</em> of what any other movie would call action or drama. There's a pointedness to that fact; there's also something radical about how beautiful she makes housework look, not by fantasizing it but by devoting herself to its rhythms. This movie is avant-garde because it is about a woman; it is experimental because it is about something that got cut from the language of cinema; it is formally radical because the entire artform of cinema was designed to tell stories about men, so to speak.<br><br>But it's also, demonstrably, a movie that changed cinema, and that will continue to change it. <em>Portrait of a Lady on Fire </em>owes its entire existence to this movie. The Slow Cinema movement that <em>Sátántangó </em>comes from would not be the same without this film. I was struck, as I watched, by how similar its rhythms and repetitions seemed to <em>Animal Crossing</em> and to similarly meditative games; whether <em>Jeanne Dielman</em> <em>directly</em> inspired those matters less than that it <em>anticipated </em>them. (And I'm sure that <em>something somewhere</em> in the causal chain of inspirations that led to <em>Animal Crossing</em> owed a debt to Akerman and <em>Jeanne Dielman.</em>)<br><br>In some ways, <em>Jeanne Dielman</em> also feels like a response to earlier generations of films depicting women: to the quietly suffering mother of <em>Tokyo Story</em>, to the sorrows of <em>Madame de...</em> The history of film seemed so much shorter to me this year, like a conversation still barely begun; just as Godard and his peers in the French New Wave simultaneously rejected Hollywood for its industrialized entertainment while admiring it for its energy and artistry, Akerman seems to reject conventional ideas about what makes a movie "interesting" or "entertaining" or "compelling" while simultaneously understanding that it's her duty to be all these things. It's easy to understand the <em>idea</em> of <em>Jeanne Dielman</em> as a film, I think, because the <em>idea</em> of it consists more of the rejection than the embrace. The experience of <em>watching</em> it is one of feeling, acutely, the ingenuity that went into every long second, the energy that keeps its central performance from ever seeming monotonous or excessive. When I watched <em>News From Home,</em> I had the sense that I'd never seen a film that felt more like sculpture; <em>Jeanne Dielman </em>is a similarly sculpted work, and like great sculpture it is defined by <em>how</em> it removed what it removed, and by how what remains is perfectly static yet never once feels it.<br><br>The less expression Jeanne shows on her face, the more that you see her routine <em>as</em> her expression; the more this movie dwells on her life's "mundanities," the clearer it becomes that these mundanities house her soul. She <em>is</em> her duty, she <em>is</em> her house, she <em>is</em> this fixed and unmoving camera, this peculiar shade of green, this door closing silently until the day grows dark. How does this movie feel like so many different kinds of film, when on the surface nothing seems to happen? Simply by giving you the time you need to realize what you're looking at, what this routine expresses, what this woman's soul is made of. Once that sets in, every slight interruption feels like violence. You see a woman sitting at Jeanne's usual seat at the local cafe, and you don't just wonder whether Jeanne's about to claw this stranger's eyes out, you feel like it would be <em>totally acceptable</em> of her to do so. This doesn't show on Jeanne's face, exactly, because it doesn't have to. The calculus of her everyday life <em>is</em> her face, her feeling, her very existence. A change in routine is an emotional blow, an outright existential panic, because <em>this is her only existence</em>. <br><br>And when Jeanne's son comes home, on that second night, and off-handedly mentions that her hair is a bit messy... when you've seen what it takes for her to get her hair right, and when you've seen what kept her from doing all of that today... well, it doesn't matter that he probably meant it to be helpful, or that he's just casually observing something that doesn't matter much to him. Jeanne's face doesn't need to betray a thing for you to know the complex pain she feels, towards this boy who's too young to understand her grief and too old to be forgiven for not understanding. Not that the movie makes a big deal out of this moment, or out of any other moment. It doesn't have to. But it <em>does</em> ask that you look closely enough to notice.<br><br>It's ironic that you couldn't even <em>try</em> and make a version of this movie yourself, even if you wanted to. You can remake <em>Citizen Kane</em>, hypothetically. You can make another adaptation of <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>. How could you possibly remake a three-and-a-half-hour-long movie in which the most compelling sequence involves twelve-ish minutes of someone failing to make coffee? If <em>Jeanne Dielman</em> didn't exist, it feels like you could perfectly recreate the whole movie from the idea of it alone, provided you were as willing to commit to its demands and needs as Akerman must have been. Now that it <em>does</em> exist, nobody else could possibly remake it. Hell, the sheer existence of smartphones means that it would be <em>impossible</em> to recreate this movie today. The world of <em>Jeanne Dielman</em> is almost as alien to the twenty-first century as the experience of watching it—quietly and in the dark and without a single sound from the audience or a single blinding phone screen—proved to be. <br><br>But you don't need to remake it. It exists, and it is perfect: a movie that could not have been made any other way, because its story could not be told by any other means. A movie whose existence is simultaneously deeply political—because how could it not be?—and completely detached from any politics but the depiction of a life. A film that is paradoxically boring <em>and</em> dazzling, audacious and plain. A film that, in so many ways, feels like a continuation of the story told and retold by Godard, by Welles, by Ozu, by countless others, each working with technology that's equal parts magical and frustrating, trying to find a way either to weave enchanting fantasy out of everyday life, or to capture something meaningful about everyday life by means of enchanting fantasy. It's the challenge that every artist faces: to find a way of looking at the same thing everybody sees, and to somehow express <em>what it is</em>, not despite but <em>because of</em> the fact that we're all so convinced we already know that we don't realize how long it's been since we actually looked, since the endless routine of life felt ominous and alien and strange.<br><br>Of <em>course</em> this movie topped the list. Of <em>course</em> it was a film from about that era, written and directed by a woman, starring a woman, made with an all-female crew. (Another quietly radical act, in that it's easy to dismiss until you think of how much outrage would ensue if any major modern director attempted the same thing.) Many people saw this year's <em>Sight and Sound</em> rankings as a referendum on gender, an attempt to "inject feminism" into the discourse, a byproduct of some kind of agenda. I don't think it <em>was</em>, though, is the thing. <em>Jeanne Dielman</em> came into being because of radical gender disparity, not just because Akerman wanted to comment on that disparity, but because that very disparity is why stories like <em>Jeanne Dielman</em>'s were overlooked, why film hadn't invented the language to <em>tell</em> a story like <em>Jeanne Dielman</em>'s, why <em>Jeanne Dielman</em> went overlooked by critics up until it was brought to their attention. (At which point, thankfully, many of them immediately grasped how extraordinary it was.)<br><br><em>Jeanne Dielman</em> is positioned where it is because it's as mammoth an evolution of cinema as an art form as <em>Citizen Kane</em> was before it. Because it inspired its generation in the same way that Godard's movies inspired <em>their</em> generation—and not <em>despite</em> the differences between Godard's and Akerman's styles, but <em>because</em> of them. If the history of art is a story of countless frustrated people attempting to express the inexpressible, and if the <em>triumphs</em> of art are those moment when, all at once, someone discovers a new language for speaking things previously unspeakable, then <em>Jeanne Dielman</em> is art at its very pinnacle. It's a vision of cinema, and it's a vision of a woman, and the two are inextricable, because its vision is of a cinema that knows how to look at women. It's a vision of cinema inverted, cinema that points <em>in</em> rather than bursts <em>out</em>, cinema whose mood is found, not in Orson Welles' dazzling hall of mirrors, but in the gradual familiarity of coming to know a person and a place across a span of time, rather than with a singular establishing quip. How did something so muted bring so many wide, delighted, astonished smiles to my face? How did I watch so much of this for so long and walk out feeling electricity fizzing in my veins?<br><br>On the flip side, a man in the theater I watched this in walked out loudly yelling, for everyone to hear, about what a waste this movie was, about how angry that he was that critics liked it. It was important to him that everybody know. I looked over my shoulder at him as I walked by; Jeanne Dielman's son would never have mentioned that his hair seemed out of place. I could still hear him yelling to his friends from two blocks away. <em>Of course.</em><br><br><br></div><h1>FINAL TOTALS: A YEAR IN REVIEW</h1><ul><li><strong><em>Number of films watched: </em></strong>i'm not counting that</li><li><strong><em>Number of films missed: </em></strong>not counting that either</li><li><strong><em>Best non-Sight and Sound movie watched this year: </em></strong><em>Speed Racer</em> (holy <em>shit)</em></li><li><strong><em>Films that I immediately proclaimed "probably my favorite of all time" upon leaving:</em></strong><strong> </strong><em>Pierrot le Fou, Playtime, Close-Up, Beau Travail, Mulholland Drive</em></li><li><strong><em>Films that I'll be thinking about for the rest of my life: </em></strong><em>Histoire(s) du cinema, Jeanne Dielman</em></li><li><strong><em>Shockingly enjoyable films: </em></strong><em>Seven Samurai, The Rules of the Game, Do the Right Thing, A Matter of Life and Death, Chungking Express, The Earrings of Madame de...</em></li><li><strong><em>Films that felt like poetry: </em></strong><em>Spirit of the Beehive, My Neighbor Totoro, Beau Travail, Tropical Malady</em></li><li><strong><em>New director crushes: </em></strong>Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean Luc Godard</li><li><strong><em>New director muses: </em></strong>Chantal Akerman, Jean Luc Godard</li><li><strong><em>Director I feel worst about not loving: </em></strong>Edward Yang</li><li><strong><em>Nation whose classic films most consistently disappointed me: </em></strong>Italy</li></ul><div><br>why are you still reading this</div><div><br></div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/311892023-09-16T22:05:22Z2023-09-17T12:02:30ZWeen live: a capsule review<div class="trix-content">
<div>The comedian Stewart Lee does a bit where he compares how easy it is for youngsters to get into BDSM now, compared to what their grandparents had to go through. He describes said grandparents sneaking onto farms, stealing empty potato sacks, in order to manufacture gimp masks for themselves. Nowadays, he sneers—half-joking, half-serious—BDSM is an "identity" that consists of an impulse Google search. Half a day later, an Amazon package arrives, and your new sense of self is here.<br><br>Ween is a band that came into existence during the era when identity had been reduced to convenience. Their music, which rapidly shifts between genres and cultures, often feels like a campy pastiche of things that were once taken seriously. Their country songs sound like <em>ideas</em> of country songs, as does their country twang. On <em>The Mollusk</em>, which parodies pretentious progressive rock among other things, their lyrics are lofty nonsense—but they're <em>fun</em> lofty nonsense, because they were written to be lofty nonsense for a listener who's aware that lofty nonsense is intended. The intended meanings of their songs often lie beneath the obvious signifiers of meaning, because to Ween, none of that meaning means much anymore. Rather, those meanings are aesthetic more than anything, and meant to be enjoyed as such.<br><br>Their live concerts have few pretenses. The band shows up in t-shirts, looking like middle-aged men, because that's what they are. They could be any middle-aged band at any festival, save for the fact that they are Ween—a band uniquely prepared to put on a staggeringly good live show, because they're prepared to offer a multitude of concert experiences. There is no singular Ween concert. Instead, there are twenty variations on a Ween concert all offered at once, with thrash metal following pop rock following jazz or country or psychedelic trip.<br><br>In the late nineties, Ween was often compared to <em>South Park,</em> which shares a similar juvenile irreverence with them. But <em>South Park</em> curdled into nihilism: its creators never grasped that, for all they loved to scorn preachy people spreading messages, their "lack of ideology" was itself a preachy ideology. Ween, by contrast, has <em>soul</em>, which feels ridiculous to say but is self-evidently true. They are shockingly good at being tender when they want to be tender; their silly songs often have emotional heft despite their silliness, and their sincerest songs are sweet, mature, and moving. Their music is fun, but they take their craft incredibly seriously. Their cleverness never undermines their heart, perhaps because that cleverness is how they go looking for their heart to begin with. And if there's a waft of bullshit about their music, it's because they grew up past the point where <em>all </em>music had become bullshit, and more patently so the more sincere it pretended to be. At some point, you can't write about the times you're in without your music belonging to those times.<br><br>There's something refreshing about the sheer simplicity of a Ween show. They come out without an opening act, without fanfare, and play for about three hours. They're laid-back and clearly having fun. Their set lists are different every night, in part because they clearly go with what feels like a good time in the moment. They're good musicians, but they're not anal-retentive about how they sound live; their shows are extraordinary because their music is extraordinary, and if they hit more notes and reach more tones and find more vibes than other bands, it's because they seemingly realized that that's all music is, and made it their job to do as much of it as they know how.<br><br>The lack of pretense is striking, in part because it exposes how often there <em>is</em> a pretense, even in the places and cultures and people who pretend to be pretense-free. Identity has become easy to adopt, and there is simultaneously an extraordinary pressure to <em>have</em> an identity—in part, I think, because of the anxious culture-wide sense that identity doesn't mean what it once did, and that it's a sin not to know exactly who you are. Ween has no identity; how could they? Their music isn't just amorphous, it's <em>easy:</em> its appeal is obvious, and requires no investment or research to appreciate. If there's a "central" kind of Ween fan, it's someone who grew up <em>without</em> a culture, likely in some anonymous suburb, absorbing the world as it filtered through TV shows and Reddit. Perhaps this someone lacks a singular sense of self. Perhaps that's a genuine loss or lack, and perhaps it's the opposite: perhaps they know their life by the feel of it, and themselves by the space they occupy, and don't succumb to the anxious idea, pressed upon them by others, that they need to "find" anything more.<br><br>You can call Ween an inventive and imaginative and creative band, because they are, but their creativity isn't an identity. It's simply the prerequisite to their craft: their music is surprising and off-beat and unusual because their music is <em>engaging,</em> and because this is how you engage. There's not much to unpack beyond that. Sometimes their music is funny, and sometimes it's heartfelt, and sometimes it's unnerving, because these are things that music can be. Their live show is the best show I've ever seen, both times I've seen it. Why? Because it's good music, played well, in all the ways that make live music good. If there's nothing else to say, then that itself is what's interesting—in part because it exposes how often we assume there needs to be an "else."</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/307482023-08-16T13:14:59Z2023-08-16T13:14:59ZThe vulnerability that most men never know.<div class="trix-content">
<div>I was talking to someone recently who, like many women, made the mistake of finding men attractive and wanting to fall in love with them. I mean, she didn't <em>want</em> to fall in love with them—she was actually kinda hoping that she'd never feel the urge to fall in love again. Because—get this—every time she tried to fall in love, it was with a <em>man!</em> Crazy, right?!<br><br></div><div>She described an unpleasant experience that I've heard a lot of women describe. It was the sense that, as she spent any time with any man in any situation whatsoever, she could see his eyes defocus; she could feel the way that, increasingly, he didn't seem to notice she was there. He'd laugh away her insecurities and upsets; he'd absentmindedly ignore her excitements and curiosities. Whatever he'd gotten from her—sex, arm candy, free household labor—he'd already gotten. Or maybe, even though the sex had dwindled down to nothing, even though they barely really spoke, even though the adventures increasingly didn't seem to matter, he was still <em>getting</em> what he wanted out of her, though that raised some disturbing questions about what he'd wanted in the first place.<br><br></div><div>In the end, my friend concluded, she was valued by this man for all of two reasons:<br><br></div><ol><li>She took up space.</li><li>She didn't take up <em>too much</em> space.</li></ol><div><br></div><div>Which is an upsetting thing to realize about your own value, especially when it's not remotely accurate.<br><br></div><div>Why <em>couldn't</em> he see her? Why did he <em>seem</em> to see her at first, then abruptly stop? What was it about this man, about these men, about so many goddamn men? What is it about <em>men?<br></em><br></div><div>My running theory is: it's because most men never really learn to see other people at all.<br><br></div><div>"Not true!" most men protest. "I see people! I'm actually <em>very</em> perceptive! And I'm super smart, and I'm great at analyzing things, and I—"<br><br></div><div>Hold up, fellas.<br><br></div><div>When I say that men don't know how to <em>see other people,</em> I'm referring to a very specific kind of seeing. I'm not talking about <em>perceiving</em> other people. I'm not even talking about <em>empathy.</em> I'm talking about something deeper: the understanding, the <em>visceral recognition,</em> that other people exist. That other people exist <em>as people.<br></em><br></div><div>In other words: that other people's experiences of the world, run just as deep, are just as complicated and multilayered, are just as <em>difficult and strange,</em> as yours are. And that those people's experiences are <em>different</em> from yours, in ways that, by your nature, <em>you literally cannot fathom.</em> Not even if you ask them about it. Not unless you are very patient, and dedicate a <em>lot</em> of time, to putting yourself aside and trying to fill your senses, your mind, your heart, with even the vaguest idea of what it's like to live in the world <em>as them.<br></em><br></div><div>Many men do not fundamentally know how to do this. Many men do not fundamentally know that <em>this is a thing that they can do.</em> They do not understand that, if other people seem shallow to them, it's because <em>they</em> have not made the efforts to form a deeper understanding of those people. Many men will literally refer to other people as "NPCs," or even mow them down as if they're blowing off some steam in Grand Theft Auto, because they have not figured out that other people exist.<br><br></div><div>Moreover, men are often <em>afraid</em> to do this. They are afraid of the <em>possibility</em> of doing this. And they are afraid because, on some level, they are afraid that <em>they</em> don't exist—and they still haven't figured out what the fuck to do about it.<br><br></div><div>Women, by contrast, are often <em>reared</em> to do some form of this. Even if they haven't been raised in a social or religious tradition that teaches them that their only purpose in life is paying dutiful attention to "their man," women are taught to be silent and make room for other people. Women are taught that their voices, their opinions, their <em>choices</em> are inconvenient and rude. Women are raised with a definition of "polite behavior" that is outright stifling. Because the moment that <em>anybody else</em> wants to speak, the moment that <em>anybody else</em> has an opinion, the moment that <em>anybody else</em> wants to take up space, women are trained to stand down.<br><br></div><div>So women often have a <em>very</em> clear sense that other people exist. They are aware to an extent that almost becomes a curse. They are aware that other people exist, and <em>boy</em> will those people make sure they don't forget it.<br><br></div><div>Men, by contrast, are often centered from a young age. Their anarchic youthful energy is treated as delightful and rambunctious. Even when they're scolded or disciplined, they're scolded <em>because there are rules,</em> not because they themselves are taking up too much room. Young boys often live an existence akin to a non-stop inner monologue, one that many of them just speak aloud constantly, never shutting up or holding back anger or doing anything but running around and screaming and giggling and such.<br><br></div><div>That part is obviously hyperbolic—different men are raised in different ways!—but this part isn't:<br><br></div><div>Men are often, at the very least, treated like equals in the room. Their presence matters; they get to have a say. Oftentimes, men take up <em>more</em> space in a room than other people, especially when those other people are women. And oftentimes, when men experience being <em>less</em>-than-equal, it's because there's another, more authoritative man in the room—an adult, when they're young, or a more charismatic peer, or someone who can speak <em>with authority</em> on something that they cannot.<br><br></div><div>These are not often situations where men are expected to be vulnerable. They're more superficial than that. And when men <em>do</em> express emotion around other men, it's often received inhospitably: when they're not mocked and belittled for it, they're treated like <em>having feelings</em> doesn't matter if they're <em>wrong.<br></em><br></div><div>So what if you're crying if I'm the one who's right? Hell, why <em>would</em> you cry except to manipulate me into putting my right aside? The more you cry, the more I'll show you just how little I care.<br><br></div><div>It's commonly theorized that men grow up seeing other men as competitors. Some psychologists go further and theorize that all men want to kill and cannibalize their fathers, as the ultimate authority figure. These theories often add that, rather than compete with their fathers, sons want to be <em>seen</em>—and that, I think, hints at what's really going on here.<br><br></div><div>Because it's not just that men aren't taught to see other people. It's that men aren't taught what it's like to be <em>seen</em>—especially not by other men. In fact, the terrifying implication is that anybody <em>else</em> who wants to be seen, anybody <em>else</em> who wants to take up space, would rather obliterate them than pay attention to them. Deeper still, the implication is that, if you're not seen, you don't <em>deserve</em> to be seen. You don't deserve to <em>exist.<br></em><br></div><div>Ah, but those psychologists <em>also</em> point out that there <em>is</em> one person who sees men when they're young—and it's their mother. The mother's role, these theorists say, is to see her son. It's to give her son an experience of being seen.<br><br></div><div>Let's pretend like that's true. Let's pretend that that's somehow <em>enough</em>—that it cuts against the terrors of the unseeing, uncaring <em>rest</em> of the world. Is the theory really that a healthy way to raise your son is to teach him that women exist to notice him?<br><br></div><div>But that's seemingly what happens. Men seemingly grow up thinking that the reason to have a woman in their life is to be seen and validated. That's even how some men define <em>love.</em> They love their girlfriends, they love their wives, because these women <em>let them be vulnerable.</em> These women let them be <em>themselves.</em> These women tell them: <em>you are seen, you are here, you are enough.<br></em><br></div><div>Plenty of these men don't stop and wonder whether this is a <em>human</em> desire, rather than a <em>male</em> one. They don't stop and ask themselves whether women might want to be seen too. They don't ask whether women might have spent years learning how to see other people, a kind of involuntary training that those men never received or realized existed. And they <em>certainly</em> don't ask whether women might struggle with being seen even <em>more</em> than men do, because men have never experienced a harder struggle than their own.<br><br></div><div>These men hear things like "most men are afraid of being vulnerable" and heatedly shoot back: <em>That's not true! I'm vulnerable </em><strong><em>all the time!</em></strong><em> I even cry around my girlfriend! I sob in my wife's arms!<br></em><br></div><div>And sure: that's a kind of vulnerability. It's an <em>important</em> kind.<br><br></div><div>But on some level, it's still not vulnerability at all. Not when you <em>expect</em> women to make room for you. Not when you <em>anticipate</em> them shrinking down as far as you need, to give you as much space as you like, to give you every kind of validation you're going to crave.<br><br></div><div>I know women who, in the middle of a <em>furious</em> fight where they have <em>every right</em> to be upset, will nonetheless quiet down and start listening and empathizing if the man they're fighting with starts to weep. No matter how much they want to say, no matter how much they <em>feel,</em> they will prioritize their partner's emotions and tenderness over themselves. It's such a common tendency, in fact, that it's a known fact that <em>abusive men use tears to manipulate women.</em> At some point, they learn that their partners' needs to validate them can be weaponized and used against them.<br><br></div><div>That's a whole other subject, though. The reason I'm bringing it up is this: vulnerability isn't just about <em>having feelings.</em> It's just not about crying. It's not just about daring to let yourself be seen. It's not just about admitting that you want someone to notice you.<br><br></div><div>No: true vulnerability begins when you do all that, when you open yourself up, when you let yourself be unguarded, <em>and you're still not the only person in the room.</em> It's <em>doing</em> all that, <em>being</em> all that, admitting that <em>this is who you are,</em> and hearing the person next to you quietly say: "I'm still here, you know."<br><br></div><div>Because <em>that's</em> the hard part of being vulnerable—and that's the reason why vulnerability is so important. Vulnerability isn't <em>just</em> a matter of feeling seen and validated. It's a matter of feeling seen and validated <em>while you acknowledge other people's rights to exist.</em> And by "acknowledge," I mean recognizing that they exist as fully-fleshed-out people with deep experiences, different lives, and every right to be in this world alongside you. True vulnerability consists of <em>letting yourself realize that</em> while still daring to exist, daring to ask that somebody see you, daring to ask that somebody let you matter. And that word, <em>let,</em> is the scariest part of all. Because you're not wholly vulnerable until you put aside <em>your</em> right to choose, <em>your</em> right to make that choice, and acknowledge that other people, in the end, get to decide what you do and don't mean to them.<br><br></div><div>If you've lived your entire life convinced that everybody else in the world wants to <em>blot you out,</em> then it is existentially terrifying to realize how rich and full and complicated and deep everybody else in the world is. Reducing other people to shallow, flat insignificances is almost a kind of coping mechanism. There are, after all, <em>so many other people.</em> So many more others than there are of you! It feels like you almost <em>have</em> to shrink them all down—and even then, it feels unbearably threatening when one of them swells even a <em>little</em> bit in size. If you ever let yourself see those other people as equal in size and importance to you...<br><br></div><div>Well, suddenly you'd feel incomprehensibly small. It would be hard to feel like you even meaningfully exist.<br><br></div><div>It's hard enough to admit your feelings and needs to someone who's trying to devote her entire life to seeing you and caring about you. Now imagine that other person is a <em>person.</em> Imagine she's <em>you</em>-sized. Imagine only taking up 50% of a room, of a relationship, of a life. If you dare imagine even <em>one other person</em> is fully person-sized too, then you're suddenly a minority. If you imagine <em>everybody else</em> being like that, you practically wink out of existence.<br><br></div><div><em>That's</em> vulnerability at its starkest. It's the terrifying realization that many men are never forced to directly acknowledge. And of the ones who <em>do</em>, plenty go full-blown nihilist over it, because they can't imagine the world as anything but a battlefield that'll only have one victor. To their minds, caring is weakness—and anyone who loves them has done them the favor of making themselves insignificant. You do them a <em>kindness</em> if you give them permission to never think about you again: they're grateful to you for that, and for nothing else at all.<br><br></div><div>But they've got it all wrong. In a world like that, in a world where you <em>are</em> so small that no amount of power, no amount of vanity, will ever make you amount to more than a gnat on the universe's radar, you wind up only having one true power of your own—and that's the fact that <em>you can see others,</em> you can take them in, you can give them room to share this world with you. Your only power, really, is to empower others, which you do every time you acknowledge that there's more to them than meets the eye, more to them than you understand. Your power is to tell people that the parts of them you <em>don't</em> see are worth a damn too—and to ask them to show you those parts of themselves as well.<br><br></div><div>If you really do reduce people down to nothing, if you do your very best to make them insignificant, then a day will come when you cry, you weep, you throw yourself at their feet, you admit what a miserable and wretched tiny little thing you are compared to them... and they look at you with no feeling at all, not even a glimmer of pity, and they turn and walk away. People, even people who make every effort to give you room in their lives, have limits. And if you abuse those people, if you exploit them, if you take advantage of their love for you, then you will realize that you are just as powerless as you always feared. Because your only power came from the fact that they wanted to let you be powerful. And when they revoke that from you, you truly have nothing.<br><br></div><div>On the contrast, if you genuinely <em>care</em> about other people—not superficially, but deeply; not as a "favor" to them, but because it matters to you that they exist—then those people will have every reason in the world to keep you in their lives. Granted, you will have to let <em>them</em> decide the capacity they keep you in: caring about them is not a cheat code that "lets" you have them, it's an act that helps them be honest about how much of themselves they'd like to share with you. That part, too, can be hard, especially if you've spent your whole life thinking of other people as trophies to be won, rewards you have to <em>earn,</em> objects whose presence in your life is a reflection of your own achievement and prowess and value. And you can't really care about someone until you realize how bullshit all that is, and start to see instead that how much they want you is a reflection of <em>them</em> and not of you. Just as your desire for them is, on some level, about <em>you</em> and not them.<br><br></div><div><em>This</em> is true vulnerability—not just the crying, but the part that comes before the crying. Not the part where you realize how much somebody means to you, but the part where you let them be human whether or not they mean anything to you at all. Not just the part where you feel human, but the part where <em>they</em> do.<br><br></div><div>Generalizations only go so far. Plenty of wonderful men <em>do</em> know this—and quite a few women don't. Different cultures rear men and women in different ways; perhaps you weren't raised like this in the slightest, and find this entire way of thinking completely foreign to you. And there are all sorts of complications where gender is concerned, and where sexuality comes into play, so if you're not straight or cisgender your experience is likely <em>radically</em> different from this—though you might find the eerie reflections of the world I'm describing haunting your own.<br><br></div><div>But "not all men" doesn't change the fact that <em>so many</em> men work this way that, for many women, this experience seems universal. It's not just universal in the sense that many women have experienced this with men: it's universal in that, for many women, <em>every</em> man has been like this. Or every man but one, or two. It's so universal that women can count the exceptions on one hand, and remember each one distinctly, because, for many women, those are the men who haunt them, like mirages from their past, so unusual that the specifics of their story are hard to understand, hard to believe were ever really there at all.<br><br></div><div>I have empathy for men who find themselves in this place. But my sympathy only goes so far. It is a hellish existence, to genuinely fear that the presence of other people might obliterate you. Hellish to think that you can only exist by reducing other people's existences down to nothing. At some point, though, it is your duty to recognize the ways that you are hurting or neglecting or abusing other people. And if you struggle to fully comprehend what that means, if it's still hard for you to hear "other people" without imagining a dim buzzing sound and picturing a swarm of irritating little bees, then try and recognize the ways in which you're neglecting and abusing <em>yourself,</em> with your refusal to see other people as people. With your blindness to what other people really mean to you. With your inability to accept that you need people more deeply than you know.<br><br></div><div>The scariest moment, when you choose to be vulnerable, is when you take your first step. It will be a small step, a clumsy one, an altogether-insignificant-feeling one, and you'll likely hate yourself for all that too. You'll hate yourself for how little it is. You'll hate yourself for how hard it is, for how scared you are, for how little it accomplishes. But you'll take it—and the next step will be a little easier, a little less scary, a little more sure. You'll take it, and soon you'll start to see that the place you're moving away <em>from</em> is far more terrifying than the place you're moving <em>towards.</em> You'll see that you were living in the place you feared all along, convinced that everywhere else was scarier, not realizing that the reason everything around you seemed so dark was that you'd fallen into this pit long before you were old enough to realize what it was.<br><br></div><div>I'm writing this for women who might better want to understand why so many men are so terrible at giving them even a <em>sliver</em> of acknowledgment. But I'm writing this to men, too. Men, we would <em>love</em> to love you—and by <em>we</em> I don't just mean women. I mean myself, and I mean other men, because it is long past time that we stopped subjecting one another to lovelessness, and long past time that we put the burden of loving men on women alone. We deserve to love and care about one another; we deserve to see one another as worthy of being cared about and loved; we deserve to be loved and cared for. If I'm critical of how so many men behave, it's to help them see that this behavior is keeping <em>them</em> from having what they most yearn for. To help <em>you</em> see, maybe, if you're the one who's reading this. I say the rest of this, not to scold or dismiss or belittle, but to see.<br><br></div><div>And to women reading this who see men they know: I hope this helps you see men better, but at the same time, I hope you see in this that it's up to the men in your life to do better. They might be able to fix themselves, but <em>you</em> will not be able to fix them. And if you're being treated this dismissively, this reductively, then the best thing that you can do, in many cases, is to pull away, to offer less, to stop giving them such one-sided love that you unintentionally reinforce their belief that they're the only meaningful person in the world. You may think you're helping them be vulnerable, especially if they've told you that themselves, but there's a chance that you might be <em>preventing</em> them from having to be vulnerable at all—because you're denying them the responsibility of having to see you as a person first and foremost.</div><div><br></div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/304532023-07-28T08:15:49Z2023-07-28T08:38:37ZHuman experience, hold the humanity.<div class="trix-content">
<div>Kittens, babies, and pornography are the most popular content on the Internet because they allow emotionally repressed people opportunities to express feelings without admitting any tenderness or vulnerability in the process.<br><br></div><div>Following in close second is content that induces outrage, resentment, grievance, and despair, for similar reasons. It lets us redirect our feelings of helplessness <em>and</em> our feelings of entitlement towards a broad enough target that we don't have to take responsibility for our feelings. At its worst, it also encourages a self-righteousness that lets us judge and condemn the people in our real lives while convincing ourselves that <em>we</em> are not doing the condemnation. In fact, the choice to judge is out of our hands altogether.<br><br></div><div>In third place, we get what I like to call "the illusion of control." This includes political conspiracies, fandom pedantries, and the sort of faux-science that offers endless information on authoritative-sounding subjects: dopamine and depression, ADHD and autism, alternative medicine, and anything else that you probably shouldn't be "researching" using Instagram. (Personality assessments like astrology and Meyers-Briggs fall into this bucket as well.)<br><br></div><div>In an increasingly disconnected age, where we are alienated from each other <em>and</em> from ourselves—from our feelings, from our labor, from our futures, and even from the things that, once upon a time, we'd have gotten to call our own—we have found clever ways to atomize the human experience, replicating what it feels like to live without the messy inconvenience of actually needing to be alive. We've replaced the complicated fibers of being human with sugar water, switching out the trickiness of genuinely learning for the ease of <em>feeling knowledgable,</em>manipulating our own emotions like a switchboard without bothering to let the emotions stand in for something more deeply and sincerely personal.<br><br></div><div>Far from <em>sparing</em> us from vulnerability, it leaves us more vulnerable than ever: we've got no topsoil, we fail to put down roots. We're electrified and absorbed by every little spark of chaos and distraction, because we have no insulation whatsoever, no grounding to help keep us focused. We all know this, on some level. We know this has a cost. But the cost is too diffuse, too broad in scope, to easily focus on, and already we've swiped to the next thing, we're playing the next song, we're appalled and horny and giggling and cooing and furious and depressed, we're liking and commenting and sharing, we're <em>reacting,</em> and a week from now we'll see it all again and it'll already feel like nostalgia, because who remembers everything they saw an hour ago, who remembers <em>anything,</em> who has anything worth remembering?<br><br></div><div>Maybe we dream, <em>if</em> we dream, of not remembering remembering at all, which could mean either orgasm or apocalypse, or likely both at once. We claim to dread the end of the world, but we make those claims in a tone of voice which suggests, perversely enough, that dread is the closest thing we've found to hope. Do we really fear that future will be hell and damnation and oblivion, or is it that the <em>present,</em> the endless present, is the hell and the oblivion that we claim to fear? It's more comfortable to pretend that it's a moment yet to come, safer to claim a doomed future than a doomed present. It certainly explains why fantasies of <em>release,</em> fantasies of all of this ending, feel so appealing, terrifying as they might seem. But release from what? An end to what? Aww, look! This kitten's made an unlikely friend!</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/300042023-06-30T22:25:48Z2023-06-30T22:25:49ZAn album review that isn't an album review, really<div class="trix-content">
<div>Today, I would like to discuss the new album <em>One-Hit Wonder</em> by Suzuki Matsuo, a duet consisting of Kiyonori Matsuo and Keiichi Suzuki, most famous for being the founder of the legendary Moonriders.<br><br>You can listen to the whole album <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kCrzrlrVt103gbCWazqk2TBcIlfXrm7tI"><strong>here</strong></a>. It would be hard for me to "review" this album, because it wears its joys and sweetnesses on its surface. I could not say a single thing about it that you wouldn't think of just by listening.<br><br>Hell, you could even just look at the album cover and come away with a decent approximation of the experience:<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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</figure><br><br>There. Isn't that nice?<br><br>What I really want to talk about is the late-period evolution of Keiichi Suzuki as an arranger and producer. If you're not familiar with Suzuki or Moonriders and cannot imagine a more tedious or obscure way to pass your time: the long and short of it is that Moonriders spent 40 years undergoing a series of astonishing and startling evolutions, all of which had less to do with "shifting genres" than to do with profound changes in their understanding of how music works, how it gets created, and what it means for different musicians to come together and make it.<br><br>From the beginning, Moonriders were a tight-knit band with an extraordinary ability to weave themselves together as a composition; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aodDY3h9YnM"><strong>this track</strong><em> </em><strong>from the mid-80s</strong></a><strong> </strong>gives a good sense of how well they operated as a unit. It also hints at their myriad of influences: beneath the funk harmonies, their sensibilities are strongly New Wave, in the sense that their compositions consist of different tight loops of contrasting sound. Beneath <em>that</em>, you can detect their roots in folk music: you don't need to know what words they're singing to detect that their melodies are soulful, emotive, and personal, for all they're tight and poppy. By the 90s, they'd found ways of working together with such subtlety and finesse that they developed the uncanny ability to sound like entirely different bands on a song-by-song basis. It's hard to imagine that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgrwwmw2j7o"><strong>this folk song</strong></a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E6puWshKBQ"><strong>this surf-rock song</strong></a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37xW84rAsZ0"><strong>this ballad</strong></a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENuysbKJ4j0"><strong>this I'm-not-sure-what-to-call-it</strong></a><strong> </strong>were written and arranged and performed and produced by the same six people, and it's harder to comprehend that these were all on <em>the same album. <br><br></em>In the last decade or so of their existence, Moonriders' approach to making music got even stranger and more sublime. It's not that they fuse genres together so much as they skirt around the notion of genre altogether: their melodies are gorgeous, their beats and grooves and riffs are killer, and their productions are inventive and lush, but it's hard to pin down exactly <em>what</em> you'd call what you're listening to. And there's no reason to pin it down, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtPBElEfOE"><strong>when it sounds as gorgeous as this.</strong></a><strong> <br><br></strong>Moonriders was a tight and fairly virtuosic band from the start, but on songs like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oImrQjl7TGA"><strong>I Hate You And I Love You</strong></a>, they're operating on a level that's fairly hard to comprehend. "I Hate You" is a driving, propulsive song with barely a pause in it, with all six band members contributing fairly relentlessly at all time; when the composition shifts, all six leap to performing new pieces so fluidly that it barely feels like a transition. Like most Moonriders music, it's so breezy and casual and just plain <em>nice</em> that you could overlook the genius that went into it. The brilliance never comments on its own brilliance: it's just a necessary part of making music that sounds as good as Moonriders wanted to make.<br><br>Keiichi Suzuki is credited as the "founder" of Moonriders; he is also generally given credit for the band's aggressively democratic approach to making music. All six members of Moonriders wrote, arranged, and produced songs; certain albums consist of playful games between the different members, where each contributes exactly the same number of songs to produce a kind of cycle between the six. Each of the six had a different musical background, and the band embraced that heterogenous mixture, reveling in how <em>different</em> each member's contributions were while also discovering new ways for each to contribute to the others' work. The evolution of sound I'm describing was no mere fluke: in a sense, it was the band's entire ethos, an ongoing attempt to discover just how deeply different performers and sounds and even <em>ideologies</em> could create harmony together.<br><br>For the last 15 years or so, Suzuki has been exploring a similar ethos as a solo musician. He has always had an extraordinary pop sensibility, and a knack for knowing how to combine crisp and unusual sounds together to make something compelling. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFfchViMPAY"><strong>White and Black</strong></a>, from the early 90s, comes to mind.) In the late 00s and early 10s, though, he embarked on a trilogy of albums whose sound got increasingly more diffuse. You can hear it in the transition from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igMn4FsmvCc"><strong>Buoy</strong></a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqp6YfoonmU"><strong>Lookin' For Miss Radio</strong></a> to his cover of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAvn4uz_3xo"><strong>Witchi-Tai-Tao</strong></a>; the first album is already soft and fuzzy, its sounds intentionally kept unsharp, but by the end of the trilogy, the production and arrangements sound almost faded, as if the different pieces are dissolving into each other. His final (as of now) solo record returned to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESBueQXQP9A"><strong>brighter and more distinctly colorful arrangements</strong></a>, but there was still a diffuseness to its orchestration and production. The sound reminds me of Impressionism or Pointillism: the sounds fade into one another, enriching each other in their refusal to interrupt or distract from one another. The gentler and less distinct they all get, the richer and more essential each one sounds.<br><br>Keiichi's recent work has largely consisted of one-on-one collaborations, such as <a href="https://music.apple.com/jp/album/ive-been-waiting-for-you/1372667120?i=1372667122&l=en"><strong>his work with YMO's Yukihiro Takahashi</strong></a> and No Lie-Sense, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mEF2gvRFJk"><strong>dark and whimsical</strong></a> group he formed with KERA. The individual details vary wildly—both Suzuki and his collaborators are as omnivorous as ever—but there's a distinct trend towards softness and mutedness, paired with increasingly rich and vivid arrangements. The combination is a fascinating one: his compositions grow more startling and striking, but the productions themselves get increasingly gentle. They remind me of Brian Eno's original definition of ambient music: songs that work perfectly whether you focus intently on them <em>or</em> pay no attention to them at all.<br><br>It's not quite a Wall of Sound, a la <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EvZOXEoJ84"><strong>Phil Spector</strong></a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWFc5mkABNo"><strong>Enya</strong></a>. The Wall of Sound approach creates arrangements whose components blend to the extent that they're no longer recognizable as individual instruments; for lack of a better word, there's a soupiness to them. Keiichi's approach never goes in that direction: you can always clearly distinguish the instruments he's working with. Neither does it have the slickness of pop productions like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAp9BKosZXs"><strong>Max Martin's</strong></a>, where the individual components are sublimated to a propulsive greater whole. What's remarkable about his work, in fact, is that you can always clearly keep track of a dozen different things happening at once, all of which serve as counterpoints to all the others, without a single piece ever quite taking center stage. In a sense, its ambience is formed <em>from</em> the discreteness of all its parts: there are so many moving pieces that the overall impression is one of a <em>mood</em>. You can, if you'd like, focus on any one piece (and be dizzied by just how many different parts are weaving in and out of one another), but the immediate impression is more one of melody and motion than of the parts.<br><br>It is very much like Keiichi Suzuki, and like Moonriders as a whole, for <em>One Hit Wonder</em> to feel both like the culmination of a lifetime's worth of work <em>and</em> like a pleasant trifle. For his entire career, Suzuki has emphasized collaboration, between musicians and between approaches <em>to</em> music; he has increasingly strived for heterogeneity, and increasingly discovered a gentleness that allows that heterogeneity to coexist. <br><br>It's hard to well whether his music's warmth, playfulness, and sweetness is separate from that pursuit, or whether those happen to be the traits that let such an astonishing variety of influences coexist together. At times, it feels to me like there's no other possible way to let such music work: without that deep tenderness, without that endless whimsy, without the sheer <em>cuteness</em> that invariably finds its way into Keiichi's work, that spectacular diversity of sound would collapse into itself. And if those aren't always the traits we associate with brilliance, or with genius, then perhaps it's because genius is so often pre-occupied with individual distinction, with an artistic kind of dominance, that it makes no room for the kinds of ingenuity that only come about when the sum of a whole is <em>solely</em> the care it lends its many different parts.<br><br>It's no fluke that Keiichi's music has always been openly socialist, concerned with the individuals of the working class. And it's no coincidence that, after Moonriders largely dissolved in 2011, Keiichi formed a new group (Controversial Spark) whose composition is, if anything, <em>more</em> democratic and diverse than Moonriders was: the age of its founding members ranged evenly from their early 20s to their mid-60s, as many women were included as men, and Keiichi's contribution to the songwriting was more scant than ever. (Its younger members, in fact, write slightly more of Controversial Spark's music overall.)<br><br>Suzuki was raised on the would-be revolutionaries of 60s music: the Beatles, Dylan, and the Grateful Dead factor strongly into his list of influences. At times, his and Moonriders' songwriting was starkly political; early Moonriders was often fiery and tortured and lonely, and later Moonriders takes a soft, not-fully-resigned attitude towards the ongoing injustices and cruelties of the world. But there's also an ongoing emphasis on friendship, community, and hope. When Suzuki was tasked with co-writing the music of <em>Mother</em> and <em>Earthbound</em> in the late 80s, selections of his work was released as an album of English pop songs. It's no coincidence that the first song off that album was titled <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBbRJoHTJAM"><strong>Pollyanna (I Believe In You)</strong></a>, or that it was immediately followed by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSshQu9rQLc"><strong>Being Friends</strong></a>. <br><br>The revolution in Keiichi Suzuki's music is as much a matter of how he and his endless collaborators made it, and of what kinds of sound resulted, as it's anything more explicit in its politics. But there <em>is</em> an inherent politics to his approach, and there might even be something political to the kind of music that ensues. If the end result is as sweet and easy and summery as music has ever sounded, that is in fact a part of the statement. And if it's hard to reconcile its gentle ease with the startling genius of the man who helped create it, perhaps that's because we're accustomed to thinking of genius as something that isolates us, individualizes us, rather than as the process by which we learn to come together. A utopia that works and sounds like Keiichi Suzuki might be exactly the utopia that we need; if we take care, it might be the utopia we deserve as well.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/296482023-06-12T19:08:17Z2023-06-12T19:16:52ZHarry Potter and the Cauldron of Media Illiteracy<div class="trix-content">
<div>Somehow, over the span of a decade, I've gone from a Problematic Harry Potter Hater to a Problematic Harry Potter Lover. At no point in that decade have my feelings about Harry Potter changed; I would go as far as to say that I'm not sure I've had an original thought about Harry Potter between 2013 and today. There simply has not been that much to think about! I thought the books were very good, I thought the movies were very bad, and I ignored the <em>Fantastic Beasts</em> franchise because I cannot imagine an emotionally healthy person sparing a single thought for it.<br><br>Ten years ago, though, it was considered ill-mannered to find Pottermania in bad taste, or to tire of the deep analytical fan essays trying to find character depth in Anthony Goldstein or Ernie MacMillan—two characters whose personalities both amount to "room stuffing." I had more than one friend get mad at me for daring to suggest that Harry Potter intentionally made whimsical and silly worldbuilding choices, and that it might be counterproductive to invest in its ideas too seriously. Things that, to me, felt like "reading Harry Potter accurately" got derided as anti-fan and anti-fun.<br><br>Now, I'm far likelier to get criticized for <em>liking</em> Harry Potter than for hating it. Funnily enough, the same people are making the criticisms; they've just switched the polarity around. The maelstrom of Harry Potter reverence has turned into a maelstrom of Harry Potter loathing; astute literary critics have revisited the greatest book series ever written, and wisely concluded that it is immoral trash. <br><br>I understand (and sympathize with) the backlash. JK Rowling, an extremely rich woman who never has to go online a single day in her life, has instead used Twitter so long and so hard that she's wound up radically transphobic. The Internet has a way of propagating certain bizarre mental behaviors as though they were literal contagious diseases; you could watch the infection invade JK's mind step-by-step, as she went from "unintentionally problematic remarks" to "sincere attempts to reconcile personal beliefs with tolerance" to "flat-out trans-hating" to "low-key endorsing trans genocide." Former die-hard Harry Potter fans are heartbroken and upset, not to mention terrified, by this transition. And it's tempting, with any kind of heartbreak, to practice a certain revisionism: to rewrite your narrative about somebody until they were conspicuously vile from the start.<br><br>What I find frustrating, though, is that the new interpretation of Harry Potter as racist trash makes the exact same misreadings as the old interpretation of Harry Potter as sophisticated social commentary. From the beginning of Pottermania, there has been a tendency to insist that Harry Potter is <em>important</em>, that its appeal is to readers' <em>hearts</em>, that it must be treated as <em>tender</em> and <em>emotional</em> and <em>dear</em>. And that makes talking about Harry Potter virtually impossible from the get-go, because above all Harry Potter is <em>enormously silly</em>. In fact, it's not just silly: it's <em>intentionally absurdist</em>. And its deeper moral and cultural message—which does, in fact, exist!—is so rooted in its absurdity, so <em>dependent</em> on the reader's acknowledgment that certain things here are <em>very very silly</em>, that to take the absurd things seriously is to render the whole series borderline illegible.<br><br>Rowling makes this clear from the very beginning—not that she or her literary technique are ever given credit. Harry Potter does not, after all, begin with Harry Potter himself. It begins thusly: <br><br></div><blockquote>Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.</blockquote><div><br>The book could not be clearer in its message: LOOK AT THESE PRIGS LOOK AT THESE PRIGS LOOK AT THESE PRIGS. "Proud to say that they were perfectly normal" becomes, in a nutshell, the book's critique of the evils in the hearts of man: to insist that <em>you</em> have the right to define what normal is, what perfection means, and to take <em>pride</em> in that fact, is to inherently exclude and ostracize anything that fails to meet your definition. It means cutting out everything in life that is mysterious and strange. Even more importantly, it means eliminating <em>all the nonsense</em>—and, as the series makes clear, nonsense is where life's magic really resides.<br><br>By the time we meet Dumbledore, the series' archetypal Wise Old Wizard, at the end of Chapter 1, it should be clear: silliness and goodness are inherently intertwined. When Dumbledore off-handedly mentions that he has a scar <em>that's a perfect map of the London Underground</em> on his left knee, we're well past the point where you can plausibly accuse Harry Potter of taking anything especially seriously. If you find yourself asking how Quidditch, a game in which the Most Special Boy can immediately score his team 150 points, could possibly function as a real sport, you have made a fundamental category error.<br><br>Now, there's a reason why this gets overlooked. Harry Potter is not <em>just</em> a very silly book series about a place called Hogwarts: it is also a moral parable about racism and classism, a Christian allegory about the redemptive power of love, and a pretty killer series of mysteries. It was a children's book series that tackled serious, even difficult, themes. And its runaway success permitted Rowling to take liberties that editors had never allowed children's authors to take before: Tamora Pierce, herself a marvelous writer—and a much better and more thoughtful person than Rowling—credits <em>Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire</em> for the fact that she's allowed to write book-length books now, rather than curtailing her novels to 200-page chunks. <br><br>It doesn't hurt that Harry Potter itself hid its ambitions until after it became the publishing world's all-time greatest success: while it lays the groundwork for its deeper, darker themes across its first few entries, it's not until Nazis murder a teenage boy in book four that the series truly begins to spread itself out. And when it returned, after the greatest spell of anticipation for a new book in <em>decades</em>, it focused on institutional failure: the government and the media goes out of its way to cover up the burgeoning supremacist movement, publicly slandering <em>another</em> teenager's reputation. The primary feeling in <em>Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix</em>, unusually for a children's book, is one of dread: Harry confronting the frustrating feeling that <em>something terrible is happening</em>, and that nobody is doing anything about it, and that each and every day things are getting worse, horribly worse.<br><br>For plenty of young readers, this was their <em>very first time</em> experiencing anything like this. Even for older readers, there was a shock that this was happening in <em>children's lit</em>—that Rowling was finding a way of welding this narrative to the kind of simple, accessible storytelling that made it palatable for less-experienced readers. And ignore the revisionism: the series is suspenseful, unpredictable, and (at times) emotionally devastating. It's far from perfect, but my experience of reading each book on its release day was of feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. I have to imagine that it must have been similar to how young Beatles fans felt after <em>Rubber Soul</em> and <em>Revolver:</em> absolutely flabbergasted, unprepared for what they'd just experienced, stunned to have <em>that much of an experience</em> in a space which had for so long been considered light, breezy, and insignificant.<br><br>So I get it. It makes sense that people dwelled on the <em>big</em> things, the <em>heavy</em> things, and not the <em>silly</em> things. It also makes sense that a huge chunk of the Harry Potter readership literally learned <em>how</em> to think about literature through this book—they didn't know how to interpret Harry Potter because they'd never really had to think seriously about a book before. After that, this series became the lodestone by which they navigated everything else; "Harry Potter" was a lens you could apply to other cultural events, but the Harry Potter <em>series</em> was defined by the emotional experience of reading it for the first time.<br><br>If you saw Harry Potter as a life-defining parable about what it means to be good—what it means to <em>fight for justice—</em>then I'm sure you can look back on it and be shocked by its casual bigotry, its meanness, its willingness to reduce characters down to caricature and cliché. But that's not some new discovery. In fact, it's part of the literary and cultural tradition that JK Rowling comes from. It was noticed and discussed by critics from the very first book onward: it's hard to overlook Harry's fat cousin literally growing a pig's tail as he's stuffing his face with Harry's birthday cake. The only shock comes from people for whom Harry Potter served as an event horizon of sorts: people who so fail to understand Harry Potter's origins that they still don't really know what Harry Potter <em>is</em>. <br><br>That's a shame, because it means that most of the contemporary criticisms of Harry Potter—an eminently criticizable book—fall flat. Meanwhile, the books' real genius goes largely unacknowledged and overlooked, because the people who most lauded it never really understood what Harry Potter was doing.<br><br>When Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python fame, offered to direct the entire series, he knew what he was doing. Monty Python is a <em>blatant</em> influence on Harry Potter, both for better and for worse. <em>Flying Circus</em> loves nothing more than to depict ostensibly-serious people digging in their heels to defend conspicuously ridiculous things; Harry Potter takes this vein of humor and runs with it, starting with the self-serious Dursleys before pivoting it around to lampoon self-serious <em>wizards</em>. What's ridiculous to us is completely ordinary to them; their prejudices and mores are taken to be deeply important, usually in the form of Ron Weasley saying bigoted, patronizing things without realizing he's saying them. (Ron, who's got a heart of gold, has nonetheless internalized a lot of the wizarding world, and finds it remarkable that anyone could find any of it funny, let alone shocked or appalled.)<br><br>The clever double-sided game that Rowling plays is to use her fantasy world to mock and lampoon the real one, and then to mock her <em>own</em> world when it falls into the same nasty human behaviors. Ron's father Arthur is endlessly delighted with Muggle inventions: he finds telephones and cars as fascinating as we find invisibility cloaks and flying broomsticks. But his wonder, his <em>affection</em>, is looked down upon by his fellow wizards—not by the genocidal supremacists, but by the "perfectly normal" wizards, his fellow government employees. They, too, have a supremacist attitude towards non-wizards; in fact, they take it for granted that wizards are naturally, obviously superior. Never mind how frequently their magical solutions are ludicrous, inefficient, and cause great amounts of pain: they're <em>magic</em>, which means they're <em>better</em>. <br><br>The irony of these inefficiencies is never once called out in text; if you're waiting for the books to tell you what to think, you're likely still waiting after a quarter of a century. Similarly, Rowling never calls attention to the fact that, <em>by design</em>, her books are likely to prejudice her readers into seeing wizards as superior too. Every reader <em>wants</em> to be a wizard: they <em>want</em> to see and do extraordinary things. They could never find everyday technology as incredible as Arthur Weasley finds it; in fact, it's silly of him to find subway turnstiles so intriguing. They take it for granted that wizards <em>are</em> superior, and that the wizarding world <em>is</em> preferable to this one. In other words, they affect the same subtle bigotry as Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge: it's not that they <em>hate</em> Muggles, because why hate anyone so conspicuously inferior? Harry Potter never calls attention to the fact that Fudge's worldview is not substantially different than Voldemort's. But the world of Harry Potter isn't just segregated: its wizards are <em>so unanimous</em> in thinking that this segregation is acceptable that it literally goes unquestioned.<br><br>I am one of maybe ten people who actually bothered to read Rowling's first non-Potter novel <em>The Casual Vacancy</em>. Don't bother with it: it's mawkish and heavy-handed. But the specific thing it's heavy-handed about is liberal racism: the ways in which a community of people who largely think of themselves as good and open-minded—the kind of community that would go out of its way nowadays to identify as anti-racist—drive a young Black woman to her death and then just... go on with their lives. Rowling is not particularly well-equipped to write about this sort of thing in the real world, but <em>The Casual Vacancy</em> is interesting because of what it says about Harry Potter: namely, that the overwhelming bigotry of the "nice" wizards isn't an oversight on Rowling's part, but is in fact a part of the point she's making. When Ron and Harry mock Hermione for her outrage at realizing that Hogwarts is run on slave labor, <em>they</em> are the butt of Rowling's joke. Time and again, Harry Potter makes it clear that the wizarding world is as dysfunctional and as inhumane as our world is; to assume that Rowling intends it as a utopian vision is to take her in the worst faith possible.<br><br>I bring up the slave-labor bit because it's become one of the go-to canards for reinterpreting Rowling as a sneering racist. It's become popular to assume that, when Rowling depicts Hermione's failed efforts to liberate the house-elves from their servitude, the joke is that Hermione's some misguided angry nag. That's a weird assumption to make, given that <em>JK Rowling herself decided to include a plotline about liberating an enslaved populace</em>. The fact that Hogwarts <em>has </em>slave labor to begin with was introduced specifically so Rowling could critique it; the fact that Ron <em>and</em> Harry find Hermione to be so ridiculous goes to show just how quickly even an outsider like Harry comes to take systemic injustice for granted, to the extent that he even sees it as <em>good and right</em>. Later, Harry's beloved godfather Sirius winds up dead <em>because</em> he's too much of a bigot to take his own house-elf Kreacher seriously; even later, that same house-elf—who is himself extremely racist—is given a redemption arc, which kicks off with the revelation that Sirius's Nazi-loving brother harbored such affection for Kreacher that he's driven to betray Voldemort and his entire cause when he sees Voldemort treat Kreacher as poorly as... well... Sirius treated Kreacher too.<br><br>The fact that this is cited as proof that JK Rowling fundamentally supports racist institutions goes to show how pernicious this sort of revisionism can be. It undermines the <em>more credible</em> things you can accuse Harry Potter (and Rowling) of, when you're so conspicuously looking to interpret things in bad faith that you start misreading the book's <em>literal text</em>. Similarly, the fact that Hogwarts is inspired by British boarding schools—themselves a classist and elitist institution—leads people to conclude that Rowling loves boarding schools, and thinks they're just hunky-dory. That's a take that requires you to overlook just how frequently the book touches upon the miserable poverty of the Weasley family—and accentuates how much of that misery comes, not just from the unspoken assumption that everyone should have enough money to afford basic everyday living, but from the bigotry of Ron's classmates, who treat him as an inferior in ways both blatant and subtle. (Just as Voldemort's racism goes hand-in-hand with Cornelius Fudge's, so too are the more classist jabs at Ron paired with many quiet moments in which Ron's friends treat him conspicuously differently for his lack of money.)<br><br>Ironically, for a book series that's often criticized for being <em>too obvious</em> about its messaging, a lot of the critiques JK Rowling receives now is due to her willingness to <em>let things remain subtext</em>. The fetishization of Hogwarts' house system, in which fans excitedly take declare houses for themselves and construct elaborate justifications for how good their specific one is, overlooks how frequently <em>the series itself</em> points out that these houses are unnecessarily divisive, and only came about because Hogwarts's four founders were petty bickerers who wanted to treat their favorite students like their property. The myths of dignity and nobility surrounding the founders are just that: myths. (You'd think that Rowling's stance on idolatry would've been pretty clear when Dumbledore turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer who accidentally murdered his own sister.) Like so much else in the series, going back to the "perfectly normal" Dursleys who need you to know the exact posh street they live on, institutions are inherently suspect, and usually awful. So critics smugly point out that the Sorting Hat system miiiiight be a <em>wee</em> bit problematic, missing how frequently Dumbledore himself calls the house system awful.<br><br>The problem is that Harry Potter's fans unironically bought into a world that is heavily ironized. They insisted on seeing Hogwarts as a utopia, when it was an absurdist hodgepodge from the get-go. Every time that a character insisted that everything about Hogwarts was Good, Actually, fans took that as face value, rather than seeing it as the Pythonesque pratfall that it was. And now that they're older and performative consciousness has become the norm—and now that JK has become a <em>genuine</em> virile bigot—their only recourse is to accuse <em>Rowling</em> of taking everything she wrote as seriously and dully as they themselves first took it. Rowling intended no ironies a decade ago, when everything she wrote was wonderful and good; she intends no ironies now, when everything she wrote is disgusting and bad. In neither case do Harry Potter's fans see Harry Potter as the series it actually was: they read Harry Potter about as astutely as Pink Floyd fans who think that <em>The Wall</em> was Roger Waters's way of saying he loves fascism.<br><br>The most obvious precedent to Harry Potter might be the worlds of Roald Dahl, which are even more conspicuously nasty than Rowling's works are herself. Dahl found that same blend of wonder and wretchedness: Willy Wonka is a psychopath, his factory is a hellscape, his adults are nasty bullies, and his children are nastier still. There's a similar emphasis on authority figures being conspicuously terrible while insisting that they're simply being proper; there's a similar sense that a more wondrous world might <em>inherently</em> be a more gruesome one. And there's a similar attitude that children might just be wretched little pricks, constantly hurting one another for the most inane of reasons.<br><br>Roald Dahl and Monty Python have quite a lot in common, on some levels; Rowling draws from both of them liberally. She also draws from <em>another</em> vein they both share: namely, mean-spirited caricature that doesn't hesitate to turn flat-out bigoted and cruel.<br><br>Here's where there's a genuine criticism of Harry Potter to be made: it's not even <em>remotely</em> considerate of the line between "satirical" and "reductive." Dudley Dursley and his aunt Marge are both grotesquely fat, in ways which (it's implied) say something about their moral character; Draco Malfoy's flunkeys Crabbe and Goyle are similarly defined by their obesity and their obsequiousness, until a nasty little twist in the final book. Minor characters are named in ways that reduce them to racial or national stereotypes: Cho Chang, Anthony Goldstein, Pavarti Patil, Seamus Finnegan. The whimsical naming strategy that's fun when it comes to naming spells or lampooning fantasy tropes turns into a different, worse kind of trope when it's defining people. (And the way that that intersects with the also-conspicuously-tropey Hogwarts houses isn't great: much ado has been made of the fact that the Jewish and the Generically Asian characters are both in Ravenclaw, the Hogwarts house for people who get good grades in school.)<br><br>Harry Potter certainly belongs to a tradition here; that tradition is also certainly worth critiquing. You can see Monty Python as brilliant and subversive <em>and also</em> acknowledge that it frequently did some pretty fucked-up shit; you can absolutely go to town on how awful Roald Dahl almost always was. And you can go further than that, and critique the authors and artists themselves: Dahl was an out-and-proud bigot, and John Cleese of Monty Python fame has veered towards cranky "anti-woke" takes as he's gotten older, occasionally landing in outright transphobic territory himself. In other words, there's a lot to take issue with here. But it also allows you to note the <em>context</em> in which Harry Potter veered into bigoted and fat-shaming territories: namely, that this reductive caricature has often gone hand-in-hand with social critique, satirical farce, and absurdist exaggeration. It points to the kind of story that Harry Potter wants to tell; it suggests the methods with which Harry Potter wants to send its message. This is a book series that intends to present you with ludicrous figures, who then go on to tell you that they are in fact extremely normal and proper, in the hopes that you'll decide you maybe shouldn't trust them.<br><br>A lot of Harry Potter's bigotry is simply <em>thoughtless:</em> it takes for granted that it can be reductive without causing harm, and doesn't examine its decisions any further. When it <em>does</em> present more complex instances of unfairness or oppression—whether you're talking the house-elf system or the general boarding-school vibes—it either makes direct critiques of the system in question or, at the very least, presents them as <em>extremely unreliable</em>. The series as a whole is incredibly anarchic: Peeves, its most chaotic character, becomes an almost heroic entity in <em>Order of the Phoenix</em>, and troublemakers are generally upheld as more worthy of reverence than actual heroes are. (Mischief, as a general rule, gets lauded; it's also suggested a few times that mischief is a kind of playful precursor to genuinely challenging unjust institutions.)<br><br>In other words, there's an argument to be made that JK Rowling is frequently thoughtless or inconsiderate; the fact that she literally got radicalized because she couldn't stop picking fights on Twitter—that she was <em>so unwilling to back down from an argument</em> that she's landed on endorsing <em>trans genocide</em>—enforces this argument, rather than undermining it. But it's a stretch to go from that to claiming that Rowling's intent, with Harry Potter, was to uphold classist, bigoted Britain as a good thing overall. You can argue that Rowling's obvious support of institutional <em>reform</em>—which shows in the way Harry winds up working for the government <em>and</em> in Rowling's own fondness for the Liberal Democrats—is insufficient as a political ideology. But these are not the arguments that Rowling's contemporary critics make.<br><br>Again, the simple fact is that every <em>illegitimate </em>criticism of Rowling undermines the very <em>legitimate</em> ones that can be made. As a Jewish man, I get annoyed by—even <em>upset</em> by—the ballyhoo that's been made of Rowling's assigning goblins to work for Gringotts Bank. Goblins, in medieval lore, have often been used as stand-ins for Jewish people; they're often characterized by their greed for gold and shiny objects, as if they were the fantasy equivalent of magpies. And, since the conceit of Harry Potter starts with "what if traditional fantastic creatures were assimilated into a contemporary Britain," Rowling places goblins in the bank, and—with typical thoughtlessness—doesn't seem to think much more of it.<br><br>If that's where the argument for Rowling's anti-semitism ended—well, that and Anthony Goldstein—then you'd have a legitimate critique: Rowling doesn't once stop to ask whether she ought to examine the connotations of where she's placing whom. This is inconsiderate, even offensive. But there's not a lot about Rowling's depictions of the goblins that's particularly anti-semitic: it's the <em>movie's</em> depiction of Griphook the goblin that gives him a large pointy nose, and adds Stars of David to the Gringotts bank floor. The actual physical description of goblins in <em>The Philosopher's Stone</em> is as follows:<br><br></div><blockquote>The goblin was about a head shorter than Harry. He had a swarthy, clever face, a pointed beard and, Harry noticed, very long fingers and feet.</blockquote><div><br>I've never heard Jewish people accused of having long fingers and feet before. Maybe you can get somewhere with the adjective "clever," but this is not a particularly Jewish description of a goblin. Only the word "goblin," and its proximity to gold, carries that traditional anti-semitic denotation.<br><br>What's more, when Griphook returns in <em>The Deathly Hallows</em>, it's obvious that Rowling is harking to a <em>different</em> trope altogether. Specifically, she uses goblins as a substitute for <em>dwarves:</em> rather than being indiscriminately obsessed with money, the goblins are <em>craftsmen,</em> and the treasures they value most are their own works. Griphook's betrayal of Harry and his friends, where he makes off with a sword that the gang needs to vanquish Voldemort, isn't simple (possibly-Jewish-coded) greed: he's taking back a goblin heirloom. And he's taking it back after Harry promises the sword to him, fully intending to renege on his promise.<br><br>The valid critique of Rowling's putting goblins in a bank—it inconsiderately reflects medieval tropes of Jewish people as goblins—is cast aside. It doesn't adequately portray Rowling as the monster it would be convenient for her to be. Instead, a farther-reaching claim is made: one that blames JK Rowling for the art direction on a movie that Christopher Columbus made, ignores her book's actual text, and disregards every detail that fails to contribute to the Rowling-as-anti-semite narrative. <br><br>I find <em>this</em> far more offensive than I find Rowling's actual text, because <em>it cynically uses accusations of anti-semitism to fabricate a narrative.</em> It's as if it's not <em>enough</em> for Rowling to be profoundly transphobic: she needs to be <em>more</em> of a bigot, <em>or else it doesn't count!</em> Which is how I've found myself in situations where non-Jewish people angrily accuse <em>me</em> of supporting anti-semitism, simply by questioning the goblins-as-anti-semitic narrative they're trying to push. Because—let's face it—these people don't actually care about Jewish identity, or about Jewish oppression. They're about as sincere as the white liberals in <em>The Casual Vacancy:</em> performing sociopolitical consciousness to make a point, rather than trying to make a meaningful criticism of a work of art.<br><br>When Rachel Rostad went viral for her slam poem about Rowling's depiction of Cho Chang, she captured the zeitgeist for a reason: Cho's ambiguous racial identity is essentially a costume that Rowling dons on her. It defines her physical looks, her cartoonish name, and not much else. In fact, Cho is not given much characterization at all: she's kind of nice-ish, and then she's very sad about her dead boyfriend, and then Harry gets mad at her, and that's about all. When Hermione unpacks Cho's feelings for Harry and Ron, it's almost entirely defined by her feelings about two men:<br><br></div><blockquote>“Well, obviously, she’s feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying. Then I expect she’s feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can’t work out who she likes best. Then she’ll be feeling guilty, thinking it’s an insult to Cedric’s memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she’ll be worrying about what everyone else might say about her if she starts going out with Harry. And she probably can’t work out what her feelings toward Harry are anyway, because he was the one who was with Cedric when Cedric died, so that’s all very mixed up and painful. Oh, and she’s afraid she’s going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she’s been flying so badly.”</blockquote><div><br>Cho's a convenient narrative prop: she exists to further Harry's narrative, and to help emphasize the tragedy of Cedric's death, and that's about it. She's also Asian, because without that she'd literally have nothing that sets her apart. And it's a problem that "Asian" got treated as a way to differentiate her! It's an issue on <em>two</em> levels: first, that nothing about Cho's identity has any weight in any way; and second, that she's only Asian <em>because</em> Rowling needed a basic adjective to set her apart.<br><br>The outrage about Anthony Goldstein, on the other hand, makes close to no sense <em>because Anthony Goldstein barely exists</em>. He is mentioned exactly seven times across exactly two books; in all but <em>two</em> of those mentions, he is named along with a list of other generic students. Of those two other mentions, one of them consists of him standing idly, waiting to be magically disarmed by another student; the other student is the actual focus of the sentence. His finest hour comes when, in the middle of a speech that Hermione is making, he says "Hear hear." (Hermione, we are told, "looks heartened.")<br><br>If you want to point to Goldstein's last name as evidence that Rowling often assigns her characters reductive names—as I did, in this very piece!—then, yes, you have a point. Rowling is, at times, so lazy that it's outright offensive. But it's <em>inconsiderate</em> more than anything—just as failing to consider the historic context of "goblins" as a myth is inconsiderate. And if your entire argument about JK Rowling hating Jewish people comes down to long-fingered goblins and Anthony "Hear, Hear" Goldstein, you have to ask yourself whether you're really making the point that you think you're making.<br><br>Once again: I'm not pointing this out because I intend to exonerate Rowling. JK Rowling is a rich woman with a giant audience and she's using her wealth <em>and</em> her audience to actively oppress transgender people. It is legitimately monstrous and vile. My issue is not that people have turned on JK Rowling: they were correct to do so, the moment she started abusing her power for such an atrocious cause. Rather, my issue is that the bullshit revisionism of Harry Potter makes her critics come across as deeply unserious people, wholly uninvested in actual social causes or in meaningful artistic critique. It comes off, instead, as illiterate and opportunistic. <br><br>Part of the broad appeal of Harry Potter is that, by abstracting out its messages about oppression to a fantasy landscape, it was able to speak more universally to the <em>lonely outsider</em>—to the child who, for whatever reason, felt ostracized and outcast, bullied, unloved. The fantasy of Hogwarts was the fantasy of realizing that, somewhere out there, <em>there were people like you: </em>people around whom you could finally feel <em>normal</em>. Harry Potter's queer and trans fans saw their experience reflected in Harry's: that niggling sense that they were different, that sense that the world was conspiring to keep them from discovering who they were—that <em>their very families </em>were trying to suppress their very nature—and that, if they slipped into the right universe, they might find the place where their identities were not only acknowledged but commonplace, to the extent that they might build an entire life around this.<br><br>You can understand why this kind of reader might overlook the way that, from the literal first sentence, Rowling also questions this idea of <em>normal</em>—not just that one person's idea of normalcy might be damaging and wrong, but that <em>normalcy itself</em> might be highly suspect. The fact that, once Harry escapes his family, he exists solely in a world where wizards and <em>their</em> normal are the most conspicuous bigots—where Harry's "chosen family" reveals itself to be just as flawed as the world that he escaped from—complicates Rowling's outsider narrative, especially since she makes it clear with Voldemort that that same "outcast" mentality defines her world's most pernicious bigots.<br><br>This is not a "both sides" narrative—far from it. Instead, it's what Rowling uses to push away from the book's early in-group/out-group binary towards her real central theme: namely, the redemptive power of Christian love, and the way that it transcends all over deciding factors.<br><br>Five characters in Harry Potter serve as tentpoles for Rowling's inquiry into ethics and human nature—basically a questioning of nature-vs-nurture, and an attempt to ask what "defines" a person's being. What can we truly, fairly judge them by? What distinguishes a good person from an evil one?<br><br>Harry serves as the series' tabula rasa. He is wholly unfamiliar with this world, raised in squalor, surrounded by a family that hates him. He is left only with the <em>idea</em> of his parents' love—and with his famous scar, which serves as a physical reminder that his mother once loved him so deeply that it saved his life. When he enters the wizarding world, he is given every reason to love it; he is also, almost immediately, presented with a vast fortune, ensuring that he will never want for anything. All of his choices, therefore, are made with absolute freedom: he may choose to do anything that he feels he ought to do.<br><br>Before he's met any other classmate, Harry encounters Draco Malfoy—the first of his four foils. Draco is supremely rich; we will also learn that he is supremely racist. Harry rejects Malfoy internally simply by witnessing Malfoy's attitude towards the world: sneering, closed-minded, the antithesis of Harry's wonderment. By the time he meets Ron, who's "pure-blooded" but poor and therefore earns Malfoy's derision, Harry has made his first significant choice. He then makes his most famous <em>symbolic</em> decision when, as the Sorting Hat works out where to put him, he asks to be put anywhere but the place where Malfoy's going. Much later, Dumbledore will tell him that this matters more than anything: who he <em>is </em>matters far less than what he <em>chooses</em>.<br><br>Opposite Harry is Tom Riddle, who later becomes Voldemort. Tom's upbringing intentionally reflects Harry's (as does his name, which makes him another of the "Toms, Dicks, and Harrys" that mark him as an everyman of sorts). He, too, grows up orphaned and unloved and without a cent. Their one telling difference is that Tom's mother, unlike Harry's, never loved him—but as neither of their mothers raised them, the only material difference is that Harry has a scar.<br><br>Harry's magic manifests, in his youth, as a series of whimsical, wondrous happenings; Tom's, on the other hand, becomes the means with which he asserts himself as superior to his fellow orphans. When Tom discovers Hogwarts, he sees it solely as a means with which to acquire power—a way of marking himself as exceptional. The supremacist "pureblood" ideology that he adopts doesn't even apply to him: Tom is what racist wizards would call a mudblood. But he adopts it just the same, as he adopts any means with which he might assert himself as superior.<br><br>Dumbledore himself serves as the third of Harry's four foils—and as a foil to Tom-slash-Voldemort as well. Dumbledore, like Tom, is exceedingly brilliant; <em>unlike</em> Tom, and unlike Harry, he grows up in a relatively well-adjusted, loving family. He takes on supremacist beliefs, in his youth, because they reinforce his understanding that he <em>is</em> naturally superior in some way; he ignores the way that this ideology casts his more-average brother, and his struggling sister, as <em>inferior</em>. This results in his sister's death, his brother's lifelong animosity, and a profound guilt on Dumbledore's part; we retroactively learn that the source of Dumbledore's wisdom is less his natural gifts, and more his devastating realization that he too had committed a tremendous evil.<br><br>Malfoy is not as brilliant as Dumbledore or Voldemort. He's far more average: the series makes a point to note that he and Harry are neck-and-neck in most ways. His upbringing and Harry's are inverted: Draco grows up in the wizarding world, with two living parents, surrounded by lavish wealth. And his trajectory and Harry's are inverted too: when Harry goes on the run, Draco gets conscripted into Voldemort's Death Eaters. Draco's never quite heroic: he's just <em>reluctant.</em> He doesn't <em>love</em> the things he's being made to do. And his supremacist ideology crumbles, not through traumatic grief like Dumbledore's, but by a gradual recognition that this fascist regime is also a loveless one.<br><br>(Another irony is that Draco is <em>shielded</em> from this fact because his parents do genuinely love him. It's only when he encounters Voldemort that he has second thoughts. And while Draco's parents, who are Death Eaters themselves and are <em>profoundly</em> elitist, never turn their back on their worldview, they abandon the war altogether at a crucial moment, simply running to find their son so they might keep him safe.)<br><br>Equidistant from all four of these characters is the most controversial character in the series: Severus Snape. It's around Snape, ultimately, that the entire series turns: his unseen actions lead to the death of Harry's parents, which is where the first chapter opens, and the seventh book's epilogue ends on Harry telling his son that Snape was the bravest man he ever knew. This line from Harry is partly why Snape is so controversial: he is, in many ways, a reprehensible man, with a single redeeming moment that many readers don't think quite suffices.<br><br>Like Harry and Voldemort, Snape grows up in poverty; like Voldemort, he is unloved; like both Voldemort <em>and</em> Dumbledore, he becomes obsessed with his own exceptionalism. <em>Unlike</em> Harry and Voldemort, he grows up with a parent, though that's of little comfort, considering the parent. And like Malfoy, he readily adopts the Death Eater ideology, and with considerably more efficacy to boot.<br><br>Like Dumbledore, Snape's actions lead to the death of a loved one. <em>Unlike</em> Dumbledore, Snape would have been completely fine with killing somebody—he just got the wrong person dead. In fact, there is only one person who Snape ever loves: Harry's mother, even after she marries Snape's cruelest childhood tormentor.<br><br>What we learn, right before the series' climax, is that Snape turned turncoat after this: that he devoted his life to Lily Potter's memory, and to doing what <em>she</em> would have wanted him to do. It's not for <em>Harry's </em>sake—on the contrary, Snape despises Harry, start-to-finish. Rather, it's the only thing he can do for the women he loved and effectively killed: try and be who she saw him as.<br><br>Between these five tentpoles, Rowling establishes a simple and universal axiom: love, selfless love, is the single defining determinant of a person's moral position. Voldemort was not loved, and does not love; Dumbledore was loved, yet failed to love in kind. Draco sets out upon a loveless path, but the love he <em>did</em> receive eventually pulled him from his path. And Snape was never loved, and loved but only once—and that was the single act of love that winds up literally saving the world.<br><br>(While <em>Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows</em> is the only book in the series that isn't <em>overtly</em> a mystery novel, it reveals itself in the end to have been a mystery all along: Harry's final confrontation with Voldemort hinges on the question of who a certain wand belonged to, and their "fight" consists more-or-less of Harry solving the mystery out loud, tracing the wand's lineage from Dumbledore to Snape to Draco to Harry himself—conveniently outlining the relationship between these five tentpole characters at the same time. And it's Snape's redemptive act that means it's <em>Harry</em>, rather than Voldemort, who truly owns the wand that Voldemort has spent the book pursuing.)<br><br>It's made clear that Harry is defined, more than anything, by his heart: to put it cornily, he can't help but love. This is often seen as a weakness—it's manipulated by Voldemort to betray Harry, and to kill his godfather Sirius. And at other times it's simply seen as less valuable, less meaningful, than brilliance or talent or skill. The power which Harry's mother bestowed upon him with her love is seen as merely a fluke; the fact that Harry himself remains alive is treated as irritating coincidence. And the point which Rowling makes, more and more explicitly, is that nothing could be further from the truth: it is Lily's love for Harry that saves him, it is Harry's love for Hogwarts that sways the final battle, and it was Snape's love for Lily that, in the end, meant that Voldemort's campaign was doomed from the start. <br><br>The imagery is explicitly Christlike—though there are two Christ figures, since both Harry and his mother qualify. And this notion of love—love as a kind of transcendental force, overcoming material circumstance or even justified personal enmity—is extremely Christian in nature. In their final showdown, Harry sincerely tries to get Tom Riddle to show remorse; we are told that Voldemort is shocked by this. But what's shocking isn't just the request. It's that <em>Harry means it—</em>that, having seen the remnants of Voldemort's fractured soul, he would rather try and get his mortal enemy (and history's greatest monster) to find redemption himself than relish in the suffering that Voldemort will have to endure forever.<br><br>Viewed through this lens, Snape's choice to live as the person his loved one <em>wished</em> he'd been becomes the act of courage that Rowling describes it as. It's <em>this</em> Snape—or even Snape's capacity to rise above himself in the name of love—that Harry reveres. "Courage," as a term, is frequently revisited in Harry Potter, but its meaning remains nebulous. Up until the epilogue, that is: if Snape is the most courageous man Harry has ever known, then it's because Snape finds it in himself to act, day in and day out, in the name of his one and only love. That it was a one-sided love scarcely matters—in fact, it underscores the nature of the love that Rowling is describing, because Snape gets no reward for loving. His only reward is the opportunity to become who his love for Lily made him want to be—and to acknowledge that as his highest and best possible self.<br><br>Depending on how you look at it, this theme can be seen as either radical or conservative. (Just like Christianity!) It is more ambiguous, more complicated, than the narrative in which outsiders and outcasts finally find a home. At the same time, it intentionally divorces itself from any kind of material analysis: love transcends class, it transcends race, it transcends intentionally trying to murder your loved one's husband. On the one hand, it's an interesting ambiguity to show Sirius murdered by an indentured servant whose life he neglects, while Sirius's Nazi brother's love for the same servant gives him a moment of redemption. On the other hand, it <em>does</em> lead to a series of moments in which people who've done monstrous things are not only allowed to turn over a new leaf, but revered for it—and given more deference, even, than people who were good and loving from the very start. (<em>Should</em> Snape really be given the final word in the series, out of everyone we've met? <em>Snape?)</em><br><br>Taken even further, you get JK Rowling's current attitude towards the transgender movement, which is that trans people are angry and mean to her and not showing her much love (true!), and that therefore they're part of a conspiratorial attempt to abuse children and seize tyrannical power for themselves (false!). Rowling, who is unable to conceive of the staggering cruelty she is showing trans people, doesn't see the profound love and self-acceptance at the heart of the trans movement: she sees only the face it displays <em>towards her,</em> which she provoked in ways she refuses to comprehend. She interprets her critics as hateful, and interprets herself as the one trying to show love; ironically, she's in more of a Tom Riddle position, incapable of finding the remorse that would let her find grace.<br><br>It may come as a shock that an author best known for her children's books is not the most reliable person to acquire a comprehensive life philosophy from. Certainly it was a shock to millions that an author of children's books in which love and acceptance generally got posited as "pretty good" turned out to fall radically short of loving <em>or</em> accepting, thanks to a web site that let her get real mad about people equating Jeremy Corbyn to Dumbledore. Harry Potter is sloppy and inconsiderate in all sorts of ways; I like Rowling's prose more than some, but she occasionally drops a real clunker of a sentence. At times, that sloppiness crosses a line and turns outright shitty, whether it's playing fast and loose with actual race or insulting a woman by describing her jaw as "mannish." Revisiting Harry Potter, it's eminently fair to say that some of the things which people overlooked or shrugged off in 1997 or 2007 would nowadays be far less accepted.<br><br>You might go a step further, in fact, and suggest that it <em>might</em> not have been a great idea to regard Harry Potter as a healthy foundation for a serious worldview, <em>ever</em>. You might say that it makes sense to keep "beloved things" separate from "meaningful things"—that you should be allowed to love things <em>without</em> forming some half-baked ideology which claims that the things you love are the most moral, the most proper, the most <em>good</em> things to fill your life with. You don't even have to go so far as the blasphemous claim that grown-up conversations about serious issues with grave real-world consequences should not require its participants to know what patronuses and horcruxes are.<br><br>One of the nice things about maintaining a healthy critical distance from things is that you don't look ridiculous when the things you love turn out to be less perfect than you claimed. Another nice thing about critical distance is that it means you don't suffer an existential crisis when, fifteen years after she finished writing your favorite childhood book series, a writer starts tweeting inane shit that will almost certainly lead to actual people dying.<br><br>But it also spares you from the ludicrous performative act of claiming that you've uncovered the Spawn of Satan beneath a book series that you've spent over a decade of your life heralding. It keeps you from being the equivalent of Bible numerologists who pull verses out of context to prove that gay people go to hell, or that women shouldn't get to have abortions. It's unsurprising that Harry Potter stans, who are as dogmatic a fandom as fandom has ever seen, would resort to the sort of grody faffy shit that religious conservatives pull to reinterpret their texts. Dogma is dogma. But it's a terrible way to go about analyzing books.<br><br>I'll admit that Harry Potter was never one of my deepest inspirations. I read too much, when I was young, for it to stand out above everything else; I was more interested in Isaac Asimov (problematic!) and Frank Herbert (problematic!) and Lemony Snicket (problematic!) than I was in JK Rowling. And by the time the denser, heavier, better books came out, I had already discovered Diana Wynne Jones, whose Chrestomanci series is often cited as one of Harry Potter's major influences, and is also incomprehensibly better. Chrestomanci, even more than Harry Potter, emphasizes absurdity, equates magic to delightful nonsense, and suggests that the most wondrous thing about magic—or about imagination—is the way it frees us from taking things so seriously that we wind up behaving monstrously. <br><br>But I loved Harry Potter for what it was. For the most part, I still do. It's a very entertaining comedy of manners. It's a series of mysteries so well-crafted that I'd like to think Agatha Christie would've approved. It's surprisingly moving, even to this day. And its message about what matters about people is one that still resonates with me, no matter how much its author seems to have forgotten it herself.<br><br>One of the things about the series that's stuck with me the most is the attitude with which Dumbledore approaches the world: merrily, unconcernedly, even nonsensically, but in a way that deftly and gently cuts intolerances to shreds. About once per novel, somebody approaches Dumbledore requesting that he do something immoral, something oppressive, something which would hurt innocent people for no reason. To which Dumbledore replies with the same merry unseriousness—only now there's an edge to his words, a suggestion that he won't take the other person seriously, because no decent person could ever seriously consider such a thing.<br><br>It's a critique, a reproach, and often a witty little put-down. But it's also, in a sense, an invitation: <em>You don't need to do this, you know. You can change your mind. Please, why not try any other thing, in any other way, than this thing which I know you know is not okay?<br><br></em>It's telling, I think, that this is how Rowling depicts her Wise Old Wizard. That he is ridiculous at the same time that he's completely serious. That his serious response to serious problems is to say, I might not <em>act</em> seriously, but <em>you're</em> the one who's being absurd. That he distinguishes between serious <em>mannerisms</em>—between acting "perfectly normal, thank you very much"—and serious <em>substance</em>. That, while he may fight Voldemort now and again, he spends far more time fighting with people who are <em>so</em> convinced that they're utterly reasonable, completely ordinary, and therefore absolutely in the right, that they will endorse injustices and atrocities unblinkingly, in their banal and wretched ways. (All traits which, incidentally, Rowling lifted from Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci.)<br><br>The silliness, in other words, is a crucial part of the series' message. It's crucial because the silliness is where the joy is found; it's also crucial because so many ridiculous things try <em>not</em> to seem ridiculous, at which point treating them like they're laughable becomes one of the most powerful ways to disarm them. (And it's crucial to note the difference between "finding something laughable" and "failing to take it seriously.")<br><br>Again, it's telling how Rowling's increasingly histrionic investment in her transphobic agenda, her attitude that she's being "persecuted" for "what she believes," utterly contrasts with the position of her books. Now <em>she's</em> the one insisting, over and over again, that she's reasonable; <em>she's</em> the one claiming that all perfectly normal people ought to think the way that she does. It's utterly laughable, which isn't to say that it's not upsettingly serious.<br><br>But I think this way, in part, <em>because</em> of Harry Potter. I see the world this way because I've come to believe that imagination and wonderment are far better tools for learning how to understand and love my fellow humans than anything else there is. To some extent, I believe in the kind of love that Rowling spent seven books trying to describe; to a much greater extent, I believe that our choices, more than anything, define us. Which means that love, in the end, is the belief that it's not too late for somebody to choose differently.<br><br>I'll keep hoping that Rowling finds remorse. I'll keep hoping that she'll choose differently.<br><br>And I do my best to understand the Harry Potter fandom that I never quite belonged to, for all I loved the series. I try to understand the radical ways in which they found things in the series that they'd never seen before: not just a sense of community, but political ideas, a push towards activism, and the sense that our society might be fundamentally broken, that our rules might not make sense, and that it's up to us to reject them when we must and push for something better.<br><br>I understand why so many fans feel the need to reject Harry Potter outright. And I certainly understand how much <em>easier</em> it is for them to do so—to not only reject the person JK Rowling has become, but to reject everything she's ever been, every book she's ever written, and to rewrite the narrative and cut Harry Potter all the way out.<br><br>It's the same reason why they <em>didn't</em> reject Harry Potter when it first got published. Why it took a decade after it finished for people to start critiquing even the obvious racism that had been there all along. When Harry Potter was what they defined themselves by, it was impervious to criticism, all its glaring defects easy to argue away. Now, it works the other way around: Harry Potter is thoroughly blighted, its every choice exposing Rowling's all-pervasive hatefulness. Every line, every character beat, every name of every spell, is the work of an untalented, hateful hack. To admit to liking Harry Potter now is tantamount to saying that you think that hating Jewish people is okay.<br><br>Personally, I find that attitude somewhat silly. But I try and love those people all the same.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/295922023-06-10T00:57:15Z2023-06-10T00:57:15ZA rant about the gaslighting bastard that is the official Shrek soundtrack.<div class="trix-content">
<div>You don't know what the world is, when you're still young. You haven't experienced its many miracles, not enough to know where to look for them. You haven't witnessed its unfathomable cruelties, either.<br><br>I wasn't ready for <em>Shrek.</em> <br><br>Specifically, I wasn't ready for John Cale. But I wasn't ready to experience such profound betrayal, either.<br><br>Leonard Cohen recorded his iconic song "Hallelujah" in 1984. It has since become one of the most-covered songs of all time. The most famous cover of all is likely Jeff Buckley's 1994 rendition, but singers return to it again and again. It's simple, it's clever, and it's heartrending.<br><br>Thing is, those "Hallelujah" covers aren't covers of Leonard Cohen. They're covers of John Cale covering Leonard Cohen.<br><br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttEMYvpoR-k">Here's Cohen singing Hallelujah.</a> It's heavily gospel-inspired—the perfect way to capture Cohen's desolation, that sense of a sacredness departing. It's also not at <em>all</em> the song that's been covered to death and back. In fact, it doesn't even have the same <em>lyrics. </em>Cohen allegedly wrote somewhere between 80 and 180 verses for the song, when he was first putting it together; when John Cale covered it in 1991, for the Cohen tribute album <em>I'm Your Fan</em>, he asked Cohen for the original batch of lyrics, plucked a new set of verses out, and created the lyric procession that has now become iconic.<br><br>Cale did more that rework the lyrics. He paired Cohen's melody to an elegant, sparse arpeggio, stripping the original instrumentation down to something that brings his deep, Welsh voice front-and-center. The result, which may sound familiar to you, was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DinEKqtCDkg">this masterpiece.</a> Even if you've never heard this version before—even if you've never seen <em>Shrek</em>—you may recognize this song. It's the one that Jeff Buckley covered three years later, the one that k.d. lang covered in 2004, the one that's become an unofficial standard.<br><br>John Cale, if you're unfamiliar, is one of the most brilliant men to ever touch popular music. He was a founding member of The Velvet Underground, which in a handful of albums profoundly changed our understanding of what rock, and what <em>pop</em>, could be. Before that, he studied under La Monte Young, arguably the most profound composer to write music in the 20th century. (It's not one of his "major" works, but Young's <em>Just Stompin'</em> is as important to me as an adult as Cale's "Hallelujah" was to me at 10.) Leonard Cohen is an astonishing songwriter in his own right, so it's a thrill and a pleasure to see what Cale draws out of his music: a rare chimera of a collaboration, one artist finding his voice through another artist's inspiration.<br><br>Cale's "Hallelujah" is featured in the Dreamworks movie <em>Shrek</em>, released in 2001. It underscores a pivotal sequence: Shrek, after misinterpreting a conversation that he overheard between the princess Fiona and the donkey Donkey, coldly hands Fiona off to the wretched man who intends to purchase her as his bride. Fiona, who is secretly in love with Shrek, mistakes the ogre's heartbreak for a rejection. And Donkey, who is the only <del>man</del> animal to know the truth, is cast out by Shrek, who has mistaken his friendship for betrayal. What follows is a cold, sad, lonely scene, as three lonely people and one blithering lord cast about in total solitude.<br><br>Dreamworks, no stranger to blatant emotional manipulation, sets this sequence to John Cale. And emotional manipulation aside, discovering "Hallelujah" was pivotal for me, as I'm sure it was for millions of young children. I hadn't been on this Earth long enough to experience music at its most heightened. Cale ripped my mind and my heart wide open.<br><br>I knew in the theater, right then and there, that this song would be an important part of my life. And I did the only thing that it was possible to do back then, in pre-9/11 America: I bought a copy of <em>Shrek: Music from the Original Motion Picture,</em> or rather, I begged my parents to buy a copy for me.<br><br>You have to understand: this was an era before Wikipedia, an era before iTunes, an era before YouTube. The only way you could listen to music from a movie was by buying a CD, putting that CD in some kind of portable spinning-music machine, and pushing the "next" button again and again until the song that you wanted to hear came on.<br><br>I skipped to track 10. But something was wrong.<br><br>This version of "Hallelujah" hit all the right notes... but it left me feeling empty. I listened to it again and again, trying to force myself to feel the same emotional catharsis that I'd felt in theaters. Absolutely nothing.<br><br>I'd never fallen out of love before. I'd never before felt what it was like to wake up one morning, look into a pair of eyes that once made me feel Complete, and admit to myself that today, here and now, I felt Apart. I hadn't experienced those miserable, wretched months of trying to make myself feel love again, hating myself for no longer loving her, hoping against hope to find some way of being the man whose love she deserved. My first crush was still a face I'd pass sometimes in the halls; <em>Shrek</em> came out a month before the fifth grade yearbook came out for me to scour, searching in vain for her face and for a name I could connect it with. I didn't have words for this feeling. "Maybe it's not as good as I remember," I thought, not daring to admit my disappointment to myself. I medicated myself with Smash Mouth, and I went on with my life.<br><br>Months passed. My parents bought the <em>Shrek </em>DVD, which was kind of like a CD if a CD came with a silly menu full of easter eggs.<br><br>I rewatched <em>Shrek. </em>And I fell in love all over again.<br><br>Excitedly, I returned to the soundtrack.<br><br>Still nothing.<br><br>It was a strange dissonance, to have what I loved so readily at hand, and to feel out-of-love at the same time. It was an optical illusion of sorts: a sleight-of-hand that produced, not wonder, but elusive disappointment.<br><br>It would be a lie to say I thought nothing of it. But my thoughts were impossible to commit to words. I didn't know how to explain what I'd experienced.<br><br>Years went by.<br><br>I turned 18. I left for college, and had the worst and loneliest year of my life. I became well-acquainted with the laptop in a dark room, the sense of staring desperately at the screen looking for a life, for a world, for a <em>connection,</em> that felt more meaningful than the emptiness and alienation that crept even into my dorm room, my cheap bunk bed, as I slept.<br><br>I turned to political activism, in vain. I turned to the nascent world of tech start-ups, and found I was too lonely and resentful to healthily participate in it. Lastly, I turned to the arts: the timeless, eternal dialogue of people trying to discover what it means to be human, what it means to live in <em>this</em> world, and trying to share their own humanity through their work.<br><br>I discovered La Monte Young, and I discovered The Velvet Underground. I discovered John Cale. And I discovered John Cale's "Hallelujah"—and, with it, felt an absolute shock. I am not being hyperbolic in the slightest: it was one of the most intense and sudden emotions I've experienced to this day.<br><br>If I'd looked up <em>Shrek: Music from the Original Motion Picture</em> on Wikipedia, I'd have learned the truth years ago. But I'd never done that. When would I have ever had a reason to?<br><br>Look the soundtrack up on Spotify, or Apple Music, or wherever else you go to find track listings of decades-old albums. Look at "Hallelujah." Look at the credited artist. Whose name do you see?<br><br>Rufus Wainwright. Rufus <em>goddamn</em> Wainwright.<br><br>Funny, that. But I don't see anyone laughing.<br><br></div><div>Without mentioning it, Dreamworks swapped the Cale "Hallelujah" for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR0DKOGco_o">the Wainwright one.</a> The covers have identical arrangements—because Wainwright, like so many other artists, took Cale's interpretation as canon. But the songs are two entirely different beasts. Rufus Wainwright, I am told, is a marvelous singer-songwriter in his own right; I am incapable of assessing him honestly, because I still hold rage in my heart. His sister Martha was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbdsR5cDJlk">one of my favorite musicians</a> when I was 18. His father, Loudon, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6eS_SmccQ">is a borderline miracle of a man.</a> I'm sure Rufus brought something to that song—something that, had I encountered to it without the deceit, I might have come to love. But Rufus is no John Cale.<br><br>There is no mention of the switcheroo on the CD case. The digital album doesn't own up to this. Certainly the movie never mentions it. Dreamworks, without a word, switched one song for another. And they did this in 2001, when I was trusting enough to be gullible, when the world was young enough that certain horrible secrets simply never came to light.<br><br>Now, it is deeply pithy to equate what Dreamworks did to gaslighting. I have been gaslit and emotionally abused; I have dealt with the slow, horrifying realization that I knew something was off from the start. That the pit of dread and misery deep in my chest was, in fact, a seed I'd willingly planted within me, as I let someone whose poisons I was too-familiar with into my heart. I do not mean to lessen or dismiss the horrors that people experience at other people's hands: the nightmarish versions of reality which, as we commit ourselves to what we think is love, we slowly come to think reflect reality itself.<br><br>The soundtrack switcheroo was more like disinformation. (You know, that thing that both of America's political parties agree is ripping the country apart.) It wasn't a byproduct of malice; the most you can accuse Dreamworks of is emotional neglect.<br><br>But I am not kidding—well, I am not <em>entirely</em> kidding—when I say that that switcheroo infuriates me to this day. I feel <em>hurt</em>. I feel <em>rage</em>. More than anything, I feel <em>betrayal: </em>a vast sense of unfairness, a feeling that <em>somebody hurt me</em> for little other reason than that they didn't care enough not to.<br><br>Maybe music doesn't matter enough to you that you can imagine getting this het up about being denied a song for half your lifetime, then being lied to about being denied. Maybe you've been through such hell that I strike you as grossly privileged, to be able to feel so hurt by so little a thing. If so, then I regret that I can promise you this: I have been hurt worse, far worse, and I know how unserious a thing this is.<br><br>When I tell this story I <em>mostly</em> laugh at myself, and at the fact that I can feel such genuine anger at this.<br><br><em>Mostly</em>.<br><br>But it's a funny story <em>because</em> the feeling is real. It's funny because, beneath the absurdity for it, beneath the hilarious fact that the song was changed out to begin with, I still can't tell this story without feeling a genuine spark of emotion, a tiny little stabbing feeling of betrayal and injustice. It's funny because the feeling is real. It's funny because, on some level, I am incapable of finding this story funny. I am incapable of reenacting my feelings without the sincere belief, as I reenact them, that Dreamworks lied to me, that they hurt me. That what they did was as blasphemous, as much a tarnishing of something sacred, as Farquad's coveting Fiona. (A comparison that's <em>also</em> funny to make, and for the same reason: that, on some level, I genuinely mean it.)<br><br>I meant it when I said that I still can't listen to Rufus Wainwright's voice. I hear that his music is witty, tender, aching; I hear that the way he explores his feelings is at once heartrending and deeply, deeply engaging. In that way, he's a worthy successor to Cohen, to Cale, to his own father Loudon. But I may never be able to hear it for myself. The wound has yet to heal.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/290422023-05-18T12:19:56Z2023-05-18T13:08:43ZNOBODY ASKED FOR THIS: Here's One Sparks Song From Every Sparks Album, Okay?<div class="trix-content">
<div>Sparks, the band, has been around for over fifty years. Their first album was released in 1972; their newest, the unfairly-well-named <em>The Girl is Crying in Her Latte</em>, releases this month. It has been noted <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_PGv4DGMvg&pp=ygUbdGhlIHNwYXJrcyBicm90aGVycyB0cmFpbGVy">by quite a lot of people</a> that Sparks remains obscenely good, unlike most things that involve men in their seventies trying to do things typically done by men in their twenties. What is their secret? Hard to say! But I suspect it has something to do with writing good songs, instead of bad ones.<br><br>Here, for no particular reason, is a single Sparks song from every Sparks album. I do not encourage you to think of it as homework, or as a playlist. Think of this as something to read, idly, until something makes you go "Oh <em>huh,"</em> at which point... listen to it? Maybe? I don't know you.<br><br><br></div><h1>1972: Halfnelson/Sparks</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxPgIjLzan0"><em>Roger</em></a><em><br><br></em>Sparks' kind-of-self-titled debut (don't ask) is mostly interesting because it's a panoply of songs that sound like songs that were written in the early 70s. It's almost a sampler plate of kinds of songs that Sparks knew people were writing, as if they were tasting music culture and seeing what they wanted to send back. <br><br>And then there's "Roger," which is just batshit. This is a batshit song. More music should be written by young men who clearly should not have been given access to a recording studio. I am not sharing these songs to provide you with a narrative; these songs will teach you nothing meaningful about Sparks' history or ethos as a band. What "Roger" teaches us about Sparks is that I love Sparks, and also probably that it's good that they only wrote this song one time.<br><br><br></div><h1>1973: A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isP_AfQtMWA"><em>Here Comes Bob</em></a><em><br></em><br>One year and one album from now, Sparks became one of the most famous glam rock bands of all time. So it makes sense that, at the moment, they're writing music for string quartets about a man who makes friends by running his car into theirs.<br><br>"I ain't subtle in my way of making friends." No indeed, Bob!<br><br><em>Woofer</em>, to be clear, also has very good songs about Germany and BDSM on it, many of which feature guitar licks and such. It just also has, y'know, this.<br><br><br></div><h1>1974: Kimono My House</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Op1tcnSjX4"><em>Here in Heaven</em></a><em><br><br></em>This was the first Sparks song I ever listened to. It took me about half a second to fall in love with them forever. Rock has never sounded more like an absurd tragic opera than this song. And that's before you get into what the song is <em>about</em>, namely: "What if Juliet reneged on that whole suicide-pact thing, Romeo wound up in heaven alone, and he's torn between missing her, feeling spiteful, and eagerly awaiting the day that she finally dies?" Yeah.<br><br>Sparks is sometimes called a cerebral band, which is technically correct. But what most defines them, I think, is this giddy juvenile impulse to write music about things that are clearly very fun, and then to play those songs like they're having a blast. Simple!<br><br><br></div><h1>Also 1974: Propaganda</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4esybKKOYYo"><em>Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth</em></a><em><br><br></em>Hey look! It's the first time I'm sharing a Sparks song that properly gets called a classic! I debated going with their song about a sneeze wiping out the human race, or their one sung from the POV of the animals who weren't allowed on Noah's Ark, but honestly this one is just too good. I avoided listening to this song for ages when I first discovered Sparks, because it sounded like some faffy politically-well-meaning anthem, and then I listened to it and of course it's about personifying Earth and treating her like a girlfriend you're fucking around on.<br><br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q6sqBdUsZw">The Depeche Mode cover of this song slaps.</a> Depeche Mode covered Sparks because, at some point in the future, after they were busy inspiring Queen, Sparks decided to inspire Depeche Mode instead. We'll get there, settle down.<br><br><br></div><h1>1975: Indiscreet</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyxuwNZ5U8g"><em>How Are You Getting Home?</em></a><em><br><br></em>This is the first Sparks album that really runs wild. So it's funny (kinda??) that the song I'm sharing is as close to normal-ish as the album gets. Oh well! I heard this song in <em>Holy Motors</em>, years before I knew what Sparks was, and was just crazy about it. It's the scene where the dad picks his daughter up from the party, you remember it. No? You only remember the CGI alien sex scene? Ok I mean that's fair.<br><br>Something I'm a sucker for is a song that starts out sounding like one kind of song that I'd really like a lot, and then turns into another kind of song that I also like a lot. This is that! Let's not overthink this.<br><br><br></div><h1>1976: Big Beat</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKsCZH3MGZI"><em>I Bought the Mississippi River</em></a><em><br><br></em>This song is really about my cowardice. <em>Big Beat</em> is a loud angry-sounding rock album that makes fun of loud angry rock. It's full of extremely nasty songs that either lampoon how casually nasty rock is ("Throw Her Away and Get a New One") or subvert the weird shit that rock was on about those days (like making fun of white rock exoticizing black women with a song called "White Women," instead). However, politics has been complicated recently, and none of those songs are worth trying to untangle the various levels of irony, non-irony, and contingency that I'd feel the need to untangle if I was sharing that stuff. Listen to those songs if that sounds like fun to you, idk.<br><br>Anyway, they also wrote a song about buying the Mississippi River, because you can do anything you want in life. 18 years later, they wrote a song about buying the BBC. It's weird that "Sparks buys something" is a subcategory of Sparks song, but such is life. Such is life!<br><br><br></div><h1>1977: Introducing Sparks</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0dfOSfbLTo"><em>Ladies</em></a><em><br><br>Introducing Sparks </em>is a famous "low point" album for Sparks, but I love it. I don't love it in some fierce spiteful rebellious sense: I just think it's a fun album full of fun songs. Such as "Ladies," in which there are lots of summery Beach Boys oohs and aahs, as a man describes some ladies that he imagines.<br><br>I'm not really sure what prompts somebody to write this song. My version of that scene in <em>The Beatles: Get Back</em> where Paul starts noodling on his guitar and accidentally writes, uh, "Get Back" would be the session where Sparks came up with the idea of "Ladies." That's a lie, but it's a fun lie, so I'm keeping it in.<br><br><br></div><h1>1979: No. 1 in Heaven</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVa1TBhT5j0"><em>The Number One Song in Heaven</em></a><em><br><br></em>It's funny: I could take or leave "This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us," which is the big Sparks single that I skipped over even mentioning. It's a delightful song, but it's off an album of delightful songs, and doesn't particularly leap out for me. But their next big hit, the disco slow/fast hybrid "The Number One Song in Heaven," feels like a fucking miracle. The first half of it alone—it's really two songs jammed into one—has that "oh my GOSH" feeling to it. And then it kicks into high gear and, man! <em>Man!</em><br><br><em>Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa</em> closes to the second half of this song. It's an extremely funny movie that goes by twice as fast as feels plausible. I had a blast with it. Then this song abruptly came on and I went, "Oh! I get it! This movie is just a great time." You know that things are a great time when the second half of this song happens in them, is basically my point.<br><br><br></div><h1>1980: Terminal Jive</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPfI2uU78gE"><em>When I'm With You</em></a><em><br></em><br>Am I sharing the hit single off an album for the second time in a row?? Huh, guess I am. Sparks is really good at writing hit disco singles, I guess.<br><br>This is a perfect song, to me. I know I just went on about how miraculous "Number One" is, but "Number One" almost doesn't feel like a Sparks song, to me. "When I'm With You," on the other hand, manages to find an absolutely lovely vibe, while twisting it <em>just</em> enough with punchy lyrics to keep it interesting the whole way through. And every single aspect of it—the bass, the string riff, the contrasting verse/chorus melodies, the little trumpet solo—brings me joy. I decided long ago that, if I ever write a Sparks jukebox musical, this'll be the closing song. Only I won't want other people to sing the music. I'll just want Sparks to sing all the songs. This right here is why <em>Mamma Earth Mia!</em> will never be a musical.<br><br><br></div><h1>1981: Whomp That Sucker</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exgxxzKC5hE"><em>Where's My Girl?</em></a><em><br><br></em>More songs should expressly ask radio listeners to do things as they listen. I don't mean like the cha-cha. I mean like asking people to call in if they see the singer's girl. I love the thought of driving around in the 80s and hearing Russell Mael popping in to be like, hey, just keep a look out, okay?<br><br>The thing about this song is, it doesn't really give you enough detail to find Russell Mael's girl. It does a great job of sounding like a B-movie song about UFO abductions, but that's not useful for a manhunt. I would like to know things like hair and eye color, personally, so I know I'm not tying up the hotline with useless tips. If you would like to write a song about <em>your</em> girl, I recommend specifying things like hair color. For that I have to dock this song half a point. 7.5/10<br><br><br></div><h1>1982: Angst in My Pants</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB9uSoH_rLI"><em>The Decline and Fall of Me</em></a><em><br><br></em>One of Sparks' weirdest geniuses is that they are <em>fantastic</em> at employing unusual rhetorical devices in their lyrics. For instance, "The Decline and Fall of Me" establishes a basic pattern of listing less-than-ideal behaviors in its singer, then following those lines up with "Other than that, I'm lots like I was then." Which leads to the punchline, where the less-than-ideal behavior in question is "Now your jokes seem really funny." They set you up! It's tremendous!<br><br>It would be very difficult to categorize Sparks' best lyrics, but I would like to shortlist this: <br><br></div><blockquote>If I had a hammer I would drop it and break it<br>Look at the pieces<br>Now I've got a hobby, I collect frozen pizzas<br>Check out my pizzas</blockquote><div><br>In general, this is one of the best albums of all time, even by Sparks standards. It makes me feel like I was alive during the 80s, even though I wasn't. I like to think I'd have worn this record out as an 80s teen.<br><br><br></div><h1>1983: In Outer Space</h1><div><strong>THE SONG:</strong> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJt2C0p8x-g"><em>Lucky Me, Lucky You</em></a><em><br><br>In Outer Space</em> is another album like <em>Big Beat</em>, where Sparks plays a genre completely straight but writes a bunch of on-the-nose songs about what songs in that genre are typically about. It holds up much better, I think. Sparks really are such a perfect synthesizer band; I forget that every time they throw in a guitar, because Sparks does guitar <em>great</em>, but the synthesizer was where Sparks really came into their own.<br><br>Anyway, this song makes me feel feelings, because I am a total sap. If you ever, for whatever reason, decide to date me, there is a chance that, at some point, I will sing you this song. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that this has become "our song." If I'm singing this song, what's <em>really</em> happening is, I'm feeling emotional because I just remembered that this song exists. My apologies to the approximately three women who I sang this song to before thinking to include this disclaimer.<br><br><br></div><h1>1984: Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMJtAQWHPEA"><em>Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat</em></a><em><br><br></em>DISCLAIMER TIME. There are exactly two Sparks albums, out of all the Sparks albums that exist, that I literally never listen to. This is the first one of those. <br><br>In 1997, Sparks released a "Sparks tribute album" where they rewrote and rerecorded a bunch of their old songs. It kicks off with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vgjp7mGYMk">a cover of Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat</a>, and that cover is one of my favorite Sparks songs of all time. The original is pretty great in an 80s-song kind of way, but I wouldn't know it if the cover didn't exist, because I don't listen to this album, ever.<br><br><br></div><h1>1986: Music That You Can Dance To</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pyFgiOdCsg"><em>Shopping Mall of Love</em></a><em><br></em><br>I love this shit. Nothing else on this album sounds like this, but man, I just love this shit. <br><br>It's one of the few songs performed by Ron Mael, the older Mael. Usually Ron just wears a Charlie Chaplin mustache and a suit and glares around as he plays piano, but here he speaks some words. This song fucking delights me. Don't expect me to say anything lucid about it. Good album, too. The title track would open my jukebox musical, FYI.<br><br><br></div><h1>1988: Interior Design</h1><div><strong>THE SONG:</strong> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVD4ti3ww68"><em>Love-O-Rama</em></a><em><br><br></em>I don't listen to this album either. Though I guess I listen to it enough that I can recommend this song to you? Hey, maybe I <em>do</em> listen to this album. Huh.<br><br>You don't have to listen to this album, though. It's not even "bad," per se, it's just impossible for me to care about in any way. It has the bad fortune to be the last less-than-sublime album that Sparks ever released. Great album art! idk let's move on<br><br><br></div><h1>1994: Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKFiOCKhLfg"><em>(When I Kiss You) I Hear Charlie Parker Playing</em></a><em><br><br></em>Not gonna lie: it is hard for me to boil this album down to a single track. Every song off it deserves, individually, to be treated like the important song off this album. This is, canonically, the moment when Sparks works out what it means to be Sparks, and never looks back. Even if their <em>real</em> breakthrough sound still hasn't happened yet, somehow. Gee.<br><br>It's so hard to pinpoint just why this album's so killer. Break it down into parts, and it's not really doing anything different from <em>Interior Design</em>. But everything <em>sparkles</em>. It's all so grabby. In a slightly different universe, Sparks became one of the most famous EDM groups of all time; in this one, they remained Sparks. I like this universe just fine.<br><br><br></div><h1>1997: Plagiarism</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKSXOL7f94c"><em>Change</em></a><em><br></em><br>Ah fuck I spoiled this album, didn't I. No spoilers, Rory!!<br><br><em>God</em>. It's so hard not to pick one of their duets with Faith No More here. If you know anything about Mike Patton—Jesus Christ <em>what do you mean you don't know anything about Mike Patton—</em>then you know that the thought of Mike Patton guesting on a Sparks cover is some kind of incredible. You're probably also realizing that Mike Patton must have listened to a <em>lot</em> of Sparks growing up, and whaddaya know, you'd be right!<br><br>But I can't <em>not </em>have the song here be "Change." There was no question in my mind. A few years from now, Sparks became best known for writing music that sounded more like classical minimalist composition than like any of the things Sparks were best known for writing; "Change" doesn't foreshadow that, but it certainly points to Sparks doing things with orchestral composition that go beyond the typical shit that bands with classical musicians try to pull. <br><br><br></div><h1>2000: Balls</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VssCsHud5vA"><em>Scheherazade</em></a><em><br><br>Balls</em> is such an odd album. It's probably got Sparks' most refined rock/electronic production. They're all <em>so tight</em>. It's like they were dumping the last of their ideas from this era out, so they could move onto the lunacy that came next.<br><br>THINGS ABOUT SCHEHERAZADE THAT I'M A SUCKER FOR: That skipping harp loop; that weirdly bouncy not-quite-a-percussion-line synth.<br><br><br></div><h1>2002: Lil' Beethoven</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJoqIA9mVp4"><em>How Do I Get To Carnegie Hall</em></a><em><br><br></em>God. <em>God.</em> Would I ever have discovered Sparks, were it not for <em>Lil Beethoven</em>? It is <em>absolutely wild</em> that they spent thirty years releasing endlessly* fantastic music, and I'm <em>still</em> tempted to say that you should throw out the whole of their catalogue before <em>Lil Beethoven. </em>It's that fucking good.<br><br>This is where Sparks synthesizes (heh) all the sounds that have come before it, laying them out like components in a classical composition. It's Philip Glass and it's <em>Discovery-</em>era Daft Punk and it's neither of those things. And somehow, even as they're inventing a brand-new way for music to sound—one that <em>still</em> feels inimitable!—they're radically transforming the way that they use words and language. The fascinating thing about <em>Lil Beethoven</em> is how it takes the concept of words and lines repeating endlessly, and finds ways of using those repetitions to introduce shades and inflections and meanings to those lines. Take "Carnegie Hall," which roots itself in a classic joke, strips the "joke" part away, adds a bit of mania and a bit of melancholy, and... gah!<br><br>You can take most Sparks songs past this point and write whole papers about how individual songs play with their lyrics. It's absolutely astounding. They're wizards.<br><br><br></div><h1>2006: Hello Young Lovers</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwZsT5OYCoY"><em>Perfume</em></a><em><br><br></em>FIRST THINGS FIRST: <em>Hello Young Lovers </em>has the best title/album cover combo of all time.<br><br>SECOND THINGS SECOND: Yes, it kills me that I'm not sharing "Dick Around." And yes, "Dick Around" is still absolutely mind-blowing.<br><br>THIRD THINGS FIRST: No, I'm not just sharing "Perfume" because <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yyW-IDgWss">Sparks performed it on Gilmore Girls.</a> Crazy, though, right?<br><br>"Perfume" is maybe the perfect hybrid of old Sparks lyricism and new Sparks lyricism. Insanely particular lyrics, maybe one of the highest ratios of unique-and-unusual-words to words-total in any non-hip-hop song. Meticulously structured and patterned. And that one little departure, that one breakaway line that hints at just why this singer keeps naming women and the perfumes that they wear:<br><br></div><blockquote>The olfactory sense is the sense that most strongly evokes memories of the past. <br><br>Well, screw the past.</blockquote><div><br>And don't even get me <em>started </em>on that fucking arrangement. An ex of mine, with whom I frequently clashed where musical taste was concerned, heard me playing this one day and went, "See, <em>this</em> is something I can get behind. I <em>love</em> electro-swing!" I wish we'd been married, just so I could have divorced her on the spot. Well, screw the past.<br><br><br></div><h1>2008: Exotic Creatures of the Deep</h1><div><strong>THE SONG:</strong> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNHjyieY2Po"><em>(She Got Me) Pregnant</em></a><em><br><br></em>For a long time, I held that this was the absolute pinnacle of Sparks' songwriting. It's all so exquisitely refined. And so, so very deranged.<br><br>No album tortures me more with my need to reduce it down to a single track. Sorry, <em>Gratuitous Sax.</em> But, at the same time, there was only ever one option here. I can't even quote a single line off this song, because I will not be able to resist just regurgitating the whole thing. It is <em>fucking insane</em> that their music is this good. It's insane that <em>any</em> music is this good, but nobody who's been writing music since the early 70s should be able to write stuff this incredible in 2008. God <em>damn</em>.<br><br><br></div><h1>2009: The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4rFB75yI64"><em>Mr. Bergman, How Are You?</em></a><em><br><br></em>They fucking wrote a duet between a movie executive and his Swedish translator. For fuck's sake. The guitar solo in this makes me ecstatically happy, in the way that guitar solos sometimes do.<br><br>I feel bad for <em>The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman</em>, for being the Sparks musical that isn't <em>Annette.</em> Guy Maddin once claimed he was filming a version of it, and I think that that might be the greatest movie of all time, but as things stand, <em>Annette</em> exists as a movie and <em>Seduction</em> doesn't, and—perhaps because of that, and perhaps because "radio musical arrangement" just doesn't have the verve of "film musical arrangement"—this one doesn't fully hold up as just a series of songs. But if anyone can change that, Guy Maddin can. Holy shit, Guy Maddin. Can you imagine?<br><br><br></div><h1>2010: Yoko Ono, "Give Me Something" </h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3Un-9lzDD0"><em>Give Me Something (Sparks Reinvention)</em></a><em><br><br></em>I would like it on the record that I've been a Yoko Ono fan since before it was cool to like Yoko Ono. I would also like it on the record that it is <em>wildly funny to me</em> that, in the 2010s, Yoko reinvented herself as a club music kind of lady and somehow had a string of hits. (For a while, her club music was outperforming <em>Katy Perry, Robin Thicke, and Lady Gaga.)</em> I love this for her.<br><br>Anyway, I'm not sure you can get a better pairing than Ono and Sparks.<br><br><br></div><h1>2015: The Final Derriere</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YQw6KLJGf8"><em>The Final Derriere</em></a><em><br><br></em>What did I fucking tell you about Guy Maddin and Sparks? Let's move on.<br><br>(Guy Maddin please film <em>Seduction</em>, please)<br><br><br></div><h1>2016: FFS</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F5DNkgpX74"><em>So Desu Ne</em></a><em><br><br></em>I know that Sparks didn't <em>actually</em> form FFS by kidnapping Franz Ferdinand and forcing them to perform as Sparks' back-up band, but isn't that such a funny image? In any case, what a delightful combo.<br><br>I have listened to this album more than I've listened to anything else that Sparks has ever done. It's unbelievably addictive. I have a playlist of individual songs that I can play on repeat for hours without getting sick and tired of them; about 70% of <em>FFS</em> is on that playlist. It's <em>propulsive.</em><br><br>This was technically their first album since <em>Exotic Creatures of the Deep</em>, which felt like the pinnacle of their semi-classical composition era (if you'd like to call it that.) <em>FFS</em> inverts the formula: it's stripped-down, no-nonsense rock with machine-tooled precision. If Apple manufactured bops instead of laptops, Apple would have manufactured this album. It's a bop!!<br><br><br></div><h1>2017: I Wish You Were Fun</h1><div><strong>THE SONG:</strong> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luCJpXlJfCo"><em>I Wish You Were Fun</em></a><em><br><br></em>I'm going to break my own rule and say: look, I've got to mention <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq6deasFD8U">Bummer</a> here too. It's extraordinary. An absolute masterpiece of tightly-woven songwriting, telling way more of a story in four minutes than feels even halfway plausible. <br><br>But "I Wish You Were Fun" is a perfect song. It is casually, effortlessly perfect. If there's a knock against Sparks, it's that their songs often reek of <em>intent</em> and <em>effort: </em>it's hard to listen to them and not notice the construction at work. This song is an exception: it's the sound of people who are masters at basically everything to do with making music lobbing a slow pitch perfectly over the plate. It should be hung in museums.<br><br>This was genuinely my Couple Song with an ex. If you are that specific ex, I promise you that you and you alone were the person who I shared this song with. Even if we should maybe have paused, in between singing this to each other on the street, and asked whether this was truly a healthy song to be a couple around. Also, I'm sorry for things.<br><br><br></div><h1>2020: A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip</h1><div><strong>THE SONG:</strong> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPSFpaCQEvA"><em>Lawnmower</em></a><em><br><br></em>If you don't listen to this song and immediately go, "Ah, yes, <em>Sparks,"</em> I don't know what to tell you. I feel bad even writing about this one. What's there to say? It's a song called "Lawnmower," about a lawnmower. It is somehow also about relationship strife, but in a fun way. It feels like a song that must have always existed.<br><br>It is very funny to me that, after mentioning that his girlfriend has given him a "your lawnmower or me" ultimatum—already very funny!—the singer just never mentions his girlfriend again. Instead, he mentions his lawnmower. Sparks would be the Shel Silverstein of our era if they weren't busy being the Sparks of our era instead.<br><br><br></div><h1>2021: Annette</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlar4V-Pr08"><em>She's Out of This World</em></a><em><br><br></em>Hey, remember when I watched <em>Annette</em> and <a href="https://world.hey.com/horses/three-essays-on-annette-64f27e1c">literally couldn't stop writing about <em>Annette?</em></a><em> </em>Remember when I <a href="https://world.hey.com/horses/a-fourth-essay-on-annette-b01892dc">just kept going?</a><br><br><em>Annette! </em>Man. It is crazy how, in 1972, Sparks was allowed into a recording studio and immediately whipped out "Roger," and then, in 2021, Sparks was allowed into a movie and immediately whipped out <em>Annette.</em> Such maniacs!<br><br>On a pure songwriting standpoint, <em>Annette</em> is beyond inspired. Such sounds! Such incredible sounds! But I'm not sure if anything <em>quite</em> captures the feeling of <em>Annette </em>like these women and one man singing a baby out of Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard. This was a Couple Song for me too, somehow. Please don't ask.<br><br><br></div><h1>2023: The Girl is Crying in Her Latte</h1><div><strong>THE SONG: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMmoTU7lPKE"><em>Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is</em></a><em><br><br></em>There are two types of Sparks music videos: there are the ones that are genuinely, astonishingly good, and then there are the ones that are silly and whimsical and cute and just a little kitschy. Of the two music videos they've released for their upcoming album—out May 26th!—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTAxPhxADo0">this</a> is a terrific example of the former, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMmoTU7lPKE">this</a> is a solid example of the latter. Both songs are bangers, and this album's gonna be a good'un.<br><br>51 years! What a preposterous amount of time. Listen to Sparks if you are ever looking for a good time, especially involving ears. Enjoy your day!</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/285752023-04-29T14:25:42Z2023-04-29T14:32:57ZA skeptic's thoughts on Transcendental Meditation™<div class="trix-content">
<div>At the start of 2022, I finally coughed up the [large sum of money] needed to take a four-day course on Transcendental Meditation™. I'd been debating doing this for close to fifteen years, yet it still felt uncomfortable—maybe even unethical—to me. TM™ has been criticized for being, not just overpriced, but cultish: maybe even predatorily so. And there were plenty of claims that TM™ was total pseudoscientific woo, akin to Scientology with more of an Eastern Philosophy flavor to it.<br><br>I'll totally admit that my main interest in TM™ was that David Lynch is its loudest advocate, and that I am a cultish devotee of David Lynch. But I was also struck, as I did my research into it, by how many laypeople's experiences of it seemed so powerfully positive. Many skeptics walked out converted, and even long-time meditation practitioners seemed to get something meaningful out of studying TM™. At the end of the day, I figured, I've got a fairly low tolerance for woo bullshit, I know enough about marketing to spot when I'm being campaigned at, and the worst that could happen would be my walking away with a fun new horror story about a wacky little cult.<br><br>I've been practicing using Transcendental Meditation™'s techniques for sixteen months now. I've stuck to it longer than I've stuck to any other meditation practice I've taken up. And I'm glad that I put the money into it that I did, though I haven't walked away a True Believer or any such. <br><br>In short, I think that Transcendental Meditation™ has constructed a very effective introduction to its techniques, frames meditation in a different and more useful way than I'm familiar with, and also offers a terrific content library that I've gotten a lot out of post-course. It strikes me as less of a cult than a very well-polished Meditation Product, one that nicely balances the deeper spiritual or psychedelic pursuits of meditation with an accessible, engaging polish. And while it's a little more predatory with the way it markets its "next-level" pricey classes, and while its articulations of What Meditation Does veer from "unnecessarily jargon-y" to "sounds kinda delusional," my experience of TM™ so far has been that it's gross in the sense that a decently-large company is gross, rather than gross in the sense that Scientology is.<br><br>Now, there is a <em>huge</em> argument to be made that the spiritual practices from which meditation is derived run in strict opposition to commercialization, marketing, and capitalism itself. Some people are fundamentally offended by the entwinement of the two. That part squicks me out too! And I think that a good meditation instructor could probably have taught me all the things that TM™ did, and with less bullshit, and far more cheaply to boot. But I've explored meditation in enough ways to know that quality instruction is rare. TM™'s accomplishment has been to standardize the teaching process strictly enough that it can mass-produce meditation instructors who are <em>good enough</em> to get people who aren't particularly self-attuned to work out the basics, and develop a practice of their own. I can appreciate that—especially since TM™ has done a good job of leaving me alone to incorporate what I've learned from it into my own personal pursuits, without pushing any ideology on me along the way.<br><br>That said, I'd love to share what I've taken away from TM™ here, For Free, to the extent that I feel like I can do so without plagiarizing TM™ or giving away anything that's not mine to give away. This is less an introduction to Transcendental Meditation™ as a system, and more a series of observations that I, personally, found salient—by which I mean they're things that I didn't quite pick up on through any other meditative approaches that I've tried.<br><br>At its heart, Transcendental Meditation™<em> </em>is mantra-based. Rather than emphasizing breathing, or counting, or attempting to eliminate thought, TM™ provides each practitioner with an individualized meaningless two-syllable sound. I'm told that instructors are given intensive training that teaches them how to pair each individual to their perfect mantra, and I like the sound of my own mantra a lot, but I suspect that the sound matters less than the <em>lack of meaning:</em> the fact that your mantra isn't just disconnected from all other definitions and associations, but in a sense serves as an explicit <em>rejection</em> of meaning and connection. It's a thought-<em>decoupler</em>, rather than a new train of thought in and of itself.<br><br>Meditations take place twice a day, for 20 minutes at a time, typically before breakfast and dinner. While I've been somewhat inconsistent in that twice-a-day practice, I find that the 20-minute length—which is quite long by meditation purposes—has been significant. It allows me to go through multiple waves of "clearing out" my head, each of which leaves me briefly feeling enlightened and unattached before I realize that there's a thicker, damper set of things on my mind that are starting to flutter loose.<br><br>The goal is not to <em>avoid</em> thoughts. Transcendental Meditation™ stresses this. (It generally emphasizes the <em>easiness</em> of its meditative form: that, if you think you're struggling, you're doing it wrong, because nothing that you are doing should require struggle, or even allow for it.) Instead, the goal is simply to <em>keep reciting the mantra:</em> to think it to yourself, and to return to it every time you notice that you've strayed. In other words, it's okay <em>not</em> to recite the mantra, but when you notice that you've stopped, you start again—until the next train of thought gradually pulls you away.<br><br>One of the metaphors that TM™ uses that I love is that thoughts are a kind of mental stress, akin to physical bruising. "Stress," here, is less a matter of conflict or anxiety, and more a simple matter of presence: when something's on your mind, it takes up space, and it takes a little energy from you to consider it (or to push yourself back to whatever else you were thinking). Some people are bad at pushing individual thoughts from their mind, and wind up distracted and overwhelmed; even people who are particularly good at suppressing or compartmentalizing thoughts, though, still have to exert effort to keep those other thoughts at bay. That effort might be slight, but it builds up over time, leading both to less mindfulness <em>at present</em> and to mental exhaustion <em>in general</em>. TM™ posits meditation as, essentially, the process of taking that mental weight off your shoulders, like removing items from a heavy backpack one-by-one.<br><br>I should note, here, that TM™'s articulation of this "thoughts as mental stress" attempts to posit it as <em>scientific fact</em>, which is one of those pseudoscience-y things that gets it slammed for being cultlike and mystical. I think that TM™ likes to say "scientific" the way a lot of people say "literally:" it's more a kind of hyperbolic emphasis than anything, a nervous tic that annoys some people and offends others. It feels fairly clear to me that TM™ articulates ideas like this as <em>metaphor:</em> they're a useful way of thinking about something abstract. Leaning into that metaphor makes it far easier to understand <em>what you should be doing</em>, which in turn makes it far easier to refine your practice. And perhaps there <em>is</em> some kernel of neuroscientific truth to it: maybe it's the kind of metaphor that <em>can</em> be interpreted in one scientifically accurate (and fascinating!) way, even if all of its other interpretations are, in fact, wishful gobbledigook. But I tend to think that most of the ways people talk about the <em>science</em> of brains are pseudoscientific themselves—I tend to tune most people out when they start to talk about "dopamine" like they know what they're saying—and I'm far less interested in "brain truth," here, and whether or not the <em>metaphorical </em>truth leads me somewhere worthwhile.<br><br>That said, Transcendental Meditation™ also claims that you can learn to hover by bouncing on your butt or something, so it's not like the organization itself doesn't get a little gobbledigooky at times. (I have not personally paid the $75,000,000 needed to take the butt-bounce course, though, so who knows. Maybe there's a kernel of truth there too.)<br><br>Back to the original point! The goal of meditating with an empty mantra is to give your thoughts room to surface, one by one. And as your thoughts arise, your tendency is to <em>attach</em> yourself to them: to follow them, to process them, to see where they go. That processing is explicitly called out as what TM™ wants you to help avoid. Thinking through a thought, after all, means thinking it even <em>more</em> into existence. The more you process a thought, the bigger and heavier it becomes, and the more energy and focus you devote to it. So the goal with TM™ is essentially to lure all your thoughts out of hiding, and to steer each one back towards your mantra, towards emptiness, towards detachment and unthinking. You can't just "turn off" a thought. But you <em>can</em>, by repeatedly refusing to engage with it when it arises, make it less sticky. It's like rubbing away the residue left behind when you pull a sticker off of something: bit by bit, the stickiness just goes away. The thought shrinks down, back to a seed that hasn't quite been planted yet.<br><br>Something about the way that TM™ went about articulating this, in between having me practice according to its instructions, felt like a real lightbulb moment for me. Buddhism, of course, is rooted in the idea that attachment leads to suffering; I've believed that for years, and found it an enlightening lens with which to view the world. But it wasn't until TM™ that I viscerally realized that <em>suffering</em> can be thought of as synonymous with <em>stress, </em>and that <em>thought</em> and <em>attachment</em> are more linked than I realized. A lot of meditative practices encourage you to try to still your emotions, letting go of <em>feelings</em>. What I realized through TM™ is that <em>feeling</em> matters less than sheer <em>sensation</em>—and that thought and emotion are <em>both</em> sensations, and exactly the sort of "attachment" that leads to suffering. (It's not that attachment <em>leads</em> to stress so much as it's that <em>attachment is itself a kind of stress.</em> Suffering is merely what happens when those stresses possess you demon-style and take over your mind, body, and life.)<br><br>Hence the repeated declaration that Transcendental Meditation™ is, above all else, easy—the "easiest thing in the world." There is no <em>trying</em> involved: "trying" means conceiving of a goal, working out the actions necessary to achieve it, and evaluating your own progress relative to your benchmark for "accomplishment." You don't need to <em>try</em> to stick to your mantra—in fact, it's perfectly okay of you to forget about it altogether. But when you remember it, you return to it—and because your mantra is impossible to attach to, being completely devoid of any meaning, it is an easier and less stressful thought than whichever other one is on your mind.<br><br>The paradox there, of course, is that if you're <em>thinking</em> about meditating, if you're interrogating whether or not it works, if you're asking yourself whether you're meditating "enough," if you're trying to process and articulate your present state of mind, then you're not meditating. Those, too, are thoughts to let go of. And perversely, realizing that truly <em>does</em> make meditating easy—because those are the thoughts that structure meditation as something profound, something necessary, something you need to do <em>right.</em><br><br>Nowadays, I consistently find the "hardest" part of meditating to be <em>how many good ideas it stirs up. </em>I don't quite have the discipline to resist the urge, when it arises, to clean my kitchen and start two rounds of laundry and spend an hour writing and another hour reading. Those feel so transparently like <em>the life I want to live</em>, the state of being that I meditate to "reach," that, when I snap into that mode, I find it hard not to break off my meditation on the spot. But I do my best to stick with my session anyway. Because meditation should <em>not</em> feel like a means to an end, in my opinion. It should not be something you pop like a pill. The goal of meditation is to find <em>a permanent state of detachment</em>—not in the sense that you never do anything again, but in the sense that you are free to choose exactly which thought or action you attach to, immerse yourself in that activity wholly, and then pull away again, shrink that back down to a seed, and choose a new thought to let bloom.<br><br>While I admire and value Buddhism, my heart most deeply resides in Taoism. And the notion of the Tao, shapeless and unnameable, the thing that births all shapes and forms, most clearly strikes me as the state of mind that meditation encourages. The hope is to find the essence—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N541HLPeG6Y">the <em>pulse</em>, as Fiona Apple calls it</a>—that exists before specificity. From there, you can take on specific form knowingly and even lustily, celebrating the shape of your thought and action and being, before releasing again, finding that profoundly generous emptiness within you, and facing your next moment with freedom and relish.<br><br>That <em>profoundly generous emptiness</em> is central to what I've found through TM™. If all sensation is stress, and thought and feeling are both kinds of sensation, then a corollary is that, just as we distract ourselves from thoughts with other thoughts, we also distract ourselves from the <em>senses</em> when we think and feel too much. Other forms of meditation I've tried have encouraged "check-ins," or even "full-body scans," where you let your mind wander through your body, feeling all the sensations that you typically let fade into the background. With Transcendental Meditation™, those check-ins have felt less necessary; instead, I simply <em>recognize</em> how beholden I am to the comforts of my flesh, the aches of my bones, the heats and chills, the little buzzing sound of my refrigerator. I realize how much information I take in before I realize that I'm taking it in. And I realize how much of that information I <em>lose</em>, when I'm overly distracted. How much of that information is important. How much of it is <em>engaging</em>, in ways that I <em>could</em> occupy myself with, were I not so overloaded by other kinds of information, so molded by other stresses.<br><br>One of the themes of the <em>Tao Te Ching</em> that I most struggle with is that sensation is an addiction, of sorts, or a distraction:<br><br></div><blockquote>The five colors<br>blind our eyes.<br>The five notes<br>deafen our ears.<br>The five flavors <br>dull our taste.</blockquote><div><br>It disturbs me as a lover of music, art, and food—sensation in general, really. And it worries me, not because I disagree with it, but because I think it's <em>true</em> on some level. At times I wonder just what consequences I unknowingly suffer through when I reject austerity.<br><br>But I don't think that austerity is the intent (just as I think people—or at least my fellow Americans—tend to interpret Buddhism far more austerely than they ought to). Each sensation is a distraction <em>from other sensations</em>. It's not that sensation is evil, just as thinking and acting aren't evil. It's that each is a <em>presence</em>—and the presence of each impacts the others, creating diminishment or discord. That's not to say that harmony isn't possible, or that there isn't a time and a place for all the other things. It's just a note that everything we fill our heads with has a cost, often in ways that we don't realize.<br><br>As I write this, I realize I can no longer hear my refrigerator. It's still making the same sound, but I'm no longer able to register it. Something else has filled my head, if not my ears, and now that sound is lost to me. But it's still present, it's still impressing itself upon me, whether or not I notice in this instant.<br><br>Is Transcendental Meditation™ the only way to go about realizing all this, or reckoning with it? Not in the slightest. While I'd never had good experiences with mantra-based meditation before this, it's possible that mantras are simply a better technique for me personally than breath-based or guided meditations were. And while I greatly value the epiphanies I've found through Transcendental Meditation™—some of which came about simply due to practice, but some of which came from the library of content they offer you once you've paid, no other strings attached—this was certainly not the only way I could have found them. At the end of the day, TM™ feels like a particularly well-designed system, not an exclusive outlet to the truth. <br><br>For me, that's enough. And my experiences with the grodier, cultier parts of it have thus far been that they're well-meaning but kind of stupid—unintentionally grody rather than grody-by-design. I don't feel comfortable blanket-recommending it, but my suggestion is that if you, like me, feel drawn to it but uncertain, you should go for it <em>if and only if</em> what you're looking for is a well-structured and insightful approach to what you've already tried doing, rather than a genuine reality-shattering epiphany. (If you've <em>never</em> meditated before, TM™ might feel reality-shattering, but I'd recommend you try at least a couple other approaches to it before biting the bullet.)<br><br>It's possible that my explanation here has given you all of the pieces of TM™ that I personally found valuable. It's fairly simple, after all—and that's a good thing. Unnecessary complexity is where the cults all get you. <br><br><br></div><h1>David Lynch sidebar</h1><div>I'll keep this brief, but: practicing Transcendental Meditation™, and knowing that Lynch has practiced it religiously for nearly all his life, has helped make sense of quite a lot about Lynch as an artist, in ways that I find extremely gratifying.<br><br>For one thing, Lynch's emphasis on sound design, particular ambient whooshes and electronic buzzes, seems to be a direct byproduct of this recognition that <em>we don't notice sounds</em>. Lynch, more than maybe any other director, seems attuned to the idea that our spaces are shaped more by sound than we recognize, and constructs worlds in which every space is keyed into a particular sound.<br><br>More broadly, Lynch seems to have a particular appreciation for <em>stress</em>. An empathy for it, really. He has a profound ability to construct psychological layers to his characters, and to capture their reactions to the world around them with an almost microscopic detail. And I think it's possible to understand Lynch's characters—at least, when Lynch himself directs them—as layered constructs of stresses. He knows what their awarenesses are tangled up in: he knows what feelings most grab them, what sensations most envelop them, and he knows that <em>which thoughts they're capable of</em> are in many ways a <em>byproduct</em> of these stresses, these attachment, these very-literal possessions. (It makes sense that BOB, in <em>Twin Peaks</em>, is a demon who possesses bodies <em>and</em> an embodiment of electricity all at once—he is the manifestation of those attachments which distort us and even change our faces.)<br><br>It helps me draw a distinction between Lynch and many other "smart" directors. Plenty of writers essentially think in terms of ideology: each of their characters has a worldview, which may be reckoned with and challenged, and while that worldview might respond to cathartic, consciousness-rupturing experience, the fundamental shift in character is nonetheless didactic. <em>I thought about the world one way, and now I think about it in another</em>.<br><br>Lynch, meanwhile, seems to approach "character" as an almost physical sensation. People form personalities the way that rivers form banks: the world erodes them, creating certain receptivenesses and rigidities, and they never stop acting on sensation. That sensation <em>might</em> include more-typical intelligence—and Lynch does marvelous work with Mark Frost's most cerebral elements in <em>Twin Peaks</em>—but even those knotty tangles of words are, in a sense, a sensual and physical phenomenon.<br><br>This helps to explain the sheer magnetism of Lynch's scenes, too. At the end of the day, Lynch is far and away my favorite director despite how many other brilliant directors there are because every scene of his has an almost-haunting pull to it: it provokes sensations in me that no other artist does. And while I can't process exactly <em>how</em> he does that without deconstructing every last one of his scenes frame-by-frame, I think it's genuinely fair to say that Lynch treats film as a sensual composition, and his scenes and conflicts as an interplay between stresses. Where those conflicts happen depends on the composition of the space they're in: they're lighter, gentler conflicts in cozier and less conflicted environments, and they dip into more savage and primitive territories as the worlds grow darker, and genuine stakes arise.<br><br>The famous hallucinatory quality of Lynch movies, where the shifts in tone feel disorienting and almost impossible to resist, comes about precisely because of those shifts in composition, I think. I've long said that Lynch is severely underrated for how well he does <em>wholesome:</em> one of his defining scenes, I think, is the one in <em>Blue Velvet</em> where Jeffrey shows Sandy his "chicken walk," which is adolescent and awkward and far-too-transparent an attempt to make a girl laugh with something lame; he also, in passing, mentions that one house used to have a kid with "the biggest tongue in the world." Lynch is able to identify exactly the realm of interplay between these two shy, awkward kids, and fills that realm with lurid and fascinating details that are simultaneously inventive and <em>amazingly</em> banal. (There aren't a lot of children's shows that could've captured as much about these characters as succinctly, or as wholesomely, as that one passage in <em>Blue Velvet</em> does.) But he also knows exactly when the dynamics between characters need to change, and how deep and multilayered those changes have to be, and the result is a film that captures tension more meticulously and evocatively than we can easily resist.<br><br>This is far too engrossing a subject for me to go any deeper into here—not without completely losing the plot—but I've long held that Lynch's <em>specific approach</em> to filmmaking is a profoundly important one for artists to understand in general, because of what it says about both people and art. And Transcendental Meditation™ as a practice goes a long way towards explaining both what exactly Lynch is saying and doing, and how exactly Lynch derived his approach in the first place.<br><br>Sidebar over!</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/275072023-03-22T13:45:14Z2023-03-22T13:45:15ZProcedural rhetoric and ludic aesthetics: understanding the relationship between play, morality, and art<div class="trix-content">
<div><em>This one's for the nerds.<br></em><br></div><div><br></div><h1><strong>Prelude (</strong>press X to skip)</h1><div><br></div><div>My academic focus, circa 2011, was play theory. I studied the <em>psychology and sociology</em> of play: how does play affect individuals, and how does it influence societies and cultures? I studied the <em>philosophy</em> of play: why is play so famously difficult to precisely define? But my real focus—to use my favorite nerd word—was ontological: I wanted to know what play "is," so I could ask the even-trickier question of what it means to make something fundamentally <em>more</em> playful.<br><br></div><div>I have always thought of myself as a working artist: what interests me are <em>results.</em> I have a great respect for lofty, intellectual ideas about what things are and how they work, but at the end of the day, I like theory because it improves my <em>practice.</em> My academic pursuits were done solely in the name of better deconstructing the art which had inspired me, and I was very good at it—up until I encountered something whose construction was so sophisticated that I realized I had literally no idea of how to articulate what it was doing. (That "something" was a game: Ice Pick Lodge's <em>Pathologic,</em> still the most visionary game ever made 20 years after its creation.) I was very much not ready.<br><br></div><div>Slightly over a decade later, let me share some of what I've learned!<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>Why is this media different from all other media?</h1><div><br></div><div>The tricky thing about discussing games-as-art is that games let you move a little dude around on a screen. No other art form gives you a little dude to move around on a screen. This poses difficult challenges for schools of theory that haven't ever had to contend with little dudes that get to move around.<br><br></div><div>In all seriousness, this is blatant horseshit. Games have been around longer than literally every artistic medium apart from poetry, theatre, and sculpture—all dying art forms, clearly. Sports have long been acknowledged to be one of the pinnacles of human achievement, a fact that bothers pasty nerds who hate that their racist uncles have actually found something cool to watch while drinking beer. And board games like chess and go are generally understood to produce forms of play that are themselves artistic achievements. (Marcel Duchamp, arguably the single most brilliant artist in the last 150 years or so, said that most works of art can't stand up to a well-played game of chess—and that it's impossible to play a good game of chess without creating an artistic masterpiece.)<br><br></div><div>But games confound contemporary aesthetic theorists, because there was an explosive proliferation of art and theory in the 20th century. And a huge part of that was the advent of film, easily <em>the</em> definitive artistic medium of the entire 1900s, along with advances in broadcasting that gave people the illusion of a truly connected <em>global</em> culture for the first time in human history. Now, we had the ability to look upon <em>the whole of artistic experience,</em> and slap a rating on the whole damn thing. We could do the thing with <em>all media</em>—music, theatre, television—that literature snobs had been doing with books this whole damn time: we could <em>revisit</em> it, frame by frame, note by note, and develop an experience of each piece as a <em>whole.</em> We were no longer confined to our <em>initial</em> experiences of something, or by a performer's <em>interpretation</em> of a work. Now we could insist that art was set in stone, "finished," and discuss it the way we discussed Homer's <em>Odyssey,</em> or that damn horny upstart James Joyce.<br><br></div><div><em>Except,</em> that is, for games. Because the whole point of a game is that it is <em>definitionally unfinished:</em> it exists to be completed in the playing. There <em>is</em> no objective experience of a game, because play is inherently subjective. You can think of a single playing of a game as a single "interpretation," only don't do that, because critics all want their interpretations to be <em>definitive</em> in some way.<br><br></div><div><em>Stop playing those games, plebes!</em> You're undermining my attempt to case them in plaster forever!<br><br></div><div>One of the major obstacles confronting games-as-art is that games have generally been seen as "popular" culture, and therefore unworthy of critical appreciation. We don't discuss the aesthetics of sports, because the people who watch sports and the people who say "aesthetics" are (wrongly) considered to be two completely different cultures from one another. It's the same issue that comics and film both faced in the twentieth century. So that part is nothing new.<br><br></div><div>What <em>is</em> new is that the advent of the computer enabled <em>far more complicated</em> games than had ever existed before, and <em>far more games</em> period. Jesper Juul likens the computer to the printing press, but where the printing press mass-distributes <em>text,</em> the computer mass-distributes <em>process.</em> And it can handle procedural complexity that goes far beyond the limits of human patience, which lets those games do things that games flat-out couldn't do across their millennia of existence.<br><br></div><div>Go players will study famous games that took place hundreds of years ago—games that remain astonishing, profound, and illuminating centuries later. That's possible, in part, because very few games like go <em>exist.</em> It means that civilization has had literally thousands of years to take in its subtleties; people have devoted countless lifetimes to progressing go, not just as a game, but as an art form.<br><br></div><div>Now, more games are invented in a year than people would be able to play <em>once</em> in a lifetime. And people approach games, not as mediums, but as consumable goods—experiences more akin to books or movies than to lifelong pursuits. There's nothing <em>wrong</em> with this, but it's a completely different mindset, and it's one that risks overlooking <em>why</em> games are traditionally a lifelong pursuit to begin with.<br><br></div><div>(Incidentally, there <em>are</em> games—or gamelike systems—in our lives that we do treat like lifelong investments. I'm referring to social media. But we're also very bad at analyzing <em>social media</em> as if it's the same kind of artistic medium that games are. That's partly due to that "popular culture" bias I mentioned earlier, but not entirely. We might return to that later.)<br><br></div><div>That thing Marcel Duchamp said, about every game of chess <em>being</em> a work of art, was quite revealing. In that mindset, chess itself <em>isn't</em> a work of art—it's a canvas. The <em>act of playing,</em> not the <em>game itself,</em> is the work of art. And the person playing the game isn't an <em>audience member</em> or <em>critic</em>—she's the artist herself.<br><br></div><div>It's worth pointing out that this is <em>not</em> a quality unique to the things we call games—especially if you step away from the twentieth century a little bit. It's understood in theatre that plays' scripts are essentially a framework <em>for</em> performances: Shakespeare's works famously offer ambiguous instructions for blocking and character motivation, meaning that different directors can craft entirely different dramatic experiences using the same texts. And in music composition, the conductor or performer is responsible for crafting new interpretations of a work—so much so that a monumental new performance of a Bach piece can considered meaningful <em>for Bach</em>, extending and enriching the original work.<br><br></div><div>But here, we at least have a way of separating the "initial" work from the "performed" work, and valuing each as a separate construct. That may be true of traditional games like chess or go, and of the most acclaimed grandmasters and professionals that play each of them. But unlike plays and compositions, games are <em>meant</em> to be open-ended. They aren't works of art so much as they're individual artistic mediums. And individual players might critique games in the same sense that artists might prefer one medium over another, pianists might prefer one composer, or directors might prefer a particular playwright. But critiquing games <em>as if they're artistic experiences themselves</em> makes about as much sense as ranking different forms of poetry, or arguing whether books are "better" than paintings.<br><br></div><div>In a lot of ways, this begins feeling very silly. But at the same time, <em>we have no choice,</em> because the fact of the matter is that we <em>do</em> consume games, we <em>do</em> have more games than ever, and we are going to wind up treating games like they're either cultural artifacts or consumable goods—and we already rate and rank those.<br><br></div><div>So the question isn't <em>whether</em> we'll wind up critiquing games this way. The only question is <em>how we ought to do it,</em> if we want our critiques to be interesting or worth a damn—or if we want to devise more interesting ways of making games.<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>In the belly of the machine</h1><div><br></div><div>Way back in the day, a bright Greek fella named Aristotle devised a basic theory of rhetoric—of aesthetics, really—that continues to be one of the cornerstones of how we understand art to this day.<br><br></div><div>Aristotle claimed that there are two basic forms of rhetoric: <em>visual,</em> which targets the senses and produces a purely <em>emotional</em> response, and <em>verbal,</em> which constructs a narrative out of symbols and creates an <em>abstract logical</em> response. One makes us think, and the other makes us feel. They can be combined in endless permutations—and "visual" rhetoric can be extended to include other kinds of sensuality, like music—but this is the primary division between how we experience the world, and therefore is the primary distinction between how we communicate with one other, and how we get our ideas across.<br><br></div><div>What kind of rhetoric are <em>games,</em> though? On some level, games deal with symbolic abstraction: every chess piece is literally a symbol to be manipulated, and the rules of a game are essentially a language so universal that they can be considered <em>objective.</em> (Johan Huizinga, whose <em>Homo Ludens</em> is the seminal work in understanding play philosophically and culturally, argued that human society <em>emerges</em> from play—and it's because a game's rules, when agreed on, create a bedrock of mutual understanding in which people truly and fully know what they are saying to each other.)<br><br></div><div>But the game of chess is not a <em>rulebook</em> explaining all the pieces. The game of chess is a <em>game.</em> And while that game is carried out through a symbolic language, the "rhetoric" of the game—the sequence of moves—only applies to the individual game being played. It doesn't describe how the construct of the game itself "speaks" to people.<br><br></div><div>Ian Bogost, in his 2007 book <em>Persuasive Games,</em> argued that this is because games need to be understood as a <em>third</em> fundamental form of rhetoric. He called this <em>procedural</em> rhetoric: the rhetoric of systems. In other words, this is the way that a system "communicates" to you <em>while you're in the middle of it.</em> It doesn't "speak" to you on an emotional or logical level: instead, you're influenced by it simply because, with every action you take, you are influenced by its rules about what you can and can't do, which gradually shapes your understanding of "the way things are." Rather than thinking and feeling, procedural rhetoric affects your <em>acting.</em> (And rather than calling it an emotional or logical form of rhetoric, you could call it an <em>actual</em> rhetoric—literally something which speaks to you <em>as you act.)<br></em><br></div><div>Procedural rhetoric is a fascinating concept, because it's a kind of rhetoric that's usually <em>invisible.</em> In fact, most of the time, it affects us <em>even as we think we're acting freely.</em> If what Johan Huizinga said is true—if we develop our consciousness, our <em>thoughts,</em> by means of playing with the world, then we are literally molded by the world we're in. The systems that teach us <em>what</em> to do, what we <em>can</em> do, what will <em>happen</em> if we do those things... ultimately, these teach us our relationship to reality. We think we're discovering a kind of clarity—but our very idea of "clear" is shaped by the system we're trapped within.<br><br></div><div>Some of the greatest philosophical and political minds of the twentieth century were obsessed with the challenge of getting people to think of the sociopolitical systems they were ensnared by. How do you get someone to recognize the machinations of an industrial society that they only exist within a sliver of? How do you get someone to look past the small community they belong to and recognize that <em>even that community</em> only exists because of a dense labyrinth of processes and systems that, along with making that community possible, ensures that that community won't notice the foundations of support it rests upon?<br><br></div><div>How do you make people aware of propaganda, when the nature of propaganda is to go unnoticed? How do you foster media literacy, when most of the techniques used by media <em>presume illiteracy?</em> These are difficult questions to answer—and it turns out they're oddly similar to the question of, how do you argue that your favorite video game is <em>objectively</em> cooler and more interesting than your best friend's favorite video game? They all have to do with this notion of procedural rhetoric: the idea that interactive systems, by giving you certain freedoms, teach you how to make sense of the world. And it's not that they teach you directly—it's that they give you an environment to work within, <em>and then you teach yourself.<br></em><br></div><div>Again, once you put a name to it, you find that this isn't <em>strictly</em> unique to "games" as a medium. Mystery writers, for instance, pride themselves in finding newer and trickier ways to mislead their audiences without leaving them feeling betrayed: the challenge is to simultaneously lead people to construct a theory that <em>feels</em> correct, then to upend that theory in a way that feels <em>more satisfying</em> than the version those people had come up with. If your twist ending feels illogical or worse or unfair, your audience will be mad at you, because you've either <em>broken</em> your own system—you've <em>cheated</em>—or you played your own game worse than they did. But if you can provide them with an answer that <em>beats</em> theirs, they'll be doubly delighted, because they <em>played along.<br></em><br></div><div>On some level, they recognize that your true artistry was in constructing a game for them to play, but building it so diabolically that they were tricked into losing it. You weren't just acting as their opponent: you were tricking them into becoming their own nemesis. And their delight lies in recognizing their own limitation—and in seeing how skillfully you constructed their ignorance by convincing them it was a brilliant insight.<br><br></div><div>This parallels the techniques used by skilled chess players. At a higher level, when players are intelligent enough to predict the outcomes of moves well into the future, your goal isn't to make the smartest possible choice <em>right now</em>—it's to trick your opponent into <em>wrongly envisioning the future.</em> It's a perilous way to play, because your opponent is free to convince you that you've successfully suckered them, all while laying traps for <em>you</em> and anticipating the moment when they break out of the act they're putting on. In a sense, you and your opponent are each inventing games for one another, trying to get each other to believe that a certain kind of upcoming process will unfold—you're using the game of chess to invent <em>this</em> game of chess. You're no longer using chess as a medium to construct a work of art: you're using chess as a medium to construct a new medium.<br><br></div><div>This is one reason why serious critics of games are often drawn to puzzle games, going back to the original <em>Myst</em> (or to the frustrating masterpieces of the "interactive fiction" era). Solving a puzzle isn't just about solving <em>this specific</em> puzzle—it's about the technique you need to use to solve it. At their most brilliant, puzzle games devise layer after layer of perplexing technique, demanding you develop an ever-richer understanding of just what a puzzle consists of, refusing to yield to you until you've reached a genuine insight. (Jonathan Blow's <em>The Witness</em> is a famous example of this, though you'd be forgiven for skipping it since Jonathan blows. Besides, <em>Stephen's Sausage Roll</em> by the incomparable Increpare is a better and vastly less pretentious way to get really mad at an extremely ingenious game.)<br><br></div><div>Of course, game design has only begun to be formally studied in earnest, so we're at an exciting and muddled time where no singular school of thought has truly had a chance to place itself at the "center" of popular or critical culture. Every theorist's darling game type has a loud and angry detractor. For instance, some critics dislike narrative-driven games for essentially trying to be "good" on the same grounds that films are appreciated, and compare narrative action games to roller coasters: thrill rides where you can't ever really leave the ride in question. Some of those critics are fans of simulation games, in which you're <em>explicitly</em> trying to learn the ways that systems work—but Ice Pick Lodge's Nikolay Dybowski has criticized sims for giving a player a detached, abstract relationship to the world they're playing with, allowing them to make choices without directly reckoning with their consequences. Some critics are enthralled with open-world games; others think that open worlds have bred terrible and lazy approaches to game design. There are endless arguments about whether multiplayer games enable <em>more</em> meaningful types of play, or whether they inherently <em>limit</em> play, by restricting a game's design to things which you can expect multiple people to comprehend well enough to communicate over. (And let's not get started on MMOs.)<br><br></div><div>Regardless of the specific takes, I feel comfortable saying that procedural rhetoric is an <em>incredibly useful concept,</em> and that allows you to start having meaningful discussions about game design in the first place. With it, you can begin discussing games the way you'd discuss other kinds of art—including discussing the relationships between procedural, verbal, and visual rhetorics. You can also examine <em>systems</em> for their rhetoric, regardless of whether or not they were intended to be games. What's the difference between Snapchat's and Instagram's forms of rhetoric? What's the procedural rhetoric of a supermarket's membership program—or of its swapping the aisles that different kinds of product are on? You can understand branding, marketing, and business in terms of the procedural "language" that they speak. You can even understand politics—not politicians, but political <em>systems</em> and political <em>methods</em>—as a kind of game, and assess it according to how it generates different kinds of process, maneuvering its participants without them realizing they're being maneuvered.<br><br></div><div>But procedural rhetoric just establishes the terms of discussion. It lets you say that one game is different from another game in terms of how it gets its player to develop new theories of action—not <em>just</em> to act or to think, but to <em>think about acting.</em> You can assess these differences the way you'd assess different painting techniques, or different relationships between styles of music and their listeners. That's important, and even necessary. But you still haven't gotten to the thorny question of establishing <em>significance:</em> what makes a game better or more interesting or more worth playing and discussing? What is the <em>qualitative</em> difference between two games, and how do we even start to form theories about what those differences mean? And if every game is a medium that turns its player into an artist, how do we assess those players <em>as</em> artists? How do we evaluate whether the impact of a game on its players is, in fact, profound?<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>What's in a game?</h1><div><br></div><div>Maybe it's obvious, but a great deal of my study of play wound up being a study of <em>education.<br></em><br></div><div>Johan Huizinga argued that play should be seen as a precursor to thought—that when we play, we <em>learn how to think.</em> James Paul Gee, a more contemporary theorist, went a step further and argued that play <em>is</em> thought: in other words, that thought can be understood as a kind of crystallized pattern of play, and that our "knowledge" is made up, not of "solid" ideas, but of stable cycles, an understanding that A leads to B. Formal logic and mathematical proofs are already constructed this way: demonstrate that a series of steps will always have the same result, and you have, not just <em>insight</em>, but a <em>method</em>—which means you can apply that method anywhere, and consistently get the same result. (The material sciences try to replicate this formal reliability, though reality <em>does</em> have a tendency to undermine things by being extremely fucking weird.)<br><br></div><div>Educational systems are designed, in a sense, to reliably output thinking students—to create a process by which people are moved from "unable to think" to "able." And the goal, in any healthy system, isn't just <em>knowledge,</em> but <em>process</em>—static knowledge matters less than the ability to <em>dynamically learn.<br></em><br></div><div>A major buzzword in education is <em>applicability:</em> how broadly useful are a particular set of skills, and how generally can they be applied? Funnily enough, this is essentially the argument for dividing "popular culture" from "high culture:" the so-called "sophistication" of the so-called "refined" arts isn't just about whether the art <em>itself</em> holds value, but about whether the skills you need to appreciate those arts will broaden your ability to appreciate <em>other</em> things as well. (Harold Bloom, a famously snobby literary critic, once said something along the lines of: "No wonder Stephen King thinks that Harry Potter will encourage kids to read. All he can imagine is kids one day reading Stephen King." Leaving aside the fact that Stephen King is fantastic, the implication was: literature is vast and deep enough that we need to teach people <em>how to explore it,</em> rather than simply finding books that those people can technically read.)<br><br></div><div>To be clear, I think that the pop-vs-high culture distinction is extremely limiting; I think that people on <em>both</em> sides of the divide are incredibly prejudicial and ignorant. But it's true, I think, that pop culture's accessibility needs to be taken at more than face value. Partly, that's because if the goal is <em>learning,</em> if part of the purpose of culture is to open us to experiences, then too insular of a culture can be extremely limiting. (I made a joke about nerds hating sports earlier, but a common critique of sports culture is that <em>it doesn't matter</em> how deep or fascinating it is, if it's completely disconnected from every other cultural avenue on the planet.) And partly the reason I'm critical of taking pop culture's "accessibility" too seriously is because of procedural rhetoric itself: mass media operates as a propaganda machine that <em>teaches</em> people how to engage with pop culture, by making it virtually impossible to ignore. A lot of what makes pop culture accessible is simply that it's inescapable, which means that we absorb enough of it that its basic precepts make sense without our knowing how or why. You can't really disconnect the ease or difficulty of a given work of media from the culture that surrounds it—because any work of media is defined by the process of encountering it in the first place.<br><br></div><div>By thinking of systems as an aesthetic form unto themselves, a lot of popular and mass-media culture becomes <em>definitionally</em> more interesting, in that <em>they generate systems.</em> And when process is seen as an aesthetic dimension, the question of <em>how</em> something generates a system around itself also becomes fascinating: why, exactly, do some things create fandoms while others don't? Snobbery that refuses to engage with these questions isn't just demonstrating a cultural or classist bias: it's admitting its own educational limits, by revealing what it's incapable of exploring and learning. At the same time, the principle that culture's goal should be to make us more open <em>to</em> culture—that the point of learning is to become better <em>at</em> learning—is important, whether you see the ultimate goal of culture as pragmatic (education, politics, ethics, functioning socially) or aesthetic (experience as an end unto itself). Either way, there is an implicit goal of <em>expanding human potential</em>, whether that means making people smarter or pushing them to their limits or simply giving them something fun to do that helps them escape the pressures of the present and the anxieties of the future.<br><br></div><div>If all of this sounds a little clinical or pretentious or sociopathic to you... you're not entirely wrong! But there's a reason it sounds this way, and it's that this is what happens when you try to collapse <em>every possible idea about what art and culture and education could mean</em> into a very dense space. And that's a problem in and of itself, because it means there's a disconnect between the <em>theory</em> of this and the <em>practice</em> of it—a disconnect between education theorists and actual teachers and students, a disconnect between ideas <em>about</em> culture and the people who take part in it, and a disconnect between artistic critique and art itself.<br><br></div><div>I said early on that I try to find theory interesting <em>because</em> it helps me achieve practical results; however, the most interesting theory has a bad habit of being the hardest to translate into anything pragmatic. It's like the gap between <em>learning</em> and <em>knowledge:</em> pragmatic skills are <em>known things,</em> while theory tries to perceive the <em>unknown.</em> When it grapples with things that actually exist, it's either trying to look at those things in brand-new ways, or it's trying to use those things as platforms to vault off from, in the hopes of discovering something new.<br><br></div><div>Here is where we can ask a genuinely interesting and pragmatic question about games, and about art in general: is it teaching you something specific, or is it teaching you <em>how to learn?</em> Is a game introducing you to a series of techniques, then letting you demonstrate that you've learned them—in the same way that a 101-level class might? Is it giving you those techniques so that it can <em>pose challenges</em> to you, testing whether you can extrapolate insights or invent new methods? And is it possible for it go to <em>beyond</em> testing your ability to do that, and actively <em>teach you how to think,</em> or how to learn? Can it go even further than that, and help you find new ways to wonder, to hope, to imagine, to dream?<br><br></div><div>Because the downside of any pragmatic system is that it limits you to that pragmatic system. When all you have is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail; when your education consists of nothing but STEM, you wrongly see the world's problems as engineering glitches. This is, more generally, a challenge faced by games (which "teach" you nothing but themselves), culture (which "introduces" you to nothing but itself), and theory itself (which past a point is just theorizing about theory). Consciousness is defined by permeability: its ability to make connections between things which are not in fact connected. The thing which makes us susceptible to propaganda, the thing that makes procedural rhetoric so effective, is exactly the thing that makes human ingenuity possible in the first place.<br><br></div><div>Compared to this, systems and models are extremely prohibitive—they can only articulate something definite and limited. On top of that, we will never <em>fully</em> absorb ourselves within them, because our minds will always wander past them and through them, meaning that their best intentions for "constructing" something precise for us will always meet with defeat. On the one hand, they can <em>only</em> be precise; on the other hand, their precision will be wasted on us. Any meaningful attempt to create art, or to create "significant" play, seems to run into two contradictory forms of defeat.<br><br></div><div>But that ambiguity, that seeming contradiction between specificity and imprecision, is <em>fundamental to the nature of play.</em> Play at its most basic can be understood as the realm of chaos that exists within otherwise-rigid limits: the things that <em>remain possible</em> within a given restrictive process. The rules which shape play, the "rigid limits" in question, aren't the play itself: <em>the play is the chaos.</em> And the art of game design, the artistic nature <em>of</em> a game, has to do with shaping that chaos. The structure of a game's rules, the structure of a given system, isn't the structure of the actual play; system design is not itself procedural rhetoric. No: what matters is the <em>potential</em> for structure to emerge <em>within</em> that chaos. The shape of play evolves within a given system of rules—and the devilish trick of designing a game isn't to build a system, but to anticipate the systems that a <em>player</em> will devise, and to construct <em>your</em> system to anticipate and influence theirs.<br><br></div><div>In other words, art is inherently a chess game between artist and audience, game maker and player. The design of every game inevitably leads to its players inventing games. The challenge of educating somebody is that you can't directly and reliably impart knowledge to them: instead, you have to anticipate <em>what they'll learn from,</em> and how they'll learn from it. And this becomes doubly tricky when your goal is to teach somebody <em>how</em> to learn—because the more open-ended and broad-scoped the method of learning you want <em>them</em> to learn is, the more intricate a construct you'll need if you want them to <em>construct</em> that method of learning for themselves. In a manner of speaking, you can't teach somebody how to learn—they need to teach themselves. So if you want them to develop a <em>sophisticated</em> method of learning, you need to convince them, somehow, to invent that method all on their own.<br><br></div><div>When I said that play is famously difficult to define, it's that play itself has a way of eluding any attempt to define what it is. It's hard to define what a <em>game</em> is: is a sport just the act of <em>playing</em> a sport, or is it the act of <em>training</em> for a sport, or is it the experience of playing that sport <em>with an audience watching,</em> or is it the experience of watching a sport itself? Post-structuralist and deconstructionist philosophers have a reputation for being impossible to understand, what with their insistence that things are not actually the things they are, but really they were part of this ongoing 20th-century attempt to understand that this elusiveness, this ambiguity, is fundamental to understanding what play <em>is</em>—and that, on some level, <em>everything</em> is play, which is why our attempts to define and regulate our understanding of the world is precisely what leads to those definitions and regulations getting fucked with. Every rule you make changes every other rule; every definition you articulate modifies all your other definitions. The chaos of play isn't a <em>lack</em> of order, but a <em>multiplicity</em> of it. Just as expert chess players play by trapping each other in games, the challenge of inventing a game is to anticipate, well in advance, the way that creating a game will prompt your players to devise new ways of thwarting your intentions.<br><br></div><div>Marcel Duchamp, noted chess player and occasional artist, made a career out of finding ways to make art thwart <em>art.</em> Every time people came to an understanding of what art "is," Duchamp found a new ingenious way to undermine their understanding. He specialized in creating art whose very method of construction requires you to develop a new understanding of what art is just to make sense of what you're looking at: the art isn't a purely sensual experience, and it isn't just a tedious declaration of what art "ought" to be, it's a <em>game</em>—and the piece you physically experience is like the first piece of a puzzle whose shape, and whose other pieces, you don't have the first notion of. It's like the clue to a mystery you didn't know existed, a single thread that leads you to unravel something you hadn't realized was knotted up in the first place.<br><br></div><div>His final piece, <em>Étant donnés,</em> is a marvelous practical joke: a half-sculpture half-painting, aping something akin to an Impressionist landscape or Romantic nude... which you have to view through two eyeholes in a thick wall, meaning you can literally only see it from one single angle at a carefully-prescribed perspective. "Look at this <em>my</em> way," it brattily fumes. "Only <em>this</em> way! Only like <em>this!"</em> But, of course, simply by insisting on that perspective, it becomes a piece <em>about</em> that insistence, rather than about the perspective itself: its attempt to force you into following its rules is precisely what thwarts its own attempt. Yet Duchamp knew this, and by constructing a piece which could <em>only</em> be about its own thwarted efforts, he ensured that you would notice his true intent even as you thought you were defying it. <em>Check and mate.<br></em><br></div><div>This intentional self-thwartedness, this seemingly-contradictory undermining that winds up giving <em>Étant donnés</em> its paradoxical stability, is fundamentally important to the idea that ludic aesthetics—comprehending fields of play stably enough to analyze and critique them—are possible in the first place. That idea that systems of play, systems of <em>thought</em>, are simultaneously too-limited and too-<em>not</em>-limited—that our minds will wander past them in part <em>because</em> they can't be comprehensive enough to circumscribe our thoughts—creates the ambiguous space in which the "real" play is constructed. Because, in our restlessness, we will invent systems that "complete" the thought of a system, filling in all its empty space, the incompleteness of a game invites us to complete it—and influences how we go about its completion.<br><br></div><div>It's in this sense that a game is <em>not</em> just a medium or a canvas: it's not <em>just</em> empty and blank, it's empty and blank in <em>very specific ways.</em> It can't teach us how to fill it, but it can think through the ways in which we <em>might</em> fill it, and make sense of those ways well before we've come up with them ourselves. And, if it devises itself carefully enough, it can relate those different potential methods of completion to one another in ways that mean we don't just discover the methods themselves, but invent <em>theories</em> about how those methods interconnect. Now we're not just artists—we're <em>theorists.</em> The game has taught us how to think about it, not by teaching us directly, but by crafting a space in which we can't help but accidentally teach ourselves.<br><br></div><div><br></div><h1>The aesthetics of morality, and the morality of aesthetics</h1><div><br></div><div>There is a storied tradition of education being carried out by means of riddles: not puzzles, even, but questions whose answers are so elusive and open-ended that, in trying to reach them, we accidentally stumble across some insight that we weren't trying to reach for to begin with. Art, similarly, has a tendency to be elusive: to provide us with a strong <em>feeling</em> of meaning without giving us <em>conclusiveness,</em> so that we grapple with our experience long after our physical experience of the art has ended. Sometimes these experiences are described as "haunting," as if they're still very much with us, refusing to let us ignore them. You can't classify these experiences using Aristotle's original systems for visual and verbal rhetoric, but with procedural rhetoric you can suddenly articulate why these experiences are so important: long after the <em>purported</em> experience is over, you're still grappling with it, playing <em>against</em> it, as if you're reckoning with an unsolved mystery, or stuck in a chess game with someone who refuses to either beat you or let you win. The field of play is extended; the game continues for so long that you don't know what it would even mean to finish it, or what the game <em>was</em> in the first place. Rather than gradually reducing itself over time, it only seems to open itself more and more, until you can barely keep sight of it at all.<br><br></div><div>This is the experience that chess and go players describe as they begin to properly learn the game: what feels like a flat or limited experience abruptly broadens, gaining depth and dimension that starts to seem outright endless. The goal is not simply to win; on the contrary, the prospect of winning is more a <em>lure</em> than anything, one that asks them to continually re-evaluate and rediscover what it would <em>mean</em> to win in the first place, as the path to victory gets increasingly convoluted and difficult to comprehend. Brilliant clarity is only possible by means of profound obscurity. The further in you get, the more capable you are of comprehending the limits of your own vision.<br><br></div><div>Similarly, deeper systems of learning promote more and more awareness of your own ignorance—your own <em>inability</em> to learn. I've said that knowing something is less useful than knowing <em>how</em> to learn it. The extension of that idea is that knowing how to learn is less useful than knowing how to <em>learn</em> how to learn—how to discover new schools of knowledge. Ignorance isn't just made up of the opaque or complex things we see but don't understand: it's the <em>invisible</em> stuff that we don't realize it's possible to be ignorant of at all. These invisibilities, these undetected <em>presumptions,</em> are our most fundamental limit—and there is an equally-unseen hierarchy of these invisible things, because some of them are easier to learn to see than others, and the most-undetectable ones are the ones we can't even conceive of not-seeing in the first place. (Or the ones we are absolutely convinced can't exist undetectably, in a way that means we make an active effort to avoid looking for them.)<br><br></div><div>Ice Pick Lodge's "Profound Games Manifesto" cites another Aristotelian concept: that of <em>catharsis,</em> which they define as the sudden, shocking glimpse of something heretofore unknown. This is not an <em>emotional</em> catharsis, which is the sort we generally think of when we refer to something as cathartic. It's an <em>intellectual</em> one—an abrupt realization that the world is stranger than we realized, and that the parts we <em>didn't</em> see are a fundamentally important part of making sense of anything at all. This is the kind of catharsis that a mystery requires if it wants to thwart us without cheating us, or that a work of art needs if it wants to leave us feeling haunted. It's the kind of catharsis that <em>educators</em> need to offer, if their goal is to teach us how to teach ourselves. And it's hard to bring about, because its nature is <em>defined</em> by the same chaos that constitutes play: it's a definite indefiniteness, a certain uncertainty, in which we are bound to discover, not something which <em>does</em> exist, but something which <em>could</em> exist. It's that shift from <em>does</em> to <em>could</em> that shifts from putting the burden of knowledge on the <em>artist</em> to putting it on the <em>audience,</em> from the teacher to the student, from the game to the player. The trick is to provide enough hints that somebody won't feel satisfied without continuing onward, despite no indication that their experience is incomplete. You have to keep them playing, so to speak, without giving away the game.<br><br></div><div>And it's this notion of "not giving away the game" that begins to define the morality of a given system. Up until now, we've been talking about the <em>potential</em> and the <em>effectiveness</em> of a particular game: what kind of play it's capable of creating, and whether or not it successfully gets its players all the way there without spoiling itself along the way. Morality often concerns itself with intent—what was the desired outcome of an action?—but in ludic systems, where the goal is to make <em>players</em> act and the construct amounts to a deliberate provocation, this doubles back on itself, because the point of a game is to <em>foster</em> intent in its player. What do you make players do? What do you make players <em>want</em> to do? What, in the end, do you teach them they <em>ought</em> to do, as they teach themselves what works and what doesn't?<br><br></div><div>Procedural rhetoric produces, not a feeler or a thinker, but an <em>actor.</em> And the action of a player within a game is molded by the nature of the game itself. Therefore, you can say that every ludic system has an <em>embedded morality</em> to it. The moral structure that it imparts upon its player isn't even a theory, because a player might not realize <em>why</em> they're acting the way they are—it's a flat-out practice. We don't perceive ourselves as changing into a different kind of person, and in some ways we're <em>not</em> changing internally... but we <em>behave</em> differently, and we perceive the world in different ways, and, over time, we internalize that our worldview is correct, and that we were right to act the ways we did.<br><br></div><div>This is a strange word to use, but action is <em>seductive.</em> It's seductive because it <em>doesn't</em> feel thoughtful or emotional: it just feels <em>clarifying,</em> as if, by acting, we are making sense of the world. If it <em>felt</em> seductive, it would be far less seductive than it actually is. And it's much easier to see what I mean if you instead use the word <em>addictive:</em> we can easily get addicted to certain kinds of action, both because the actions themselves are easy to take and because we anticipate the feedback we'll receive when we take action. We imagine the pleasure an action would give us, and unconsciously act, to turn our <em>imagined</em> pleasure real. We imagine the taste of our food, so we acquire it. We imagine the emotional catharsis of screaming at a driver on the highway, so we scream. The action we take feels as clear and as obvious as still water: it is simply a medium, a means to a certain end.<br><br></div><div>James Paul Gee argued that knowledge is just crystallized play; in that sense, <em>we perceive action as knowledge.</em> If I know that action will make me feel a certain way, and I <em>want</em> to feel that way, I might act unconsciously, as if I'm already <em>presuming</em> that I will act, as if my action is <em>already inevitable.</em> The moment I anticipate the end result, I reflexively act. And my action isn't just muscle memory: in a sense, it's <em>perception.</em> Because something makes me feel a certain way and want a certain thing, because I act <em>reflexively</em> on those feelings and desires, the moment I perceive something is the moment I act upon it. Action therefore becomes a kind of collapsed consciousness: a way of eliminating my perception that I have a choice, or that an experience I have is <em>open</em> in some way, rather than a tunnel that only points in one direction.<br><br></div><div>Games both <em>let</em> us act and <em>require</em> us to act. And games decide what our actions mean, by offering us feedback, by creating the <em>possibility</em> that certain actions might lead to certain things. When I refer to "ludic aesthetics," the aesthetics of play itself, I'm referring to the way that play opens some possibilities while collapsing others. And if you want to understand procedural rhetoric in a nutshell, you could say that the most fundamental form of procedural rhetoric involves telling a player what a process <em>is:</em> what their options are, when they're expected to make a choice, and conversely when they <em>don't</em> have options and when they <em>shouldn't</em> consider choosing.<br><br></div><div>When a mystery successfully outplays its audience, it does so by cleverly misdirecting them: offering them misleading options, getting them focused on making deductions in the wrong places, while guiding them away from the places where real uncertainty exists, and where a meaningful piece of information might give away the game. And the trick to <em>misdirection</em> is that it's not enough simply not to show something: it's to show <em>everything,</em> without anybody cottoning on to what it means. That's where the satisfaction of the reveal comes in: "Aha! It was there all along, under our noses!" In a game where this is <em>expected</em> behavior, this sort of misdirection is delightful. But a system where that behavior is <em>not</em> anticipated or expected—which means that people aren't actively looking for it—is actively manipulating its participants, whether or not that manipulation is intentional propaganda.<br><br></div><div>Just as we think <em>emotions</em> when we think of catharsis, we typically think of propaganda in terms of <em>thought and feeling</em> rather than action. Propagandistic action isn't necessarily emotional and doesn't openly promote an idea: it simply teaches people to take certain actions under certain circumstances, to get them used to the idea that this action is an effective or appropriate one to take. Its goal isn't to enrage or to argue: it's to create a new kind of neutrality, a warped "clarity," a flawed understanding of the ways things work.<br><br></div><div>One of the simplest ways that this works, in practice, is by convincing us that certain things just <em>aren't worth thinking about.</em> Casinos don't want you to think about how much money you're spending in them. Social networks don't want you to think about how much time you're investing in them. Bigoted schools of thought don't want you to ask yourself whether your critics have a point. The world you live in doesn't want you to wonder how it came about, or what goes into keeping it going.<br><br></div><div><em>Thinking</em> about a game is not the same thing as <em>playing</em> that game. And it's easy for a game to manufacture circumstances under which <em>there's no time to think,</em> just as it's easy for a film to move along so quickly and bombastically that you simply have no simple to stop and think about a single part of it. That need for reflection, that need to <em>revisit</em> our initial experience of a thing, is why critics value the ability to return to the same experience over and over again, to see how it changes once we anticipate it, once we know what's happening, once we're simply <em>less grabbed</em> by the experience. But that reflection is harder within ludic systems, where the nature of the experience <em>demands</em> your attention and <em>insists</em> that you move along with it, lest the entire experience change.<br><br></div><div>Games can try to counteract this by expanding their horizons, by offering more options, by removing your limits—but games, by their nature, will <em>always</em> be limited, and those options might offer obscurity rather than clarity. (Much in the same way that the easiest way to misdirect an audience is by throwing too <em>much</em> information at them, rather than by offering too little.) You can't brute-force your way around this problem, for the same reason that you can't brute-force your way through a well-designed puzzle: the method you use to craft your play <em>is</em> the play you're crafting. You define the game by how you play it. And when the game you're playing is game-making, your creative approach is what ultimately yields the game you're left with.<br><br></div><div>If the struggle you're reckoning with concerns <em>too much</em> action, action as a substitute for feeling or thought, the only possible alternative is <em>in</em>action: creating pockets of <em>non</em>-movement, encouraging thought and feeling about something more than <em>just</em> what lies ahead, the next obstacle, the next conflict. Similarly, if misdirection is a matter of <em>non</em>-obviousness, then the key to making a person play <em>with</em> your game rather than just <em>playing</em> it is to resort to <em>too</em>-obviousness: make it clear what you're doing and why, even as you're doing it, so that your player begins to reckon with the construct that they're caught in. Much as Duchamp created a work of art whose method, whose <em>intent,</em> was so blatant that the intent and method themselves became a part of its experience, a game can make itself a part of play by making the nature of its own design so obvious that a player has no choice but to contend with it, maybe even reject it altogether.<br><br></div><div>This is the equivalent, in math, of making a student add a number repeatedly to itself, then revealing multiplication as the simpler method of that practice—and then exponents as a similar simplification of protracted multiplication. Once you understand a system, you can <em>reduce</em> it, the way the fans of genre fiction begin to notice a work's tropes, or chess players notice the basic shapes and patterns of each other's moves. These reductions are invented systems: we create them to ease our own cognitive burden. A game, however, can <em>anticipate</em> those inventions, and plan new obstacles, new courses of action, that only reveal themselves once its player has invented enough of a method to reach that next level. And it can <em>inspire</em> those inventions by making its intentions clear enough that players realize what they ought to be solving for.<br><br></div><div>Ludic artistry consists of making room for players to make games, while simultaneously <em>requiring</em> that they invent those games and anticipating those games well enough to react <em>to</em> them, once they've been made. If you don't require enough of your player, they won't invent; if their invention flat-out <em>breaks</em> your game, then they have beaten you and your game. And it's the nature of every game—that contradiction of both its limits <em>and</em> the unlimitedness of its player—that it <em>will</em> be beaten. So a game's ultimate aesthetic experience is defined by just how long it holds on before its beaten: how many things it expects its player to do, how many ways it lets its player do them, and how prepared it is to address all of those approaches, not by acknowledging victory or offering up defeat, but by revealing a new layer of the game.<br><br></div><div>Similarly, the pinnacle of procedural rhetoric is for it to reveal its own nature: to take what <em>should</em> be the invisible workings of systemic process and to make the player notice them, by making them realize <em>how</em> to notice them. Such a game might begin by exposing itself obviously, then obfuscating itself more and more cleverly, until by the end its creator is hiding the game they're constructing in the most diabolical ways they know how—enough that any player, by beating the game, reveals that they understand more than the original creator. (When the first person to reach the final level of Pac-Man had a chance to discuss the game with the person who made it, he realized that Pac-Man's creator understood the game far less clearly than he himself did: principles which he'd learned deeply enough to teach to others were a mystery to the man who'd birthed those principles in the first place.)<br><br></div><div>The paradox of play is that, by granting its player certain freedoms, it simultaneously <em>denies</em> freedom to its player: accepting the possibilities of the game also binds the player to them. Which leads to the other paradox: by <em>denying</em> a player obvious freedoms, a game challenges them to discover <em>less</em> obvious ones, inventing new ways they can be free. Repressive social orders make a big show of how empowered their citizens are for this very reason: people stop struggling to escape when you've convinced them that they're free. And the art of teaching someone, the art of <em>helping</em> them free themselves, is to offer them just enough of an obstacle that they trust their ability to overcome it.<br><br></div><div>For this reason, primitive games are often profound: go, one of the simplest games ever devised, is also one of the most staggeringly complex. And to say that the design of a game is basic is <em>not</em> to say that it's inelegant: limited mediums are often the easiest to devise brilliant evolutions within, because the obviousness of their constraints is what prompts innovation.<br><br></div><div>Conversely, the more <em>conspicuous</em> choice is offered, and the less obvious it is that those choices have consequences, the harder it can be to make those choices matter. It is much harder to craft a meaningful game within a complex medium than it is to craft one within a simpler medium, because the sheer abundance of possibilities makes it much harder to discover any challenges or limits.<br><br></div><div><em>But that itself becomes a game.</em> Within any seemingly-free environment, the challenge <em>is</em> to discover limits: to figure out what seems undoable, and to work around it. Genuine creativity begins when certain things are no longer possible; if a game is defined by its constraints, then the art of making a game is the art of discovering meaningful constraint. For imagination to begin to take shape, shape itself needs to be acknowledged as meaningful.<br><br></div><div>Education and growth can be seen as the progression from ignorance to knowledge, from restriction to freedom—but from the perspective of the one learning and growing, you can <em>also</em> see them as the shift from someone's confidence in their own knowledge to their appreciation of their deep ignorance, their shift from only ever dreaming of freedom to realizing that, to be free, they have to discover limits they have yet to see. Similarly, a young artist seeks accomplishment—and a mature one, one who's tasted accomplishment, sets out to find what they are still unable to achieve.<br><br></div><div>A simple game challenges you to beat it, by showing you the obstacles in your path. A trickier game shows you your <em>freedoms</em>—and challenges you to work out what's missing. In the former, the game exists already; all that's left to do is follow along the path that ends it. In the latter, the most meaningful part of the game <em>doesn't</em> exist—and your goal is not to escape what's there, but to invent what isn't. As with advanced games of chess, you're not playing the game in front of you so much as you're using it as the medium in which you invent a new one. Your success will not be evaluated by the standards of the game you were given: it will be evaluated by the person you give your game to in turn. And you'll know you have succeeded when they respond to you with a game of their own—and when you find that game worth playing back.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/273012023-03-15T08:29:07Z2023-03-15T08:29:07ZThe perils of a consumer mindset.<div class="trix-content">
<div>In the wake of <a href="https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1635687373060317185">OpenAI announcing their latest and greatest GPT-4 model</a>, I realized what bugs me the most about AI culture. It's not the technologies we're calling "AI" themselves, which I think are occasionally exciting and frequently very fun. (I find it less exciting than most people seem to, but I value fun more anyway.) No: the thing that bugs me about AI is the way that its evangelists talk about it. <br><br>It's not the breathless tone of voice they use, or the fact that some of them seem to think that AI genuinely thinks for itself—though I <em>do</em> find the latter endlessly irritating. The part that disturbs me is what they seem to view the purpose of AI <em>as</em>. Because they act as if AI is a font of endless content: not <em>creativity</em>, but <em>content</em>. It is the ultimate buffet, capable of feeding them whatever they hunger for. And it's clear that, for many of them, that's the end-all be-all of any so-called creative act: to cater to themselves endlessly, to offer themselves whatever they feel like feeding on. <br><br>The goal isn't even to offer up the things AI makes for them outwardly, as if they're the "artists" steering AI to create meaningful material. The goal is just to consume, endlessly, without having to deal with the quirks and foibles of other human beings. To cut out the "middleman," so to speak, between themselves and the things they consume.<br><br>That's not a new impulse. (Very little about AI culture is new.) The era of the "individual," whether you pin its start on the youth culture rebellions of the 60s or on the shark-eat-shark mentality of 80s Reaganism and Thatcherism, has relentlessly pursued the dream of individual satiation. And the modern digital age has made this gluttonous self-centeredness extraordinarily clear: every pursuit, whether it's dating or reading the news or (ironically) enlightenment and well-being, has been distilled down to an app model where you, <em>the user, </em>are at the center of the universe. Everything is catered to you, adjusted for your pleasure, presented as if all that matters in the world is what <em>you</em> want—and as if other people are just an irritation to be endured.<br><br>Stewart Lee, in his show <em>Content Provider</em>—which is so nakedly about the dehumanization of culture that its "set" is just an ocean of other comedians' bargain-bin DVDs—does a bit about the devaluation of BDSM in contemporary society. His grandparents, he says, had to <em>work</em> for their kinky sex. They had to sneak out to farms and steal burlap potato sacks in the dead of night, so they could carve holes in them and use them for gimp masks. The "potato sack sex mask," as Lee puts it, serves as his stand-in for another era: one where things were worse in many ways, but where people had to commit to the things they cared about, and defined themselves partly by the things they felt were <em>worth inconveniencing themselves for</em>. <br><br>"'I'm really into BDSM,'" he says, mimicking a caricature of a modern couple. "'Since when?' 'Oh, since about last night at ten.'" <br><br>On the one hand, it's maybe neat that you can "explore" "BDSM" with a couple of impulse-clicks on Amazon. On the other, it's a fundamentally reductive act, one that turns a culture and a practice and a set of values into yet another kind of consumption. And it doesn't end with kink: dating sites like Tinder literally reduce the dating pool to a tasting menu, one that encourages viewing other people as consumable goods. Dating and sex are all-too-often reduced to onanism: we start to view other people, not as opportunities to escape the existential prison of the insular self, but as yet another kind of curated content.<br><br>Is it any wonder that people wind up treating each other the same way they treat the media they consume? Gamer culture, in which reviewers are stalked and harassed for giving a AAA game an 8/10 instead of a perfect 10, dovetails neatly with incel culture, whose fundamental issue with women is that they're allowed to deny men sex. On the younger progressive left, individuals and content alike are declared "toxic" for holding mildly disagreeable opinions; keeping those people in your life or harboring affection for those things becomes proof that you, in turn, are likely toxic and ought to be excised. I, the individual, become the ultimate barometer for the rest of the world; my preferences and feelings aren't whims, they're ironclad and resolute, and it's an injustice when the world fails to perfectly cater to me.<br><br>(To be clear, when I loop the "younger progressive left" into this, I'm talking about phenomena like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/style/your-fave-is-problematic-tumblr.html">Your Fave is Problematic</a>, rather than about when bigotry is rightly criticized and called out for being dangerous. But bigotry is itself a monstrously insular and self-centered phenomenon: the act of being so obsessed with yourself, and so unable to bear the world deviating from you you you, that you label anyone different from you <em>deviant</em> and consider it a justice when terrible things are done to "correct" the "problem" of their existence.)<br><br>Is it any wonder, then, that AI zealots were excitedly advocating the possibility that <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-so-over">AI would replace porn</a>? Or that <a href="https://thenextweb.com/news/confused-replika-ai-users-are-standing-up-for-bots-trying-bang-the-algorithm">some of them have turned to AI chatbots</a> as a substitute for having relationships? This is the end goal of individualism, the final dream of consumerism, the vision that AI advocates are seemingly so breathless over: <em>the elimination of the other person</em>. The dream of a world in which other people are finally unnecessary, so you can live in a world made up of only you.<br><br>When people talk about AI replacing composers and musicians, writers and poets, painters and visual artists, programmers and code, they're talking about doing away with <em>people</em>. It's not enough to reduce the world to content farms, algorithmically-targeted products, and TV shows that are literally designed around what Netflix's data tells them will addict people. It's not enough to envision so-called "AI technology" as a tool that could simplify creative processes, removing monotonous drudge work to let artists focus on the parts that really matter. The dream is <em>replacement</em>—because the thought of life involving other people, the thought of a "culture" that you have to particulate <em>in,</em> is unbearable. (And it's no surprise that this worldview makes a perfect breeding ground for white supremacy, violent misogyny, and whatever TERFy nonsense J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle keep yammering on about.)<br><br>Over the weekend, I was fortunate enough to get to watch Béla Tarr's <em>Sátántangó,</em> a seven-and-a-half-hour-long black-and-white film about misfortune that besets a desolate Hungarian village. I've had fun with the horror acquaintances feel at the prospect of such a movie, and it <em>is</em> a little humorous just how unappealing that thumbnail description of the movie makes it seem, but the honest truth is that <em>Sátántangó </em>was a shockingly pleasant, enjoyable, and easy-to-watch film. It moved slowly and intelligently; the slowness made for an extremely relaxing experience, and the intelligence made it engaging all the way through. I found it easier to watch than I've found some films a quarter of its length—and much easier to watch than the hour-long first episodes of certain TV series. <br><br>It's hard to explain, and I didn't understand it until I watched it myself... but that's exactly why I went to go see it. I knew I <em>didn't</em> understand, and I knew that a lot of people who'd had that experience <em>did</em> find it valuable and weirdly pleasant, so I went in and let the movie teach me how to watch it. That, in a nutshell, is what I find most valuable about art: not its pleasantness or entertainment value, not even just its sheer <em>craft</em>, but those moments when I grapple with something and discover a new way to experience it, and a new way to experience the world in general. The <em>meaning</em> of art comes about when you put yourself and your preconceptions to the side, distance yourself from your own kneejerk reactions, and consider the possibility that there's something else out there which you haven't... well, <em>considered</em>.<br><br>That's the point of <em>culture</em>, really. That's the reason why <em>other people</em> matter. Connection is valuable, not because it means somebody else is identical to me, but because it means we get to genuinely rejoice in each other's differences. The strangenesses of other people is what makes familiarity such a blessing—not as a shelter <em>from</em> the strangeness, but as an opportunity to make a home <em>within</em> the strangeness, and be at peace with it, until one day we realize that we, too, have become strange and new.<br><br>That's what I find unsettling about AI culture: the eagerness to replace "strange" with "controlled". The elimination, not of difficulty or toil or obstacle, but of anything that could be <em>perceived</em> as an obstacle, including creative process and consumption itself. ("Make AI read books and tell me what the point of them is" seems to be, unsurprising, a major draw for people who <em>want to have read </em>books, but hate the part where they actually have to <em>read.</em>) <br><br>The problem isn't with AI technologies themselves—every time I hear <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@mnateshyamalan/video/7202786342957370670?_r=1&_t=8a4qVfGNBs3">Joe Biden deliver a surreal monologue about Young Sheldon</a> or watch another variant of <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/unlimitedsteam">Unlimited Steam</a>, in which an AI tries to rewrite and perform the "steamed hams" scene from <em>The Simpsons,</em> I am beside myself with joy. The problem, as ever, is with people. The novelties of AI are delightfully novel, but at its heart, the mindset and the culture and the limits and the poisons of AI really are nothing new.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/270792023-03-07T18:20:19Z2023-03-07T18:20:19ZCults of charisma<div class="trix-content">
<div>Paolo Sorrentino's <em>The New Pope</em> is a show about fanaticism: specifically, about the kind of <em>passionate devotion</em> that goes past love or even reference to become a dogmatic, unflinching worldview. It follows John Brannox, who reluctantly becomes Pope John Paul III in the wake of his popular predecessor's unexpected near-death. The first thing we see in Brannox's residence is his elderly parents, unspeaking and unmoving, bound to wheelchairs with oxygen masks covering their faces. They are devoted to the memory of John's dead twin brother, Adam—a brilliant writer and religious thinker whose shadow covers John's entire life.<br><br>In death, Adam became an institution. And his quieter, tenderer, more sensitive brother suffered for it. His parents stopped speaking to him after Adam's death. Their meeker <em>living</em> son means less to them than Adam's brilliant memory. The papacy of John Paul III is defined, in part, by this, and by John's slow reckoning with the burden of being himself—or, as he puts it, of being entirely forgotten.<br><br>But there's another, steeper shadow covering John's papacy: that of his predecessor, the chain-smoking New Yorker Lenny Belardo, better known as Pius XIII. In life, Pius was magnetic and controversial; in (what amounts to) death, he is remembered as a miracle worker and a saint, a stunning and epochal force—perhaps the most influential Christian since Jesus Christ himself.<br><br>Lenny's story is told in an earlier series, <em>The Young Pope.</em> If its sequel is primarily a tale about fanaticism, then <em>The Young Pope</em> is more specifically about the kind of man who births fanatics. Lenny Belardo is outrageous, both politically and personally: he is a rude, haughty man who demands obedience, and an arch-conservative Catholic whose positions against abortion and gay marriage are harsh enough to shock even his fellow conservatives. Yet he is also incredibly intriguing: an unreadable enigma, who intends to turn the church into an extension of his forbidding, mysterious self.<br><br><em>The Young Pope</em>, in other words, is a story about <em>charisma—</em>a word that has political, cultural, <em>and</em> religious connotations. Lenny compares himself directly to celebrities at some point: he wants to be the Daft Punk of popes, and compulsively refuses to let any photo of him be taken. To the Italian prime minister, he explains that he can use wield his charisma as a weapon: "While a Catholic might disobey the Pope, they'd never disobey Christ. I'm already the former, but believe me: if I want to, I can have myself accredited as the latter as well." His exceptional handsomeness—which is commented upon explicitly and repeatedly—is a part of his arsenal. And to underscore this, <em>The Young Pope</em> fills the Vatican with memorably plain and ugly faces: an ocean of non-beauty against which Jude Law's chiseled face shines out like a beacon, or maybe a miracle.<br><br>But it's the Christian meaning of the word <em>charisma</em> that's most relevant here. It specifically refers to <em>divinity,</em> and even more specifically to <em>miracles.</em> The word originates from a Greek term that means a <em>favor</em> or <em>gift</em>—namely, a gift from God or from the gods, a living proof of God's realness and power. "Charismatic Christians," as a denomination, believe in the literal supernatural reality of miracles, and claim to experience those supernatural moments themselves. And it's <em>this</em> charisma that defines Pius XIII: his followers' belief that he is genuinely supernatural, and therefore speaks for God. Lenny cultivates this belief, using the mystery of his handsome face to tempt Catholics into seeing him as unknowable, unreachable, an outright miracle. He obsesses over his own mystery, not because it makes him alluring, but because he knows it makes him superhuman.<br><br>Charisma is power, in other words. It is what grants the Church its ability to insist that Catholics must place it and Christ above their families, above their nations, above the human world they live in. Pius is unmoved by pleas, by evidence of suffering: suffering is human, and God transcends it. He articulates a vision of the Church that's borderline inaccessible, harsh and hostile to everyday worshippers; as he says to one of his employees, he despises familiar relationships, and insists on only having formal ones, as clear as water, as definite and unmoving as stone.<br><br>That word, <em>familiar</em>, also holds important meaning. Lenny Belardo is an orphan; his life is defined by the moment that his parents abandoned him, cutting him off from the earliest and most primitive form of love and connection. "An orphan lacks a first love," he confesses, in an eventually-discovered love letter. "That's the source of his awkwardness, his naiveté." By time time we meet him, all awkwardness and naiveté has been lost—or at least, carefully papered-over and transformed. He now intends the Church to do to its followers what his parents did to him: abandon them, torturing them into striving to meet an unreachable, unknowable standard. He will inflict such a strictness upon his followers, such a coldness, that they will have no choice but to shed their humanity, and become divine.<br><br>Cruelty, power, and charisma are inseparable—or so it seems. Even the most liberal cardinals in the Vatican swear off sex, romance, marriage, and family. This is what it means to be devoted to God. Lenny's conservatism would eliminate <em>all</em> softness, forgiveness, and humanity from Catholicism, but his is just a vision of the Church pushed to an extreme. This is <em>already</em> the Catholic church's nature, <em>The Young Pope</em> suggests. Its rigidity and inflexibility, its stern and at-times-inhuman demands, are what elevate its Christians. It makes something more of them, something holier, purer, more powerful, more divine.<br><br>Sorrentino's crucial and fascinating insight is that chastity is not just an <em>elimination</em> of excitement or pleasure. It is a fetish in and of itself. Both <em>The Young Pope </em>and <em>The New Pope</em> revel in this, depicting the exaggerated formality of the Vatican as not only pleasurable, but <em>campy</em>. It remixes chants and hymns with club music, pop songs, and tribal beats. As Lenny Belardo strips naked and dons his papal vestments, covering himself with so many layers of clothing and jewelry that his body becomes indiscernible, we realize that <em>this</em> is the reason for his baroque adornments: not just that he is concealing his body, but that he is emphasizing the fact that his body needs to be concealed.<br><br>At times, this campiness undercuts the self-seriousness of Catholicism. At other times, it <em>underscores</em> it: making it clear that <em>this</em> is the allure, borderline-erotic, of the Church itself. Authority as ecstasy; repression as charisma. The urge to self-deny becomes a form of maddening eros in and of itself: next to it, yearning and desire seem softer, weaker, more familial. Human, but less intriguing for being so.<br><br>Lenny is never described outright as a fascist, but his ideology and mannerisms are distinctly fascistic in nature. Fascism, too, is a fundamentally charismatic ideology: it worships action, sees violence as the ultimate <em>form</em> of action, and worships the permanent intolerance of death. In fascism, repression and tradition are eroticized; <em>questioning</em> or <em>analyzing</em> tradition is treasonous. Unity through exclusivity is the goal—and the only way to join its brotherhood is by rejecting or excising everything that sets you apart, embracing not only conformity but <em>fetishizing</em> the act of cutting the non-conformist parts of yourself away, violently mutilating every part of you that "doesn't belong," ritualistically celebrating your own murder.<br><br>As Pope, Lenny would eliminate everything human about himself, up to and including his own face. As with his papal vestments, it's not simply the <em>lack</em> of his face that gives him power: it's his conveying, through denial, that his face is powerful enough to be worth concealing. He is eminently desirable; he is profoundly unobtainable. As <em>The New Pope </em>opens, with him lying in his coma, the nun who sponges off his body steps aside, lies down, and starts to masturbate: not furiously, but slowly, longingly, as if her lust for him is just another kind of sacrament.<br><br>If God was real, would He be less powerful? If we knew that He existed, would our worship of Him matter any less?<br><br>For Sorrentino, an agnostic, the answer seems pretty clear. More than any other show, <em>The Young Pope</em> and <em>The New Pope</em> go out of their way to <em>tease</em> us, with a narrative structure and visual compositions that act almost as flirtations. There is a central mystery to Lenny—a <em>definitive</em> mystery—that isn't resolved or even explained until near the end of <em>The Young Pope</em>. Before that, we don't even realize that there <em>is</em> a mystery: the resolution that we eventually get is illuminating, but it's not an <em>answer</em>, because we don't know enough to even ask a question. We only get the sense that there is something missing, something not-quite-clear, a central puzzle piece that holds the rest together—and its unspoken absence, rather than infuriating, is utterly compelling. And it only reveals himself well after Lenny reaches the limits of his would-be dictatorship, and his Church crumbles around him, and he starts taking the painful steps of allowing himself to be human.<br><br>For the Pius XIII who is worshipped in <em>The New Pope</em> is not the Pius XIII we were initially given. <em>The Young Pope</em> is a story about Lenny's <em>reconciliation:</em> he never renounces his charisma or his mystery, or even his initial conservative impulses, but he finds a way to let that coexist with the simple fact that he is human. He hurts; he mourns; he grieves; he is afraid. He is lost and he is frightened; if he doesn't fear or revere God as seems prudent, perhaps it's because not even God seems as distant as his own parents remain.<br><br>By undercutting the Church's conservatism with camp and ribald sexuality, <em>The Young Pope</em> keeps us from taking its religious politics at face value. But by taking Catholicism seriously, by <em>leaning into </em>its harshest worldview and most regressive beliefs, it allows the Vatican and Christianity itself to be treated as meaningful, not by surgically removing its ugliest features but by treating that ugliness with respect. It lends it a <em>compassion</em>, in other words, and tries to see this flavor of Catholicism as it sees itself. (One of the most striking scenes of the series is a debate about abortion between Lenny and his mentor, Cardinal Spencer—himself a deeply conservative man. It's striking because it's an argument about abortion <em>between two men who despise abortion as a sin:</em> the differences in their opinion are far more fascinating for how similarly they think, and for how much room they still find to disagree.)<em> </em> <br><br>This compassion, in the face of such intolerance, is a far more powerful rebuke of it than simple dismissal could ever be. <em>The Young Pope</em> is not potent because it is blasphemous; on the contrary, it's potent because it makes the shocking decision to keep the faith.<br><br>It is this legacy, this miraculous blend of charismatic divinity and humble humanity, that confronts John Brannox as he becomes John Paul III. Brannox is a moderate by comparison; he is soft-spoken; his central religious principle is that of The Middle Way, an attempted reconciliation between the arch-conservative Church and a more radical, progressive interpretation of it. Yet Brannox himself is a compromise, less a vote of confidence than the man who all the other cardinals tolerated the most. And he is haunted by Lenny's memory, and by the possibility of his return: noted serial sexual abuser Marilyn Manson pops up, at once point, blithely confused by the fact that this pope is much older than he remembers the exciting sexy pope being.<br><br><em>The Young Pope</em>'s pet political issue is not abortion but homosexuality: the question of whether gay cardinals should be excised from the Vatican, and why their sexuality would matter, when <em>every </em>cardinal is sworn to chastity. <em>The New Pope</em> is far more centered around female sexuality and women's rights, exploring desirability and desire, finding variations on sexuality and romantic love. A question is raised, several times, on whether the Catholic Church can find a way of granting equality to women <em>without</em> renouncing its own heavily-gendered policies; this paradox of uncompromising reconciliation, in which both parties are satisfied without sacrifice, is part of John Paul III's agenda. (At one point, an interesting solution to a problem is proposed; it's hard to tell whether or not it could hold up in practice, but it's a striking parable of finding a way to satisfy modernism and tradition without either yielding to the other.)<br><br>As with its treatment of Catholicism and camp, <em>The New Pope</em> finds ways of using sexuality to both undercut <em>and</em> bolster a vision of yearning and love as kinds of sacraments. At time, its sexuality is bawdy and grotesque, a defiant wink at the Church's restrictive beliefs. But sometimes, and often without warning, this gratuitous sexuality turns into a depiction of longing, the sort that touches on the soul. Visions of sexual desirability show up in the dreams of men who cannot yield to such desires; these visions aren't carnal or thrilling, but tender and aching and bittersweet. No naked body can be as striking as the right blend of hunger and deep sorrow in a tortured pair of eyes.<br><br>The tired cliché is to depict sexuality as a weapon, typically a tool employed by femininity against weak-willed and lustful men. Thankfully, <em>The New Pope</em> avoids this: its vision of charisma, after all, is achieved through sexual <em>repression</em> than through sexual indulgence. Instead, it depicts desire as a portal to something more vulnerable and human—not <em>base</em> or <em>carnal</em>, but simply small and person-sized, the antithesis of the divine. Sexual abuse is the <em>denial</em> of somebody's humanity: the reduction of them to an outlet, a means to an end, that severs the human connection for abuser and victim both. And at one point, a peculiar kind of sex work is depicted as flat-out holy: a kind of miracle in and of itself, granting a connection that feels outright impossible. (“Do you know what the difference is between a whore and a saint?” asks the woman who hires a self-described whore for her son. "None.")<br><br>This is reflected in <em>The New Pope</em>'s spectacular series of title sequences, all of which depict nuns dancing erotically, in increasingly frenzied ways. On one level, it's part of the show's camp, its ongoing attempt to make a lurid spectacle out of the Catholic church—and to keep viewers' attentions through its never-ending series of sober discussions about faith and the nature of the Church. On another level, though, it's the first of many depictions of people dancing to reclaim, not their bodies or their sexuality, but their right to express themselves and their emotions. The majority of the show's ending credits feature characters dancing, in different places, to different songs—revealing both their comfort in themselves and their relationship with whoever happens to be watching. (One sequence, of a woman dancing post-divorce, was cut from HBO's version of the show, and it's a travesty: it's the apex of the show depicting playfulness <em>as</em> liberation, and even as a kind of salvation, the ultimate moment of a person realizing themselves.)<br><br>Against this stand the fanatics of Pius XIII, almost all of whom are women, clothing their bodies in formless hoodies emblazoned with Pius's finally-revealed face. Their reverence for the man once known as Lenny Belardo borders on sacrilegious: they believe that he was murdered by the Vatican, and that he has more claim to being the Catholic church than the Catholic church itself. They are devoted, not to the man, but to the miracle: they are the Catholics that Lenny once proclaimed he would create, forsaking everything but their devotion to his vision. Realized in the flesh, that vision seems more more like idolatry: they revere, not Lenny's forbidding Divine Father, but the charisma of Lenny Belardo himself.<br><br>There's something fascinating about the inverse trajectories of the two popes: Belardo recedes, Brannox advances. Lenny, who lives his life haunted by parents he can barely remember, learns to approach God, not as an absent father to emulate, but as an ear that will forever receive him as a young and confused child, and perhaps even forgive him. Brannox, whose life is haunted by <em>living</em> parents and by a dead brother he can remember all too well, discovers, at last, a new kind of charisma: the fieriness of an overlooked outcast, who seeks, not vengeance against those who overlooked him, but the power to behold all the others who were similarly overlooked. </div><div><br></div><blockquote>“There is no place for you here,” they told us with their silence. “Then where is our place?” we implored them with our silence. We never received that reply, but now we know. Yes, we know our place. Our place is here. Our place is the Church. <br><br>Cardinal Biffi said it first, and in an astonishingly simple way: “We are all miserable wretches whom God brought together to form a glorious church.” Yes: we are all miserable wretches! Yes: we are all the same! And yes, we are the forgotten ones. <em>But no longer.</em> From this day forth, we shall no longer be forgotten, I assure you. They will remember us because <em>we are the Church."</em></blockquote><div><br>It is a human miracle, not a divine one. Yet it too is a transubstantiation: one of suffering to compassion, hurt to love. Those who were invisible become, not merely <em>seen</em>, but <em>the ones who see. </em>They reject the authority of the ones they hoped would see them and insist upon a new authority of their own: the right to become, and the duty of becoming, the ones who now bear witness.<br><br>Pius XIII envisioned empowerment through powerlessness: an ascent to divinity by means of sacrificing everything human. John Paul III offers a different vision: the empowerment of any one individual to empower others. Not a sacrifice of the self, but an acknowledgment of its worth, by offering who we are to others. There is a similar selflessness to it, but that selflessness has an altogether different meaning. Pius made himself charismatic by making himself unseeable; John Paul made himself charismatic by allowing himself to see.<br><br>Does God see us? Does God care?<br><br>I've heard many Christians reject atheism with the simple logic that, if God didn't exist, then the world would be too horrible for them to bear. (I was raised Jewish, and my experience has been that Jewish people have a somewhat different perspective, post-Holocaust, on how unbearable and horrible the world can be, God or no.) I even knew a woman who justified her Evangelical faith with the simplest logic possible: out of all the possible interpretations of God, she picked the one that seemed the easiest to follow, and the vision of redemption and heaven that would ask the least of her in the process.<br><br><em>The Young Pope</em> and <em>The New Pope</em> have trickier thoughts about God than that. God doesn't seem to see us, yet God sees us; God doesn't seem to care about us, yet God cares. Through God's seeming betrayals, we both reject our faith <em>and</em> double down on it; our attempts to rebuild God in our own image turn out to be a blasphemy, but it is precisely for that blasphemy that God forgives us. This is true, it seems, whether or not God is in fact real. Whether God exists or not, in fact, seems to be the <em>least</em> relevant part of God's existence.<br><br>Charisma, the "gift from God," is similarly tricky. <em>Belief</em> in divine presence seemingly has nothing to do with whether or not the divine exists. That which <em>feels</em> divine, that which inspires awe and devotion and even dogma, might not be divine in the slightest; it may, in fact, be what drives people to blasphemy and cruelty and profoundly inhuman acts. <br><br>We can reject divinity, just as we can reject our own humanity. Yet in both cases, we still cry out: we crave humanity, we crave the divine. We seek miracles and magic as surely as we seek out our own face. We hunger for mystery. We respond to charisma, not because it is beautiful, but because it is transcendent—just as we respond to beauty, not because <em>it</em> is transcendent, but because it reminds us that we are not. We will always be drawn to what lies beyond, even though it means we risk leaving behind everything that's right in front of us, even though we risk creating something inhospitable, something antithetical to the idea of home. Yet we are also transcendent ourselves: we are the Other, we are the <em>mystery</em>, we are the unknowable world to everybody else. Charisma lies beyond us <em>and</em> within us. We ourselves are the divine gift. And we bestow that gift upon others, we grant them a divine favor that<em> only we can grant</em>, when we look upon them, not as divine, not as human, but as simultaneously human and divine.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/266802023-02-23T17:02:34Z2023-02-23T17:02:34ZAn "Unforgettable" Sound<div class="trix-content">
<div>Shortly after learning about the death of Tohru Okada, one of the six men who made up the seminal and somewhat unbelievable Moonriders, I learned that he'd released an album only a few years ago that I'd never heard about. <br><br>To understand how strange this is, you'd need to understand the depths of my Moonriders obsession: I track this band like a hunter tracks prey, poring over new announcements from its members on a semi-monthly basis, and have kept tabs on everything down to their live shows for the better part of a decade. I have a playlist of its members' music that's over <em>six days</em> long; on more than one occasion, I've written a record publisher directly, asking if we can arrange some kind of import. For one of its members to release new work—and not just work that he <em>played</em> on or <em>produced</em>, but work that (to use a problematic phrase) is <em>his—</em>without being noticed is...<br><br>Well, for Tohru Okada, it's somewhat unsurprising, really. Okada, more even than his bandmates, has a penchant for disappearing behind names that aren't his own. A look at <a href="https://www.discogs.com/artist/297419-Tohru-Okada?sort=year%2Cdesc&limit=500&type=Credits&filter_anv=0&page=1">his album credits</a> on Discogs reveals a dizzying 360 titles, including separate long lists of work for "writing and arrangement," "production," and "instrumental performance," but that list—I know from experience—is frustratingly incomplete. It includes his experimental pop trio <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAEAIAilvqk">Ya-to-i</a> and his accordion ensemble, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDmEnmUJE-o">Life Goes On</a>. It briefly hints at the existence of his electronica project, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMgGSOC3vHk">CTO LAB</a>, and misses most incarnations of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiH6a82qY3U">Chiroline</a>, the girl-group band he formed whenever he'd written music that he thought a girl-group should sing. It completely misses <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21Z7QXX4QtU">Ukulenica</a>, a surprisingly lovely ukulele quartet, and also skips the album he created <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBSRbwz0jp0">using the vocaloid Hatsune Miku</a>, which he did using the Americanized alias Thomas O'Hara. Beyond that, it's hard to tell <em>what's</em> undocumented, because there <em>is</em> no reliable authority on Tohru Okada's works: every fan site, every record company's log, is missing more than it includes.<br><br>The more you describe a Moonrider's musical history, the more it sounds like you're flat-out making things up. That's true of the Moonriders themselves, it's true of its individual members, and it's truer of Tohru Okada than it is of anybody else, both because Okada's range of musical interests was eclectic and inexhaustible <em>and</em> because he seemingly found it easier to express himself through other musicians than as a solo artist of any kind. Only one album, 2016's aptly-named <em>Portraiture of T, </em>ever carried his name without embellishment; his earliest work, without fail, billed itself as <em>The "Unforgettable" Sound of Tohru Okada</em>, quote marks and everything, and revolved around a theme of some kind, as if he was selling a music library rather than an album proper.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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</figure><br><br>When you look at his work with Moonriders, with whom he recorded for nearly 50 years, Okada gets <em>more</em> elusive, not less. He's there from the very beginning: the band's first recorded song, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrWLr9izlqo">Anu Musume No Love Letter</a>, is credited to him. When the band pivoted to its breakthrough jittery New Wave sound in <em>Mania Maniera</em>, Okada is again credited with writing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chNar2UOp2o">the album's legendary opening track</a>. He wrote <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVl_yc_Eg2g">lush, heartfelt rock</a>; he wrote <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfw77clzGpM">ballads that segue implausibly into funk</a>. He wrote one of the band's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSkNEeJsJbQ">most moving and soulful songs</a>, and then, a decade later, rewrote it as a sunny pseudo-reggae beach jam. When the band was ready to make its farewell in 2011, Okada wrote what was meant to be <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv6Gb27q9aM">its farewell song</a>, a deceptively simple and happy song whose layers are as subtle and hard to pin down as the man himself.<br><br>On what may be the band's magnum opus, 2006's <em>Moon Over the Rosebud</em>, Okada contributed the stunning <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvhu71FdldM">Vintage Wine Spirits, and Roses</a>, a mostly-acoustic number with hints of tropical sounds, whose laid-back pace conceals surprisingly powerful emotion. But it was his other contribution, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Yut4E5IvyA">WEATHERMAN</a>, that sometimes feels like a summary of Moonriders, and of Okada himself, in a nutshell. WEATHERMAN's layers pass over and across each other like, well, weather fronts: elements which are strikingly dissimilar from one another alternate, meet, contrast, and merge, passing over a melody whose rhythms and harmonies seem to reflect and contain everything around it. It's hard to pin down, hard to reduce to a single genre, hard even to work out where its components might otherwise belong.<br><br>I'm not sure whether "unforgettable," as in "The 'Unforgettable' Sounds," was meant as a nudge-and-a-wink or whether the choice of keeping it in quotes was some cultural or linguistic fluke. It always <em>seemed</em> funny, placed in front of works that seemed intentionally constrained to a very specific and arbitrary sound: here is the "dream vacation" album, here is the "imaginary film scores" album, and so on. More broadly, it seems funny to call Tohru Okada's sound "unforgettable," when it's impossible to say what his sound actually <em>is</em>. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8WfwWG1IMA">One of his last released songs</a>, on Moonriders' 2022 "comeback" album, is, if anything, even more impressively enjambed than WEATHERMAN, with the band coming off more than ever like a classical sextet working with non-classical musical styles.)<br><br>But that elusiveness, that ever-shifting nature, that seeming willingness to embrace anything and everything that "music" could mean, was exactly what made Okada such an essential part of Moonriders—and likely what made Moonriders the band they were. There's a fundamental generosity to his music: a friendliness, a sweetness, that can seem trivial at first brush, until you give it time and realize just how much intelligence, just how much care, he put into everything he touched. He helped Moonriders become a band whose nature changed, not just between releases, but between every individual song, and oftentimes <em>within</em> them. Left to his own devices, his albums and bands seem almost like <em>dreams</em> of albums, <em>ideas</em> of bands, briefly given form by somebody whose unique gifts let him make almost anything seem possible. <br><br>His Chiroline albums are exquisite, which is not a word I'd ever think to use in conjunction with a poppy girl group. Ukulenica's music manages to make ukuleles seem like versatile instruments with surprisingly intelligent uses. <em>Hatsune Miku Sings Moonriders</em> is fascinating, not in its reinterpretation of old songs or in its adaptation of new production technologies, but in the ways that Okada finds to reinforce the old with the new, embracing newer sounds without restraint or shame, but inventing new ways to do the old ideas justice. (And what other 70s rocker would spend part of the 2010s programming a robot singer to cover his old songs?)<br><br>These are not just fascinating artifacts of Tohru Okada's sound. This <em>is</em> Tohru Okada's sound. This is the canon of a man who wrote <em>for</em> others and <em>through</em> others, not because he was unable to perform himself, but because it was through others that his feelings and dreams seemed to take form.<br><br>It's almost hard to say I miss him, when I know full well that I'll be discovering new albums and obscurities of his decades from now, scattered into spaces I can scarcely think to search through. But of course I miss him just the same. The world has lost a strangely-invisible giant; he is gone, but not forgotten.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/266412023-02-22T11:55:55Z2023-02-22T12:09:37ZIt's clear to me that all of Blue Velvet's central conflicts could have been solved with polyamory<div class="trix-content">
<div>I have been informed, by many enthusiastic practitioners of polyamory—people who date, love, and even marry more than one individual at a time—that quite a number of great works of art can be understood by enlightened modern audiences to be about how superior polyamory is as a way of handling relationships.<br><br><em>Hamlet</em>, for example, is no longer a play about the horrible price of vengeance: it's about how Hamlet's uncle Claudius wouldn't have had to kill his father had his mother been permitted to sleep with two men at a time. A classic example of male possessiveness! <em>The One I Love,</em> a surreal horror-romance in which a couple is asked to pick between their <em>actual</em> partner and an <em>idealized version</em> of their partner, could have been far less harrowing if they could have picked <em>both</em> versions of their partner instead. (This, I have been further informed, does not misinterpret the movie's point whatsoever.)<br><br>Last night, I was fortunate enough to catch David Lynch's masterful <em>Blue Velvet</em> in theaters. Lynch has long been an artistic idol of mine, and <em>Blue Velvet</em> is considered to be the first movie where he really finds his voice, subverting Americana, delving deep into strange erotic fascinations, and exploring people's struggles as they attempt to navigate civilized society and wilder emotional impulses. But it is also, I realized, a movie about how toxic monogamy is as a relationship model, and how every problem with America and the human psyche could probably be solved with a little polyamory.<br><br>Let's examine, together, some of the central tensions in this famously tense film, and look at how virtually all of them could have been resolved with a well-worn copy of <em>The Ethical Slut.</em><br><br><em>[trigger warning: the entire plot of Blue Velvet]</em><br><br></div><h1>Frank and Don</h1><div><br>Now, some people may find this a controversial claim. After all, the inciting incident of the whole movie is the discovery of Don's ear, which Frank has cut off of him in order to pressure Don's wife Dorothy into letting him sexually assault her. But think about it for a minute, and you'll realize there is no better evidence that this otherwise-iconic triad really just needs a little bit of polyamory to help them out with their backwater binary thinking. <br><br><em>Don't cut the </em><strong><em>ear</em></strong><em>,</em> in other words. <em>Cut the </em><strong><em>crap!</em></strong><br><br>Frank Booth's iconic line—"I'll fuck anything that moves!"—is perhaps the simplest articulation of Frank's dark and animal nature. He's terrifying because he is completely unafraid of his own id: he will murder whomever he wants, he will take hostages, and he will unrepentantly commit horrific sexual crimes. But really, why <em>should</em> Frank be afraid to admit that he's attracted to another man's wife? And why should he feel any shame over his daddy-baby-mommy-gas mask fetish, which clearly marks a superior understanding of his own sexual palette?<br><br>To a more worldly contemporary audience, it's clear that Frank's fondness for murder and mutilation is just an outlet for the energies which monogamy has denied him. Could it be that the real villain of <em>Blue Velvet, </em>lurking in the shadows, is the institution of marriage itself? Maybe, in 2023, we can finally reinterpret the meaning of that severed ear: it now symbolizes the fact that terrible things happen when people are afraid to just <em>listen to their hearts.</em><br><br><br></div><h1>Dorothy and Sandy (and Mike and Jeffrey)</h1><div><br>One of the most difficult and upsetting scenes in <em>Blue Velvet</em> begins when Dorothy Vallens materializes, naked and battered, in the middle of an otherwise-unassuming suburb. Jeffrey has just been chased down by Sandy's high-school boyfriend Mike, in a strange moment of comic relief—he first assumes that he's being attacked by Frank Booth, instead. And the fight that Mike's raring for immediately diffuses when he sees Dorothy and realizes that Jeffrey's involved in something far stranger, sadder, and darker than any petty relationship jealousy.<br><br><br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpeg">
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</figure><br><em>Sandy's football-playing high school boyfriend, Mike.</em><br><br><br><br>What follows is a disturbing scene in Sandy's house. Dorothy, out of her mind with fear and pain, reaches out to Jeffrey, whose sexual explorations with her have been the closest thing she's found to love and comfort in a long while. Sandy, whose budding relationship with Jeffrey is more chaste—they haven't done more than kiss—is horrified, both by the realization that Jeffrey has been sleeping with this woman <em>and</em> by the sudden awareness of just how much Jeffrey has been sanitizing his narrative for her sake, not just to protect her but to hide evidence of his own disturbing desires. Jeffrey, meanwhile, is torn between comforting Dorothy and comforting Sandy, simultaneously wrenched with empathy for Dorothy and uncomfortably aware that every utterance from her mouth is exposing him to Sandy more—and exposing Sandy to something that he'd been trying to keep her safe from.<br><br>It's an overwhelmingly intricate scene whose emotional ranges could be—and have been—unpacked for decades. But does it need to exist? We could have avoided its legendary nuances if Sandy was prepared, instead, to recognize that Jeffrey simply meets different needs with different women. With Sandy, Jeffrey explores the more wholesome and conventional forms of eros and romance, allowing desire to slowly mutate into love. With Dorothy, Jeffrey is confronted with his more primal emotions laid bare, strange and difficult feelings that terrify him. Why shouldn't he be allowed to pursue both at once?<br><br>Dorothy is clearly more sophisticated in these matters. Although she is married, she welcomes Jeffrey gratefully into her bed, hunting for even a simulacrum of something she can call love. Yes, her love for Jeffrey is really a kind of transference—she refers to Jeffrey by her husband's name, and clearly is seeking out a phantom love through him—but he is able to provide her with a much-needed solace. Why should she be ashamed of that? "He put his disease in me," she says of Jeffrey—but what's the disease? Perhaps it's a little-examined relationship structure that I like to call monogamy.<br><br>Really, the unsung hero of <em>Blue Velvet</em> is Mike, the high-school boyfriend who recognizes, clearly, that his feelings about his girlfriend cheating on him are his own problem to deal with. <em>Blue Velvet</em> is a coming-of-age story, sure... but what if it isn't Jeffrey's story after all? What if this is really the tale of a young teenage boy discovering compersion for the first time?<br><br><br></div><h1>Jeffrey and Frank</h1><div><br>"You're just like me," Frank snarls at Jeffrey, after taking him on a long, surreal, and disturbing joyride. What he means is: <em>You feel this savagery too. You lust for women—and you understand how violent that lust can be.</em> He views Jeffrey as a rival, in a sense—which means he also sees Jeffrey as a kindred spirit.<br><br>The next morning, Jeffrey sobs, thinking of the way that he struck Dorothy in a moment of passion, after she shrieked at him to strike her. "Why are there people like Frank?" he asked Sandy much earlier, in a different fit of tears; we now realize that what unsettles him is not Frank, but himself. <em>Blue Velvet</em> is, in part, a story about Jeffrey struggling with the man he is becoming: it is framed by his father's hospitalization, hooked up to machines whose hisses are nearly identical to the hiss of Frank's gas mask, and in the absence of genuine fatherhood, Frank appears to act as a kind of surrogate father, a different vision of a man fully grown.<br><br><br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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</figure><br><em>One of several instances of men seeking solace through inhaled gasses.<br><br></em><br><br><em>Blue Velvet</em> can thus be understood as a narrative about Jeffrey killing and <em>conquering</em> his darker side <em>or</em> as a narrative about him killing and <em>usurping</em> his ersatz father. Frank has contempt for what he sees as Jeffrey's naiveté: it's not just weakness, it's <em>cowardice</em>, a reluctance to admit to a truth. Yet he fears Jeffrey too, for he sees Jeffrey's need to "be a good neighbor" to Dorothy as more than just a hope to save her: it's driven by lust, however sublimated. And in the conflict between civility and carnality, civility can be cast aside, but carnality never can—Jeffrey might repress it or channel it, but it will never go away. ("I still can see blue velvet through my tears," as the song and the movie both end.)<br><br>I should scarcely need to say it, but this existential tension could have been done away with, had Frank and Jeffrey both been willing to bond over their similarities instead. The son didn't need to <em>kill</em> his fake dad: instead, he could have welcomed an older mentor, and valued the unrepressed sexual confidence that he found in Frank. Similarly, Frank could have seen in Jeffrey a fond memory of his own tentative youth, or perhaps even a reminder of the better angels of his nature—one that could have pushed him towards more courteous and genteel behaviors, rather than towards the behaviors he exhibits in the movie (such as repeatedly kissing Jeffrey's face before beating the shit out of him in a lumberyard). These two men clearly feel a connection—yet a worldview which can only interpret them as competitors has the unfortunate effect of tearing them apart.<br><br><br></div><h1>Heineken and Pabst Blue Ribbon</h1><div><br>Could it be that David Lynch, visionary that he is, anticipated a more fully awakened society one day rejecting his message of inner conflict and tenuously-negotiated civilization? Perhaps his unconscious mind presented us with a key, knowing that, one day, we would discover what it unlocks? <br><br><br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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</figure><br><em>One of David Lynch's many famous keys (this one from Blue Velvet, 1986).</em><br><br><br>"Heineken?!" Frank shouts, infuriated, when Jeffrey says that that's his beer of choice. <em>"Fuck that shit! </em><strong><em>Pabst Blue Ribbon!!!</em></strong><em>"</em><br><br>But really, do we <em>need</em> to decide between different brands of beer?<br><br>I will freely admit to enjoying a good PBR now and again. It's not my everyday beer, but it's a good time just the same. I don't have to forsake it forever just because I'd rather have a Yuengling, or—even better—a Golden or Sour Monkey. Brands don't demand our loyalty; they know we are free to choose between them and their so-called "competitors" at any time. <br><br>Why should love be any different? Why should <em>sex</em> be any different? Imagine a world in which these characters, Frank and Jeffrey and Dorothy and Sandy and Mike and Don, could meet together, not in violence, but in love. Imagine the MFMMFM polycule that could ensue. Frank could teach the gang about the benefits of certain inhalants in acts of lovemaking. Jeffrey could teach Frank, and Dorothy too, about more consensual ways of exploring sadomasochism in a relationship. Sandy could regale the group with her fanciful tales of love and robins, as Mike puts that impressive upper body strength to work. And Don... well, we hear him referred to as Van Gogh once, so perhaps Don could bring that unseen artistic prowess to the table, and capture the loving relationships he sees before him in a tableaux as iconic as the one that he himself is in, after Frank murders him and his accomplice and leaves their bodies out in the middle of Dorothy's apartment.<br><br>Afterwards, they could all go out and celebrate with a beer—and feel secure in their right to go with any beer they think they'd love.<br><br>Except for Heineken. Really, Jeffrey, fuck that shit.<br><br></div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/262502023-02-10T19:29:56Z2023-02-10T19:29:56ZAmoral morality: on "Breathless" and Tarantino<div class="trix-content">
<h1>I: Godard</h1><div><br>It was only by sheer fluke that I wound up watching Quentin Tarantino's <em>Pulp Fiction</em> and Jean-Luc Godard's <em>Breathless</em> back-to-back. <em>Pulp Fiction</em> was a whimsical date-night pick, because she hadn't seen it and I likely haven't for a decade; <em>Breathless</em> was in preparation for Godard's <em>Histoire(s) du cinéma,</em> which the Philadelphia Film Society is screening this weekend and which I didn't want to go into blind. (<em>Histoire(s)</em> is a series of "documentary" episodes, about four-and-a-half hours long in total; I didn't want to subject myself to that without a <em>very</em> recent viewing of <em>something</em> by Godard. I am willing to be a masochist in the name of art, but even I have my limits.)<br><br>Tarantino famously worships Godard: his studio is named A Band Apart in homage to Godard's film <em>Bande à part.</em> Godard, in turn, mostly seemed to have contempt for Tarantino. (He once said that Tarantino would have done him a better homage by just giving him some money.) But the two are linked, not just by their playful attitudes towards filmmaking, but by their depictions of violence and psychopathy, and the ironized way they depict them. <br><br>There has been endless debate over whether Tarantino truly cares about morality or humanity or whether he sees them as manipulative plot devices; he has been called shallow, callous, and adolescent. Godard, meanwhile, gave us maybe the iconic depiction of callous adolescence with <em>Breathless</em>, in which a man who casually steals cars and murders a cop is somehow <em>less</em> soulless than his (so-called) romantic (so-called) partner. Describing "the kids" in <em>Breathless</em>, Pauline Kael wrote this, which in retrospect feels disturbingly prescient:<br><br></div><blockquote>They are as detached as a foreign colony, as uncommitted as visitors from another planet, yet the youth of several countries seem, to one degree or another, to share the same characteristics. They're not consciously against society: they have no ideologies at all, they're not even rebels without a cause. They're not rebelling against anything—they don't pay that much attention to what doesn't please or amuse them. There is nothing that they really want to do, and there's nothing they won't do. Not that they're perverse or deliberately cruel: they have charm and intelligence—but they live on impulse.<br><br>The codes of civilized living presuppose that people have an inner life and outer aims, but this new race lives for the moment, because that is all that they care about. And the standards of judgment we might bring to bear on them don't touch them and don't interest them. They have the narcissism of youth, and we are out of it, we are bores. They are the youthful representatives of mass society. They seem giddy and gauche and amusingly individualistic, until you consider that this individualism is not only a reaction to mass conformity, but, more terrifyingly, is the new form that mass society takes: indifference to human values.</blockquote><div><br>Eric Hobsbawm, writing from 2001, said in <em>The Age of Extremes</em> that the twentieth century seemed retrospectively to be defined by the rise of mass media and individualism as a phenomenon. As a Marxist, he was particularly disturbed by the way that individualism upended the sorts of solidarity necessary to create meaningful communities, let alone meaningful labor movements. The naked pursuit of the self cannot coexist with the pursuit of community, unless it understands that collective organization <em>is</em> its only hope for genuine advancement. Individualism, meanwhile, advocates rebellion, not against a singular source of authority, but against the idea of organization itself. How do you create a meaningful movement when each individual is encouraged to revolt against anything recognizable as a movement?<br><br>Hence <em>Breathless</em>, whose protagonist Michel believes in nothing, and whose not-really-girlfriend Patricia believes in even less. Michel is disaffected and disgusted; he wants to look and sound like Humphrey Bogart, but doesn't seem to value much beyond cars, cigarettes, and women. His treatment of Patricia is possessive, jealous, and crass—and somehow <em>that's</em> the closest that he gets to seeming human. Patricia, meanwhile, is best described as listless; nothing seems particularly real to her, whether it's the various men who make passes at her or the newspaper she only pretends to sell. The closest she comes to indicating a desire is when she emphasizes that she'd like her parents to keep sending her money; she watches Michel get shot to death with less passion. <br><br>Rewatching <em>Breathless</em>, my responses to Patricia kept oscillating: I couldn't decide whether or not she had a point. Why <em>shouldn't</em> she react to Michel like the fraud he is, politely accepting his claims to love her in between constant demands that she take her clothes off or let him grope her? Why would she take his offer to go to Rome seriously? It's not that he doesn't mean it—he'd love to take her to Rome—but that Rome, to him, is nothing but a place that isn't here. He claims to love her, not for who she is, but for who she isn't: she manages to be more than one of the faceless women he references sleeping with, but he still makes his way through half a dozen women (real or imagined) before coming back to her. He's a murderer; she gives him up to the police. Why shouldn't she? What does she owe him after all of this?<br><br>During the shockingly-long sequence where Patricia and Michel faff about in bed together, she quotes Faulkner's line about how, between grief and nothing, he'd choose grief. Michel responds that he'd rather pick nothing: grief is a compromise, and he'd rather work with absolutes. Later, dying, he manages to eke out the word "Nauseating," which the cop that shot him takes to mean he's calling <em>Patricia</em> disgusting. "What's 'nauseating'?" she asks, and it's unclear whether she simply doesn't know the word, doesn't know how it would apply to her, or doesn't think Michel has a right to judge her in the first place. But then, Michel might not be referring to her at all: while he claims he'd be happy in prison, he decides to flee the police anyway, because he's "tired" with his life; getting shot for no reason is as fine a way to go as any other.<br><br>Kael interprets Michel's line about choosing nothing as his giving the <em>honest</em> answer, the one that Patricia won't admit that she agrees with. When he chooses to die after her betrayal, that's him putting his money where his mouth is: better death than heartbreak. But you can replace "grief" with Michel's "nauseation," and a different story emerges: Michel, as alienated and psychopathic about the world as he is, at least cares enough about the world to be disgusted by it. His affectations are shallow, but he at least puts on affectations, and seems repulsed by how little they matter. Patricia, given a choice between nauseation and nothing, chooses nothing: she watches a man die because of her own actions, she hears his dying word, and all she can do is ask, blank-faced, what it means. The only reason she gives Michel is that, when she suspected she loved him, her only choice was to be intentionally "mean" to him. People who love each other aren't mean; therefore, if she's mean to him, she doesn't love him. To her, the hypothetical feeling reflects the action: the possibility of acting on feeling is a non-starter.<br><br>As I'm fond of quoting, Harry Frankfurt says in <em>On Bullshit</em> that the pursuit of a "sincere" self is inherently bullshit. The idea that some singular person-specific "truth" exists is basically fatalism: if being yourself consists of searching for some external "real you," you're justified in saying or doing anything that seems "sincere," because to do otherwise would be a "betrayal" of yourself. In the name of individualism, you have somehow managed to find a way to exonerate yourself of any real responsibility. "Sincerity is bullshit," he says; rebellion against authority becomes meaningless, as Hobsbawm puts it, when "rebellion against authority" becomes a brand. <br><br>Everything about Michel is insincere, but—perversely—honestly so. His one kernel of genuine feeling becomes the one thing that Patricia rejects in him. Earlier, when she seems so passively adrift between the various men who act on her, it seems that her passivity is a response <em>to</em> (and a rejection <em>of) </em>their insincerities; later, it becomes clear that she welcomes the insincerity, in her passive way. It's the possibility that Michel might "mean" something that she pushes against. Her idea of sincerity is to test whether she is capable of sending him to jail or to his death; the idea that "testing herself" is some meaningful decision, that it will teach her anything whatsoever, is Frankfurt's idea of bullshit. <br><br>One thing that Hobsbawn suggests in <em>The Age of Extremes</em> is that, in an era of capitalist individualism, brands become perversely popular <em>because</em> they mean nothing. Family and culture and ideology and religion all <em>want </em>something out of you: they have expectations of you, ideas of what you might become. Brands want nothing from you but your money; they're cynical, but they're <em>safe</em>. Yet this is not completely accurate—because brands sell themselves, not as an imposition <em>upon</em> the individual, but as an extension <em>of</em> the individual. Your choice of brand becomes a <em>pursuit</em> of self: it either signifies your values, or it holds some <em>personal</em> deep meaning. Therefore, it is an act of <em>sincerity</em> to invest in your brands of choice: your preference of liquor shows either your good taste or your lack of pretension; your preference of pop music shows which young hot singer expresses your feelings the most truthfully. <br><br>The fact that all this is explicitly marketed and manufactured, the fact that it's designed to take as much of your money as you're willing to give, paradoxically makes it trustworthy, because it <em>just</em> wants your money and your brand loyalty. If it, in turn, makes you feel like you have a soul, that's you getting something from it that it never intended you to have. <em>You're cheating the system</em>, by finding a way to convince yourself of your own authenticity within it. Individualism as an institution never <em>needs</em> to overtly pressure you into being what it wants you to be: it claims <em>not</em> to be an institution, then freely <em>offers</em> you a number of ways to define and value yourself, each of which comes with a marketing proposal attached. Nobody needs to <em>overtly</em> push you into adhering to this: every person who invests in this flavor of "self-expression" becomes a walking advertisement for it. And individualism as a system is difficult to challenge, because any challenge comes in the form of an ideology or theory or belief that smells suspiciously <em>like a system.<br><br></em>Hence <em>Breathless</em>, a movie released on the cusp of the most radically "individual" decade in existence—one whose styles and techniques were immediately appropriated by none other than the Beatles, in a film that established their primary brand as "skeptical of brands." <em>Breathless</em>, a movie about a generation of people who'd been raised on movies: a film that suggested it was safer to <em>pretend</em> to be Bogart than to actually <em>be</em> Bogart, safer to feign feelings than to actually feel, safer to feign dissatisfaction than to genuinely be dissatisfied. <em>Breathless, </em>an iconic film released at a moment when films were more iconic than ever, about the kind of culture that emerges in a landscape where iconic films are suddenly possible.<br><br><em>Breathless:</em> a movie that offers us two visions of the future: one terminal, one eternal, both fucked.<br><br><br></div><h1>II: Tarantino</h1><div><br></div><div>Whether you love Quentin Tarantino or loathe him, it's hard to argue that his movies aren't iconic.<br><br><em>Pulp Fiction's</em> poster was <em>the</em> iconic movie poster of the 90s. <em>Kill Bill</em> cribbed a tracksuit taken directly from a Bruce Lee movie and made that <em>tracksuit</em> iconic. (Hell, Uma Thurman is an <em>icon</em> because of those two movies and because of Tarantino—Fall Out Boy didn't write a song about her for nothing.) <em>Inglourious Basterds </em>is a movie <em>about</em> iconography, whose "heroes" carve swastikas on the foreheads of Nazis attempting to escape their own brand. <em>Django Unchained?</em> Controversial for its politics of race, but <em>iconically</em> controversial—so much so that you could teach a class on appropriation in art <em>just </em>by covering the debates over whether or not Tarantino should have made it.<br><br>Quentin Tarantino, too, is arguably <em>the</em> iconic controversial director. He's critically acclaimed and critically scorned in equal measure. He's either a shallow psychopath or a subtle satirist. He's either masculinity's grossest advocate or its sharpest critic. He either hates women or he writes them brilliantly well. He either rips other movies off wholesale—their soundtracks, their shots, their lines of dialogue—or he's proof that pastiche is an art form in its own right, that collage and curation can create works that transcend their immediate surroundings.<br><br>Like Godard, Tarantino makes movies that are oversaturated with pop culture: not movies <em>about </em>movies, per se, but certainly movies about people who <em>watch</em> movies. Godard described his film <em>Masculin Féminin </em>as "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola." Tarantino prefaces a kung-fu showdown in <em>Kill Bill </em>by quoting an ad for Trix cereal. <br><br><em>Unlike</em> Godard, whose films are overtly a commentary <em>on</em> this culture, Tarantino avoids direct commentary, which is one reason why he's frequently called shallow or insincere. But the commentary is always there if you care to look.<br><br><em>Pulp Fiction</em> opens with a conversation between a couple that could have been Michel and Patricia's children. It's a witty, lively, and intelligent discussion that just so happens to be about robbing the cafe they're in. When they leap to their feet, guns in hand, and start screaming at waitstaff and patrons alike, the scene freezes and they vanish; it feels like the point has been made, and there's nothing more to be said. By the time they reappear, most viewers have completely forgotten they existed to begin with.<br><br>Longwinded conversation makes up most of <em>Pulp Fiction</em>'s running. Almost none of it advances the plot, or means much of anything at all; instead, Tarantino uses it to depict relationships between his characters, showing their familiarity with one another, the things they are and aren't willing to open up about, the things they do and don't consider worth discussing. Crime and violence are a backdrop more than anything: their lives consist of what they say before, during, and after. <br><br>It is far more common, in <em>Pulp Fiction, </em>for violence to be one-sided, armed versus unarmed; there are only two or three instances where two people are genuinely both out for each other's blood, and exactly none of them wind up looking like genuine confrontations. When Bruce Willis's boxer Butch gets informed that he beat his opponent to death in the ring, his response is to scold his dead opponent: "If he was a better fighter, he'd be alive. If he never laced up his gloves in the first place, which he never shoulda done, he'd be alive." Most of the movie's confrontations take place like this: one person can conspicuously kill, and the other person can either avoid their own death or let themselves be killed. <br><br>Violence isn't justice: it's the law, and it must be obeyed. Writing about <em>The Godfather,</em> Roger Ebert pointed out that the movie cleverly gives us room to sympathize with criminals by creating a world in which only criminals exist. It doesn't show us innocent victims—only people who have collectively agreed to abide by its code, however crooked. <em>Pulp Fiction</em> has no similar pretense of honor, but its world follows a similar unspoken code: power is absolute, and therefore demands absolute respect.<br><br><em>Pulp Fiction</em> isn't <em>quite</em> a mob movie, but it's neatly positioned, chronologically, between <em>Goodfellas</em> and <em>The Sopranos</em>, both of which were an answer to (and refutation of) <em>The Godfather</em> as surely as <em>Breathless</em> was a response to an earlier, simpler era of mob movie. In <em>Goodfellas</em>, the so-called honor of the Mafia family was replaced by rank hedonism and gleeful violence. <em>The Sopranos</em>, meanwhile, dealt with the contrast of a sociopath exploring therapy, trying to "understand" himself better, while refusing to acknowledge the glaring moral void at the center of his life—not too far off from <em>Breathless</em> itself. And the fact that <em>Pulp Fiction</em>'s crime rings are surreal and shapeless hammers home a similar theme: its culture isn't questioned, because <em>there is no culture.</em> Its violence and amorality aren't embraced so much as taken for granted: the possibility that things could be any other way never quite comes up.<br><br>Viewed in isolation, you can argue that Tarantino's arguments against violence pale before the adrenaline-fueled way that he depicts (and maybe <em>glorify)</em> it. He seems far less interested in critiquing violence, on the surface, than depicting increasingly-fanciful scenarios in which violence is used for the "right" cause (and it's hard to say he doesn't relish in that violence). But Tarantino becomes much more interesting when viewed as a <em>response</em> to Godard—not as a response to the filmmaker himself, but as a response to the culture that he was depicting, in which superficiality and individual self-pursuit becomes criminally psychotic. He depicts, not a struggle between this worldview and some more traditionally moral one, but the ways in which people caught up in this world catch dim glimpses of something better on the horizon.<br><br><em>Pulp Fiction</em>, after all, is a religious movie—albeit one told cleverly in reverse. It's a movie in which, arguably, God gives two gangsters a sign to change their ways, then gives a <em>second</em> warning to the gangster that doesn't take the first hint, then kills him. It's a movie where Butch's life is ultimately saved, not through his attempts to outmaneuver and outgun Marcellus Wallace, but because he saves Marcellus Wallace's life despite Wallace being out to kill him—forgiving him, in a sense, for living by the rules of his world, when he's faced with a worse fate than even Butch's judgment would allow him.<br><br>Why is <em>Pulp Fiction</em> told the way that it is, with its middle section excised? Because the middle section omits the fact that <em>Vincent Vega was warned</em>. When Butch stumbles upon Vincent guarding his kitchen, it's the first time we've seen him since his date with Mia Wallace, and his panicked attempt to save her life. Chemistry between Vega and Wallace aside, Vincent doesn't save her life for any moral reason: the thing that pushes him to the extreme lengths that he goes to is his awareness that, if Mia dies, Marcellus will kill him. Fear of death is the reason he gives himself as to why he and Mia shouldn't sleep together; fear of death is what pushes him to save her from the overdose that he's inadvertently responsible for. <br><br>We've followed Vincent longer than we've followed any other character, so we're inclined to empathize with him; we find him plenty likable, even after watching him murder a young man in cold blood. After all, that murder was just him <em>following the rules, </em>just as Michel's murder of the cop is exasperated rather than vicious or desperate. ("The cop caught me speeding, so now I have to shoot him. Man! What a drag.") We're more inclined to think of Vincent in terms of the charming things he says, the conversations that he has, anything <em>but</em> the things he does. Just as Mia would certainly rather Vincent see her as the vivacious wit that she presents herself as on their date, rather than as the bedraggled mess that she is when he drops her off at her house. Image isn't everything—but it's maybe everything <em>apart</em> from smeared blood and shattered skulls.<br><br>It's a shock to see Vincent emerge from Butch's bathroom—but why should it be? Only because it feels senseless that he'd die like this, for little reason more than that Butch's Pop Tarts popped at the wrong time. He's not quite the Vincent that we've seen before: he's just a hired thug, a faceless goon. He doesn't even get to <em>speak</em>. (Though his, too, is Butch's answer to the way Vincent treats him when they meet earlier at the bar: Vincent is not his friend, and therefore, they shouldn't expect to speak.)<br><br>Knowing that Vincent is fated to die should make us more sympathetic to the road that takes him to his end, shouldn't it? Instead, it does the opposite: it underscores how petty his skepticism of Jules is, how little he seems to care that he blows an innocent man's brains out, how childish and <em>sullen </em>he seems when Jules and Winston Wolf push him to at least cover up his crimes. He can't even be bothered to treat Jimmy's hand towels with respect. Why should he? Vincent, not Jimmy, is the one with the gun.<br><br>By contrast, Tarantino doesn't make an effort to make Butch seem likable. He, too, seems unaffected when he learns he's killed a man. He violently destroys a TV in a fit of rage, terrifying his wife in the process. When he rams Marcellus Wallace with his car, it's hard to decide whether you'd <em>really</em> care if Marcellus was the one who wound up killing Butch. Yet somehow, Butch winds up sympathetic—in part because he and Marcellus are faced with a trio of sadistic killers far crueler than anything we've seen from Marcellus and his gang, in part because Butch saves Marcellus when he doesn't have to, but more than anything, because Butch genuinely seems to love Fabienne, his wife. (Their bedroom conversation is as long and meandering as Michel's and Patricia's in <em>Breathless</em>, with one major difference: Butch and Fabienne come across as genuinely in love with each other, which makes Butch seemingly the only man in this universe with a thing worth living for.)<br><br>In a sense, Butch plays fair by the twisted views of Marcellus Wallace's world. He cheats Marcellus, sure, but Marcellus was bribing him, and rigging his match, in the first place. He kills his opponent, sure, but beats him fair and square in the ring. He prepares himself to face Marcellus's wrath, and gets the better of Vincent in the process. And he does it all for self-interested reasons, but he's not <em>just</em> doing it for himself: he's doing it for the woman who he loves, and who loves him back. Which doesn't make him any less of an amoral protagonist, but it makes him "merely" amoral rather than outright criminal—which sets him up for the damnation and redemption he finds afterwards, when he saves Marcellus's life. And unlike Vincent saving Mia, Butch genuinely does what he does for more than self-preservation: maybe it's the murkiest act of goodness imaginable, but it's an act of goodness just the same.<br><br>Pauline Kael said of Michel and Patricia in <em>Breathless: </em>"There is nothing that they really want to do, and there's nothing they won't do. Not that they're perverse or deliberately cruel: they have charm and intelligence—but they live on impulse." That describes Vincent and Jules and Mia Wallace (and nearly-but-not-quite describes Butch) to a tee—at least, as we first encounter them. They are Michel and Patricia without the "outside" world to hold them in check: Michel and Patricia in a world of Michels and Patricias, drowning in charm and impulse, unable to envision anything more beyond. Against them, we get three foils: Winston Wolf, straight out of <em>The Godfather</em> (which is to say, superficially more honorable and mannered, but still fundamentally a part of an amoral world); Marcellus Wallace, a Satanic figure both in his lust for power and his adherence to his own perverse code; and Jimmy, played by Tarantino himself. <br><br>(A generation ago, Jimmy and his married suburban life would have been the orderly "society" whose authority youth and criminals alike would have rebelled against; here, Jimmy's absolutely powerless, not only against the mobsters who show up at his door but against his own wife. The American dream of a house in the suburbs is portrayed, casually, as the purview of the emasculated and weak. Winston flatters Jimmy by showing him respect, but the respect is a veneer; Winston is just better at masking his power than Vincent or Jules. And it's not like Jimmy is an innocent victim either: he's complicit in helping these two cover up a murder, and his "distance" from this world is really just a willingness to overlook it. It's no coincidence that Jimmy appears in a part of the movie that's explicitly about <em>averting your eyes:</em> literally covering up corpses in quilts.<br><br>In retrospect, it is <em>extremely questionable</em> for Tarantino to have written and cast himself as a character who, in his brief appearance, says the N word more than any other person in the film. But it surely wasn't an <em>unintentional </em>decision to have Jimmy appear immediately after Vincent shoots a young Black man, which in turn happens immediately after Confederacy-loving men with Southern accents rape a Black crimelord. And if you need further proof that Jimmy sees the slur as a pathetic way for him to assert some power, note that he launches into his infamous monologue immediately after talking shit about how his wife Bonnie has terrible taste in coffee—and that, when we briefly see Bonnie from behind, we learn that the wife Jimmy's terrified of, the wife Jimmy has to hide his own criminal past from, is Black. It is very easy and reasonable to call most any choice that Tarantino makes ill-advised, but at the very least, he constructs his films with considerable intent.)<br><br>But the characters who most resemble Patricia and Michel aren't Butch or Jules or Mia or even Vincent. They're Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, the would-be cafe robbers, conspicuously love and partway through their <em>own</em> crime spree—a crime spree that very nearly ends in their abrupt, untimely deaths. And if you want proof that Tarantino sees violence as more than <em>just</em> an adolescent power fantasy—that he indulges in cinema's embrace of violence as thrill, violence as rebellion, as an attempt to say something <em>about</em> those violent fantasies—you probably want to start with how <em>Pulp Fiction</em> starts with the thrill of an armed robbery, but climaxes with the thrill of watching a man try and get three violent psychopaths to <em>not shoot.</em><br><br>Jules knows the rules of this world as well as any other. He knows that, in most confrontations, the person with the gun gets to kill, and the person <em>without</em> the gun gets to die. Sure, he and Vince are professional killers, and the man who ambushes them point blank is a terrified kid, <em>but that doesn't matter:</em> the logic of this universe dictates that he and Vince should have their brains splattered across the late Brett's apartment wall, just as Brett's brains are splattered there already. <br><br>If he's alive, then the world must not be the world he saw himself as living in. And that profane epiphany—about as dumb and as crude an awakening as you can possibly imagine—is enough that, a couple of hours later, he finds himself trying really hard <em>not</em> to kill the two violent dumbasses who threaten to kill <em>him, </em>despite not having a clue in the world how to go about doing that.<br><br>What's fascinating about that final, terse showdown is how different the emotions are in each of the four people pointing guns at one another. Jules is trying hard to push each of the other three to a place where they'll <em>let him talk</em>, without doing the only thing they ever do that isn't talking. Vincent, as ever, can't be bothered to think much further than: he can kill the people he wants to kill, and therefore he's allowed to. Honey Bunny is <em>terrified</em>, melting down not at the thought of herself being killed but at the thought of her lover dying. And Pumpkin, in turn, is on edge due to the gun in his face, but he's thinking more about Honey Bunny than about himself, talking to her in an even, measured, calming tone that's clearly a struggle for him to maintain.<br><br>Samuel L. Jackson's iconic monologue clearly steals the scene, but it's the relationship between Pumpkin and Honey Bunny that makes holds the scene together. There is no contradiction between their two halves: they love one another very much, and they will also rob and maybe murder whomever they please. Jules is mainly talking about himself, but at the same time, he's using their love for one another: pushing them towards that love, away from violence. Hollywood tradition is that criminals can have their spree, but must be punished afterwards; Bonnie and Clyde, cinema's most famous married criminal couple, both go down in a hail of bullets. But here <em>the criminal has already been punished</em>, even if he's still alive in this moment, even if nobody else in this room knows this. Jules isn't trying to save himself: he's trying to save these two. What he's looking for isn't some self-centered redemption, some resolution to his misery and guilt (and notice that Jules never once admits to feeling guilt). His goal isn't to "redeem" himself. It's to <em>do the right thing</em>, which—because it means concrete action, however small—is infinitely harder, in part because it <em>isn't</em> grandiose.<br><br>Miracle or no miracle, I lied when I said that <em>Pulp Fiction</em> is a film about God. In fact, it's precisely a movie about there <em>not</em> being any God. There <em>is</em> no outside authority in this universe: no cops hunting down the baddies, no external force pushing anybody towards some higher calling, no real greater good. Butch and Fabienne get a happy ending, but it's a materialist happy ending: one where they can afford to live somewhere sunny and tropical, because of the pile of money Butch made with his double-cross. The power of Jules' epiphany comes from the way it happens <em>within </em>this world, not by his escaping <em>from</em> it. The only miracle is that, just one time, the terrible thing that always happens didn't happen. It's enough for a man whose existence is defined by self-interest and the justified abuse of power to start seeking something, <em>anything</em>, that isn't that. And the fun of <em>Pulp Fiction,</em> and of Tarantino in general, lies in how it develops ingenious ways to transcend that world of puerile, thrill-seeking violence without ever leaving it behind.<br><br>When you know to look for it, you can find this as a theme in every one of Tarantino's movies: the inescapability of this violent world paired with the ways in which people escape it anyway. <em>Kill Bill</em> revolves around a woman whose attempt to start a family is interrupted by the criminal who couldn't bear for her to start one with anybody but him; it is bookended, in a sense, by her two attempts to leave him and his world behind. <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> is a propagandistic movie about propaganda, an American war movie made in the style of Nazi war movies, in which a team of psychopathic American Jews tee off against an intelligent, germane Nazi who fully attempts to leave his past behind. The turning point of <em>Django Unchained</em> comes when a plantation owner doesn't just coerce a bounty hunter at gunpoint, but insists that the other man shake his hand: it's the false veneer of civility, more than the abuse of power itself, that pushes the bounty hunter past his breaking point.<br><br>It's entirely possible to enjoy a Quentin Tarantino film as a tapestry of rich dialogue, shocking violence, and no moral whatsoever. Some of Tarantino's critics sincerely think of him this way; others are more bothered that he'd make films which <em>let</em> his audiences participate that glibly. It is certainly possible to watch Tarantino without taking anything more away than adrenaline, testosterone, and gleefully skillful pacing. I'm not sure it would be possible to make movies that operate in these escapist, adolescent worlds <em>without</em> allowing for that possibility—not without breaking from that fabric, which Tarantino never does.<br><br>But to me, that's what makes Tarantino so interesting as a director, and what makes his philosophy of moviemaking so paradoxically enigmatic. Godard's early movies were a commentary <em>about</em> a disturbing kind of youth culture, and they were eagerly taken up <em>by</em> youth culture, but they were never exactly <em>for</em> youth culture. First he was criticized for the same things Tarantino was: being more style than substance, relishing in vulgarity and violence without moralizing about it. Later, he was criticized for moralizing <em>too</em> much, for being <em>too</em> elite and superior for his own good. Tarantino, meanwhile, sticks to the rules of the cinema he loves: he gets <em>more</em> Hollywood rather than less, he pushes <em>more</em> into the violence, the schlock, and (increasingly) the ahistoricism, allowing Movie Logic to rewrite actual events whenever reality breaks from cinema's rules about good plot. Within that, though, he has found astonishingly varied ways to tell stories about people who are both fully ensconced by this psychopathic worldview <em>and</em> who run up against the limits of that world, breaking from it despite lacking the vocabulary to articulate anything <em>but</em> it. They are characters in movies who think of themselves as characters in movies, two-dimensional beings probing a three-dimensional world without ever gaining a third dimension themselves.<br><br>The tricky thing about <em>Breathless</em> is that it's a depiction of two people looking for fun because everything seems meaningless—and it was so fun that people flocked to it and cinema changed because of it, but its fun stuck and its meaning didn't. It's about a man emulating movie mobsters because they're cool, ignoring the part where they die a tragic, inevitable, melodramatic death—and then he dies a melodramatic death, but his girlfriend totally overlooks it. Michel might make pretenses of escaping a world that he despises, but Patricia never does—and neither of them <em>will</em> escape it, because the two of them <em>are</em> that world, whether Michel realizes it or not. You can't escape a meaningless world by being meaningless. You can only escape it by finding something else—and maybe Michel found something or maybe he didn't, maybe his heartbreak was real or maybe he never felt much of anything at all, but either way it amounts to the same thing, which is that, between grief and nothingness, both found nothingness (albeit in contrasting ways).<br><br>Tarantino's films are all about senseless, meaningless worlds, but they're never meaningless. They're about people who've been born and raised in these meaningless worlds, people who've never known anything less meaningless, who wind up confronting something meaningful after all. That glimpse of meaning never makes up the <em>bulk</em> of Tarantino's running times: the ratio of schlock-to-insight is about as extreme as the ratio of dialogue-to-violence, which is to say that it serves a similar purpose. Tarantino's artistry is the skill with which he constructs meaningless scene after meaningless scene, conversation after conversation, thrill after thrill, in ways that slowly add up, using two-dimensional planes as facets to construct something larger without your ever noticing—until, in one sudden, shocking outburst, subtext becomes text, before you have a chance to realize there was any subtext to begin with. He states things so obviously that you never stop to notice how un-obvious those things were, even though they weren't <em>at all </em>obvious until he mentions it. And he has the gift of making incredibly unusual choices that, in retrospect, feel like thyeey must have been inevitable. How could they not be, when everything else reveals itself to be pointing, obviously not-so-obviously, to that secret, shocking, and utterly predictable center?<br><br>When Jules tells Vincent that he wants to move on and find something better, Vincent scoffs. Why wouldn't he? Most protestations of meaning sound meaningless: it can be hard not to roll your eyes when someone starts talking about higher callings, or finding their purpose, or—hell—love. Especially when you know that person well, you know all their worst moments, you know the various dumb ways in which they get in their own way. Besides, what they're talking about has nothing to do with you—least of all when they're saying it all in the hopes that you'll convert along with them, to whatever cause or romance they suddenly think they've found. Meaning and meaninglessness, on the surface, sound more-or-less the same. And the more bullshit you've heard, the harder it is to hear <em>anything</em> without suspecting it of being more of the same—especially since bullshitters try harder than anyone to seem plausibly sincere.<br><br><em>Breathless</em> is a film about people who think they live in a meaningless world, and either pretend to find meaning in one another or—perhaps more tragically—really do. <em>Pulp Fiction</em> is about people who think their senseless world is really sensible, until one or two of them find something that makes a lot more sense. They both play with the language of cinema, and with the language of drama: are the moments that seem dramatic truly more important, or is that just another fraud? And what lies in those dull, everyday moments, the moments that seem to contain nothing? Are they just ways to fill the time between what truly matters, or ways of papering over the meanings that we'd rather not see, or are they meaningful in and of themselves, in ways we've been conditioned not to notice?<br><br>How do you tell a story about the ways our stories shape the world? How do you meaningfully observe people who are constantly observing themselves? How do you depict people whose lives consist of endless stories that they tell themselves, without becoming just another story that they're telling? How do you describe banality without, yourself, being banal?<br><br>Watched together, <em>Breathless</em> seems to be a film about a time when people <em>first</em> encountered some of these questions, first reckoned with the reflexive way that movies became about people trying to be people in movies. <em>Pulp Fiction</em> seems like a story about a generation later, after we'd all become so accustomed to endless halls of mirrors that we'd forgotten there was ever anything before it. Both are movies about crime; both are movies about movies about crime. They are both moral fables about crime, and moral fables about the limits of moral fables about crime. Both make points about the dangers of making terrible people out to be sexy and fun, despite making terrible people out to be sexy and fun themselves. And both have interesting things to say, though in both cases, you do have to work a little to make those things out, and in both cases, the films themselves are seductive enough entertainments that you'd be forgiven for not wanting to work at them at all. <br><br>Paradoxical, perhaps, or maybe just inevitable. But to me, both movies ask a similar question in their respective ways: if this <em>is</em> inevitable, if this <em>is</em> just the way that people are, if this <em>is</em> the way that things are going to be... well, what then? What next?</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/259892023-02-02T21:00:24Z2023-02-02T21:00:24ZThoughts on Groundhog Day<div class="trix-content">
<div>Part of the genius of <em>Groundhog Day</em> is that—to paraphrase Ebert (I think)—Bill Murray plays Phil as somebody who is <em>plausibly above all this.</em> Sure, he's a jerk and a chauvinist, but that first go-around is perfectly tooled to make you sympathetic to his jerkiness, if not the chauvinism stuff. It's not that he's some hotshot TV guy, it's that everybody around him seems myopic: their mannerisms are irritating specifically because they involve an attention to, and obsession with, little tiny things that just aren't especially interesting to begin with.<br><br>There's a line in the original <em>Office</em> where Tim gets a novelty beer-drinking hat for his birthday, and mentions dryly that, sure, he likes the works of Proust, but a novelty hat is fine too. In <em>The Office,</em> it's a sympathetic moment, because Tim, like Phil, is trapped in what seems to be a dreary, monotonous hellscape. But you could easily interpret that comment less as a plea for substance and meaning than as a snide, pretentious thing to say about a silly birthday gift. What's brilliant about <em>Groundhog Day</em> is that it starts Phil off as a <em>relatable</em> asshole, then confronts him with the things he hates the most until he learns to love them after all.<br><br>For me, the bit where he kidnaps Punxsutawney Phil and drives off a cliff is <em>so</em> good. It's everybody's fantasy of <em>finally snapping</em> at that minor thing that drives them up the wall. And plenty of movies offer power fantasies of characters taking vengeance against the petty irritations of their life (<em>American Beauty</em> comes to mind). But here, Phil loses it, gets his satisfaction, and... it doesn't matter. It just isn't worth a damn thing. Because no amount of Phil being irritable or weary or above it all changes the fact that <em>this</em> is the world he lives in, <em>these</em> are the people who he knows, and his only real choice is whether or not he ought to care.<br><br>Caring, of course, is what everybody else in this world does <em>but</em> him. Yes, they care about tiny things, trivial things, menial things—in other words, their lives. Phil can imagine better things to care about, sure, but what he <em>can't</em> imagine is caring about what's right in front of him.<br><br>Part of the irony of the movie, which I never really see commented on, is that Phil's first version of "caring" is basically for the purposes of manipulation. It's not "good" to memorize the movements of the folks unloading that armored truck, but it <em>does</em> take genuine investment. It's shallow as hell to try and learn every one of Rita's interests for purposes of seducing her, but it take Phil putting effort into learning what he doesn't already know. The irony is that this <em>is</em> his first step towards redemption: the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions, so to speak (at least at first).<br><br>Which leads to Phil's next plan: to become God. If he's trapped in this town, he's going to make it <em>his</em> town. He will take his old familiar superior self and <em>apply</em> it to all these little bits and pieces. Only he can't. He can't save every life. He can't right every wrong. He can't "own" Rita, or make her want anything other than what she really wants.<br><br>And Rita doesn't just want someone who cares about <em>her,</em> for all that she's the first person Phil winds up caring about. She wants someone who cares about <em>everything.</em> Someone who sees life as meaningful, not in the general but in the particular. What is meaning, after all, but connection and intent? To find things meaningful is to connect yourself with them. If you devote yourself to one person exclusively, you're still fundamentally performing a selfish and limited act, one that divorces you from the world around you. It's only when Phil truly embraces the world that Rita realizes she can love him after all—and it only takes her a day to fall in love.<br><br>I think a lot about how the Vatican called this the most religious film of all time, or what-have-you. I think that a part of that is that <em>Groundhog Day</em> presents two opposing visions of God. One is the God that sees all, knows all, controls all. (Would Phil really be all-powerful if he <em>could</em> bring back the dead and make women fall for him with a snap of his fingers? Not really—because he'd still be trapped in this place that he hates.) The other vision of God is, for lack of better words, a being that cherishes the world, and affords even the littlest pieces of it endless dignity.<br><br>Phil doesn't become God by holding himself above the world, in other words: he becomes God through an act of genuine humility, one that places him not above or below or equal to it so much as turns him into its <em>embrace.</em> Phil, by finally loving the world as it is, becomes something greater than Phil. He becomes the world.<br><br>Consciousness is a trickster. Simply by existing, it tells itself that it is separate from everything around it—in ways that lead to its walling itself off. But consciousness is also what lets us see others, not as <em>equal</em> to us, but <em>as</em> us: that feat of imagination and empathy and sheer heart that takes the lonely precipice we start as and broadens its ground, taking more of the world into its fold. Putting God aside, Phil starts out as the one version of consciousness—the lonely, superior kind—and ends as the other sort, the tree whose roots connect it to the Earth.<br><br>(If you want to <em>really</em> stretch, you can say that Phil moves on when he finally stops noticing his own shadow. But that really is a stretch.)<br><br>Religion or no, philosophy of conscious or not, I think the beauty of <em>Groundhog Day</em> is that it grapples with the process of becoming <em>more human</em> in a completely mundane, plot-driven, comedic sort of way. It's a movie about a guy trying to "earn" a girl, and it's also a movie that finds a way to overlap superficial popcorn-movie love with profound expansion-of-self love. You can watch it as a fun movie about a guy who gets into some hijinx, or you can watch it as a movie about someone learning that humanity and love are synonyms, and either way more-or-less every scene works perfectly. There's no separation between mundane and profound, local and cosmic, personal and universal. The moral of the story, really, is that there never was.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/249502022-12-26T14:22:38Z2022-12-26T14:30:38ZAssorted thoughts about Avatar 2: The Way of Water 2: Way Waterier<div class="trix-content">
<div>Mostly spoiler-free.<br><br></div><ul><li>The middle hour of <em>The Way of Water </em>consists entirely of a family getting to know a new community they belong to, while also discovering the ecology that that community is defined by. That's the movie in a nutshell: community belonging to its environs, families belonging to community, individuals belonging to family. There are no overt dramatic arcs, because there don't need to be. The story is of people discovering the world around them.</li></ul><div><br></div><ul><li>The last hour of <em>The Way of Water</em>, which is tremendous action filmmaking through-and-through, matters only because you care about this world on all these scales: not just the individuals but the families; not just the families but the culture; not just the culture but the natural world.</li></ul><div><br></div><ul><li>What <em>Avatar</em> gets about blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on CGI that other sci-fi/fantasy franchises don't is that <em>ecology</em> is the heart of worldbuilding. The fancy spectacular visual details don't matter unless they're a reflection of a world that seems <em>alive.</em> The middle hour of <em>The Way of Water</em> works beautifully (and could have been hours longer) because all that "empty space" is full of oceanic flora and fauna so dense that every shot pulls your eyes in a dozen different directions at once. I lost count of how many species we're shown almost immediately. It doesn't distract, because the throughline is always this story of people coming to know and appreciate a new place, but it also makes these scenes feel rich rather than obligatory.</li></ul><div><br></div><ul><li>Similarly, an amazing amount of this movie's character drama is told through body language alone. I started noticing how many stretches of the film were completely wordless, with its characters expressing themselves through body language alone. And there's a similar density here as there is to the fantasy ecologies of this world: the characters may not be complex as depicted through their lines alone, but there are plenty of sequences with seven or eight characters on-screen, not saying much, but <em>communicating</em> with an impressive visual density. I kept looking at side characters' faces rather than the speaking characters', because I didn't want to miss a thing. Half a dozen different unspoken conversations are happening in every scene at any moment.</li></ul><div><br></div><ul><li>Cameron's screenplay isn't mediocre—it's intentionally quiet, because it wants its story told through all these other means of communication. It's technically superb: I marveled at how it sequences all those seemingly-plotless moments in its middle act, because they obviously had a logic but just-as-obviously were operating according to subtle patterns too big for me to pick up on. I'll watch that middle hour alone a dozen times just to see how it's all laid out.</li></ul><div><br></div><ul><li>The American military is fundamentally characterized as devoid of ecology and community. Their faux-masculine banter and ongoing "oo-<em>rah!"</em> chants serve to punctuate how little they're actually saying and doing; their pretenses at "being family" or "having honor" pale in comparison to the genuine family connection we see among the Sullies. This is reflected in the way that their technology mimics organic life: faux crabs, faux humans, faux Na'vi. At the end of the day, they're glorified businessmen—their only mission is economic, as underscored by the way their place in this film largely consists of (minor spoilers) helping whalers while claiming it serves a national purpose.</li></ul><div><br></div><ul><li><em>Avatar's</em> anti-colonialist message gets misinterpreted when it gets critiqued. The whole "guy wishes he was a different race and culture" part is there, but it's unimportant; the real stories are "guy wishes he was connected to a meaningful community" and "guy wishes he could care about the world he lives in." Which is why the human sympathizers bond with one another, not just with the Na'vi; it's why you get Jermaine Clement as a marine biologist in this movie, mourning the whales his expedition is hunting and loathing that the people he's with are too apathetic to mourn.</li></ul><div><br></div><div>I haven't bothered with the original <em>Avatar</em> since it left theaters, but I have nothing but fond memories of how powerfully it affected me when I saw it there. <em>The Way of Water</em> was no different. It's stunning as a work of fantasy, stunning as an action movie, stunning in how many different techniques it uses to tell its story—both in how smart those techniques are and in how many different levels they operate on—and its family drama is solid as hell, which is what it needs to be to justify a non-stop hour of people blowing the shit out of each other in ways that make you care.<br><br>I highly recommend you find a big-ass screen to see it on.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/246402022-12-09T02:01:47Z2022-12-09T02:03:52ZEntertainment<div class="trix-content">
<div>I don't exactly believe in inevitability. There are other worlds in which I became drastically different flavors of person, I'm sure. But sometimes I think about the way that I've gradually shifted, across the course of my life, towards a fascination with the spiritual significance of play, and wonder how much of that end destination stems from the simple fact that, on some level, I feel driven to pursue entertainment and enjoyment at all costs.<br><br>It's not always something that I love about myself. At times, I worry that it means I'm shallow, or even heartless. My instinct in most situations is to look for humor, which isn't always appreciated. Sometimes I feel like I might be hiding my own vulnerabilities, or diverting people from noticing feelings that I wish they'd notice, when I look for what's fun rather than for what's "significant." And as a writer, a thinker, and an artist, I continually fret about what it says about me that I'm so relentlessly driven by entertainment above everything else: whether I'm uncultured and anti-intellectual because of how much I struggle with art that isn't actively trying to engage me, or whether the things I care about expressing are worth saying at all. In my bleakest moods, I feel convinced that I'm just parroting smarter and deeper people's ideas, and that the only reason people pay attention to what I say or do at all is that I show them a good time while convincing them that they're actually thinking.<br><br>And maybe none of that would matter if I felt funnier or more entertaining, but I'm usually convinced that I'm not especially good even at that. I'm too sloppy, too imprecise. Not nearly enough of a craftsman to hone my own work, or to come up with material truly worth delivering. There's a punchline for you.<br><br>This probably sounds darker or sadder than I mean it to. There's not much of a difference, in the end, between comedy and tragedy. Classic forms of poetry often contain a formal "turn," which is a moment where the subject abruptly shifts from one thing to another in a way that (ideally) generates unexpected emotion. Turns and punchlines work similarly, just as the mechanics of a finely-wrought diversion are functionally similar to the ones that produce harrowing, even brutal stories. When I was younger, it frustrated me to no end that the things I wrote in my most despairing moods typically struck other people as extremely funny. These days, I usually get the opposite reaction: I write about things that I find curious, or produce what I think of as mechanical contraptions, only to be told later that what I've written left someone in tears all day.<br><br>One of the inherent paradoxes of play is the idea that mechanics inspire movement. Something which is cold to the touch can nonetheless produce great feeling. I think of Christopher Alexander, who once said he'd realized that the molds which were used to create a certain kind of gorgeous patterned tile were the true works of art, not the tiles themselves: in a sense, the tiles were the beautiful, tangible echo of their silent creators, who possessed a profundity that the tiles themselves did not. Similarly, the beauty of play can always be thought of in two ways: there is the beauty of individual games, and then there is the beauty of a game's rules, which ultimately are what give play a chance to be meaningful in the first place. Behind every joke is the theory of comedy which shaped it; behind every poem is a powerful formal understanding of the rules that govern poetry. <br><br>This is not a particularly fun way of thinking about these things—and accordingly I try not to get serious about this subject very often—but I think it's fundamentally correct. Art, language, communication, and play itself are ultimately attempts to create patterns, shapes, and logic for something which feels inherently shapeless, something whose patterns and logic are so sublime that they're nearly impossible to grasp. Too strict a shape, too simple a pattern, snuffs out the thing you were trying to articulate in the first place. Too loose or abstract a shape, and you may not have fucked that thing up, but you haven't snapped it into focus either. The clarity of articulation is a negotiation—and all negotiations are a kind of play. <br><br>(One reason why stories about the law—whether courtroom drama, cop-vs-criminal, murder mystery, or even true crime—are so popular is that they are inherently centered around a kind of negotiation that's inherent to their proceedings. The law is musty and tedious; the law inspires tremendous drama. It isn't a paradox that both these things can be true at once.)<br><br>Given a choice, I far prefer too-tight to too-loose; I'll take fun-but-glib over deep-but-entertaining every day. I clearly can be very introspective, but I don't always love introspective people; I have introverted tendencies, but fundamentally think of myself as an extravert, and generally prefer extraverts to introverts (though my closest friends tend to screw that binary up). There are a few deep subjects that I'm heavily invested in, but the more invested I get in something the <em>less</em> interested I typically am in people who'd like to have deep conversations on the subject—though really it's that I've learned that the people whose thoughts truly <em>are</em> deepest on those subjects are typically the ones who can talk about those things as if they're making small talk, because they understand the material so well that they don't feel strain in the slightest, no matter how deep the two of you plunge.<br><br>I've heard it said that there are two levels of mastery over the subject. The lesser mastery is to thoroughly understand it <em>yourself;</em> the greater mastery is to know how to speak of it to others. Everyone speaks a different language, and it's impossible to wholly understand theirs unless you can put everything else out of your head to focus on the subtleties and nuanced of how they take you in, and how they put themselves back out. This is mastery: to know something so well that it's truly weightless to you, so that it shapeshifts in your hands to take whatever form someone <em>else</em> needs it to become. You might call the lesser mastery the <em>heavy</em> mastery, the kind that seeps deep into your bones, and the greater mastery the <em>light</em> mastery. I am obsessed with the word <em>surface</em>, which connotes both the shallowest layer of a thing <em>and</em> the process of something rising up from tremendous depths, until it at last makes itself known in the most banally sensual way possible. (Sensuality, incidentally, is paradoxical in an inverse manner to play: that which is sensual is experienced viscerally and immediately and without processing, but is often the byproduct of a great deal of thought, labor, and even artistry.)<br><br>This is what I tell myself, at least, to justify both my personal preferences and my manner of behavior. If someone hasn't mastered their craft enough to immediately compel me with it, how should I be expected to trust their mastery in the first place? Likewise, why should I bother with the pretense of substance or meaning, when any genuine substance or meaning ought to exist whether or not I bother acknowledging its presence? I have a theory about blasphemy: any meaningful religious experience ought to be able to withstand <em>and even encourage</em> blasphemy, because, if its truth is profound enough, it will convert even the most scandalous attempt to blaspheme into an experience packed with genuine meaning. Similarly, on some level, I'm drawn to lightheartedness because the one thing it's <em>not</em> trying to do is convince me to care—so if I find myself caring about it anyway, it feels earned rather than coerced.<br><br>Sometimes, I feel like I use that as an excuse. Like I said, I'm interested in games and play; a part of that leads to my feeling like most modern games are pretty awful, especially given how much time they demand of their player. Yet I squander endless hours playing them—because, in the end, I don't <em>need</em> meaning. I <em>want</em> meaning, I <em>care</em> about meaning, but what I crave is merely fun. I have intense addictive tendencies and I know it: what is entertainment, after all, than a relentless demand for stimulation? The fact that entertainment can be meaningful gives me hope that I, a born clown, might be worth a damn despite myself, but it's also my justification for wallowing, either as a listless consumer or as a lazy producer. (I have a fascination with improv, with jazz, with creative modes that revolve around spontaneity—which is another way of saying that I <em>love</em> the idea of not having to edit myself, or even plan things out in advance.)<br><br>What's neat about deciding that entertainment can be meaningful, that art ought to be pleasing <em>and</em> spiritual, is that you can suddenly justify virtually any waste of time as "research." When I reread a book series that I loved when I was ten years old, I'm just "returning to my roots." When I sink a hundred hours into a generic grind of an RPG, it's because that's the only way to "get the <em>feel"</em> of the experience. Don't get me started on how compulsively I watch and rewatch sitcoms. <br><br>And, of course, I still read quite a lot of poetry—though I've noticed I prefer the ones who keep things short. The lovely thing about Anna Swir...<br><br></div><blockquote><strong>She Does Not Remember<br><br></strong>She was an evil stepmother.<br>In her old age she is slowly dying<br>in an empty hovel.<br><br>She shudders<br>like a wad of burning paper.<br>She does not remember that she was evil.<br>But she knows<br>that she feels cold.</blockquote><div><br>...is not just that her poetry consistently stuns me, it's that it took me all of fifteen seconds to decide that she was worth my time. Every so often, I flip through the collection I own of her work, and within five minutes, have picked up another ten or so poems that I'll be recommending to friends of mine a couple dozen years from now. (Yet at the same time, of course, I can't stand Rupi Kaur.)<br><br>Flipping through Swir's <em>Talking To My Body</em> even as I write this, I come across another poem of hers, I think the second of hers that I ever read. It feels like such a perfect part of this conversation that suddenly I don't feel the need to continue my half of it any longer. Whatever I meant to say here, I've said; whatever I intended to share of myself has been shared. I'll let Anna finish speaking for me, and fall silent, and hope that that silence stretches out meaningfully, rather than simply says that I've found a convenient moment to slip off-stage and bolt for the door.<br><br></div><blockquote><strong>The Sea and Man<br></strong><br>You will not tame this sea<br>either by humility or rapture.<br>But you can laugh<br>in its face.<br><br>Laughter<br>was invented by those<br>who live briefly<br>as a burst of laughter.<br><br>The eternal sea<br>will never learn to laugh.</blockquote>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/246202022-12-07T15:00:27Z2022-12-07T15:00:27ZMaximum Viable Product [I]<div class="trix-content">
<div><em>I'm going to tell a story about myself in two parts. But for me to tell it, I have to start with the part that has to do with Steve Jobs. Forgive me, and bear with me; there is a reason I'm going here, I promise you.</em><br><br></div><h1><strong>I. </strong></h1><div><br>Of all my teenage memories, the original iPhone unveiling remains one of the clearest. I cringe every time I say that, but it's not like I meant for that to happen: it just happened to be the one time when anticipation had a payoff that seemed to justify months and years of speculation. I can't think of a single other experience—not in theaters, not with new albums or books, not with anything apart from sheer human connection—where reality somehow outstripped imagination.<br><br>I wasn't an Apple obsessive. I'd completely ignored the iPod's ascent, up until I got one as a present and realized: <em>Oh, this is GOOD.</em> Apple was starting to demonstrate that its talent for product design was leagues beyond any other company's, but the products it was offering didn't intrigue me. I was more of a Nintendo fanboy, and I bought into every wild rumor. Before they announced the Wii, I was convinced it would have shapeshifting controllers, and no amount of sheer physical impossibility would convince me otherwise. "Apple's making a phone" was intriguing, maybe even exciting, but the future still felt like the Motorola RAZR. I owned a rinky-dink Palm Pilot and hoped to one day have a Blackberry; who daydreamed about something as pedestrian as a phone?<br><br>In <a href="https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg">its iconic unveiling</a>, it takes Steve Jobs six and a half minutes to reveal the iPhone's actual design. That's not just showmanship: it takes him that long to explain the <em>conceptual foundation</em> that led to the iPhone being designed the way it is. It's been nearly two decades since the iPhone was released; in those two decades, none of what Jobs says in those first six minutes has changed. The iPhone was the culmination of his vision, not of a phone, but of a computer. It changed society in part because it achieved the thing Jobs spent his lifetime trying to achieve. And its unveiling was the culmination of Jobs' attempt to translate concept into concrete shape: the perfect fusion of idea and articulation.<br><br></div><h1><strong>II.</strong></h1><div><br>Steve Jobs is a controversial figure, among both techies and political lefties. Tech nerds will insist that Jobs is the lesser of "the two Steves;" his partner, Steve Wozniak, was and is the archetypal nerd, not only brilliant but overjoyed with the prospect of fiddling around with technical nuances, trying to get a machine to work. Lefties sneer at what they see as Jobs' artistic pretenses, his attempts to equate what he devoted his lifetime to with the Beatles or Bob Dylan. To both sorts, Jobs is a salesman rather than a thinker or an artist; he existed to promote Product, which they see as the antithesis to either technological prowess or artistic expression. <br><br>It doesn't help that Jobs is the patron saint of the bullshit-heavy tech bro, the one who cares about econ rather than emacs, "UX" rather than genuine human connection. Like all pseudo-religious figures, much of the dogma he's inspired is garbage at best, abusive at worst. It's hard to be someone's hero without some of your hero-worshippers turning to absolute shit.<br><br>But Jobs became one of my heroes, in a way that I hope doesn't make <em>me</em> shit by default. I adore Steve Wozniak, but it's Jobs who ultimately defined Apple, both in the 80s and in the 00s. And I think that Jobs' artistic "pretenses" weren't pretense at all. Industrial design isn't the same as recording music, but a similar spirit can be found in both—even if it would be silly to look for the soul of a computer in the same place you look for soul in music. <br><br>(You can find predatory capitalism in both places too: the people who scorn the Beatles-and-Bob-Dylan comparisons have to really stretch to avoid how mercenary those musicians are and were. Dylan has repeatedly shrugged off attempts to make him some artistic icon, and emphasized how money-driven a lot of his endeavors were. The Beatles, meanwhile, made a joke of just how market-driven a lot of their choices were—and they in turn were inspired by Monty Python, another group of artistic visionaries who openly embraced what sheer sell-outs they were willing to be.)<br><br>The genius of Jobs lay in his ability to find the intersection of technology and human connection. His tastes weren't flawless, but even his errors were in the name of finding ways to translate technological potential into human meaning—either figuring out how to make computational abstraction something that a layman could understand, or figuring out <em>why it mattered</em> that computers could do what they do. He reduced complexities of technology and language down to terse statements, not because he didn't care about the complexities, but because his focus was on what needed to emerge <em>from</em> those complexities: the one takeaway that would mean something both for the philosophy behind a computer's design and for the person who'd eventually use that computer.<br><br>I think a lot about him <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KdlJlHAAbQ">famously saying</a>, in 1995, that Microsoft had "absolutely no taste:"<br><br></div><blockquote>I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. And you say, well, why is that important? Well, proportionately-spaced fonts come from typesetting, and beautiful books. That's where one gets the idea. If it weren't for the Mac, they would never have that in their products. I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success—I have no problem with their success; they've earned their success, for the most part—I have a problem with the fact that they just really make third-rate products.</blockquote><div><br>Jobs is saying this at a moment that's exactly equidistant from the unveiling of the Macintosh in 1984 and the unveiling of the iPhone in early 2007. At the moment, he's more-or-less just a curiosity in the tech world; nobody expects him to become a major player ever again. His major project is Pixar's <em>Toy Story</em>—and if you want Jobs' artistic bona fides, it's that it was his vision that brought Pixar to life, though Pixar is similarly criticized for its ratios of artistic-expression-to-marketing-sheen. <br><br>And the thing he can think to say about Microsoft has to do with... font spacing. His criticism of Gates is that Gates never thinks about how letters appear on a computer screen.<br><br></div><h1><strong>III.</strong></h1><div><br>Unless you're a font nerd, you probably don't think of Steve Jobs as the patron saint of digital typography. Hell, most <em>font nerds</em> don't think of Steve Jobs that way. But the soul Jobs brought to computers came down to his focus on <em>making computers more cultured</em>, where "culture" had nothing to do with snobbery or pretenses and everything to do with simple human connection. His criticism of Microsoft can be understood as: "They don't really think about what it means to make computers <em>for people."</em> And the reason he is revered by people who revere him, the reason why a site exists just to document <a href="https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&characters=Steve%20Jobs">minor stories</a> about his original reign at Apple, is that he was hellbent on working out how to make a computer express itself to the people who, one way or another, were going to have to use it.<br><br></div><div>If Jobs had <em>just</em> invented modern digital typographic systems, it would ironically be much easier for the people who despise him to recognize his accomplishments. Isolate any one feature or function or design that he helped introduce to computing, and it's easy to think of it as humanistic. <br><br>But Jobs understood that he'd never be able to "just" release a system for typesetting. Nobody thinks of computers as typesetting machines first and foremost. There's no <em>product</em> there. The only way to advocate for any one of the things he cared about was, paradoxically, to <em>build a bigger system</em>. He spent his career working on <em>gigantic</em> feats of engineering and design, hardware and software both, because he needed to reach the point at which all the different pieces of what he worked on would congeal to become a feasible consumer good—the thing he gets sneered at for focusing on. The thing which he learned mattered from... you know, the Beatles. Because he'd spent his childhood listening to <em>Rubber Soul</em> and <em>Revolver</em> and realizing that, in order to make all those advances in "the state of pop music," in order to fit in all those moments of vulnerability and political commentary and sheer psychedelia, the Beatles had to write a bunch of very good pop songs, and sequence them in a way that turned the albums they were on into pop iconography.<br><br>The typesetting is, at best, a pop song. (It's really more like the one weird instrument that makes that one great pop song so darn memorable.) The product itself is the album. And without the mammoth vision that defines the end result, you have, at best, an artistic curiosity. Far easier to "respect," but respected only by the handful of people who know that it exists.<br><br></div><h1><strong>IV.</strong></h1><div><br>The tech world has a phrase that it loves: Minimum Viable Product, or MVP for short. It's the simplest possible thing you can make that will sell. Conventional wisdom is: you make that product, because it gets you the funds to expand. It's why companies like Facebook and Uber and whatnot all started with a seemingly-simple core product—something actually useful, even likable—and gradually choked their own products to death with their sheer megalomania. The Minimum Viable Product makes them their millions, wedges them into our lives, and then lets them try to leverage and coerce their way towards billions.<br><br>Those start-up CEOs are the worst of the assholes who like Steve Jobs. But they seem to overlook the fact that their Minimum Viable Product philosophy directly contradicts Jobs' own lifelong strategy. Jobs <em>never</em> started small. When he left Apple and started NeXT, his first computer retailed for <em>$9,999.</em> That's an absolutely garbage amount of money, but it's what the Big-Ass Thing he created had to cost. Just as the original Macintosh was sold for a prohibitive $2,500, and the original iPhone sparked outrage when it sold for $600. Yes, those prices more-or-less made all of Jobs' original products available only to people with considerable means—but they were also the prices that let him sell the thing he'd actually made, the thing that incorporated all those different pieces he was passionate about, in a way that let him make an honest sale.<br><br>There's a lot to criticize about Jobs, and about Apple in general. Both are flawed and have made mistakes that range from incompetence to venality to corruption. But it feels telling that, at the moment, Google and Facebook and Amazon—all companies who take pride in how little they directly charge their consumers—are actively hemorrhaging workers, laying off tens of thousands of people at once, while Apple remains relatively steady. It feels telling that the companies which claim to be Apple's successors largely operate by selling out their users, exploiting lax regulatory laws, and generally degrading the world, while Apple's shittiness largely extends to "charging more money for things than people would like." <br><br>While I don't feel comfortable defending Apple's business practices, I would say that Apple's a less corrosive cultural force than virtually all of the tech companies that operate on its level. And I'd argue that the reason why is that, from the start, Apple's "peers" have operated by trying to sell the Minimum Viable Product—whether it was Microsoft's anticompetitive business dealings, Google's attempts to offer the world Everything for the price of Totally Free, or Amazon's relentless pursuit of the cheapest possible consumable good. To the extent that Apple has a soul, however dinged-up and dirty, it's that Apple tries to make products worth actually paying money for—and that the "worth actually paying money for" part involves its trying to find that link between technological potential and human meaning.<br><br></div><h1><strong>V.</strong></h1><div><br>Jobs and Apple get called minimalist. They're viewed as "reducing" the inherent complexity of computers down to accessible, "user-friendly" paradigms. But you can only call them minimalist, paradoxically, if you accept that their ambitions were about as maximalist as you can get in tech: making their devices' purposes as open-ended as humanly possible, producing hardware <em>and</em> software (and micro-managing the integrations between the two), and conceiving of "user experience" as the connective tissue between both, where the hardware articulates the software and vice versa. <br><br>If your only interest in technology has to do with the backend ("how do I tell computers to do what they can do?"), it's easy to dismiss Apple's focus on interface and experience as mere frippery at best, anti-freedom at worst. If your focus on what Apple makes is <em>on</em> computers as a commercial good, you might criticize Apple the other way around, dismissing the human potential of computers as just another consumer distraction, and attacking Apple <em>for</em> creating products with popular appeal, and for honing in on just what it is that helps drive sales.<br><br>From both angles, it's easy to dismiss Steve Jobs as a tech figure. Either way, he's the guy who popularized computers while ruining them, taking their potential for cultural or social impact and turning them into just another vessel for distraction and consumption and waste. But either view misses that artistry is <em>always</em> the negotiation of technique and production, the pathfinding between what-can-be-done and what-will-be-seen. The rearticulation of vast complexity as seeming simplicity <em>is</em> art. And in a computing environment, philosophy becomes uniquely tangible: the what and the why and the how fuse into a singular whole, with abstract ideas about how a computer ought to work lending themselves to literal symbolic expressions that in turn become the material reality of working with a computer in the first place.<br><br>The lasting impact of Jobs, beyond the iPhone or even the personal computer, will be that he demonstrated this in a major way. He taught us how to think about computers—not about <em>their</em> potential, but about <em>ours. </em>He is not the only tech titan, and you can argue that he isn't the most profound or influential or even intelligent of them, but he is by far the most popularly beloved, because he spent his life translating the things he <em>imagined</em> computers doing into their <em>reality.</em> He found a path between the <em>idea</em> and the <em>articulation</em>. And in doing so, he showed that building digital worlds <em>is </em>a kind of art, as plainly as music or film or literature, because the challenge is fundamentally the same thing: what he called <em>culture </em>and what I keep calling <em>expression,</em> or the process of taking what is hypothetically possible and giving it form. Not just <em>technical</em> form, but <em>meaningful</em> form. The kind of thing that people not only see but immediately <em>grasp. </em>The kind of thing that makes sense to us as if it was made to lie in the palm of our h—<br><br>ok I'll stop<br><br></div><h1>VI.</h1><div><br>Back to those six-and-a-half minutes.<br><br>Before he reveals the face of the iPhone, Steve Jobs walks us through a series of conceptual explanations. <br><br>The first one, of course, is that Apple isn't <em>just</em> revealing an iPod or a phone or a "breakthrough Internet communications device"—his phrase, not mine—but a single product that encapsulates all three.<br><br>The second is the explanation of why the iPhone won't have a physical keyboard—that this kind of hardware immediately dates a device, keeping it from receiving meaningful updates or enhancements of any kind.<br><br>And the third, which he explains after the iPhone's <em>hardware</em> has been revealed but before we see a mock-up of its screen, is that the phone has been built around the human finger. There's no mouse, obviously. There's no stylus, either. Its interface was built around the forefinger—everything from the size of its app icons to its interface buttons to the original iconic lock screen.<br><br>It takes him fifteen minutes to go through all that, and then he turns the iPhone on for the first time. The very first thing he does is unlock the device—just swipes his finger from left to right. Then he locks the phone, so he can show his audience again.<br><br>The second feature he displays is scrolling through a list. That's it: just swiping his finger. The audience <em>gasps</em>.<br><br>Over the next half hour, the only new tech feature Jobs demonstrates is rotating the phone to adjust its interface. It isn't until about the 45-minute mark that he opens up a photo, explains "pinching" to his audience, and zooms into the photo with only his fingers. Again: gasps. The app interfaces—look at the sixteen programs we've invented for this brand-new system!—are nice, but the real wow moments are when Jobs demonstrates the little things a system like this lets you do.<br><br>The grand climax of the demonstration is the Maps app, of all things. Jobs opens the map. He zooms in and out. He looks for a Starbucks—and, voila!, pins fall onto the map. He taps one of the pins. Then <em>he places a call then and there,</em> not just from the phone but <em>from the map—</em>and when he does, the background of that phone call is the photo he zoomed into and set up as his wallpaper. Its a triple-pirouette demonstration whose technical implementation is no less astonishing than the theatrical architecture of the moment.<br><br>You can try to delineate the technological accomplishments that make that moment possible, but you don't need to. The structure of the iPhone's unveiling delineates it all for you. It follows a simple pattern: Steve Jobs explains the <em>human</em> distinction between the iPhone and everything that came before it, and then he delves into technical wonkery as he explains what made this particular feature possible, and then he touches the screen. Human intent first, technical underpinnings second, and then the inherent theatricality that comes from <em>simply using the device</em>. <br><br>It's hard not to watch that unveiling and realize: <em>every moment of this is a product</em>. Every interaction, every swipe, every rotate, every new interface, every new placement of a menu, is something that could have <em>defined</em> an entire new product line-up. Hell, the iPods at the time would loudly advertise the transition from clickable navigation buttons to a spinnable wheel, or from black-and-white to color, or the advent of video playback. The iPhone took dozens of things that each would have defined a <em>year's worth</em> of product evolution, and placed them all together. It didn't just <em>unify</em> them—it <em>sequenced</em> them. It created something that people could call "simple" with a straight face, even as it emphasized its own complexity.<br><br>As a geeky teen who'd lost his mind over the Nintendo Wii just a year earlier, it was impossible not to understand that the iPhone was simply in a different league. It took the wildest rumors and <em>exceeded</em> them—and exceeded them, not by doing the physically impossible, but by taking all of its different pieces and connecting the dots between them, finding connections too fine-tuned and granular to be worth most people's imaginations.<br><br>Douglas Adams, a lifelong admirer of both Apple <em>and</em> the Beatles, once wrote that the difference between a Beatles record and any other bands' was that, the first time he put on <em>Rubber Soul</em> or <em>Revolver</em> or <em>Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band</em>, he couldn't entirely comprehend what he was listening to. The sounds were too bewilderingly different from what he'd been expecting. It was only through gradually listening that he realized it was because he was listening to something stranger and better than anything he'd ever heard before. <br><br><em>That</em>, to me, is the pinnacle of artistic achievement. It's the way I felt when I first discovered my favorite novels, my favorite albums, my favorite films, my favorite <em>people</em>. And it's the way I felt when I first saw the iPhone. You have to wonder whether Steve Jobs learned a thing or two from his and Adams' favorite band. <br><br>Tech bros love talking about <em>disruption</em>. They take their Minimum Viable Product, their feature that's <em>just</em> compelling enough to convince a million people to download the free version of the app, and discuss it like it's going to change the world (in the sense of making them a billion dollars). Peter Thiel, would-be patron saint of start-up bros and neo-Nazis alike, talks about <em>this</em> being the most exciting feeling in tech: the sense of a flash-in-the-pan that means you'll temporarily have a monopoly that lets you wring some money from the world. <br><br>This, they claim, is Steve Jobs' legacy. Be loud and glib and get bored people's attention and get venal people erect enough to throw <em>more</em> money at you. All you need is the One Little Big Idea that slips that check under your door. It's the same mindset as the douchebags with guitars who think that a song or two about how evil "they" are will make them the next Bob Dylan, or the junky pop-music dipshits who think that the Beatles were the Beatles because they thought that love was neat.<br><br>I would argue that Jobs' real legacy is close to the exact opposite. It's a demonstration that an idea <em>doesn't</em> have to be banal in order to succeed, that inherent simplicity matters less than strived-for elegance, that convoluted inner workings can nonetheless yield something utterly iconic. My takeaway from Jobs is that the <em>Maximum</em> Viable Product is worth reaching for: those pie-in-the-sky ambitions that look past the individual possibilities to grasp at the gigantic world-changing ones, well, those might not be so pie-in-the-sky after all. It might be possible to change the world, just as it's possible for a single moment or experience to transform an entire life. <br><br>For me, the life-changing experience wasn't <em>just</em> the iPhone—it was the way in which it was revealed. Not just the product, but the explanation: the step-by-step performance that took an immensely complicated idea and turned it, not <em>just</em> into plain English, but into <em>theatre:</em> taking all those things which should have been obstacles and turning them into dance steps, and revealing in the process that those things which seem most daunting and impossible-to-resolve may, in fact, be the wellspring for the most exciting opportunities.<br><br></div><h1>VI and a half</h1><div><br>I'm talking all this out, not to fanboy, but to lay down a foundation. It matters to me, not only as a story in and of itself, but as a way of clarifying what comes next.<br><br><em>to be continued etc</em></div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/243332022-11-24T05:37:12Z2022-11-24T13:24:56ZCrude simulacra<div class="trix-content">
<blockquote>They look at racist and violent systems and see them as hobby systems, like learning lore in a video game. They have special costumes. They can recite trivia about racist and violent systems but have no grasp of the systems' meaning. Where someone else might go into fashion or community theater, they invent costumes that convey the "gravitas" of "their work", like the eight-kids loons do. It's like they're not quite present, in a way, so no wonder they all think that human priorities should be determined by whether we can bring into being billions of simulated people on planet-sized computers in the year 20,000CE.<br>— <a href="https://www.metafilter.com/197180/Obviously-a-Chance-of-Typos#8323775">Frowner, on MetaFilter</a></blockquote><div><br></div><h1>One</h1><div>When I was 18 years old, I wanted to found a start-up. Part of my desire was genuine: I've been building web sites since I was a pre-teen, and was fascinated by the process of shaping digital space. Part of it, though, was that I was profoundly miserable. I was unprepared for the transition from high school to college, or for the loss of the hometown peers I'd spent 13 long years slowly getting to know. My sense of who I was, and who I wanted to be, was shattered. I felt a desperate, panicky need to escape my own life—and nothing seemed like more of an escape than tech.<br><br>The thing about a digital life is that you can live it in the darkness, from the claustrophobic confinement of a dorm room you're too terrified to leave. The digital world is made up exclusively of signifiers: everything is quantifiable, even the qualitative bits. If you have a head for it, you can tweak and tweak and tweak your approach, gradually fine-tuning your online presence towards some platonic ideal of "successful." What's crazy is, at some point this can <em>very plausibly</em> yield material consequences: you can post so well that venture capitalists will give you millions of dollars for it. Hack the computer hard enough, and it suddenly feels like you're hacking the world.<br><br>This is a wretched way to think about the world, so it makes sense that I developed a series of deep resentments for other people I encountered. There was a curious pattern to those resentments: I despised a certain kind of person who was more successful than I was, but I just-as-thoroughly despised a certain kind of person who was much closer to being a failure. Though I couldn't have articulated it at the time, the reason for my resentment was that these two types of people were, in fact, one and the same. What I still can't tell you is how much of that resentment had to do with my fierce hope that I would never be like that kind of person, how much had to do with my worry that I'd <em>have</em> to become that kind of person if I wanted to succeed, and how much had to do with a deep-seated dread at the possibility that I'd been one of them all along.<br><br><br></div><h1>Two</h1><div>By the time I graduated college, I had a phrase stuck in my head: <em>crude simulacra.</em> It was the term I'd found to describe the thing I'd come to discover, not just among those aspiring Silicon Valley types, but in virtually every corner of modern culture. I didn't know what to do with the phrase, but at least I had a name for what I saw.<br><br>A crude simulacrum is a plausible reproduction of something real. It mimics its attributes, its presentation, its demeanor; it faithfully reproduces what appears to be its substance. But there's nothing there. There's no meaning to its mimicry. Its feints at deeper order are just that: feints. Any purported connection between its pieces is just a shadow of some other meaningful connection that existed elsewhere.<br><br>When I read Harry Frankfurter's <em>On Bullshit</em>—which I probably cite more than any other single piece of writing nowadays—it felt like a revelation. Bullshit, according to Frankfurter, is defined by ulterior motive: whatever "it" is doesn't matter, because its only purpose is to fuck with your perception. Bullshit isn't lying. It's not caring about the truth, <em>because the substance of what you say is unimportant.</em> You're only saying it so that people will see you saying it, and think of you as the kind of person who says those kinds of things. How they think of you is what matters. Who you are is utterly irrelevant.<br><br>After a year at that college, I transferred to art school instead, where I completed my degree. Art school is a great place to go to find bullshit: every flavor of art has its own pet flavors of fraudulence. Musicians spout one kind of bullshit; poets spout another. The fine arts are rife with so much bullshit that it's often impenetrable to the outside observer. Yet I discovered two things that helped me better understand what the "crude simulacra" I was struggling to understand were made of.<br><br>First, I realized that many of the young artists who were spouting bullshit <em>didn't realize they were spouting it.</em> For them, the bullshit was just spackle: a way to fill in space that couldn't otherwise be filled. They'd never encountered a <em>non-</em>bullshit version of what they were spouting; while a few struggled with the frustrating sense that something was missing, many of them were convinced that they were doing precisely what they were supposed to do. It didn't feel insincere to them, because they <em>meant</em> it, for one definition of the word "meant." It was all a kind of glossolalia: what mattered were the sounds of them saying it, and the way in which it was said. <br><br>(When Sam Bankman-Fried texts that Western culture just consists of <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy">"saying all the right shiboleths,"</a> I can immediately picture him as a former classmate of mine. I have no doubt that he thinks of himself as earnest, for all that what he's saying is profoundly cynical. Sincerity and cynicism are not foils for one another: they're <em>frequently</em> one and the same. As Frankfurter concludes, "Sincerity is bullshit.") <br><br>Second, I eventually discovered a lot of the "real" things which those artists' bullshit was meant to emulate. And I learned—surprise, surprise!—that while plenty of successful artists are fraudulent or just a little dim, many really <em>do</em> operate from places of personal or political or philosophical meaning. They have <em>aims</em> in mind; their art is an attempt, however successful, to communicate or negotiate a reality that is often treacherously difficult to translate. It has nothing to do with mechanical skill, or with showmanship, or even with the quality of the finished result. It's a matter of where that work is coming from: what, exactly, inspires it, and why someone is trying to dip into that source. <br><br>There is a difference, in other words, between something that's <em>successful</em>, or even something that's <em>good</em>, and something that's <em>meaningful</em>. You can try and fail to express something meaningful, and still have something that's better than nothing at all, because you at least were reaching for, and pointing to, something that matters. Conversely, you can do something <em>successfully</em>, and still not have done anything meaningful whatsoever. You can even do something that on many levels qualifies as <em>good</em>, and still have done little more than created a particularly well-crafted piece of kitsch. "Goodness" only means as much as the metric by which you measure it; similarly, "success" meaning nothing other than that, according to one particular lens, something was to some extent effective.<br><br>A crude simulacrum presents itself as good. It is often, irritatingly, some kind of successful. People who care only about those definitions of success, and those definitions of good, will take no issue with what they're seeing. It's only troublesome when you look at the simulacrum from a slightly different angle, and realize that even that slight shift seems to make it stop existing altogether.<br><br><br></div><h1>Three</h1><div>For a long while, my most-reread book was a satire called <em>Syrup</em>, by Max Barry. <em>Syrup</em> is about a young happy-go-lucky wannabe sociopath—which is to say, an aspiring marketer. Scat, which is what he calls himself, is obsessed with becoming rich and famous; he is virtually incapable of seeing the world through any lens but marketing, because, as he's so fond of saying, "perception is reality." His "character flaw," as he sees it, is that he can't keep himself from being human: he is flawed, emotional, and messy, and never quite capable of hiding that from the world. Yet this inevitably winds up being his saving grace: his genuinely-psychopathic nemesis, Sneaky Pete, projects himself onto the world in a way that Scat never could, but is fundamentally incapable of the spark of excitement that makes all of Scat's work human. He can only capture the slickness of surfaces, never the hidden significances that lurk beneath.<br><br>If sincerity doesn't preclude cynicism, the opposite is true too: it is possible to be cynical and genuine at the same time. I loved <em>Syrup</em> because I identified so much with its relentless deconstruction of image and presentation, and enjoyed the bleak way in which it depicted American life as a non-stop series of cons. But I also loved it because, even as it drew the world from that angle, it seemed to argue that none of these systems necessarily <em>denied</em> the possibility of genuine meaning. As Scat navigates the worlds of corporate and executive power, he encounters a lot of people who, in their own ways, are earnest people, living meaningful lives. The C-suite wielders of power can't possibly wield their power <em>responsibly</em>, but they are at least doing their distorted best; the forces of seemingly-soulless bureaucracy sometimes <em>do</em> have souls, they're just bewilderingly stupid. Some people "make it" while remaining basically human; a rare few are successful <em>because</em> of what they're able to express. <br><br>Scat thinks of himself as battling for his right to become rich, vapid, and abusive—he more-or-less says so out loud—but those are only the superficial stakes. The real question is whether or not he can achieve what he wants to achieve <em>without</em> forsaking the things that make him worth a damn; while he would sell his own soul with a smile, the fact remains that Scat is <em>just not capable</em> of selling it, so his only hope is to make it without faking it (if you will). <br><br>I never had qualms about enterprise or self-promotion or marketing. On some level, I see it all as a kind of exhibitionism, and I was always a fan of hamming it up. To the extent that some amount of that is part of the process of making a living—whether it's resume-polishing or business analysis or finding a way to stand out as an artist—I find it pretty easy to accept as an inevitability, and either have fun with it or at least treat it like it's no less soul-destroying than busywork. It's a part of my personality that I know I'm lucky to have. But I also tend to want to make things which are sprawling, messy, and intricate, and therefore hard to reduce down to some concise package. And if I relate to Scat, it's because I struggle with the tension between those two extremes: my ability to market myself on the one hand, and my inability to compromise on the other. <br><br>There are people who I love who are defiantly unmarketable and messy; their meaning is their meaning, and it will wait for you to come to it, or decide it's worth your time. But there are also people who I love that seem to have a natural talent for finding that conduit between themselves and their audience; that they are inherently gifted at selling themselves doesn't make the thing they're selling any less authentic or substantial. Many people, of course, are a mixture of the two, and the way they navigate those tensions is precisely what makes them so fascinating.<br><br>Crude simulacra, as I define it, isn't a matter of one winning out over the other: it's not Bill Hicks' insistence that, if you're in marketing, you should kill yourself. (A line which, ironically, always pinged the "crude simulacrum" nerve for me in and of itself.) It consists of a <em>severance,</em> of sorts, between internality and externality, a failure of one to map onto the other. And while it often consists of very popular things with no internal substance whatsoever, crude simulacra can be the opposite too: an interior reality that no longer even <em>tries</em> to express itself in meaningful ways. There are countless examples, in tech and in the arts and in sociopolitical philosophy, of a kind of gatekeeping that manifests itself as utter apathy towards outsiders, mixed with a condemnation of outsiders for the crime of existing outside. That behavior feels of a piece with what I'm trying to describe here. <br><br>The point is not to value the one and not the other—it is to recognize the importance of the relationship between the two. Sever that connection, and all you have left is pretension, in both its populist and elitist varieties.<br><br><br></div><h1>Four</h1><div>There's a reason I started all this with an anecdote about Silicon Valley: the phenomenon of crude simulacra is an intensely digital one. Bullshit has always existed; the kind of fraudulence I'm describing here is inherent to capitalism and to humanity in general. But bullshit isn't a <em>rhetorical </em>matter—it's a <em>systemic</em> one, in that it directly involves the manipulation of structures. And the key to some of the worst excesses of our day and age lies in recognizing that, at its core, a computer is a means of <em>systemic reproduction.</em> Jesper Juul likens the computer to the printing press in terms of social revolution; a printing press enabled the reproduction of complex texts, and a computer enables the reproduction of complex <em>systems.</em> The foundation underlying much of our modern blight lies in the recognition that systems can be bullshit too.<br><br>Social order is a kind of grammar; it is the structure by which people learn how to articulate themselves. Our eloquences and sophistications, our inadequacies and our apathies, are in part a byproduct of how we are socialized. And while socialization is in many ways intimate and highly individual, the grammars of a society inform what kinds of personal development are likely or even possible. <br><br>When I talk about digital culture, I'm not referring to the actual process of people connecting across screens, or even to the lossiness of communicating through abstraction rather than in the richness of physical space. Those are important, but not central. Instead, I'd define digital culture as <em>the permeability of social structures:</em> the ease with which people can design, join, and be absorbed by new social environments. The disconnect from physical space may sever certain kinds of connection, but it allows other kinds to scale extraordinarily rapidly: physical space no longer limits the potential size of a new community, and the ease of digital replication and distribution means that a brand-new social structure could root itself in a million people's lives virtually overnight.<br><br>We could talk about the needs of capital to make digital environments as profitable as possible, or about the psychological techniques employed to make those spaces addictive. Even putting that aside, though, the simple fact is that the programmatic nature of digital systems means that patterns of communication must be imposed, to some extent; they are defined by whoever owns and operates the space. Organic communal evolution still happens, but within rigidly-defined structures that are often arbitrary and not well-understood. Rapid expansion makes it likelier that the design of these spaces is crude or ill-considered, particularly because the needs of a given system changes drastically as a community scales. We are not used to thinking of systems as a kind of language; we are even less used to understanding that they are <em>social </em>languages, dictated as much by participants as by mechanical function and process.<br><br>We don't fully understand, either, that process drastically impacts our ways of thinking. Consciousness is part pattern recognition; we pick up on rhythms and manners whether or not we realize it. The social structures which we take for granted, often to the point that they become invisible to us, are shaping us in ways that change how we operate within a space. And the hardest part of designing a social environment is that you are designing a cast, a mold into which people are poured. Communities are designed indirectly; the systems we build are <em>influencers</em> on behavior, but the behavior they're shaping is still human, which is to say it's messy and chaotic. And a paradoxical part of that chaos and that mess is that we take to patterns, we mold ourselves around them, and we begin <em>speaking in their language, </em>adjusting our behaviors in order to manipulate the system we belong to. That manipulation isn't necessarily sinister—to manipulate is just to grasp, to interact with a world on its own terms—but its impact on us is real.<br><br>What does it mean to be a real person? What does it mean to be <em>sincere?</em> A part of Frankfurter's critique of sincerity is that its pursuit is self-centered and insular—and the real question of "who we are" often lies beyond ourselves. The interesting messiness that's worth a damn happens when we interact with other people, in that strangely ambiguous space that separates us from them. Pursue <em>yourself</em> too much, and you paradoxically get trapped by the confines of whatever space you happen to be in: your world becomes a hall of mirrors, its every facet somehow reflecting yourself. Meaningful self-discovery is only possible through permeability and rupture. It is only when you enter spaces where your prior understanding of yourself no longer suffices, when you must put yourself forth in unfamiliar ways, when you can no longer perfectly predict the outcome of your actions, that you experience yourself in a way that could be called <em>substantial</em>. Everything else is limited, cordoned off. And while <em>limited</em> is not inherently <em>fake</em>, there is a real danger to accepting those limits, or to forgetting that those limits are limits in the first place. Plato's allegory of the cave is not merely about lies and truth: it is about shallowness that we forget is shallow.<br><br>The paradox of digital community is that there is permeability <em>between</em> communities, but each individual community is typically severely limited. Most social networks have a particular <em>form</em> at their center; moreover, there are assessments which tell us whether our <em>use</em> of that form was approved of or not. Either of these—the formal restriction or the ever-present validator—can be dangerous. When the two combine, the result can be catastrophic. <br><br>At the same time, it is hard to eliminate humanity in all its messiness. Life has a way of growing through the cracks. And as anyone who's interested in any kind of art knows, formalism can be a creative blessing: its limits <em>inspire</em> color and mess, encouraging people to invent new ways of expressing themselves that work within the rules. (That, or they find ways of breaking the rules altogether.)<br><br>The bullshittiness of a given system—and its tendency towards crude simulacrum—might be understood as a tension between its form and what that form inspires. That's true of all systems, not just digital ones: you can understand a philosophy by what perspectives it lends itself to, and you can understand a political outlook by looking past its ideals and studying the consequences it generates. This dance between map and territory is somewhat universal: you can see it in Freud's notion of the dueling id and superego. Focus too much on the map, and you wind up repressed; focused too much on the territory, and you wind up unconscious. <br><br>What makes digital experience unique, perhaps, is that the two extremes are one and the same, which results in an oblivious id-like obsession with the game. Outcomes are quantifiable; the metric is all that matters. Action has no fundamental meaning beyond its result, and is constantly tweaked and mutated in order to maximize the end result. <br><br>This can be understood as a byproduct of computers' system-centric creative method: the more id-like the creation of a community's code, the more the byproduct is a mock-superego fixation on outcome by its participants. But this, of course, is also a reflection of capitalism's fundamentally algorithmic nature—the idea of a "free market" determining what deserves to live or die is essentially a dogmatic adherence to a mostly-thoughtless code, one that assigns a "score" to everything, and encourages us to optimize ourselves and our society to maximize that score. And Silicon Valley's adherence to the bullshit metrics of capitalism means that its apps are "rationally" designed to garner its creators maximum results, meaning that even the careful evolution of its psychologically-ensnaring techniques ultimately obeys the unthinking id of the marketplace.<br><br>Is it surprising that the way these app designers have learned to ensnare us is by creating systems which echo the capitalist superstructure that they're trapped within themselves? Or that the influence of venture capital, in which promising new apps are given tens of millions of dollars and asked to find a way to get us hooked, before asking developers to pay off their loans by pursuing profit at all costs, winds up with uncannily-similar stories of user exploitation, as the need to squeeze every possible moment of attention ratchets up? <br><br>If we want to understand why social media feels like hell, in other words, or why it feels like culture, mired as it is in social media, is similarly collapsing into a hell-like state, perhaps what we need to understand is: computers' boundless ability to let us invent our own worlds has led to us recreating the world we already lived in, in increasingly exaggerated and parodic ways. It is a world in which nothing but the number matters. A world in which we only deserve to exist inasmuch as the number says we ought to. A world in which the easiest way to "win" that number is by acting, not as we feel like acting, but as the number says we ought to feel—and where the easiest way to do <em>that</em> is by recreating the world we're trapped in <em>yet again, </em>producing a simulation of a simulation, world as a pyramid scheme, nothing but turtles and bullshit all the way down.<br><br><em>These</em> are the crude simulacra. And once you start looking for them, it's shocking how many of them there are.<br><br><br></div><h1>Five</h1><div>Here are the successes stories and failures of crude-simulacrum culture, as witnessed by my time in deep-cut Silicon Valley culture.<br><br>A successful simulacrum identifies—as marketing classes teach their students to identify—a genuine-seeming need. They create a product, or at least a brand, that promises a solution to a problem, or an answer to a question. This, again, is Advertising 101, maybe even Capitalism 101. Make the thing that people want, and they will give you something in exchange for it. Identify a need, or even <em>create</em> a need, and what you're offering takes on meaning in those people's eyes. <br><br>There's nothing inherently unhealthy about this—or at least, this much can be done in healthy ways. But in a crude simulacrum of a world, the key word is <em>seeming:</em> a genuine-<em>seeming </em>need followed by a genuine-<em>seeming</em> solution to a problem. And so many of the needs we think we have amount to an inability to process the obscene amounts of information that we're confronted with. Some of this is simply that we have <em>access</em> to more of the information that was already there: our too-tidy bubble was punctured. Some of it is that we're encouraged to <em>create</em> "information," or at least content, whether that takes the form of posts or Etsy stores or hot takes or start-ups. The end result, though, is that we want some manner of guidance, some sort of navigation, some way of parsing things down.<br><br>Some of the solutions we're offered are bullshit from the start. There's 24/7 news, and then there's 24/7 commentary <em>on</em> the news. There are music and film and game reviewers, and then there are review <em>aggregators</em>, trying to provide an authoritative review of the reviews. Many of these are offered in bad faith; some are offered by dimwits who think they can engineer simple solutions to complex problems. But some are intelligent, thoughtful, and considerate—and even that doesn't seem to help. Because the moment an attempt at curation or authority exists, <em>the curation becomes the new system.</em> You no longer have to fool your audience directly: you just have to optimize your product to fool the curators. Cater to their tastes; exploit their biases. They will, in turn, tell their audience exactly what you want that audience to hear—and the more earnestly and skillfully their project started, the more exploitable their audience becomes. Because we are bad at noticing shifts in quality; if a formerly-trustworthy source deteriorates, it's likely that we won't notice.<br><br>Silicon Valley prides itself on being flat: its rich and powerful want to feel like they're participating with their entire community as equals. Cynical outsiders might not believe this, but to some extent they mean this in good faith: they <em>want</em> their community to be as open as possible. But this just makes the powerful people in Silicon Valley the specific set of rubes that bullshitters optimize their wares for. The more certain they are that they're objective and unfoolable, the easier they are to fool. And because they hold genuine power—access to capital—their blindnesses have an extraordinary impact on the world around them.<br><br>There was a guy I particularly hated who was very, very good at catering to their tastes. Everything he did was slick, "minimalist," "innovative." Bold, thick lines. Products whose sales pitches were "simplifying" things which were already simple. A crude sort of bombast. A lot of mock-"existentialist" content, contending with profound ideas in the shallowest possible ways. You could tell that the list of qualities he sought to reflect with his work was itself an extremely labored-upon and market-tested list. Once you worked on the assumption that everything he did was a clumsy attempt at manipulation, it became clear that <em>everything</em> he did, every facet of everything he ever touched, was the byproduct of some kind of algorithm he'd invented. Everything down to his writing style was mechanically-wrought.<br><br>Nothing he ever made gained an audience. I think his biggest and most ambitious attempt at a product launched got maybe twenty or thirty people on board, all of them clout-seekers of the same flavor he was, looking to launch a grift within his grift. His products were, across the board, total failures. <em>But it didn't matter</em>. The right people fell for him hook, line, and sinker; he made off with enough of their money that he never had to work again. A few years after I walked away from that community, I checked in on him and learned that he'd had a nervous breakdown, came to regret everything he'd ever done, and decided to pursue the life of a quiet, humbler, rich man. All in all, not the most toxic possible outcome. But man: when I was young and trying to do something genuine within the same spaces as the garbage he spat out, I could not have hated him more. And what I hated wasn't just the insincerity: it was the realization that what he was doing was far easier than what I was, and that the things which kept tripping me up were precisely the things that would have gotten me no reward whatsoever.<br><br>On the other hand, though...<br><br>There was a kid. 15 or so. He ran the same kind of hustle, only poorly. He kept "launching start-ups," and even simulated selling them, but nobody cared and nobody bought it. Everything he made was the kind of faux-slick that fails to actually impress. All his big ideas were the kinds of "big" that were too niche to make for successful bullshit—and that mattered, because there clearly weren't any ideas there at all.<br><br>I wasn't much older than him at the time, though maybe I was just old enough ("18") that I shouldn't have detested him. But I couldn't help myself. It was so transparent that <em>all</em> he wanted was prestige, <em>all</em> he wanted was money and success, <em>all</em> he wanted was a blog that other people fawned over, a cadre of pathetic fans hoping that he'd throw a few eyeballs (or a few thousand dollars) their way. He didn't have ideas, he didn't have products, he didn't have visions. All that he had was the yearning for validation from a system he wasn't smart enough to manipulate. And when he had <em>his</em> existential panic over this, it wasn't because he felt bad about himself at all—the only existence he was worried about was the one where the number next to his name went up, and it wasn't rising as quickly as he'd like.<br><br>Somehow, the failed grift upset me more than the successful one did. Because when the successful guy succeeded, I could at least understand his motivations. It was bullshit, sure, it was a waste of space, it was hours and days and weeks devoted to sucking money out of a system that hypothetically could be offered to something genuinely worth a damn... but hey, he was traveling the world and living out of luxury hotels. Maybe you can live a meaningful life atop a hollow foundation. A part of why I loathed him, I knew, was that I couldn't tell whether I had <em>too much integrity</em> to do what he'd done, or whether I simply wasn't as good at the grift. Maybe, given half a chance, I'd make exactly the choices he'd made, and be happy with the life he pretended to be happy with, at least for a while.<br><br>But the failkid... man, he pissed me off. I was, as I mentioned earlier, extremely miserable and depressed that year, so I could calculate just how much time he devoted to his bullshit. He was throwing his life away, and for what? Sacrificing so goddamn much of his time and his brain and his potential to make <em>any</em> other sort of connection, all in exchange for dogshit. And the worst part of it was, dogshit was <em>what he deserved!</em> And he didn't seem to realize that! He didn't seem to realize that there was a difference between him and the more successful bullshitters, let alone between him and the people who were actually producing something of substance in the world. He <em>certainly</em> didn't seem to understand how valuable the things he'd forsaken were.<br> <br>That year, 2008, was hands-down the worst year of my life. But I still lived my life. I sat out on cafe patios at midnight, flute in hand, improvising alongside a guitar player who lived on my floor. I fell in love; I had my heart broken. I took trips up to NYC, and met people in tech who at the time were heroes of mine (and I met them because <em>they liked what I had to say).</em> I devoured films and albums; I read an unbelievable collection of books and essays. A couple of the classes I took left me with ideas that I'm fascinated with even to this day. And while the things I tried to make that year were bullshittier than I'd like, I still take pride in the fact that a friend and I launched a site that went unexpectedly viral—enough that I still brag about it to this day—and decided, after a wild and heady month, that we'd rather shut it down and focus on making something meaningful than keep it running.<br><br>I am generally hopeful, where human nature is concerned. I believe there's hope for almost everybody, even the impossibly hurt and outrageously unaware; I tend to think that society, as a whole, is closer to the kinds of breakthroughs that might radically transform it for the better than it ever seems to be. But some people get trapped in the simulacra, and start living a crude simulacrum of their own lives. They do it even when the simulacrum destroys them; they do it because they can't comprehend there being anything else. They have completely confused the map for the territory, the number for the reality. They can't comprehend that "the world" exists in any non-bullshit way; they can't comprehend that the thing they're desperate for, the thing rending them from the inside out, the thing they're dimly aware that <em>other people have</em> that they do not, is more than just some bit catalogued on some server somewhere. They have lost touch with the fact that anything else could possibly exist.<br><br><br></div><h1>Six</h1><div>Another obsession of mine, when I was eighteen, was pick-up artist blogs.<br><br>I remember being fascinated with one blogger's claim that attractive men all stood with their toes pointed outward, one knee slightly bent, in a way that made them irresistible to women <strong><em>[citation needed]</em></strong>. I forget his reasoning. And for the sake of my dignity, I need to be clear that I always, at all times, thought that this dude and his claim were utterly bullshit. But for <em>years</em> after I read that post of his, out of a mixture of superstition and insecurity and loneliness, I'd find myself self-consciously adjusting my stance to match his recommendations, especially when I found myself in the company of people I was attracted to.<br><br>Pick-up artists (and incels, their gnarly spawn) like to claim that their work is rooted in <em>evolutionary biology</em>. That's bullshit in two levels. Level #1 is that evo-bio is itself some hot garbage—but I think it's pointless to even acknowledge that. Because the deeper layer of bullshit is that I don't think they or their readers <em>care</em> whether or not biology can justify their claims. What they're looking for is a <em>system</em>. They want to reduce sexual interaction to another series of mechanics that they can hack their way though. And the appeal isn't that they <em>believe</em> this system or its explanations—the appeal is that <em>they believe a system could work.</em> The deepest layer of belief is not even that <em>this</em> system is right: it's that they can find an answer if they keep on thinking like this.<br><br>Right-wing culture is increasingly modeled after video-game logic. QAnon, it has been noted, is patterned very similarly to the narrative design of video games. Ditto anti-vaxxing and election denialism. Ditto Fox News as an institution. Ditto Alex Jones. <br><br>The appeal is always that <em>there is an answer,</em> something that explains where the world went wrong and points to a way back out. And while that phrase, "world went wrong," is without fail mired in reactionary bullshit—violent and hateful thoughts about women, race, sexuality, gender, foreigners, political opponents—there is often, on some level, a (wildly-misinterpreted) emotional truth. People are alienated and lonely. The economy is collapsing. Inequality is increasing. Politicians are failing to help. <br><br>The future looks, depending on how you squint, either apocalyptic or merely dismal. And the worst interpretations of all this are conspiratorial and aggrieved and detached from reality altogether, because they are all <em>attempts to reduce the world down to its constituent components.</em> They proclaim grandiose laws; they identify sinister Others; they go on a scavenger hunt for symbols and signifiers, fixating on bizarre codes and obscure events and endless minutiae. The payoff is that you get to believe in whatever order you've subscribed to: you get to think you <em>understand.</em> You have replaced the world as-it-is with a crude simulacrum. <br><br>In this simulacrum, the universe is predestined: your enemies are more sinister, their plans farther-reaching, their fates inevitable. Umberto Eco noted that, in fascism, your enemies are simultaneously painted to be terrifyingly powerful <em>and</em> total pushovers in the face of good; it is the inherent contradiction that justifies its horrid excess. It is this simulacrum that holds such allure: it's not that people buy into its logic and therefore agree with its conclusions, it's that they <em>want</em> to believe in its conclusions, and therefore overlook how little its logic makes sense. The promise is always: <em>there is a reason</em>. There is a system. The bullshit is our reality.<br><br>It's this kind of just-so "logic" that defines all reactionary philosophy. Corey Robin, in <em>The Reactionary Mind</em>, describes the phenomenon of reactionaries in every era drawing inspiration from the revolutionaries they claim to despise. They borrow their enemies' rhetoric, their vocabulary, even their style, all while envying their energy (and pooh-poohing on the conservative vanguard they're ostensibly sided with). But while revolutionaries derive their language and their energy <em>from</em> their ideas, the reactionary starts with the language and the energy and works backward, reconstructing a "philosophy" that justifies whatever state of affairs already exists. I enjoy my power and privilege; other people are critiquing it. Therefore, I must develop a theory which states that I am <em>correct</em> to have this power and privilege, and that anyone who would threaten it is either the wrong or outright evil.<br><br>Sartre once said of Nazis:<br><br></div><blockquote>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.</blockquote><div><br>In other words, their purported philosophy is a crude simulacrum of philosophy. It claims to be a wellspring from which valid perspectives can be derived, but it is a <em>reaction</em> to the emotions which were already present. It doesn't care about being valid or even about making coherent arguments: all that matters is that those arguments <em>seem</em> valid, and that they reach deeply enough to seem plausible to the other side.<br><br><br></div><h1>Seven</h1><div>It should not be shocking that reactionaries and con men so often find themselves in the same company. There is a laziness to both, a fraudulence that can be identified, more than anything, by how profoundly concerned it is with "legitimacy." When all that matters to you is appearance, you can devote far more time to it, and it comes far more easily—because you are no longer trying to negotiate between internal and external, ideation and manifestation, and therefore run into fewer obstacles along the way. If you're trying to con people without offering them anything, you don't have to worry about what you're offering. If your only interest in political or philosophical outlook is whether it lets you keep what you have and aspire towards more, you don't have to worry about the <em>legitimacy</em> of opposing worldviews—you only need to muster enough firepower to crush them. <br><br>Take that far enough, and the result is genocidal. Whoever doesn't fit into the simulacrum can simply be eradicated. The poor deserve to be extinguished. Anything which defies patriarchal order, anything which contradicts white supremacy, doesn't need to be <em>thought</em> about, except for in the sense that Eco's fascism thinks about things: it must be feared and it must be destroyed. It's only fitting that both must remain true at once: there will always be challenges to the simulacrum, because the simulacrum is crude; those challenges will always be easy to surmount, because if they were not easy, the simulacrum could no longer be believed in.<br><br>I mentioned generally being hopeful about the world, and my hope comes from this: while these forces typically acquire power very rapidly, because power is the only outcome they truly believe in, they are also prone to extreme cannibalism, and tend to devour themselves. Both ends of this are direct byproducts of their nature: they are difficult to directly confront, but they are inherently threats to themselves. That which opposes them, meanwhile, is more delicate, more difficult to create, and vulnerable enough that it can genuinely be destroyed... but it is a source of life, of stability, of clarity itself. It does not spring to life easily, but where it exists, there is life—and life, though it is strange and messy and full of suffering, <em>does</em> seem to know how to persist.<br><br>I am far more at peace with myself, and with the world, than I was when I was 18. That peace is not because I think the world is any better now than I thought then; if anything, the world has outwardly gotten much worse. The peace has come about, I think, because I understand the simulacra better, and that understanding has brought about...<br><br>Well. I want to be careful with my words here, because it's not that I'm "at peace" with it all. I still despise it, sometimes in ways that make me uncontrollably emotional. It still terrifies me. I am frustrated to no end when other people can't seem to tell that the things they're buying into aren't real, just as I am profoundly pained every time I realize that I have bought into a crude simulacrum myself—as happens consistently.<br><br>I think that our world is infested with such simulacra—more so, perhaps, with every passing year. I think that these simulacra are incredibly dangerous, not just because they take up space that would otherwise be filled with more meaningful connections, not even because they often go hand-in-hand with ideologies that are incredibly destructive, but because at their core they want to disconnect us from each other and from reality. The crude simulacrum is inherently alienating, because it replaces meaning with "meaning," connection with "connection," value with "value." It erodes solidarity. It is worse than betrayal, in the sense that Frankfurter suggested that bullshit is worse than lies. Lies and betrayal are <em>intentional actions</em>: they inherently respect truth and trust by caring enough to subvert them. Bullshit and simulacra, by contrast, care so little about the notion of truth, or the possibility or trust, that to brush up against them is to wonder whether or not there's reason to care about truth—or to try and trust—at all. The simulacrum is inherently viral: to buy into it is to replicate it, because your belief in it is what lets you perform the acts that perpetuate that belief in others.<br><br><br></div><h1>Eight</h1><div>Our world is in the state it's in for a few reasons. First, capitalism is reaching its advanced cannibalistic phases, and has begun to feed upon itself. Second, we, in our resultant suffering, are reaching ever-more-frantically for some kind of justification, some kind of system, some kind of "hope"—as opposed to real hope—and are forming and discovering simulacra in the process, easy answers which are both inherently reactionary <em>and</em> echoes of the only crude system that we have ever known. Third, the damage we've wrought upon the world itself has accelerated that panic, spurred some people to seek more desperate justifications for refusing to change a thing, and led others to the kinds of nihilistic doomer thinking that would justify throwing the real world away for the sake of the simulacrum—because if humanity truly is about to vanish altogether, then the only sensible response <em>is</em> to live for the number, for immediate gratification, for what shallow things can be wrung out of being before we cease to be altogether.<br><br>But beneath all that, we are undergoing a mammoth technological revolution, one which nobody—<em>especially</em> not people actually "in tech"—understands. It's a revolution, fundamentally, in <em>how we construct systems,</em> and the implications of that are genuinely difficult to grasp. Because, simply put, we have never had power of this magnitude before: not as individuals, and not as a collective. The printing press pales by comparison: computers let us toy with the <em>foundations </em>of our communities, our societies, our civilization as a whole. The current pessimism with the digital age is founded in our rightly acknowledging how badly the last decade-and-a-half of tech has fucked things up, but we're looking at things that happened in <em>one brief fifteen-year window</em> and making the mistake that every generation does, which is that what we're looking at how will be the future writ large. None of us understand how significant the change we're undergoing will be—and I think the abject pessimism is as misguided, in its own way, as Silicon Valley's blind optimism always was.<br><br>The one problem with comparing computers to the printing press is that the written word existed long before the press enabled widespread distribution of written material. While the press enabled both Martin Luther's manifestoes and William Shakespeare's plays—both of which were byproducts of the century immediately following the printing press's invention—Luther and Shakespeare were both working from generations' worth of predecessors. Shakespeare borrowed and adapted many existing stories and even plays; Luther was devising his own variant of a religious faith that was 1500 years old. Computers' antecedents, by contrast, are extremely primitive. While on some level "systemic structure" has pervaded humanity from the start, our understanding of it is nowhere <em>near</em> as concrete, or as translatable into digital terms, as the written word was in the 1500s. <br><br>But look at the days of early film: the silly whimsical shorts by the Lumière brothers, audiences gasping at a train seemingly coming towards them, or at a man pointing a pistol at them from on-screen. Or look at the cultural panic that followed rock n' roll, as society seemingly changed overnight. More importantly, look at how <em>simple</em> these revolutionary forces seem in retrospect: how crude early rock seems, how tacky early films look to the modern eye. These were mediums being probed, for the very first time, by people who didn't know a thing about how they worked. Over time, most people have stopped thinking of them as anything more than historical curiosities, in part because they seem <em>crude—</em>not bullshit, exactly, but certainly a lot bullshittier than the things we think hold value today. They couldn't help but seem artificial and coarse by comparison: nobody knew any better at the time.<br><br>Computers are like that, but far more powerful—powerful enough that it would be hard to comprehend how <em>much</em> more powerful they are. They have proven themselves able to rewrite entire industries overnight—but that, arguably, is just a <em>tremor</em> of their real power, rather than a glimpse of the power itself. They have accelerated the dystopian capitalist society we're in, but I suspect that that too is just a <em>hint</em> of what they're capable of, and not a full demonstration.<br><br>At the same time, most of the technobabble that comes out of Silicon Valley—the obsession with AI, with transhumanism—needs to be understood as an inherently reactionary interpretation of what's happening. People with power are looking at what's unfolding, and, as ever, coming up with a retroactive interpretation that justifies the state that things are already in. Caring about the present is less ethical than caring about the future. The computers, not the rich, are the real danger. It's pointless to worry about the Earth when Mars is in sight. It's pointless to care about the human race, when we are just the next step on the evolutionary ladder.<br><br>What's really happening is that <em>we are being given the chance to create new kinds of society.</em> We have the tools to rebuild the underlying frameworks that make our world work. We can construct systems of such elegance that they've have been unthinkable a <em>decade</em> ago, let alone <em>five</em> decades ago. A vast interconnection is taking place, not in terms of Facebook or Twitter or TikTok, but in terms of the underlying machinery which is gradually shaping up—machinery which itself is so sophisticated that systems only twenty years old now seem frustratingly ancient. That interconnection is only meaningful in and of itself because it enables <em>other</em> forms of connection to be built on top of it. We don't understand the significance of that, because we've never seen those other kinds of connection done well. Our tech magnates are shithead versions of the Lumière brothers, and they're desperate to convince us that they're Orson Welles.<br><br>(This is, to be clear, a deeply hurtful and unfair thing to say about the Lumières.)<br><br>The early optimism of the computer pioneers has reasonably taken a blow as capitalism and finance have devoured that world whole, but there's a reason there was such blinding optimism in the first place. The reactionaries have repurposed that optimism and formed crude-simulacrum versions of it that tout the glories of capital and tyranny, but the source of the original optimism was that the systemic distribution which computers enable is <em>extraordinarily</em> exciting—was then, and still is now. <br><br>The possibility to exchange, not just ideas, but intricate systems, and to <em>collaborate</em> on them, constructing vast worlds together, is not just revolutionary in theory. Without the open-source movement, without literally millions of individuals working together on projects literally vaster than the Seven Wonders of the World put together, the world as we know it couldn't exist. The most exciting digital work is shockingly organic, an ongoing evolution aided by a hundred thousand hands at once. It is a kind of creation, a kind of <em>organization,</em> that has never been possible in history. And for all that the attention lands on the most corporate iterations of this, for reasons that are themselves reactionary in nature, the fact remains that corporate control of this stack is the tip of the iceberg. (The big tech corps know this themselves: Google, Facebook, and Apple fund an insane amount of open-source work, because they all know that they could not possible maintain their own code without a vast foundation of open material to build upon.)<br><br>We don't know what this starts to look like as it grows beyond the venture silos. We know that it <em>will</em> grow beyond them, because it <em>is</em> growing beyond them, because no company in existence has worked out a way to contain what's being made (and none ever will). We don't know the first thing about how to make communities out of this, because we've never been able to approach community-making as if it were an art form before, one to be studied and practiced and shared and innovated upon. So much is new.<br><br>But we are all feeling that alienation, that distrust, that sense that the world as we've been taught it is fundamentally unreal. And while many of us are turning out to the same old tired shibboleths, the same violent closed-mindedness, the same attempts to perpetuate a false reality even as it eats itself, and us, alive, many of us are responding to it by pursuing new kinds of meaning. By turning, not towards systems, but towards <em>desystemization, </em>whether it's queer theory or anarchism or an empowerment of labor and the disenfranchised. <br><br>It is easier to bullshit than it is to articulate a truth. But the truth lasts. And that's not because debate works (it doesn't) or because reactionary forces will go quietly (they won't). Ironically, I think that reality will pervade over the simulacra because people are apathetic: they want <em>some</em> kind of answer, but they don't really care what the answer is. It takes a lot longer to find the real answer, but the real answer has a way of sticking around. Because it's the one answer that won't devour itself whole. <br><br><br></div><h1>Nine</h1><div>Mathematicians all seem to agree that the only true proof of a theory is its elegance. Eventually, when an idea is understood, it takes on its most elegant possible form. Before then, you get ugly fumbles towards a truth, and you get <em>seeming</em> elegances which don't hold up, but neither of those is an obstacle, exactly, to the elegant truth. Because the truth exists before we know how to see it—and once it's glimpsed, there's no longer any reason to look away.<br><br>That kind of rhetoric is used to justify a thousand different systems of thought: philosophies, religions, rules of etiquette, artistic theories. Many of the systems it props up are bullshit; the rhetoric sounds nice, and therefore we decide that whatever it's used to support must be nice too. You could draw the conclusion that that rhetoric is <em>always</em> bullshit... but with mathematics, it inherently isn't. There is an unwavering truth, and then there is that truth's expression—and the more elegant the expression, the longer it endures. It's not something you can disbelieve, because its abstractions are simultaneously purely symbolic and absolutely concrete. <br><br>That's how my favorite mystics feel about their respective faiths, and it's how I've come to feel about the world. It's not my <em>pragmatic</em> feeling: on a day-to-day level, I try to think a lot about technology, and community, and connection, and capitalism, and heterosexual masculinity (the last category of which I was assigned to mostly against my will). I try to look for the connections, the meanings, that might bring things together for other people. Sometimes I let myself have the pipe-dream hope that my work might result in significant material change to the world; sometimes I let myself be grateful to the changes I can bring to the community I have around me; sometimes I feel more isolated, and have to let myself believe that whatever I do today, however futile or pointless it might feel, might lead to something better tomorrow. But beneath all that, I think, there lies a sense that reality is worth a damn, that meaning isn't just bullshit, that solidarity and connection alone will be enough to save us.<br><br>Because one thing is indisputably true: I was most bothered by—and most obsessed with—these crude simulacra when my life felt emptiest. The fuller my life has become, the more the crudeness and fakeness of the the crude, fake things just don't affect me the same way. That seems true of everyone I know: the more alone they are, the more readily they buy into the bullshit, and the likelier they are to resort to desperate, destructive means to try and close the gap that's in their lives. That's true of the rich and the poor, the privileged and the unprivileged—and every category of person I know includes people whose lives are empty and people whose lives are full.<br><br>The one thing that I feel confident helps other people is this: <em>Give them something meaningful. Give them something real.</em> <em>That</em> is never bullshit. It is the escape from the simulacrum. And the littlest shred of it, the tiniest seed, has a way of growing and growing and growing.<br><br>I don't know how to reach the people who have the most to gain from their own bullshit, the people who most fear losing what they have. I don't know how to dismantle the biggest and worst systems, not all at once. I don't know how to find the people who are the most lost in simulation, and the likeliest to lash out against others, because they've forgotten that other people are, despite all contrary evidence, real.<br><br>But not having the answers to those questions doesn't keep me up at night. Because caring too much about answers, and too little about the questions, leads to bullshit. I don't want a simulation of an answer: I want the kind of answer that grows bit by bit, the one whose every piece feels like an extension of the last, until all at once it seems so elegant and obvious that we can't believe we didn't see it before, and abruptly forget that there was a time when we didn't take the answer for granted.<br><br>What I <em>do</em> believe—and what I hope isn't bullshit—is that it's never been easier to reach for those answers than it is now. Even if we've maybe never needed those answers as direly as we do these days. And what I hope—though this may be bullshit too—is that, in ways either big or little, I might not find those answers, but still help make those answers easier for others to find. In a sense, everything real that I've found, everything real that I know, has served as an extension of that pursuit. </div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/240822022-11-12T15:51:01Z2022-11-12T15:55:03ZWhere desire leads, beyond the moment.<div class="trix-content">
<div>For a long time, I struggled with the Buddhist concept that desire leads to suffering. It felt severe to me, harsh, even a little bit inhuman. Sure, I've suffered over desire—haven't we all?—but I didn't want to <em>stop</em> feeling desirous. The people I know who tried to live that austere, meditative life didn't strike me as wise or particularly liberated: if anything, they seemed disconnected with themselves, afraid of some of the most basic parts of who they were.<br><br></div><div>But I'd misunderstood (and so did they, I think). It's not <em>desire</em> that leads to suffering. Desire leads to <em>attachment,</em> and <em>attachment</em> leads to suffering. Attachment: when you stop living through your own eyes, and start living in your head. When <em>what you have</em> is not enough, because of <em>what you want.</em> When here-and-now starts to feel miserable, because you imagine somewhere else, you imagine a future that might not come to be, and here-and-now seems mean and impoverished by comparison.<br><br></div><div>Trite as this feels to say, desire is a joy when you enjoy it. When the fact of wanting is a pleasure in and of itself, you are <em>at peace</em> with your desires. You owe nothing to them, lose nothing. You are free to live alongside your wanting, influenced by it only by the fact that you're happy right where you are.<br><br></div><div>I'm not a fan of the phrase "live in the moment." It, too, seems to be spoken a lot by people who are short-sighted and lost, and it gets used as a justification for some extremely asinine ways of living. But there's a similar sentiment that I like a lot, which I feel cuts back on a lot of the horseshit. It's the notion that utopia is <em>right here and right now.</em> It is not some faraway dream for you to cling to. It's not the potential for the world to turn into something else. The only potential you've got is what you have right where you are, right in this moment. And it's only when you appreciate it—both what you have and what you <em>don't</em> have, both the eases and the hardships—that you can work with it <em>as it is,</em> instead of letting it pass by for the sake of something that may be coming down the line.<br><br></div><div>Paradise is <em>what could be.</em> It's not what could be <em>later,</em> though. It's what could be <em>right now.</em> Somehow, the thought of that is <em>more</em> overwhelming than the thought of dreaming of the future—turns out there's a lot more opportunity in the present than <em>any</em> of us feel comfortable with. But it's noticing that, and appreciating it, and finding ways of doing <em>something</em> with it and <em>celebrating</em> it, that make the days sweeter, and life longer, and the harder parts a little easier to work with.<br><br></div><div>The people I've been happiest with are the ones who enjoyed what we had together in the moments that we had it. The ones I've been the most miserable with didn't give a fuck about right now: none of it mattered, except for the thought of what it might lead to later. Similarly, sometimes I want people so wretchedly that it makes me miserable, because all I can <em>think</em> about is what I might have with them one day—and the possibility of <em>not</em> having it, and the question of why it <em>wouldn't</em> happen (which leads inevitably to self-loathing). These days, I'm much better at wanting people <em>just</em> for what they are to me, and what I have with them. Sometimes that leads to much richer and more decadent things; sometimes it goes nowhere. Either way, I'm happy. It's a pleasure just to be with them, just to want them as they are right now—and if they go, it's a pleasure to wave farewell, knowing how lovely it's been to have even a little of them in my life.<br><br></div><div>Sometimes, a certain kind of person gets suspicious when I enjoy being with them. They accuse me of having an ulterior motive. It's not that I <em>seem</em> to be hiding something from them that sets off their alarm bells—perversely, it's the fact that I don't seem to be concealing anything at all. Where am I trying to get with them? What do I <em>want</em> from them? Where is all this leading? It's harder for them to accept that I sincerely mean it when I say that I'm happy with this, right here and right now, and am not thinking too hard about a minute from now. What's there to think about? One way or another, we will get there.<br><br></div><div>What took me a while to understand—and what I worry most about <em>not </em>understanding—is that, for some people, the pleasure of the present moment is <em>only</em> the hope it gives them for the future. Whatever delights they're feeling now pale before the possibilities they're imagining; their joy comes from picturing what's next. The slightest deviation from that possibility, the littlest potential threat, plants a pit of dread in their stomach. They're craving a stability they can't find, because the stability they want is an unbroken path spanning years into the future: a guarantee that they will comfortably sail towards some destination that's too far away to physically see. The gentlest turbulence becomes deeply unsettling, because any shift in their "calculated" course threatens to lead them thousands of miles away from where they wanted to wind up.<br><br></div><div>Of course, it isn't calculation. There's no strategy to it, no tactics. Only a blind faith in a fairy tale, and a prayer that someone else could make that fairy tale come true. They <em>need</em> someone else to do it, and they spend their lives waiting for the right person to come along and make it happen, because none of it is about what they would like to <em>do.</em> It is purely about what they'd like to have happen all around them. They're a passive consumer of their own life, and the most they can think to do is leave a sour Yelp review when the thing that happens isn't just the thing they want.<br><br></div><div>This all sounds harsh, but I don't mean it harshly. I sympathize with people who work like this, because of course I've been this person too. When you feel powerless, every little hurt rips into you like your heart is an overripe fruit—and of <em>course</em> you feel like you're doomed by fate, unable to change a thing. I felt powerless. But I felt powerless because I failed to comprehend what power <em>was.</em>I'd been hurt by people who left me feeling small, so I imagined that power meant feeling big. I'd been made to feel weak, so I imagined strength. I'd been unable to stop the things that happened to me, so what I imagined was control: forcing the world around me into place, and keeping it there. And when I wasn't perfectly strong, utterly vast, entirely in control—and of course I never was, because I'm human—all I could do was fantasize about something <em>else</em> coming along, a great power that could right all my wrongs, undo all my certainties, and left me live the life that I'd imagined.<br><br></div><div>None of that is power. Or I should say: none of that is <em>deep</em> power. Power, I came to realize, is presence: it's living in your own shoes, in your own head, in your own life, in your own body, in your own world. Power is <em>embracing</em> where you are, and who you are, rather than shunning and denying it. It is recognizing that you are strong and you are weak; you are big and you are small; you are in control, and you are adrift in a vast storm. I don't exactly believe in souls, but I'd still describe power as ownership over your own soul: taking possession of yourself, letting yourself be who and what you are, and rejoicing in it—regardless of what other people feel and think and do.<br><br></div><div>When we suffer, we dissociate. We try and leave ourselves behind... and sometimes we never come back. When the moment is painful, we leave the moment. When the world feels like a burden, we leave the world behind. But anyone who's ever healed from this kind of hurt, anyone who's found their way back to themselves, knows that the healing itself can make you cry. The healing is a gentle kind of pain: it's letting yourself feel what you denied yourself back then, letting yourself take ownership of it bit by bit, feeling the tenderness that you tried to cut off, the life that you tried to suffocate, letting it hurt because you <em>are</em> hurting, as much as you <em>were</em> hurting, because the hurt will never end unless you let it hurt. The hurt is hidden down a series of abandoned passageways that we never let ourselves go down, the once-vastness within us slowly growing cold and narrow and dark, until we're stuck in a single cramped room, trying not to feel claustrophobic, because every other place in our house has been taken over by the demons that we fear. All that we have left is the most wretched kind of hope: the kind that we <em>must</em> externalize, some outside force that we invent to believe in, because we've given up all hope that we will ever believe in ourselves.<br><br></div><div>This vision of paradise is a violent one, though we never admit its violence. Power, by contrast, is a gentleness, even amidst all the turbulence, even amidst the suffering. It's the difference between denying something and letting it go: to say farewell, you must embrace it. And the power lies in the courage of that embrace. The power is letting yourself hold what you're afraid of holding, feel what you're afraid of feeling, trusting that, whatever it is (and whatever it <em>isn't),</em>it will not destroy you. It <em>can't</em> destroy you. Only you can do that to yourself. Self-destruction is the one of the only two real powers that we have—the other being, of course, daring to let yourself remain alive.<br><br></div><div>The exuberance of desire can mean two things. I love one, and am deathly wary of the other. The one I'm wary of is the fierce, frenzied "happiness" of somebody who believes that <em>they may have found a way to escape</em>—a way to stop being themselves. To them, it feels like freedom, but it is doomed to collapse into a new sense of self-annihilation. Because their exuberance, even in the moment, is a kind of self-destruction: it is a confession that what they desire is not somebody or something, but the possibility that the object of their desire will destroy them, and build them into something new.<br><br></div><div>The other kind of exuberance is gentler: it doesn't thrash. It's more the smile of a creature in the sun: an all-encompassing embrace, lingering on every moment. It needs nothing; it doesn't need to go anywhere. All it wants is what it has right here.<br><br></div><div>Both kinds of desire lead to motion; with a little experience, you can set the two apart. The one kind of motion is like a sales pitch. It's cunning; it's a maneuver. It wants to make the next thing happen. It tries to seem cool and unstudied, utterly unflappable, but this masks a profound agitation. Attempt a moment's patience with it, test it for even the length of a long breath, and it will suddenly lunge out and try to rip you to pieces. The other motion, by contrast, is patient and unhurried. It stretches out like a plant unfurling towards the light. It is an <em>extension</em> of this moment, a <em>continuation,</em> building upon what's already there, loving and respecting everything that's presently in place, as its roots crawl deeper and its buds start to blossom out. Everything stays in place, even amidst all of the movement.<br><br></div><div>These are the two interpretations of desire: the two potential visions of what comes next. One is the attachment that leads to suffering. The other is unattached, because it isn't quite desire—it is <em>attainment.</em> Attainment, not of what you hope comes next, but of what you've found already. It is peace, both with what moves and with what doesn't. It is the opposite of severe or repressed; lack of attachment is not the same thing as abandonment. If anything, it is what all healthy commitment is founded on: a commitment, not to uprooting, but to letting things remain as they are, while accepting that they will also change. Its vision of the future is a vision of the present moment; its paradise is already here. <em>All is well, all is well, all is well.</em> Even the parts that aren't okay, paradoxically, are okay. What hurts is what heals, and vice versa. <em>All is well, all is well, all is well.<br></em><br></div><div>It is a privilege, and a fortune, to feel desirous. The bounty lies, not in the payoff, but in what you feel right here and now. Let it linger. Don't try to change it. This wanting is part of the beauty; when you can look someone in the eyes and thank them for what they've given you, and mean it, before they feel they've given you anything at all, then you have what it takes to be happy with them. Not just to find happiness <em>in</em> them, but to bring happiness back to them too. And if they look at you suspiciously, if they ask you what your game is, if they ask what on <em>earth</em> you want to happen next... you can say with a straight face, "I'm not sure. What would <em>you</em> like to have happen?" The deepest joy is to help somebody find what they already have—to share, and to rejoice with them, and to bask, in everything that is already here.</div><div><br></div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/238782022-11-02T12:35:40Z2022-11-02T12:59:18ZDissecting the new White Lotus intro, because I can<div class="trix-content">
<div>I can't stop listening to the new theme to season 2 of <em>The White Lotus,</em> which has been playing on repeat ever since it popped into the iTunes store halfway through Monday. I also keep watching <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fN7JGL0Pzc&themeRefresh=1">the new <em>intro</em> to <em>The White Lotus</em></a>, because—in my opinion—it is a glorious masterpiece that deserves to be taught in schools. This might just be the endorphins talking.<br><br>Anyway! Let's look at all the lovely fun things that happen in it, just because we can.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
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</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 1:</strong> A dandy man doin' all gentlemanly shit with a dandy lady. Note the dagger piercing the two wedding rings on the bottom right, though that's so obvious we don't need to dwell too much on it.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
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<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSGJiWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--c3a2910f90ac4381aac8e2d9dff616be163019d0/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.39.50%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.39.50 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSGJiWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--c3a2910f90ac4381aac8e2d9dff616be163019d0/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.39.50%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSGJiWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--c3a2910f90ac4381aac8e2d9dff616be163019d0/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.39.50%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 2: </strong>A <em>seeming</em> detail-to-pan shot of the original portrait, which was shown so quickly that you could imagine you simply failed to notice the jealous lady peering off in the wings. But nope! Already this intro is fucking with you.<br><br>Look at the jealous lady's sour face. I love her pursed lips and furrowed brows. Even her pearl necklace is sour, somehow. I adore her. I would totally buy her at least four drinks.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.46.47 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.46.47 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996533443" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVBrWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--52560febbae118e74a84f0670f2f6e10eb40b5c5/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.46.47%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVBrWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--52560febbae118e74a84f0670f2f6e10eb40b5c5/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.46.47%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.46.47 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVBrWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--52560febbae118e74a84f0670f2f6e10eb40b5c5/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.46.47%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVBrWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--52560febbae118e74a84f0670f2f6e10eb40b5c5/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.46.47%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 2A: </strong>Above the painting-as-already seen, this monkey tries to escape the lady whose room he's caged to. We will get more adorable animals, fear not. None of them are very happy.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.48.18 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.48.18 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996534641" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSEhwWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--d985e520d9db56baf45fcb7dd2760cd4fbcce64e/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.48.18%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSEhwWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--d985e520d9db56baf45fcb7dd2760cd4fbcce64e/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.48.18%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.48.18 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSEhwWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--d985e520d9db56baf45fcb7dd2760cd4fbcce64e/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.48.18%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSEhwWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--d985e520d9db56baf45fcb7dd2760cd4fbcce64e/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.48.18%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 3:</strong> A lad serenades a lady with some bagpiping. She does not look particularly impressed. Meanwhile, his yapping dog looks about ready to hump.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.49.26 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.49.26 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996535548" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUHpzWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--73c771d4404dba5a39db87e7470030e09e94ed62/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.49.26%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUHpzWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--73c771d4404dba5a39db87e7470030e09e94ed62/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.49.26%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.49.26 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUHpzWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--73c771d4404dba5a39db87e7470030e09e94ed62/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.49.26%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUHpzWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--73c771d4404dba5a39db87e7470030e09e94ed62/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.49.26%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 3A:</strong> Cherubs!!!<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.50.10 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.50.10 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996536218" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSnJ2WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--d32b6dd0f571fe7d8df26eb22ed10a5402b22ccf/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.50.10%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSnJ2WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--d32b6dd0f571fe7d8df26eb22ed10a5402b22ccf/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.50.10%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.50.10 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSnJ2WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--d32b6dd0f571fe7d8df26eb22ed10a5402b22ccf/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.50.10%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSnJ2WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--d32b6dd0f571fe7d8df26eb22ed10a5402b22ccf/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.50.10%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 4: </strong>A sexy pegasus, watching over...<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.50.36 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.50.36 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996536571" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUHZ3WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--a48251fe85772c80d67fc781905314e0a7a2e898/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.50.36%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUHZ3WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--a48251fe85772c80d67fc781905314e0a7a2e898/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.50.36%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.50.36 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUHZ3WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--a48251fe85772c80d67fc781905314e0a7a2e898/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.50.36%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUHZ3WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--a48251fe85772c80d67fc781905314e0a7a2e898/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.50.36%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 4A: </strong>...a nice young couple and their ass.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.51.08 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.51.08 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996537065" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT255WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--ff0efd85ac95ae2fbf9b1da98db615b751c88d6e/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.51.08%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT255WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--ff0efd85ac95ae2fbf9b1da98db615b751c88d6e/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.51.08%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.51.08 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT255WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--ff0efd85ac95ae2fbf9b1da98db615b751c88d6e/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.51.08%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT255WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--ff0efd85ac95ae2fbf9b1da98db615b751c88d6e/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.51.08%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 5: </strong>I had several reviews spoil for me that Tom Hollander's arc is, at least in part, "Delightful catty gay man introduces Jennifer Coolidge to his cadre of catty gays," so... these are the catty gays, I guess.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.52.16 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.52.16 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996538002" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSkwyWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b7d12e76bfb9b88ee27351662ddfcbf27603a2ed/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.52.16%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSkwyWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b7d12e76bfb9b88ee27351662ddfcbf27603a2ed/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.52.16%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.52.16 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSkwyWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b7d12e76bfb9b88ee27351662ddfcbf27603a2ed/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.52.16%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSkwyWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b7d12e76bfb9b88ee27351662ddfcbf27603a2ed/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.52.16%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 5A: </strong>Sabrina Impacciatore's frazzled hotel manager gets to be part of the cadre too. This feels fitting.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.53.21 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.53.21 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996538933" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRFg2WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--a9c3e5403d50daf2336c6ba68fa9e30d833afb47/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.53.21%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRFg2WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--a9c3e5403d50daf2336c6ba68fa9e30d833afb47/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.53.21%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.53.21 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRFg2WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--a9c3e5403d50daf2336c6ba68fa9e30d833afb47/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.53.21%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRFg2WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--a9c3e5403d50daf2336c6ba68fa9e30d833afb47/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.53.21%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 6: </strong>Man kneeling (groveling?); boat taking off.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.53.56 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.53.56 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996539364" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT1Q3WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2b86a9ee397e4ab575e987558dab199870446353/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.53.56%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT1Q3WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2b86a9ee397e4ab575e987558dab199870446353/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.53.56%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.53.56 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT1Q3WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2b86a9ee397e4ab575e987558dab199870446353/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.53.56%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT1Q3WlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2b86a9ee397e4ab575e987558dab199870446353/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.53.56%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 7: </strong>Another stealth edit! Everyone else has vanished; now the woman is dropping this necklace into the sea. Guy does not look pleased about it.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.55.00 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.55.00 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996540140" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT3orWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f7fe66d2a806cdcc2f123bb297aed7c9f480bf42/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.55.00%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT3orWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f7fe66d2a806cdcc2f123bb297aed7c9f480bf42/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.55.00%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.55.00 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT3orWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f7fe66d2a806cdcc2f123bb297aed7c9f480bf42/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.55.00%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT3orWlRzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f7fe66d2a806cdcc2f123bb297aed7c9f480bf42/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.55.00%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 8: </strong>Theo James.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.55.26 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.55.26 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996540516" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCR1FBWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7c39cb7cc3adc9714577318f3c3305d9970b2cdd/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.55.26%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCR1FBWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7c39cb7cc3adc9714577318f3c3305d9970b2cdd/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.55.26%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.55.26 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCR1FBWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7c39cb7cc3adc9714577318f3c3305d9970b2cdd/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.55.26%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCR1FBWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7c39cb7cc3adc9714577318f3c3305d9970b2cdd/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.55.26%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 8A: </strong>No, really, Theo James. And a deformed man and/or monkey, cowering before Theo James' majesty. (Unless... the <em>man-slash-monkey </em>is Theo James?? Idk, it makes you think.)<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.56.32 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.56.32 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996541491" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRE1FWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--28af8ea2e5dadd8c8e1345918cf627c756364313/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.56.32%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRE1FWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--28af8ea2e5dadd8c8e1345918cf627c756364313/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.56.32%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.56.32 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRE1FWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--28af8ea2e5dadd8c8e1345918cf627c756364313/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.56.32%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRE1FWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--28af8ea2e5dadd8c8e1345918cf627c756364313/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.56.32%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 8B: </strong>Above the statue, one bird kicks the crap out of another bird. The ambiguity of which of these birds is Aubrey Plaza mirrors the ambiguity of whether or not Aubrey Plaza intends to fuck and/or murder Theo James.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.57.37 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.57.37 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996542404" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVFIWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--cafe418d5c97e0e75f307f9e6f1a7c4021f40dc0/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.57.37%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVFIWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--cafe418d5c97e0e75f307f9e6f1a7c4021f40dc0/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.57.37%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.57.37 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVFIWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--cafe418d5c97e0e75f307f9e6f1a7c4021f40dc0/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.57.37%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVFIWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--cafe418d5c97e0e75f307f9e6f1a7c4021f40dc0/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.57.37%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 9: </strong>Wistful girl; unwistful goat.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.58.29 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.58.29 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996543173" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVVLWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--4fc8c503b36e528eab3161cfd2a63c7af13384fd/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.58.29%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVVLWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--4fc8c503b36e528eab3161cfd2a63c7af13384fd/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.58.29%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.58.29 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVVLWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--4fc8c503b36e528eab3161cfd2a63c7af13384fd/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.58.29%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTVVLWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--4fc8c503b36e528eab3161cfd2a63c7af13384fd/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.58.29%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 10:</strong> Two cuts of this lad and lass. Is that lil scrawl above her hand meant to imply that she's turning his bowl of decorative wheats down?? Only time will tell.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.59.39 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.59.39 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996544076" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRXdPWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b3d030b342e0eae05bcfb09055585cb28838ac8a/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.59.39%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRXdPWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b3d030b342e0eae05bcfb09055585cb28838ac8a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.59.39%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 7.59.39 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRXdPWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b3d030b342e0eae05bcfb09055585cb28838ac8a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.59.39%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRXdPWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b3d030b342e0eae05bcfb09055585cb28838ac8a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%207.59.39%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 11:</strong> Leopard with fish.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.00.22 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.00.22 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996545160" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSWdTWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2e59651e5b3ab1b1d0ab15b1a8f7e62ead97b526/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.00.22%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSWdTWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2e59651e5b3ab1b1d0ab15b1a8f7e62ead97b526/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.00.22%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.00.22 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSWdTWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2e59651e5b3ab1b1d0ab15b1a8f7e62ead97b526/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.00.22%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSWdTWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2e59651e5b3ab1b1d0ab15b1a8f7e62ead97b526/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.00.22%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 12: </strong>Suggestive Boys.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.01.07 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.01.07 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996546931" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSE1aWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f9f6b6aa6eaccbb351af80d6f61b4d71f334731c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.01.07%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSE1aWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f9f6b6aa6eaccbb351af80d6f61b4d71f334731c/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.01.07%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.01.07 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSE1aWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f9f6b6aa6eaccbb351af80d6f61b4d71f334731c/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.01.07%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSE1aWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f9f6b6aa6eaccbb351af80d6f61b4d71f334731c/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.01.07%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 13: </strong>An androgynous lad and/or lass, now crushed by a bowl of decorative wheats. (Yes, I know that isn't wheat. Shut up. My point is, it's symbolic. It's symbolic is my point.)<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.02.16 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.02.16 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996549777" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSkVrWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--21bfc53382a0152e36218ea37c08533178d64e3d/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.02.16%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSkVrWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--21bfc53382a0152e36218ea37c08533178d64e3d/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.02.16%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.02.16 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSkVrWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--21bfc53382a0152e36218ea37c08533178d64e3d/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.02.16%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSkVrWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--21bfc53382a0152e36218ea37c08533178d64e3d/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.02.16%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 14:</strong> if I knew more about Italian art, I might have something interesting to say about the presence of sphinx-y pegasi watching over couples. Sadly, I know very little about anything.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.03.27 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.03.27 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996552279" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRmN1WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bafc7e53aa3c5485b8d7eb5d061df69c8fc29ea7/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.03.27%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRmN1WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bafc7e53aa3c5485b8d7eb5d061df69c8fc29ea7/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.03.27%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.03.27 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRmN1WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bafc7e53aa3c5485b8d7eb5d061df69c8fc29ea7/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.03.27%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRmN1WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bafc7e53aa3c5485b8d7eb5d061df69c8fc29ea7/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.03.27%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 15: </strong>The monkey is so angry to be wearing clothes! Perfect thing to announce the costume designer alongside, imo. Also, his collar is identical to the other monkey's collar. Could this be the same monkey?? Have we met this goat before??? Mysteries like this are what make <em>The White Lotus</em> so compelling, when you think about it<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.05.11 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.05.11 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996555557" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQ1U3WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--1d058248f2d83e1a95511bbf1113f785ee9dc4bf/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.05.11%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQ1U3WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--1d058248f2d83e1a95511bbf1113f785ee9dc4bf/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.05.11%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.05.11 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQ1U3WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--1d058248f2d83e1a95511bbf1113f785ee9dc4bf/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.05.11%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQ1U3WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--1d058248f2d83e1a95511bbf1113f785ee9dc4bf/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.05.11%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 16:</strong> Establishing a broader landscape, before...<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.05.45 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.05.45 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996556545" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQUUvWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f66cfa6dd3641af6933e848e8dab0645325c73f2/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.05.45%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQUUvWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f66cfa6dd3641af6933e848e8dab0645325c73f2/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.05.45%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.05.45 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQUUvWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f66cfa6dd3641af6933e848e8dab0645325c73f2/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.05.45%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQUUvWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--f66cfa6dd3641af6933e848e8dab0645325c73f2/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.05.45%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 16A: </strong>...a horny old man harasses a young woman...<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.06.16 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.06.16 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996557517" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTTFDWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2a2b2ce205905095fd55f94dae7dcd0019d0ef7f/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.06.16%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTTFDWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2a2b2ce205905095fd55f94dae7dcd0019d0ef7f/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.06.16%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.06.16 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTTFDWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2a2b2ce205905095fd55f94dae7dcd0019d0ef7f/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.06.16%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTTFDWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2a2b2ce205905095fd55f94dae7dcd0019d0ef7f/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.06.16%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 16B: </strong>...while, just outside of the original frame, a virile young man gets some.<br><br>We wonder what the man with the walking stick is thinking, and this creates tension. Is he giving the lucky couple some privacy out of politeness? Or is he so fascinated by horny-old-man drama that he simply fails to notice? Perhaps John M. Valerio, ACE could lend some illumination on this subject.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.08.37 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.08.37 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996560985" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRmxRWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--993816cda086204a47275ec1372dbbdb4ab7b99b/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.08.37%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRmxRWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--993816cda086204a47275ec1372dbbdb4ab7b99b/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.08.37%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.08.37 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRmxRWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--993816cda086204a47275ec1372dbbdb4ab7b99b/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.08.37%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRmxRWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--993816cda086204a47275ec1372dbbdb4ab7b99b/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.08.37%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 17: </strong>Okay, but now we're at the part that got me obsessed, obviously—and not just because of the incredible beat drop that happens midway through this sequence. First, we get a majestic city on fire, ominous, impactful...<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.09.41 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.09.41 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996562653" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTjFXWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bbb9c1c73fd34014c84e840e8951740766dd858e/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.09.41%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTjFXWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bbb9c1c73fd34014c84e840e8951740766dd858e/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.09.41%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.09.41 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTjFXWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bbb9c1c73fd34014c84e840e8951740766dd858e/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.09.41%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTjFXWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bbb9c1c73fd34014c84e840e8951740766dd858e/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.09.41%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 17A: </strong>...as a lone fisherman observes, poignant, fearful, contemplative...<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.10.36 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.10.36 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996563904" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTUJiWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--084840dca838b11b2699b538522b30f31928347a/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.10.36%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTUJiWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--084840dca838b11b2699b538522b30f31928347a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.10.36%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.10.36 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTUJiWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--084840dca838b11b2699b538522b30f31928347a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.10.36%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTUJiWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--084840dca838b11b2699b538522b30f31928347a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.10.36%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 17B: </strong><em>...and this guy's getting head. </em>Drop that beat. Look at him, symbolically ignoring the city b—wait, what's this?<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.12.03 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.12.03 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996565753" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUGxpWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bbf410a1d5de7971d20dc6a3437dfd6c520cefa3/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.12.03%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUGxpWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bbf410a1d5de7971d20dc6a3437dfd6c520cefa3/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.12.03%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.12.03 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUGxpWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bbf410a1d5de7971d20dc6a3437dfd6c520cefa3/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.12.03%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCUGxpWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--bbf410a1d5de7971d20dc6a3437dfd6c520cefa3/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.12.03%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 17C: </strong><em>Goat fucking. </em>God, is this the best sequence of pans in cinematic history? I think it just might be.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.12.53 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.12.53 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996566832" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCREJuWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--8d38b0885ecd83a5b60634044402efcc3ec2d35a/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.12.53%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCREJuWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--8d38b0885ecd83a5b60634044402efcc3ec2d35a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.12.53%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.12.53 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCREJuWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--8d38b0885ecd83a5b60634044402efcc3ec2d35a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.12.53%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCREJuWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--8d38b0885ecd83a5b60634044402efcc3ec2d35a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.12.53%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 18: </strong>This might be the single funniest bit in the whole intro, though. You need to see it in motion to get why, and to appreciate the repeated dramatic zoom cuts. <strong><em>HOLES</em></strong>, the cinematography is saying. <strong><em>HOOOOLES.</em></strong><br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.15.03 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.15.03 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996569523" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTE54WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b18c4727f694d9131c866d466b964bc89e8d86e7/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.15.03%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTE54WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b18c4727f694d9131c866d466b964bc89e8d86e7/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.15.03%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.15.03 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTE54WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b18c4727f694d9131c866d466b964bc89e8d86e7/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.15.03%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTE54WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--b18c4727f694d9131c866d466b964bc89e8d86e7/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.15.03%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 19:</strong> The horniest and most sapphic statue to date. Meanwhile...<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.15.39 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.15.39 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996570350" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTzUwWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--cc2a795b936beba0ea5904d8aabf2042e69224db/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.15.39%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTzUwWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--cc2a795b936beba0ea5904d8aabf2042e69224db/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.15.39%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.15.39 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTzUwWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--cc2a795b936beba0ea5904d8aabf2042e69224db/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.15.39%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTzUwWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--cc2a795b936beba0ea5904d8aabf2042e69224db/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.15.39%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 19A: </strong>We are past the point where <em>The White Lotus</em> owes us any subtlety. The Goats Have Fucked; the naked man will stab the boar beneath the two beautiful lady-statues. (A couple continues bickering, in the distance.)<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.16.53 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.16.53 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996572023" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSGQ3WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--9239ceaa55feb4bf3b47fce719c89f8307a460a6/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.16.53%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSGQ3WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--9239ceaa55feb4bf3b47fce719c89f8307a460a6/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.16.53%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.16.53 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSGQ3WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--9239ceaa55feb4bf3b47fce719c89f8307a460a6/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.16.53%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSGQ3WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--9239ceaa55feb4bf3b47fce719c89f8307a460a6/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.16.53%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 20: </strong>The stabbed man falling down the stairs is one thing, but the absolutely feigned surprise of the woman behind him is where it's at. "Oh <em>my!"</em> she says politely, half-yawning.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.18.10 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.18.10 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996573607" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCS2VCWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--c3db51f47d89711df7a03a7b4e3ef1a5f91fac27/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.18.10%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCS2VCWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--c3db51f47d89711df7a03a7b4e3ef1a5f91fac27/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.18.10%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.18.10 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCS2VCWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--c3db51f47d89711df7a03a7b4e3ef1a5f91fac27/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.18.10%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCS2VCWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--c3db51f47d89711df7a03a7b4e3ef1a5f91fac27/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.18.10%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 21: </strong>Some more classic sexual jealousy. It's so fun to juxtapose Lady MacBeth imagery with elegant depictions of blowjobs. I love this show so much.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.19.20 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.19.20 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996574794" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRXFHWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--9ec719814ef897ad163bf10f0a5225a7ac895ded/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.19.20%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRXFHWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--9ec719814ef897ad163bf10f0a5225a7ac895ded/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.19.20%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.19.20 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRXFHWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--9ec719814ef897ad163bf10f0a5225a7ac895ded/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.19.20%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRXFHWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--9ec719814ef897ad163bf10f0a5225a7ac895ded/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.19.20%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 22:</strong> A man points, possibly at a statue or a hornt animal or someone who just got shot.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.20.50 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.20.50 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996576530" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQktOWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2f346ff1c591d99a97946576420f8da092cd8562/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.20.50%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQktOWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2f346ff1c591d99a97946576420f8da092cd8562/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.20.50%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.20.50 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQktOWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2f346ff1c591d99a97946576420f8da092cd8562/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.20.50%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQktOWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2f346ff1c591d99a97946576420f8da092cd8562/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.20.50%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 22A: </strong>Watch out, dude!!!!!<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.21.19 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.21.19 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996576981" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTldPWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7e0904b96acf7aac66ca1b8ce4ab6171dd8c9d36/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.21.19%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTldPWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7e0904b96acf7aac66ca1b8ce4ab6171dd8c9d36/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.21.19%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.21.19 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTldPWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7e0904b96acf7aac66ca1b8ce4ab6171dd8c9d36/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.21.19%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCTldPWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7e0904b96acf7aac66ca1b8ce4ab6171dd8c9d36/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.21.19%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 23:</strong> They forgot to give Zeus his title card. Sorry: Jupiter.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.22.05 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.22.05 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996577806" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQTZTWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7303a64dfe1441e93e66e2f1d0d1d5f96c1b28b1/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.22.05%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQTZTWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7303a64dfe1441e93e66e2f1d0d1d5f96c1b28b1/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.22.05%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.22.05 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQTZTWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7303a64dfe1441e93e66e2f1d0d1d5f96c1b28b1/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.22.05%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQTZTWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--7303a64dfe1441e93e66e2f1d0d1d5f96c1b28b1/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.22.05%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 24:</strong> The horny fountain. Instantly iconic.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.22.45 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.22.45 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996578463" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSitVWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2384cd0478ad9ac91fb74904b6987790607de259/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.22.45%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSitVWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2384cd0478ad9ac91fb74904b6987790607de259/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.22.45%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.22.45 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSitVWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2384cd0478ad9ac91fb74904b6987790607de259/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.22.45%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSitVWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--2384cd0478ad9ac91fb74904b6987790607de259/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.22.45%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 25: </strong>See, this is why art criticism matters. The fool sees this shot and says, <em>Fountain. </em>The wise one sees this shot and says, <em>Ejaculate.</em> This subtle imagery can only be appreciated by the finest minds.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.24.23 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.24.23 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996579961" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSG1hWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--8777d9e5c24176f59249b54405d35bb3ab00584a/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.24.23%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSG1hWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--8777d9e5c24176f59249b54405d35bb3ab00584a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.24.23%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.24.23 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSG1hWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--8777d9e5c24176f59249b54405d35bb3ab00584a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.24.23%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSG1hWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--8777d9e5c24176f59249b54405d35bb3ab00584a/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.24.23%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 26:</strong> The lotus is finally seen!<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.24.51 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.24.51 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996580521" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCS21jWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--032b917bba143b9748430979ebdc3e504f70a223/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.24.51%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCS21jWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--032b917bba143b9748430979ebdc3e504f70a223/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.24.51%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.24.51 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCS21jWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--032b917bba143b9748430979ebdc3e504f70a223/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.24.51%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCS21jWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--032b917bba143b9748430979ebdc3e504f70a223/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.24.51%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 26A: </strong>At this point, when you see a bunch of men and women and dead animals in one place, you can't help but wonder: what are these decadent fuckers gonna do next? <em>The White Lotus</em>, ladies and gents!<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.27.57 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.27.57 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996583806" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSDZwWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--68ac946ee9b5c77ed1235ee7e1405edb9f88932d/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.27.57%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSDZwWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--68ac946ee9b5c77ed1235ee7e1405edb9f88932d/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.27.57%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.27.57 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSDZwWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--68ac946ee9b5c77ed1235ee7e1405edb9f88932d/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.27.57%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCSDZwWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--68ac946ee9b5c77ed1235ee7e1405edb9f88932d/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.27.57%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 26B: </strong>Executive producer Mike White Lotus! God, it's great that HBO feels bad for canceling <em>Enlightened</em> and just shovels money at him by way of apology. Thank you, Mike White! Thank you, lotus-tending ladies!<br><br>The most interesting part of this sequence, though, is that we get detail shots of the left and bottom of the original painting, but not whatever's happening with those naked dudes on the right. Also, please note: the Aubrey Plaza bird duel seems to be back.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.30.04 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.30.04 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996585836" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCR3l4WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--606e4004444b7822c5773fcfde4b3c2467f955e9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.30.04%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCR3l4WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--606e4004444b7822c5773fcfde4b3c2467f955e9/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.30.04%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.30.04 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCR3l4WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--606e4004444b7822c5773fcfde4b3c2467f955e9/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.30.04%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCR3l4WmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--606e4004444b7822c5773fcfde4b3c2467f955e9/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.30.04%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 27: </strong>Nero fiddled while Rome burned, alright. <em>On the skin fl—</em>you know what sometimes it's best to leave it as subtext.<br><br>Also, you don't actually fiddle a flute?? This is art class, not music class. We are studying art, which means studying symbolism, which means learning that a bunch of rich people are about to fuck their way into body bags. <em>The White Lotus</em> is a sitcom.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
<a download="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.32.04 AM.png" title="Download Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.32.04 AM.png" data-click-proxy-target="lightbox_link_blob_996589064" href="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQWkrWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--732477f4ad84d0fb4dcf6035c319169614cc80f5/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.32.04%20AM.png?disposition=attachment">
<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQWkrWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--732477f4ad84d0fb4dcf6035c319169614cc80f5/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.32.04%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-11-02 at 8.32.04 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQWkrWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--732477f4ad84d0fb4dcf6035c319169614cc80f5/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.32.04%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/41ecc653/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQWkrWmpzPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--732477f4ad84d0fb4dcf6035c319169614cc80f5/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-11-02%20at%208.32.04%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 28: </strong>There they are! The squabbling couples and one bird. Welcome to Sicily, thank you for watching.<br><br>Oh wait, one last sneak edit: <br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
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</figure><br><br><strong>Shot 29: </strong>Gotta let the monkeys have their day.<br><br>This concludes our analysis of <em>The White Lotus: Eurotrip.</em> Stay safe out there, folks.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/238732022-11-01T20:07:55Z2022-11-01T20:07:55ZAre poptimists hipsters? An investigation<div class="trix-content">
<div>I spent a year of my life—specifically, my freshman year in college—fascinated by hipsters from afar. I was at a dull school, wondering how on earth my life was supposed to begin, and I lived close enough to New York City that I could imagine a more exotic life happening just beyond my grasp. I couldn't imagine the world of art, culture, and riches that the Internet suggested was happening out there. And enough people within that world spent enough time complaining about hipsters that I found myself anxiously wondering which of the people I was following were "real" and which were not. <br><br>Who was I <em>supposed</em> to find interesting? Was I letting myself be suckered by a bunch of snake oil salesmen from a distance? Was I simply too cut off from anything real or interesting or good to even know what the "correct" things were to like?<br><br>In retrospect, this anxiety of mine <em>was</em> what defined the so-called hipster: a fear of trusting your own preferences. Judgment could come from so many different directions that the thought of liking something became a little paralyzing; the dream was to find something so compelling, on every possible level, that you could enjoy something and feel beyond reproach. (Of course, whenever someone <em>did</em> discover something like that, news would spread like wildfire, which created a new reason to hate that thing, forever sullying its potential to be a Genuinely Enjoyable Thing.)<br><br>A year later, I was living in a major city, surrounded by art students with the hippest and weirdest tastes imaginable. And I learned what should have been an obvious truth from the start, which is that people like all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, and that youth are doomed to always be confused; some people like obscure things because they're very peculiar people, and other people like them because they enjoy treasure hunting, or because they started from a deeply unusual vantage point. In any event, I'd started to learn that some things just <em>spoke</em> to me, and I made some friends who seemed to respond to the same kinds of thing that I did; over time, I found great ways to discover things that I loved, and stopped thinking about the matter all that much.<br><br>That was about the time that poptimism surged into the mainstream. Poptimism started out as a response to the kind of dipshit dude who insisted that rock n' roll was the only "authentic" kind of music, particularly compared to the sugariness of pop; it insisted that pop music not only had value in and of itself, but was capable of saying serious things about the world around us. Over time, this ballooned beyond pop <em>music</em> to become a statement about pop culture in <em>general:</em> it embraced that which was mainstream, and gave as much attention to hit TV shows or Disney films as previous cultural movements paid to relatively niche subcultures like shoegaze or the Young British Artists. That was perfectly timed to coincide with the rise of streaming services, which helped collapse culture into an increasingly top-heavy configuration. The biggest musicians in the world started taking up more and more space, aided by services like Spotify; hit TV shows were not only available on demand for a fraction of the price of cable, but generated endless memes, permeating every corner of our culture with almost no latency.<br><br>This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you! It was just a Thing. And while most Things do get annoying with overexposure—which is part of <em>why</em> people have found themselves irritated by earworms since the advent of radio—there are certainly a lot of interesting aspects to pop culture. And there's nothing wrong about simply enjoying things to begin with: you're allowed to like what you like, and there's not much point to thinking less of other people for what <em>they</em> like. Especially since, with virtually <em>anything</em>, the deeper you dive the weirder it gets.<br><br>But with the rise of poptimism came a certain backlash to people who <em>weren't</em> fundamentally concerned with pop culture—and a kneejerk backlash to anyone who would dare criticize it. This, not poptimism itself, is where things get interesting to me. <br><br>Over the years, I've developed a neurotic dislike of being called "pretentious." I'm fine with being called picky, or snobbish, or opinionated, or even elitist; it's just "pretentious" that sticks in my craw. That's because I only encounter that word from one kind of person: the kind that assumes I only like what I like, or think what I think, as an excuse to judge or belittle other people's preferences. The undercurrent of the accusation is always: <em>Oh, you think you're </em>better<em> than me, huh?</em> And it's almost always offered as a substitution for actual conversation. I'm not accused of <em>not listening</em> or <em>not taking someone seriously:</em> the charge is that I <em>only like things as a form of social maneuvering.</em> Which offends me less because it's false—though it is—than because I spend an awful lot of time obsessing <em>quite naturally</em> about the weird shit that I find interesting. Ironically, when that very-central aspect of my personality gets overlooked or dismissed, it feels very easy to feel like the person I'm talking with either isn't listening to me or isn't taking me seriously—or that they're approaching our conversation as, well, a sort of social maneuvering.<br><br>In other words, it's a cynical accusation of cynicism. Which is surprisingly similar to the old hipster conversation, for all it pops up on the opposite end of the cultural spectrum from the place the hipsters used to dwell. <br><br>(Or does it?)<br><br>I've been thinking recently about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE">the old Jon Stewart appearance on <em>Crossfire</em></a>, the one that eventually got <em>Crossfire</em> canceled. (Man, remember when Tucker Carlson was just a harmless blowhard in a bow tie?) What made it so shocking, and so compelling, was that Jon Stewart kept trying to have a <em>sincere conversation</em>—and that the thing he wanted to be sincere about was this crazy idea that politics wasn't just a team sport, and that treating it like just another flavor of entertainment might be culturally corrosive. And the two hosts of <em>Crossfire</em>, Tucker especially, just could not take him seriously. <em>What's your angle?</em> they kept seeming to say. <em>What's your motive? What game are you playing?</em> They just couldn't fathom the idea that Stewart meant what he said—and that exposed, somewhat jarringly, just how little they believed anything that <em>they</em> were saying. It was all positioning, positioning, positioning. The words they used were tactics, not substance. They no longer seemed to believe that anything <em>could</em> be real.<br><br>That was the alleged hipster in a nutshell. That was the thing that made people so despise the word "irony" for so long. <em>The hipster wasn't real</em>. All their tastes were part of a game with Byzantine rules, one that was so up its own ass that you'd have to be a hipster just to know what you were playing. They treated subcultures like chess pieces: they didn't want to <em>enjoy</em>, they wanted to <em>impress</em>. They wanted to be photographed with the right microcelebrities at the right underground concerts. You were supposed to be impressed with who they namedropped—and if you <em>weren't</em> impressed, well, that was proof that you were too lowbrow to know you were supposed to be. It was one giant game of gatekeeping, one whose only reward was... well... not losing. <br><br>Funnily enough, it was never the "hipsters" that I knew who worked like this. I found this behavior far more commonly among geeks. Gamers would try to impress each other with their knowledge of obscure RPGs, or offbeat pen-and-paper games; comic book fans would get outright hostile with one another while discussing Batman's least-known villains. The science fiction/fantasy readers I knew were a lot more aggressive about their favorite authors than the people I knew who were busy reading Dostoyevsky, or discussing Junot Díaz books. Generally speaking, the biggest distinction I saw was between people who dedicated themselves to <em>single</em> cultures and people whose tastes were more omnivorous; the monoculture people tended to be a lot more arrogant about the supremacy of their chosen tastes, and a lot more paranoid about the idea that the cosmopolitan sorts were looking down their noses at them. (The "fake gamer girl" meme was a good microcosm of this: how <em>dare</em> someone enjoy a few games <em>but also enjoy other things</em>, and maybe look attractive while doing so??)<br><br>Both types of people have interesting patterns to their tastes. The more obsessive you get about a single culture—ask me how I know—the more you start appreciating highly particular traits in the individual pieces that you consume. Things that feel more generic, or less heightened, put you off because you've simply encountered it before. The broader your tastes get, on the other hand, the less likely it is that you'll be consumed by a single kind of culture <em>just</em> because it exists: you're operating with a wider palate, and may be less taken by one particular innovation within one particular movement. On the other hand, the things that <em>do</em> grab you may well be less interesting to the true devotees, because you appreciate things which to them have long since lost their flavor.<br><br>Pop culture makes for a particularly interesting sort of monoculture. It's never <em>truly</em> monocultural, since by its nature virtually everybody is exposed to it, and people with all sorts of interests find they enjoy one big thing or another. But it also serves as a <em>default</em> monoculture of sorts: if you're not particularly curious about a particular facet of culture, it's <em>the</em> likeliest thing you'll run into. <em>The Big Bang Theory</em> was not an especially good sitcom, but it was an exceedingly popular one, so it was likely that, if you watched exactly one sitcom, that was the one you'd wind up watching. Billboard 40 music functions as a genre in and of itself—albeit one that shifts around in interesting ways—and it's possible to wind up listening to little else. Pop is simultaneously broad and narrow. It <em>subsumes</em> a broad variety of other cultures, but is monocultural in and of itself.<br><br>Moreover, pop has increasingly incorporated <em>geek</em> culture under its umbrella. Marvel and Star Wars have become major institutions, while somehow convincing the old comic-book geeks that they're still connoisseurs of niche products. The cottage industries that pop up around popular shows—podcasts, episode-by-episode recaps, wikis—feel like a mainstream variant of what used to be geek-only behaviors. Word-by-word dissection of song lyrics, which became especially common around hiphop's multilayered allusions and wordplay, became regular habit for fans of BTS and Harry Styles and Taylor Swift. Obsessions are encouraged. More than encouraged: they are <em>enabled</em>, masterfully engineered, by corporations with big budgets who can afford to craft entire experiences around products they think might make them billions-with-a-b. Pop culture can literally afford an appreciation that's simultaneously broad and deep. In the same way that social networks manipulate their users into never quite losing their focus, Netflix can algorithmically calculate how to keep its viewers invested, while pop stars engineer their every look to maximize online discussion. Attention is a resource—and what is culture if not our collective attention?<br><br>But it's not just about the numbers. Rather, on some level it's about other <em>kinds</em> of numbers: the aggregated scores that critics give various products, on sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. On these sites, even critics who <em>don't</em> offer easily-quantifiable ratings have their reviews reduced to numbers; Rotten Tomatoes decides whether an individual review is a rave of a pan, while Metacritic goes a step forward and decides whether an individual piece of writing feels more like a 70% or a 75%. These numbers inspire tremendous aggression: it's been 15 years since Jeff Gerstmann was fired for daring to give a game a tepid review. Nowadays, critics who pan the wrong product can be attacked or even assaulted by fans who can't bear to see a product get 99% consensus rather than unanimity.<br><br>That's not such a big problem, though, because corporate interests have discovered the formulas that <em>do</em> prompt critics to say nice things. About a decade ago, every Disney film started to receive rave reviews; it's rare that a product under the Disney umbrella—meaning Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel—will get a Rotten Tomatoes score below 80%. (For a while, even sub-90% scores were rare.) They cracked the code, so to speak, and figured out what blend of wit, narrative pacing, emotional turn, and satisfactory resolution would consistently make critics <em>just</em> happy enough that consensus leaned Fresh rather than Rotten. TV shows enjoyed similar coding, at least for a time (though television reviewers seem more fickle than film reviewers overall, perhaps because of how much time they need to dedicate to every individual show). AAA game designers have long known how to ensure the satisfaction of their fans.<br><br>This consensus-manufacturing extends to <em>political</em> consensus—because content creators know that critical appreciation is increasingly linked to a sense that a given product is "good" for the world. That's how you get <em>Black Panther</em> as politically radical filmmaking, Taylor Swift as queer icon, and the faux-academic writing style that I used to associate with sites like Tumblr, which put a shallow "intellectual" patina on convoluted arguments that a given mass-media product is <em>actually</em> highly woke, feminist, or bisexual. This flavor of politics is easy to codify, because it is literally formulaic: its output is as patterned as a meme because it <em>is</em> a meme, and you can reduce political advocacy to a series of broad symbols that serve as wards, ensuring that nobody can <em>actually</em> take issue with your product without being accused of being bigots themselves.<br><br><a href="https://world.hey.com/horses/a-long-goodbye-d86961f2">I touched upon this last year,</a> when I touched upon the Scorsese-vs-Marvel controversy that still seems to be ongoing. Scorsese's criticism of Marvel was that it had reduced filmmaking to product design, stripping it of what he felt was vital to cinema; Marvel fans responded by claiming that Scorsese was <em>literally a sexist</em>, strip-mining his movies for proof that his mission in life was to demean and degrade women. The issue isn't that it's wrong to take issue with Scorsese's depiction of women—it's that, as with <em>Crossfire</em>, the accusation was tactical rather than substantial. Nobody cared whether or not Scorsese was actually misogynist—hell, <em>Martin Scorsese fans</em> have more serious debates about his misogyny. The accusation was intended to invalidate Scorsese without refuting him, ignoring whether or not he had a point to dwell instead on whether or not he had a right to be listened to at all.<br><br>This is a prime example of what <a href="http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf">Harry Frankfurt</a> calls bullshit: a statement that's made, not because it's true or even because it's a useful lie, but because it pushes an image. The person who makes the statement isn't lying, exactly, because they don't <em>care</em> whether what they're saying is true or false. Validity is beside the point. What matters is steering the conversation towards one thing and away from another.<br><br>Tom Scocca touched upon this in his iconic 2013 spin on Frankfurt, <a href="https://www.gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977">"On Smarm."</a> In it, he looked at the connection between positive-reviews-only culture and the quantity-as-quality argument for cultural assessment: it is better to be positive than negative, and on top of that, if <em>this many people</em> like something, it must be good! "Smarm" was his term for something that claimed to be earnest and anti-cynical, while simultaneously being extraordinarily cynical. It seems innocent to say that everyone's opinions are equal, because on some level that's completely true; it seems harmless and even beneficial to say that, <em>because</em> everyone's opinions are equal, it's wrong to dismiss other people's opinions, which again is true for <em>some</em> interpretations and not others. It's easy to extend from that to saying that people shouldn't spend time voicing negative opinions, which makes a bullshit equivocation of "criticism" and "dismissal" (and of "a thing" to "people who like that thing"). And then you're left with the proposition that, if all opinions are equal, then the <em>only</em> true assessment of anything is popular opinion. Because something liked by <em>more</em> people—and thereby more equally-valid assessments of quality—must objectively be better than something that's liked by <em>fewer</em> people. Voila: quality is a myth. It's the kind of postmodern language game beloved by the exact sorts of people who claim to hate postmodern language games, because it's savvy enough not to use the word "postmodern."<br><br>Perversely, this means that poptimist logic is identical to hipster logic. The hipster sought media that was critically unassailable by searching for things which, in their obscurity, could make a claim to "authenticity." The poptimist seeks media that's critically unassailable by claiming that only the <em>least</em> obscure things are authentically, verifiably likable. A "poser," to a hipster, was anyone who claimed to like something that would <em>otherwise</em> be "authentic" for the sake of their own image—a claim you could make of anybody who liked anything you couldn't otherwise dismiss. "Pretension," to a poptimist, is liking something simply because you like it, rather than liking it because you can prove that other people like it too.<br><br>There's an anxiety at work in both cases: a fear, not just of criticism, but on some level of powerlessness. It's the insecurity that your opinion is meaningless unless you can "justify" it somehow—and that, conversely, <em>you</em> will be meaningless unless you can keep yourself from being dismissed. It's the same paranoia that defines much of geek culture, that sense of persecution, of being beset on all sides. Unsurprisingly, it's a paranoia that also manifests itself across political classes, whether you're alt-right or progressive left or extremist center. (Although this paranoia is backed up by genuine persecution in some cases, and by bullshit "persecution" in others. My sympathy is with the ones who genuinely suffer, for some reason.)<br><br>In 2008, the historian Gregory Afinogenov <a href="https://www.metafilter.com/73760/Hipster-The-End-of-Wester-Civilization#2204627">left a comment</a> on the community weblog MetaFilter, offering his perspective on the phenomenon of the hipster. Hipsterdom, he said, was a tremor caused by the collapse of "authenticity" as a concept: by the belief that no culture could ever be "genuine" again, because every counter-culture is immediately subsumed by capitalism and turned into a product, just as subculture can be subsumed by pop culture and turn into pop.<br><br></div><blockquote>[Hipsterdom] cannot appeal to authenticity; it plays with surface, with collage, with costume—with everything "superficial." But of course this could never be innocent while capitalism was around to sell it everything it needed. Thus hipsterdom stopped being a "counter" culture on any substantive level at all: there has almost never been a group of non-mainstream youth so invested in the preservation of the system, for all their Naomi Klein platitudes. <br><br>Hipster self-hatred is the return of the repressed appeal to authenticity. After all, hipsterdom incorporated into itself all of its predecessors. The self-hatred, then, is the condemnation of everything it stands for by the value systems it inherited—which provide the only semblance of a normative content hipsterdom can ever manifest. This means hipsterdom is constantly at odds with itself, unable to resolve the contradiction between its countercultural heritage and its thoroughly capitalized rejection of authenticity. Authenticity, within hipsterdom, is a zombie—dead, yet unkillable, and always threatening.<br><br>This contradiction lies behind the most familiar elements of hipster culture. Pabst, high-school sports T-shirts (until recently?), Bruce Springsteen, old vinyl, trucker hats--all these are the paraphernalia of a world where authenticity could be easily and unproblematically assumed, the earnest and unpretentious vanished world of the blue-collar male. Of course, this is ironic: in searching for authenticity hipsterdom once more encounters only its superficial, external expressions. (This was Derrida's point, in a way. The hipsters are looking for authenticity, "presence," but can only seem to reach it by constructing a "supplement," which seems like a pretty good facsimile of the real thing until you realize that it never resolves the aporia, the gap between the authentic and the fake, which made it necessary to begin with.)<br><br>Is there a future for the counterculture as a social formation? I don't think so. <strong>The hipsters mark the point where rebels stop selling out and start buying in.</strong></blockquote><div><strong><br></strong>He was writing this shortly before the advent of poptimism. Looking back, it almost feels like he's describing hipsters as a <em>necessary precursor</em> to poptimists: the Disney/Marvel/Netflix world is what we get once that self-conscious struggle gives up. Capitalism is culture; culture is capitalism. There is no longer any need to ask whether there's something uncomfortable with letting our society revolve around consumption, or with letting it be mass-produced. The numbers clearly prove that everything's okay.<br><br>The thing is, I was never curious about hipsters because I wanted to be <em>right.</em> Sure, I picked up some self-consciousness and some anxiety along the way, but that was a byproduct of what I <em>really</em> wanted: <em>discovering cool things. </em>I wanted to know what movies and what music and what books were out there; I wanted to know what <em>people</em> were up to, because I was trapped in a place where nobody was up to <em>anything</em>. And if I reacted strongly to someone dismissing something that I liked, it wasn't with defensiveness but with hope: maybe something <em>even neater</em> was out there, and if it was, I wanted to know about it. <br><br>We are not in the best place these days, culturally and politically speaking. But that hasn't stopped people from doing tremendously fascinating things. Most of the people I know who are making art still struggle; plenty of them feel like the stabilizing institutions they might once have depended on are gone. Maybe we're on the verge of a genuine collapse, where artists stop being able to create meaningful culture altogether. But I doubt it. Art and culture have a remarkable tenacity: they thrive even as things fall apart. The urge to create something worth a damn is rooted in something deeper than profitability, or even popularity. Substance is more than merely tactical. So long as it remains true that <em>some things are just worth saying</em>, people are going to find a way to say it.<br><br>I find some pop culture tepid, because... well... I do. Sometimes I'd argue that something feels <em>objectively</em> shallow or insufficient to my liking; other times I simply like the things I like. I'm dismissive of plenty of niche things, too: you can't go to art school for three years without concluding that a lot of artists are just dumb as rocks. But it's not controversial to dislike things when nobody else likes them. Controversy starts when you dislike things that other people like.<br><br>I'm not sure I ever really knew a hipster. I get the sense that the "real" hipster culture was either happening slightly farther away from me, or it peaked when I was still a teenager, and that I hit adulthood at a time when "hipster" was a meme rather than flat-out reality. To the extent that I ever found a "real" kind of hipster, it felt like yet another subset of geek culture, albeit one where the manner of geekery was more oblique than most. But regardless of subculture, the main issue I have is always with bullshit: the confusion of image and substance, the refusal to treat genuine enjoyment as valid, the insistence that genuine criticism or dislike is somehow inauthentic or not allowed.<br><br>Afinogenov was right when he said that there is no longer a <em>singular</em> authentic culture. (His point, after all, is that "authenticity" was always a bit of a trap to begin with.) But thoughts and feelings are inherently authentic. Your response to things <em>is</em> a kind of authenticity, whether impulsive or considered. These are the building blocks of any kind of cultural connection; culture is <em>created</em> when we begin to take an interest in <em>each</em> <em>other's</em> reactions, leaving ourselves open to evaluations and responses which were not ours.<br><br>Good artists, I have long since learned, are typically both fiercely open-minded and passionately opinionated. This is not a contradiction: you can be curious about things <em>and </em>hold strong opinions about them, once you get over the idea that the point of opinions and tastes is to "win." Similarly, some kinds of namedropping are a contest, or a kind of dismissive gatekeeping; other times, people reference things because <em>they care about those things</em>, and would love nothing more than to introduce you to those worlds. It's kind of hard to talk about culture without talking about culture. It only ever <em>feels</em> like everybody's on the same page when, well, you're caught up in a monoculture.<br><br>Recently, <a href="https://twitter.com/calebgamman/status/1583474726797979649">a video went viral</a> of a twentysomething man demonstrating his uncanny ability to tell which Taylor Swift songs were produced by Jack Antonoff, a producer who has worked with many popular musicians over the last ten-to-fifteen years. <a href="https://defector.com/the-internets-biggest-jack-antonoff-hater-explains-himself/">In an interview with Defector</a>, he talked about both how he was able to identify Antonoff productions—a visceral hatred mixed with a genuine enthusiasm in music theory—and came off as genuinely enthusiastic about the subject (and not too cruel towards Jack Antonoff, to boot). I found one strain of response to this interview especially disheartening: people accused him of "not really liking" music, of being too "detached" to genuinely enjoy things, of being—as Taytay might put it—a hater. His feelings, in other words, weren't "real" feelings: they were proof that he just disliked things that other people liked, for no other reason than to belittle people who likes them. A cynical accusation of cynicism, as I keep putting it.<br><br>It bummed me out because this truly is a dead-end road. It's infinitely more dismissive than just hating on Antonoff: it insists that there's no possible way for someone to dislike music for something as pedestrian as its sound, or for them to form opinions merely by listening to something. It takes something that I find interesting—sometimes Caleb Gamman can detect an Antonoff song just from the way Taylor Swift <em>inhales</em>—and asserts that <em>it is not possible to find this interesting</em>, because there cannot <em>possibly</em> be anything substantial there, because nobody who holds this opinion can possibly mean what they say.<br><br>It's that <em>Crossfire</em> interview all over again. <em>What's his angle? What's his motive? What game is he playing?</em> Nobody would say this just because they <em>mean</em> it. <br><br>The old Onion joke about <a href="https://www.theonion.com/two-hipsters-angrily-call-each-other-hipster-1819568370">two hipsters angrily calling each other hipsters</a> works when both parties are acknowledged, from a distance, as plausible hipsters. The poptimist, by contrast, not only claims not to be a hipster but would insist that <em>by definition</em> they cannot be one. They alone have the authority to proclaim other people hipsters, because they alone are demonstrably authentic; theirs is the only taste that lies beyond reproach, quantifiably and even <em>ethically</em> so. They alone can truly speak with the voice of the people. They alone are unassailably pure.<br><br>Sounds pretty hipster, if you ask me.<br><br><strong>Poptimists: </strong><em>pretentious<br></em>QED</div>
</div>
Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/238482022-10-31T12:38:26Z2022-10-31T12:40:25Z"Hey, Siri."<div class="trix-content">
<div> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
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</a>
</figure><br><br>She lives in your hotel, but she only leaves her room at night. Her life consists of her bedroom and the hotel kitchen—nothing outside, nothing in between. She doesn't want to talk to you. She doesn't want to talk to anyone.<br><br><em>else Heart.Break(),</em> released by Erik Svedang in 2015, is a uniquely lonely game. Most characters in it say very little to you. When you've exhausted their dialogue, they fall completely silent: clicking on them to talk with them is about as productive as clicking on a rock. Almost all conversations consist of small talk. This is a game where one of the closest things to connection you can find is a young man who will talk to you while he's on drugs, to offer you drugs, and to talk about the drugs he's taken. (He's a sweet kid, really.)<br><br>The irony is that, in <em>else Heart.Break(), </em>you are virtually a god. Every object in the game is reprogrammable: you can rewrite a cup of coffee to unlock doors nearby you when you sip it, or redesign a turtle to turn it into a bloodhound. Its world is astoundingly dense, and full of layered secrets—most of which you'll never come across by following the game's overarching story.<br><br>The one thing you can't change is people.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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</a>
</figure><br><br>Let's talk about that story briefly: once, and then never again. In <em>else Heart.Break()</em>, you are Sebastian, an awkward twentysomething who still lives with his not-exactly-loving parents. You get a job in distant Dorisburg, selling a type of soda that nobody in town really wants. (And the douchebag who hired you isn't really all that keen to make your acquaintance.) While you're there, though, you stumble upon something wondrous: for some reason, this town seems to be half-digital. People can literally see the code that makes it operate, and tweak it to their liking.<br><br>Predictably, this leads you to a confrontation with an evil dystopian corporation. Even more predictably, you get into all of this because you meet a girl at a nightclub.<br><br>The girl: Pixie. Her shitty neglectful boyfriend: Ivan. It's all so cut-and-dry.<br><br>Only it isn't. You can save the day, but you can't get the girl. In fact, saving the day means her kicking you out of town—for your own good, of course. Ivan remains. Hell, the one time you "crack the case" and track Pixie down to her secret cyberpunk renegade underground hideout, she accuses you of stalking her. Which is fair, because... well... you stalked her.<br><br>Nobody cares that you're here. They are lonely, but they're not waiting for you. You are an outsider, literally and figuratively. Trying and failing to sell shitty sodas is the most empowering option you've got. Well, that and rewriting the fundamental rules of this universe, until its every door opens for you and you alone. (Again, literally <em>and</em> figuratively.)<br><br>Dorisburg is littered with floppy disks. People keep their notes on them—and their diaries, too. Their inner worlds, their favorite poems, notes on revolutions, the things that trouble them, the struggles that define their relationships with other people... all of it can be found, these blogs that are scattered across this cluttered physical world, clues to the mysteries that these people will never solve for you. Questions that kick off new mysteries—not all of which will ever be resolved.<br><br>You can read them. It doesn't matter. <em>The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask</em> iconically offered you an item called the Bomber's Notebook, which tracked every townsperson in its world, giving you a way to help each one with their respective sorrows. The world could be healed, person by person, even if your constant time-travel meant the healing was inevitably undone. <em>else Heart.Break()</em> has no Bomber's Notebook; you can learn things about people that they've never tell you to your face, and your reward is... nothing. You are still an outsider to them.<br><br>Plenty of people in this world program it too: they sit by their computers day and night, working on projects you can't fathom. Some of them seem to be pursuing other coders, ones who've vanished, ones you'll only ever know by name. A few of them are dwelling on the ominous fact that parts of this world seem to be dissolving, replaced by pulsating neon abstractions that might be spreading. None of this is part of the story. It hangs in the air, unspoken and unaddressed. Whatever these people discover, whatever adventures they'll get into once you leave, are not yours to experience. All you'll ever get to know of them is their silence as they type and type and type away, exploring worlds unseen and unknown.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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</a>
</figure><br><br>You too might find yourself lost in abstraction. The power you hold over this world is amazing: there is potential, not just to be powerful, but to be <em>creative. </em>The entire town is a circuitboard, waiting for you to program it. You could reprogram a single door in every map to return you to a centralized hub, letting you travel anywhere from anywhere. (I once turned a cruise ship into my secret base: the door to every passenger's room led me to a different critical location.) You could rewire a security computer to target streetlights nearby you, flashing as you walk by them—or speaking the locations of other characters out loud, rewriting the entire town to serve as a personalized panopticon. <br><br>There are no "rewards" for doing this, apart from seeing just how much you can get away with. (My younger sister was briefly the world record holder for <em>else Heart.Break()</em> speedruns, utilizing a script she wrote that, among other things, literally placed a crucial character in Sebastian's pocket.) Given enough coffee—or given a programmable sink that can rewrite your coffee for you—you can do away with your need for sleep, which means doing away with your hotel room altogether. You can stay up for days straight, working on projects of yours in real-time. When you see the outside world, it might be dawn or afternoon or midnight. Life is slipping you by, but that's okay: there was nothing out there for you anyway. Your parents won't notice if you go missing. Nobody will notice. You walk into the other coders' rooms and it doesn't matter that they won't speak to you, because you've stopped trying to speak to them anyway. Pixie can't break your heart if you never talk to her at all.<br><br>Which brings me back to Siri, the lonely woman trapped in your hotel.<br><br>Siri doesn't touch computers. She paces her bedroom during the day, or lies in bed with her eyes open. She'll sneak into the hotel kitchen late at night, but this minor, harmless transgression is the closest she gets to taking action of any kind. Unlike most characters, you can talk with her more than once; she'll talk with you once a night, unless you seem threatening or judgmental in any way, in which case she'll back off.<br><br>These conversations are stiff at first, but slowly they blossom, until they're as close to "real" dialogue as this game gives you. She eventually asks you what your favorite kind of music is—believe me when I say that, by <em>else Heart.Break()</em> standards, this is absolutely meteoric. Two days later, she asks whether she can talk to you about something. You agree, and she pauses, and then... she changes her mind. This is the last conversation you and she will ever have.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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</figure><br><br>It is possible to parse through the game's own files—how meta!—and find one final conversation you could have had with Siri. I've never been able to work out how to trigger it; it seems to happen if you're on the verge of leaving Dorisburg, and stop by to see her and say goodbye. You might have asked her to come with you; she would have refused, of course. But there's one line in the files, seemingly disconnected from all the others, that hints at something never seen, never discussed, never implemented.<br><br><em>"You'll never have to be afraid of him again,"</em> you would have said.<br><br>She'd still say no. And then you'd leave, with just another heartbreak added to the pile.<br> <br>As things stand, it's hard to even know where exactly this line fits in. Was Siri originally intended to tell you something extra? Does <em>him</em> refer to a man you've met in this town, a man you've walked past and tried to talk to, or would it have been somebody far away, never seen and never named? Is this the reason why Siri hides out in her room during the daytime? Is this why she sits alone every night?<br><br>There are no answers: not in the game, not tucked away on floppy disks, not even in <em>else Heart.Break()</em>'s cryptic program files. All you're left with is the closest thing to a "gamelike" moment you can share with someone in this world: the one thing you have to work towards, night after night, in order to achieve. A moment where someone <em>almost</em> opens up and tells you something, <em>almost</em> gives you what might have been an answer or a reason or an explanation, enough to ask you whether or not you'd let her say it to you... and finds out that she can't.<br><br>In this world, you can do anything but anything. You can put another person in your pocket, but they'll never tell you who they are.<br><br>You are the protagonist. You are at the center of the world. You are God.<br><br>And like God, you are alone.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/238222022-10-29T21:19:50Z2022-10-29T21:23:34ZOn the luminous ground.<div class="trix-content">
<div>I've been rereading Christopher Alexander's <em>The Luminous Ground</em>, the fourth volume of his magnum opus <em>The Nature of Order</em>. His first three volumes are what you might call pragmatic and secular: they focus on properties of composition that might be used to create more fulfilling—literally more <em>alive</em>—architecture, and on how these properties might be put into practice by people trying to breathe more life into the world. <em>The Luminous Ground</em>, on the other hand, is explicitly a somewhat religious book: Alexander apologizes for this, and the book is his attempt to express his theories in as secular and non-mystical a way as possible, but he is nonetheless dealing with what might be called a spiritual dimension, and re-evaluating his own school of thought as a potentially religious concept.<br><br>It's important to note that I think the actual "fifteen properties" that <em>The Nature of Order</em> revolves around are among the most breathtaking and illuminating ideas I've ever encountered. I first encountered them on <a href="https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/fifteen.htm">this delightfully-still-unfinished page</a>; even incomplete, accompanied by the vaguest possible images, something about his system of thinking was utterly compelling. Furthermore, Alexander was a <em>working</em> architect, one who consistently tried to apply his theories to the actual buildings he made. And <a href="https://www.patternlanguage.com/gallery/gallery.html">his work</a> is, indeed, lovely in a way that I find hard to articulate; it is all simultaneously modest and striking, comfortable and energizing at the same time. The easiest way to put it might just be that <em>it works</em>, in the way that the most charming places in the town I grew up in, or the city I live now, simply give me a place that I like to call home. The difference is that, in Alexander's work, that sense of charm and livability extends to every corner of every room—because it was, in fact, created intentionally and from the ground up.<br><br><em>The Luminous Ground</em> is Alexander's attempt to explain what his work seeks to achieve, and to reconcile it with our physical understanding of the universe. Because it's important to Alexander, as a mathematician and scientist, to respect all possible intellectual pursuits of reality—if anything, his argument is that science has been exploited to create an <em>anti-</em>intellectual atmosphere, one in which possible interpretations of the world must be rigorously tested under laboratory conditions; the ones that can't be tested are considered not only "unproven" but actively uninteresting and distasteful. Which isn't to say that he then spent any time trying to justify alternative medicine or homeopathic remedies, because his critique was not conspiratorial in nature. It was that science can breed incuriosity, and moreover is better at examining certain subject matters than others. It should not be inherently discrediting to be curious about things which science can't easily study, yet a certain STEM or anti-theistic mindset is scornful of anything that exists outside its "rationalist" purview—often to the point of dogma and irrationality.<br><br>(This is all my way of saying: please don't take my specific interest in Christopher Alexander as an endorsement of other spiritual or religious theories, or as an endorsement of science-skepticism in general.)<br><br>What Alexander posits is that there is a kind of being—the "ground"—which could be thought of as a single, unified "Self." Rather, the phenomenon which we call life, including both biological life and human consciousness, is an extension <em>of</em> this ground, which means that our very notion of a "self" dips into this broader kind of being. When certain experiences make us feel, not just more alive, but <em>more like ourselves,</em> it is because we are encountering the very thing that defines <em>us</em>, and feel ourselves literally expand in the process. When you find yourself in a beautiful clearing in the woods and get the sense that, somehow, the clearing <em>is</em> you, or that you are an extension of the clearing, it is because you and the clearing are made of the same stuff, on a level in which there <em>is</em> no such thing as separateness. You both belong to the same ground, so to speak.<br><br>This is obviously a little bit handwavey, and way more woo than I could ever be comfortable with. Thankfully, the same is true of Alexander, who both apologizes for the nebulousness of his articulations and searches for ways to bind this theory to more concrete studies. One of his ongoing experiments involved showing a plethora of people pictures of various works—some of which he deemed "lifelike," others of which were visually striking, award-winning, even popular, but didn't meet his definition of lifelikeness—and asking them which they felt more <em>resembled </em>them. Not which one they thought was more beautiful or interesting or fun: which one they thought most seemed like their sense of <em>what they were like as a person.</em> What he found was that, while people's interpretations of beauty or interest varied wildly, their interpretation of "self" remained shockingly constant: they would respond more to the lifelike buildings every time.<br><br>This test is still quite handwavey, but Alexander goes on—which is where his fifteen properties come into effect. He takes pains to analyze these buildings, not even as architecture, but as <em>mathematical compositions, </em>studying them for the various concrete patterns which define their deeper structure. And what he shows, across <em>The Nature of Order</em>, is that deceptively simple works of architecture contain astonishing layers of patterning, ones that turn out to mirror far more overtly ornate buildings whose designs nonetheless seem to follow the same deeper logic. (<a href="https://archive.org/details/AForeshadowingOf21stCenturyArt/page/n2/mode/1up">An earlier book of his</a> studies different eras of Turkish rug design, and finds the same patterns popping up within their weaves—notably during a period where rug patterns <em>were</em> explicitly seen as an attempt to depict the deeper nature of God.)<br><br>Essentially, Alexander argues that it's not just some psychological trick that certain places, certain paintings, and certain musical compositions hold a profound and seemingly-universal appeal. He makes an effort to demonstrate that these works' impact transcends individual cultures, and that different cultures seem to come to the same fundamental expressions, even when their starting points are initially quite different from one another. It has nothing to do with highbrow or lowbrow, or with rural or urban mentalities, or with intellectual versus emotive manners of expression: all of these are capable of reflecting that innate sense of self, and all of them are capable of alienation from it. His emphasis on mathematical observation of hidden things lets him both formally study things which are often seen as unworthy of study, <em>and</em> suggest that "sophistication," in this particular sense, is an abstract concept that has next-to-nothing to do with <em>formal</em> or <em>cultural</em> sophistication. His manner is erudite, but not elitist.<br><br>When I call this a theory of the "divine," or say that it is fundamentally a spiritual and even religious notion, I don't mean that it's an argument for or against the existence of God—at least, not as "God" is conventionally interpreted. At some point, Alexander more-or-less makes clear that this <em>is</em> his conception of God, and that it is the <em>whole</em> of his conception: there is no sentient divine creature that exists beyond this "luminous ground." And it is possible to interpret all of the major religions using this conception, without doing their notions of divinity a disservice. (Personally speaking, Alexander made it far easier for me to both understand and appreciate the meanings behind various faiths, even as I disagree with other versions of "God" enough to still identify as an atheist.) If God is the name for this deeper sense of existence, this unified and universal sense of self, then you can say quite soberly that we are a reflection of God's image or that certain experiences take us closer to the divine than others. But you also, just as importantly, never <em>have</em> to: you can cut God out of the equation altogether, and treat this as a way of observing the world or even just mathematical and architectural patterns, without its being blasphemy in the slightest. Alexander doesn't want you to <em>believe </em>in the sense of devoting yourself to a faith; he wants you to <em>believe</em> in the sense that you find this theory leads you to interesting insights and observations, and might lend itself to practical application.<br><br>At the end of the day, he says, his only goal was pragmatic: he simply wanted to <em>make better buildings.</em> It just so happens that that ambition led him to certain methods of mathematical analysis, and that he reached a point where more spiritual, mystic, even divine modes of thinking were the <em>simplest</em> ways to explain his own theories. He stresses, over and over again, that he did not work backwards from religious conception to so-called mathematical "proof," the way that numerologists devise bizarre mathematical equations to decide when some random line in the Bible means that Jesus is coming back. Rather, at some point his architectural theories reached a point of complexity that led him to say: let's <em>assume</em> that there is a layer of reality, cohabitative with and not contradictory to physical reality, which speaks to us in a somewhat universal and meaningful way. Let's assume that, when the bulk of humanity responds powerfully to certain buildings, certain parts of nature, certain melodies, certain poems, that we are not deluding ourselves to think there is something significant about that shared experience. And let's take the fact that what we're <em>physically</em> discussing is a sense of connectedness, the mathematical fact of something's pieces operating in a way that's not only unified but blurs the line between the individual parts, and ask whether or not that's connected to the <em>emotional</em> experiences that people have, the ones where they refer to a sense of togetherness, an elimination of the alienated fear that they are somehow alone and apart from the whole of existence. If we work off that assumption, do the demonstrable physical properties of this work make more or less sense? And if we start to try and <em>test</em> that assumption, forming tests to examine them—and trying as hard as possible to deal with the fact that, if these theories say what we think they say, on some level they will have to be at least a <em>little</em> subjective—do the tests at least point to the <em>possibility</em> that there's something real there?<br><br>Ultimately, Christopher Alexander's religious beliefs matter less to me than that he makes buildings that I love, and captures a feeling that I long to capture myself—a feeling that few artists in <em>any</em> medium capture as reliably as he does, let alone on such a scale that you can literally walk through and live in his worlds. The fact that he posits a new conception of reality, or suggests that, <em>because</em> of it, the thought that we might be interconnected (or transform the <em>world</em> in ways that let us feel more connected with it) can be taken more literally than we usually imagine... well, that's neat, but it's nowhere near as important to me as the fact that his fifteen properties, or the process he describes of how to procedurally create large works by letting them slowly emerge, are among the most powerful creative tools I've ever discovered. His suggestion that there might be a way to conceive of God secularly, and in a way that holds consistently across different faiths, is really cool, but sometimes he talks about what makes good poetry good, or about what it means to truly love another person, in ways that open my eyes and stir my soul and help me be a better and happier person. And the only reason I'm talking about Alexander's spiritual thoughts at <em>all</em> is that they don't exist separately from any of his other thoughts: they are a unification of all these things, the underlying fabric that connects poetry and love and architecture and art and mathematics, and they offer a vision of spiritual living as expressed <em>through</em> these other things. His idea of a spiritual life is one in which your relationship with God is articulated in the everyday mundane, and becomes the thing which makes the everyday <em>less</em> mundane in the process.<br><br>To me, that's the only way that any true God could be. If you think that God is real, it would be insane <em>not</em> to try and understand every part of your life as a reflection of that divine connection. It's a pity that most of the people who <em>try</em> to do this seem to do so in such dogmatic and lunatic ways that they make God look like a ludicrous tyrant by relation. Look: I've done too much in life to think that a singular culture's idea of faith is the literal only way to live a good life. If you can't make room in your cosmology, the way that Alexander does, for seeing a divine presence in hand-painted Harley-Davidsons, and if you can't suggest with a straight face that sometimes the spiritual nature of the world is easier to see when you're two or three beers deep, then I'm going to suggest that the world is stranger and more wondrous than you're willing to let yourself believe. And if you're trying to argue in a <em>divine presence</em>, in a being so extraordinary that it <em>transcends</em> the rest of existence, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you can only believe in God by denying yourself access to the weirdest and most delightful corners of reality.<br><br>But that's why Alexander's luminous ground delights me so. His is a worldview that <em>wants</em> to embrace diversity and strangeness and complexity, and that sees possibility virtually everywhere. He suggests that things are <em>more</em> connected than we think—and that alienation occurs, not because some lifestyles or cultures are "less Godly" than others, but because the modern world increasingly <em>rejects connection</em>, atomizing societies and isolating individuals and literally reshaping our streets and homes and rooms and buildings in ways that cut us off from one another, and from the world in which we ought to be living.<br><br>There's an anecdote in his book <em>Battle</em>, which describes his efforts to construct a high school in Japan. Alexander's plan calls for a lake in a certain part of the campus. The school's administrators aren't so sure. What's the practical benefit of this lake, or the bridge that spans it? What <em>utility</em> does it serve? Why create a lake rather than a pool, or dwell too much on a body of water at all?<br><br>But they build the lake anyway, with the proviso that the administration might change its mind later. And within days of the lake's construction, a family of ducks makes its home there. They become unofficial mascots of the school, a tiny part of campus life. In time, they make the rest of the campus their home too. And of course the administration decides they can't do anything about the lake <em>now</em>, not when the ducks have become such an essential part of what gives this community life.<br><br>Alexander points to this and says: the ducks came here because they, too, could feel the life we gave this place. By coming here, the ducks in turn brought life to this whole campus. The students responded to the ducks in ways that gave the ducks an even broader home. And the life of the students mingles with the life of the ducks, and both of those mingle with the life of the campus as a whole; and by building a lake where we built it, we tapped into a deeper wellspring of life. That wellspring <em>could</em> have been proven mathematically as a part of this campus's overall design, but it didn't have to be—because all of a sudden, there were ducks.<br><br>That's Alexander's definition of God in a nutshell: <em>Suddenly, ducks.<br><br></em>I'm still not sure that I <em>believe</em> any of what he says in <em>The Luminous Ground</em>. But he makes it easy to have faith.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/235092022-10-14T05:20:01Z2022-10-14T05:27:25ZThe rupture of the nuclear family.<div class="trix-content">
<div><em>This essay contains major, ruinous spoilers for the seventh episode of the second season of </em>Twin Peaks<em>, "Lonely Souls," which was my favorite episode of television for a good decade. I cannot convince you to care about this, other than to say that </em>Twin Peaks<em> is a show worth experiencing, and that this episode is one of the few things worth knowing nothing about beforehand. I am aware that this does not make for a compelling argument.<br><br>This essay will also hint at certain aspects of the third season of that show, but hopefully without giving away the game. That said, there will certainly be tremors.<br><br>Lastly, it will be revealed that the movie </em>Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me<em> contains at least one shot of a clock. Please steer clear if you would rather not know anything about </em>Fire Walk With Me<em>, or about clocks.<br><br>Proceed, or don't, as you wish.<br><br>______________________<br><br></em>"I just miss having a life of my own," says Maddy Ferguson to her aunt and uncle, tucked snugly between them, as Louis Armstrong plays in the background. The irony couldn't be more apparent if you underlined it with a photo of her dead cousin, which the shot conveniently does. Laura Palmer (deceased) and Maddy Ferguson (soon-to-be-deceased) are both played by Sheryl Lee; Maddy is just Laura with a brunette wig on. But for the moment, it seems like an innocent wink, just a tongue-in-cheek joke during a wholesome moment. Maddy has recently found closure amidst a disorienting love triangle; more profoundly, Leland and Sarah Palmer have found closure through the doppelgänger of their dead daughter. Maddy is leaving; perhaps this suggests that Leland and Sarah are finally ready to let go.<br><br>The shot is composed is composed strangely and serenely. The three family members seem unusually far away, shrunken down in the middle of a scene that's all about them. The camera moves slowly, gently, making the room feel larger the more it travels along. At first, the shot is foregrounded by Laura's photo; it takes a full two minutes of slow movement before it rests, at last, on the record player upon which "What a Wonderful World" is still spinning.<br><br>When Maddy is murdered, that same room is lit by a harsh spotlight. The room's spatial dimensions are all but eliminated; that space which seemed so cavernous is now abruptly claustrophobic. No efforts are made to keep the blinding white from dissolving entire portions of each frame; the camera, which still takes pains to observe rules of formal composition half the time, suddenly moves in jagged and uneven ways whenever the spotlight switches on. The framerate slows to a crawl. The room, which is part of an actual house, suddenly feels like a cheap set, while the actor's faces and mouths begin to feel disturbingly, unsettlingly real. The audio of Maddy's screams lowers until it sounds like her murderer's low growl.<br><br>All the while, the record keeps skipping. It skips, not missing a single beat, not slowing down along with the slowed-down pace of the spotlight shots. Its low hiss-and-click repeats, maddeningly, until you almost forget you can hear it. Everything feels increasingly trapped in place.<br><br>It isn't just the slo-mo shots that give you the sense that things are falling apart. From the moment the spotlight first turns on to the end of the scene, four minutes go by—four long, excruciating minutes. There is almost no discernible dialogue. There is virtually no <em>action,</em> at least not in the sense that plot beats are occurring. We are trapped in the moment of a murder, trapped in a place that feels too small, as individual moments stretch out for an eternity. (Most notably, a far-too-close-up shot of Maddy's killer sucking on her chin that lasts for twenty-one whopping seconds.)<br><br>The minute just <em>before</em> the spotlight is superbly-crafted horror, the reveal both of a killer and of a woman still in the house with him. It's supremely tense. <em>Twin Peaks</em> models itself around the twists and turns of soap operas, and here is a moment that, <em>for</em> a moment, feels like it could lead to many places, most (but not quite all) of them bad. You could imagine an unbearable, gripping situation, one in which Maddy's fate is left uncertain until the final shocking moments.<br><br>Then the spotlight rips a hole in reality and a part of you goes: <em>Ah, I see.</em> This is not a moment in a longer scene. The thing we were dreading would happen has already happened; what happens next will be anything but uncertain. Maddy Ferguson is already dead. There is no possible escape. We know it, and most excruciatingly of all, we can tell she knows it too. You can see it in her eyes, long before the moment of her actual death. She is sobbing, but she has stopped fighting. All that's left is waiting for it to end.<br><br>This is trauma made manifest. Trauma revolves around a literal rupture, a break of some kind. Survivors of trauma struggle, years later, to escape that single moment; it can feel unavoidable, even timeless. There is also, in many cases, a pre-traumatic moment of seeming inevitability: you realize what is about to occur, and you realize on some level that it cannot possibly be diverted, and the part of you that panics and tries to bolt or struggle conflicts with the part of you that wants to start resigning yourself to what's about to happen now, even before the incident has fully begun.<br><br>"Is it future," a man will ask twenty-five years later, "or is it past?" The original run of <em>Twin Peaks</em> set several scenes a quarter-century into the future; in 2017, the third season of <em>Twin Peaks</em> recreated sequences that had initially been shot in 1990 and 1991. Where are we, when one scene shows us the future from the past, and another shows us the past from the future? Are we now, or are we then? And did then come before and after?<br><br>If it feels pithy to juxtapose film commentary with traumatic events, or real traumas with fictional ones, it's important to note how seriously and carefully David Lynch depicts trauma. While his reputation is sometimes reduced down to his being "bizarre" or "dark," few filmmakers (hell, few <em>artists)</em> have spent as much time exploring traumatic experience, or covered it from as many angles. The so-called strangeness of his filmmaking often reveals itself, in due time, to be a physical reproduction of traumatic moments: an attempt to viscerally and plainly reproduce something which we only ever feel internally, and abstractly, in feelings we barely know how to express.<br><br>The pilot episode of <em>Twin Peaks</em> opens with the discovery of Laura Palmer's body. What follows is thirty minutes of the world around her slowly learning about her death: the creeping dread her mother feels as she dials number after number, trying to find where her daughter might have gone; the slow dissolution of her classroom at school, as eyes meet across the chasm of her empty seat; the cop photographing her who can't help but cry. He gets reprimanded, of course, but why <em>wouldn't</em> he cry? It feels both unusual and normal to spend so much time depicting grief: unusual, because few shows ever dwell for so long on such a fixed tone, and normal, because why <em>wouldn't</em> there be grief? Why are those who mourn the dead so often reduced to pithy sadness one-liners, then pushed to the side, so the action can begin? How many crime dramas spend as much time depicting grief across a single season as <em>Twin Peaks</em> spends in its first half hour?<br><br>There is an absence. That's a lie: there are two. There is the sudden loss of Laura, experienced across her whole small town. But there is also an absence of Laura <em>from</em> the show, and an absence of her death. <em>Twin Peaks</em> revolves around the murder of a girl who is never seen alive; its entire plot arises from her horrific death, yet her death is never seen. (At least, it wasn't seen before the prequel movie, made after the full run of the initial show.) <br><br>The moment exists in the eternal past, left behind for the sake of the present. Only Laura's smiling face, fixed in a photo frame, remains as a reminder, staring at us as the credits roll at the end of every episode. The show is about a tragedy we didn't get to see. Until, all at once, Maddy is murdered, and the moment seems to stretch out further the longer it goes on, and we realize: <em>it is still happening.</em> In this moment, here and now, Laura Palmer is being killed. Just because it's happened doesn't mean it isn't happening now, or couldn't happen again.<br><br>"It is happening again," says the Giant to Dale Cooper, before we quite know what he means. He says it twice in a row. <em>"It is happening again."</em><br><br><em>______________________</em><br><br><em>Twin Peaks, </em>like many of Lynch's projects, is both a vision and a subversion of 1950s America. It depicts a blissful, almost innocent world. And it shows the truth beneath that seeming world: a truth that, while not wholly dark, is by necessity darker than the wannabe-utopia that the American suburb pretended to be. That world is extreme and highly contradictory; its joys and tendernesses are more potent than the opiatic pleasantness of the ever-smiling 50s, but that's partly because they exist in contrast to grief and loss, to trauma and outright cruelty.<br><br>At the center of this imaginary world lay the nuclear family: perfect, indivisible. Two parents and two children. The stable atomic unit of a functioning society, neatly parceled into neighborhoods, house-by-house.<br><br>You don't notice unless you're looking, but there are no nuclear families in Twin Peaks. The closest thing would be the Hornes, who serve as a foil to the Palmers in some ways. There is a father, mother, son, and daughter, but there is also an everpresent uncle, who his brother Ben loves far more than he loves his wife. And the son, Johnny, is developmentally disabled, which feels like an offbeat detail until you start to think about how much Ben's relationship with Audrey, the younger child, must have been influenced by the family that existed before she came into the world. We don't know when Ben grew estranged from his wife, but his relationship with his daughter is chilly at best—and that's <em>before</em> he unknowingly tried to fuck her. The closest thing Twin Peaks has to a nuclear family is obviously decaying, to the point that it can barely be called a family at all.<br><br>The Palmers, on the other hand, are only a nuclear family if you count both Maddy and Laura as members. To achieve that idyllic vision of Americana, Laura must be literally split in two.<br><br>Lynch has a thing for splitting women in half. In <em>Blue Velvet</em>, innocent young Sandy is contrasted with the anything-but-innocent Dorothy. After <em>Twin Peaks</em>, the divide turned increasingly literal. <em>Lost Highway </em>casts Patricia Arquette in brunette as a man's wife, and in platinum blonde as a gangster's moll who gets lusted after by that man's teenage alter ego. <em>Mulholland Drive,</em> too, revolves around a blonde and a brunette, whose identities are confused in ways both accidental and intentional. In every case, the split is triggered by a rupture: occasionally an overt tragedy, but far more often a trauma which occurs without us realizing it, or a trauma which <em>has</em> occurred, warping the logic of the narrative in ways that we can't understand until, all at once, we discover what must have shattered the world.<br><br>Maddy Ferguson isn't <em>literally</em> Laura Palmer... is she? Well, no: she's not. She just seduces the same man that Laura does, dresses like Laura (in a hilariously bad blonde wig) to manipulate Laura's former therapist, and is eventually murdered in the same manner that Laura is, by the same man: her uncle Leland, Laura's father. Everywhere she goes, people see Laura, and respond to her the way they used to. That's true up to her last moments, where rather than bidding her a wistful farewell, Leland recreates the night of his daughter's death, in conveniently plain sight, so the cameras can finally capture what happened. Look! There's even a spotlight!<br><br>(And that's to say nothing of the red curtains that fall immediately after.)<br><br>Across "Lonely Souls," which starts by depicting Leland as the perfect image of a loving father and ends by revealing that he's anything but, Benjamin Horne suffers a Greek tragedy in reverse order. Cause and effect are mirrored: he has committed two cardinal sins, and he is punished for both in this episode, but neither he nor the audience realizes it until much later.<br><br>When Audrey confronts him for owning the local whorehouse and reveals that she was the masked woman he nearly tried to fuck, we are still unsure whether or not Ben is Laura's killer. Ben confesses that he slept with Laura; he sleeps with an awful lot of 18-year-old girls, and while they're all "consenting" prostitutes on one level, he grooms each and every one of them, plucking them from retail jobs at his department store by offering them quicker, easier money. It's unclear whether he's also the one who's molested Laura since she was young; we only find out later that it wasn't him, and that there's every chance he "only" ever slept with the most technical possible definition of "adults." In retrospect, his confession at Audrey's hands feels like a retribution: he was unaware of the near-incest he committed, or of how close he came to what would have been the unpardonable climax of his hedonistic, family-shattering lust.<br><br>In the moments where she confronts him, we see something new in Ben's eyes: genuine shame. If Leland's path leads him from bereaved parent to literal demon, Ben's path takes him in the opposite direction: if not redemption, then at least a sincere desire to be redeemed.<br><br>Ben's other punishment is similarly only clear in retrospect. We see him sign a contract with Mr. Tojamura, the mysterious (and extremely racist depiction of a) man who offers him $5 million in exchange for Ghostwood, the MacGuffin of a land deal that Ben is perpetually chasing. Immediately after signing, Ben is arrested on suspicion of Laura's murder. But it's not until later that we learn "Tojamura" is secretly Catherine Martell, Ben's former lover and would-be victim, in disguise. Ben conspired with and double-crossed her as part of her Ghostwood schemes; he later left her for dead. We don't realize in the moment that his "dead" ex-partner just stole his project back from him when it happens. It's only looking back that "Lonely Souls" reveals itself to be a divine retribution for Horne, his past crimes avenging themselves upon him through a mirror.<br><br>Ben and his lawyer Leland aren't as obvious foils as Maddy and Laura, just as Audrey is a slightly-more-obscure foil for Laura than her literal doppelgänger Maddy is. (Though Audrey and Laura are the two women who steal Dale Cooper's heart, in slightly different ways.) Nonetheless, the parallels between Leland and Ben reach their pinnacle here, albeit in oblique, tangential ways. They both are fathers and adulterers; they have both torn their own families apart. But on the night that Leland re-murders his daughter, Ben confesses himself to his. There can be no undoing the past, and Ben has traumatized his daughter clearly enough that you can see her skin crawl when he so much as looks at her. But here, there is a future, whatever the past may have held. <br><br>That can't be said for Leland and Laura, let alone for Leland and Maddy. There is no future; there is no longer any past. There is only a present moment, horrific and unending. The moment when the nuclear family forever split.<br><br><em>______________________<br><br></em>David Lynch's art is infamously elusive. Symbols abound, but their meaning is rarely obvious. The ones <em>do</em> that stand for something blatant often seem to waver between sincere and insincere, earnest recreations or cheesy parodies or savage deconstructions.<br><br>Nonetheless, Lynch has an uncanny knack for convincing you that <em>something</em> meaningful is taking place. You may not understand it—you may be confronted by a reality that is flat-out <em>ludicrous</em>—but on some level, it is apparent that everything somehow makes sense. Even if it's a sense with which you are wholly unacquainted.<br><br>Shortly before Maddy is murdered in the Palmer living room, Laura's mother Sarah has a vision of a white horse. I will not pretend to understand what that horse means. I've seen many theories; none of them feel halfway convincing to me. The horse may have simply been a horse.<br><br>It is hard to argue that <em>Twin Peaks</em> <em>isn't</em> an intentional deconstruction of an American pastiche. It's not particularly subtle in its portrayal of seemingly-happy households that conceal various kinds of secrets. Some husbands are abusive. Some wives escape the lovelessness in their marriages by striving to invent the perfectly silent drape. Every teen but one, at <em>Twin Peaks'</em> onset, is cheating on every other teen.<br><br>You can say that <em>Twin Peaks</em> isn't <em>about</em> the myth of the patriarch, but a whole lot of <em>Twin Peaks</em> sure does seem to revolve around husbands and dads. The emotional denouement of its first episode is a conversation between Laura's best friend Donna and her dad, at the end of the very long day in which Donna learned that Laura was dead. Doc Hayward, amidst an evening of cacophony and violence and fear, is loving and understanding, protective but trusting, tender with her even amidst impossibly difficult circumstances. We won't learn for a long time <em>just</em> how different the moment they share is from, say, moments Laura shared with her father, but it's telling that this was the emotional catharsis that closes the show's first outing: perhaps the purest moment of a father doing what fathers are generally supposed to do. (And even this moment will be subverted in due time.)<br><br>Meanwhile, conversely, Dale Cooper becomes a father figure to nearly everyone in Twin Peaks, despite being virtually celibate. He subverts Audrey's lust for him, and puts his own admitted lust aside, to offer her what she's never received from Ben. (This happens shortly before her real father unwittingly tries to... you know.) And his grief for Laura is pure in a way that Leland's clearly can't be. He becomes, not just a father, but an <em>inverse</em> father: a mirror to all the real fathers of this world. Perhaps that's why he simply never finds time for Donna: to be the opposite of <em>her</em> father is to be absent.<br><br>You can argue that <em>Twin Peaks </em>isn't "about" trauma, for all that Maddy's murder is so traumatic that it literally shatters the reality of the show. You could argue that Maddy doesn't spring into existence because Laura's death is such a rupture that it splits her in half: the Laura that exists <em>before</em> the murder, inaccessible because we never knew her "before," and the Laura that exists <em>after</em> the murder, the future counterpart who seems to have no existence of her own until she absorbs Laura's personality through osmosis, and dies the moment she decides to leave. You can argue that, when Maddy sits between her parents—sorry, her aunt and uncle—she isn't <em>literally</em> taking Laura's place, framed in-shot by a photo of Laura that is itself framed. Nothing in any of Lynch's films will insist that the strange division of women into separate halves, combined invariably with a confusion of past and present, is his disturbingly effective way of portraying what trauma does to the mind that suffers it, not even when the murderer in that one movie of his suffers a splitting headache that somehow transforms him into a completely different man. My interpretation is just that: interpretation.<br><br>You can argue that my "nuclear family" analogy is a bit of a stretch. Sure, it's strange that the detonation of the atomic bomb is referenced <em>just</em> before Maddy gets killed, as if to place that image squarely in our heads: "My family was at Nagasaki," claims Tojamura, who I will remind you is an extremely racist caricature of a Japanese man played by a white woman. But it's not like Lynch literally detonates an atomic bomb the moment that Laura or Maddy dies; he never goes overly nerdy and describes what happens with Laura and Maddy as a sort of quantum superposition, or tries to connect trauma's scattering of time and memory with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. He's got a little arthouse in him, sure, but he's not the sort to draw an overly obvious metaphor and eagerly wait for you to pat him on the back; he's not constructing the symbols in <em>Twin Peaks</em> as mysteries waiting to be solved, as if the point is to connect the dots <em>just</em> the right way and reveal the "real" story lying just underneath.<br><br>Conversely, though, Lynch has a genius for doing obvious things in exceptionally non-obvious ways. It's shocking to learn that Leland was the killer, until on rewatch it feels like there could be no other answer, just as it feels impossible in retrospect to imagine Maddy ending anywhere but dead. Playing Louis Armstrong over a heartwarming family moment <em>is</em> a bit on the nose, isn't it? It's not like <em>Twin Peaks </em>has, I don't know, one major emotional melody that it plays every time something remotely emotional takes place, sometimes swelling it up from out of nowhere at the drop of a hat, other times revealing that it was a song on the jukebox or a radio when somebody abruptly decides to change the tune.<br><br>Maybe it's <em>too</em> obvious to reference the splitting of the atom, a literal rupture that sends out shockwaves of energy, when describing the death of Laura Palmer, a figurative rupture whose energy propels the entire show. Maybe the nuclear family I think I see is just a charming American family, minus the incest and the murder. Maybe the fact that Leland and Sarah <em>kind of</em> have two daughters, just like those two daughters are <em>kind of</em> one and the same, is a bit of a stretch. And maybe the way that the show continually returns to Laura's death, emphasizing how it split not just her family but the whole damn town, <em>isn't</em> a way of depicting trauma and rupture and abjection after all: it was just a clever device to introduce its broad cast of characters by suspending them, at the very start of the show, in a seemingly unending grief, just as it was an artistic flourish to spend four minutes at the moment of Maddy's death, a single horrific moment suspended in time.<br><br>After all, it's not like scattered time and trauma and quantum superposition are ever explicitly linked. It's not like Laura Palmer ever looks at a clock and—<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
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</figure><br><br>ah<br><br>well carry on then<br><br>Ahem. We can argue the significance of the spotlight, or we can try to figure out the horse, although I will leave you to figure out that one on your own. But I'd rather return to one last thing, one incontrovertibly meaningful symbol—though like all of Lynch's symbols, its exact meaning is open to interpretation.<br><br>We first see the Palmer family room in that long, steady shot, ending on their record player. When the killing starts, we return to that living room by way of the record player, which has just begun to skip.<br><br>"It's a Wonderful World" has been replaced by a jarring, uncanny noise. <em>That </em>part's visceral and obvious. The record player keeps skipping, across the long, gradual reveal of Leland as Laura's killer, through his prolonged murder of Maddie. Even as time distorts around her death, the skipping of the record player remains constant, unaltered in any way.<br><br>We are reliving the night of Laura's murder. It doesn't matter whether that reliving is literal or figurative. We are told: it is happening again. It is happening <em>again.</em> What we thought was behind us is now in front of us. <em>Then</em> has simultaneously become <em>now</em> and <em>soon</em>. Anticipation is replaced with a sad, disturbing resignation. Prolonged dramatic suspense increasingly has us catching our breath as we await the release of the near future; profound <em>lack</em> of suspense, on the other hand, just makes the present moment increasingly agitating, increasingly upsetting. You can't wonder what will happen next once you know there won't be any "next" to wonder about.<br><br>Trauma experienced in one direction is a perpetual return to the past, an abrupt shattering of the boundary between past and present. Trauma experienced in the other direction is an abandonment to a horrific future, a relinquishing of any hope that anything is coming but you already know will come. It is a cleave and a collapse, both a rupture of what felt whole and a violation of the space between things which appeared to be separate. Maddie is being murdered, or she is about to be murdered, or she has been murdered already. Or perhaps it's Laura, Laura still dead, Laura dying all over again, Laura miserably dreading her own death. It is hard to make sense of, and it is the most obvious thing in the world, <em>painfully</em> obvious, too obvious to ignore, so obvious you stop seeing it. You see it even when you think you don't; you know what it is even as you tell yourself it makes no sense. You blink, and all at once you're there again, remembering how, even as it happened, a part of you wondered whether you had dreamt this all before. Prophesy and memory begin to blur. Past and future stop mattering when there's no such thing as time, just as you can travel anywhere in the world and close your eyes and realize that you're still right back in that place. It is inevitable; it is irreversible; there is no longer anything to reverse. It is excruciating; you are sick of it; it is impossible to get used to. It's not even <em>new</em>. You know it all the instant it begins. It's just another story you've already heard, another endless moment to endure. Another broken fucking record.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/233712022-10-03T00:31:40Z2022-10-03T00:38:24ZThe algorithm wants to kill you.<div class="trix-content">
<div><em>[tw: suicide]</em><br><br>For the first time, a court has found two social networks <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/business/instagram-suicide-ruling-britain.html"><strong>directly responsible</strong></a><strong> </strong>for the death of one of its users. A coroner <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/30/molly-russell-died-while-suffering-negative-effects-of-online-content-rules-coroner"><strong>testified</strong></a> that Instagram and Pinterest contributed to her death "in a more than minimal way."<br><br></div><div>The defense these companies provided was that they are not responsible for the content of their sites. They are <em>mediums,</em> which means that they are <em>neutral. </em>Sure, people can post and consume terrible things while they're there, but those people are directly responsible. The medium isn't responsible for what's it's used for, right?<br><br></div><div>The thing is, the mediums <em>aren't</em> neutral. Social networks aren't just "mediums"—they're <em>companies</em>. Their mechanics aren't inert or unintentional or inevitable—they're designed for a specific purpose. They're <em>technologies</em>—and they're technologies that have been evolved to specific psychological and financial ends. <strong>They want us to feel something. And the thing they want us to feel is literally bad for us.<br></strong><br></div><div>Let's go past the obvious. Yes, they want to addict us. Yes, they are designed to continually grab our attention. Yes, they revolve around "likes" and "notifications," and are designed to make us crave both—and to "create content" that will generate both, in between listlessly scrolling to find more.<br><br></div><div>All that is true. But why do social networks exacerbate anxiety and depression so much? Why are they all so consistently good at radicalizing their users? It goes beyond red numbers and infinitely-scrolling feeds. At the heart of all these mechanics lies a simple but non-obvious truth: <strong>social networks are designed to put us in competition with one another—and on some level, the game board is your very sense of self.<br></strong><br></div><div>Your "character" is <em>you,</em> no matter what the particular game. Are you interesting? Are you beautiful? Are you funny? Do you have enough friends? Are you enjoying your life enough? Are you rich? Are you famous? Are you <em>right?</em> Are your feelings and opinions the correct ones to have? Are the things you enjoy, objectively speaking, the most correct things you can enjoy?<br><br></div><div>The more invested you get—and these games are expertly designed <em>to make us feel invested</em>—the less it suffices to play completely honestly, "as yourself." There is an increasing pressure to perform, to <em>outdo</em>, to win at all costs. But your "reward" isn't really a reward, and there are two reasons why that is:<br><br></div><ol><li>First, any chemical reaction in your brain to "being liked" is extremely fleeting, unless it's connected to some genuine intrinsic benefit (like "meaningful connection"). Social networks aren't designed to offer you that.<br><br></li><li>Second, and more perniciously, the <em>actual</em> "reward" in the schema of the game is that <em>you make other people feel worse,</em> driving them to try and outdo <em>you.</em> This is the Möbius strip of sequence that defines social networking: you doing "well" is what causes other people to "lose," usually in ways designed to make them feel specific forms of inadequacy. And they respond to those feelings by doubling down, pushing those feelings onto you instead.<br><br></li></ol><div>It's a game without an actual winner, because nobody's <em>accurately</em> depicting anything. They're just lying to make other people feel bad. Projecting images that are designed, somewhat consciously but mostly due to social-network manipulation, to make other people feel more alienated and alone. Which leads to the phenomenon that defines the social-media age: literal billions of people are unified in these feelings of resentful isolation, but that unification is sundered by the fact that they've all been taught to see each other as the enemy.<br><br></div><div>The "algorithm" is designed to blindly push people towards things that generate the most engagement—in other words, the things that make people feel the most compelled to <em>commit</em> to something. Perversely, that often means the things that make people feel the worst, because that's what leads them to want to lash out or overcompensate in some way. "Lowest common denominator" obviously holds some advantage—hence cute animals popping up everywhere—but ultimately that's not <em>quite</em> enough. The most successful things are also <em>irritating</em> or <em>aggravating</em> on some level, because that's what sets the feedback loop into motion.<br><br></div><div>The algorithm doesn't know what it's pushing—but there's plenty of data on <em>what</em> it pushes and why. It helps users encourage one another to despair, because the more you despair, the more you need an outlet for venting that despair. Hence communities that revolve around suicidal ideation or eating disorders or explaining why slight variations in the shape of a male forehead determine whether women feel a biological need to screw a man over. The unifying trait of these communities is that they consist of <em>people encouraging each other to keep going,</em> confirming for one another that their worldview is right while constantly upping the ante, escalating the bleakness, ratcheting up the sense of urgency. And these communities proliferate because they do the algorithm's work for it—so the algorithm keeps recommending them to new people. New users, if you will.<br><br></div><div>You know the popular story about the "paperclips AI?" The machine that gets told to make paperclips as optimally as possible, and ends up destroying the world by turning it all into paperclips? I've seen it suggested before that publicly-owned corporations are a version of this AI: companies like Chevron can't <em>help</em> setting the world on fire, because they're an algorithm tooled towards maximizing profits at the expense of literally anything else. Social media algorithms work the same way: they will destroy communities and human connection and they will do their damnedest to destroy your soul too, because they don't care about human beings.<br><br></div><div>The "optimal user," to these algorithms, is the most horrific image of a person that you can imagine—the kind of person who'd annihilate a part of your mental well-being if you so much as glimpsed at them. That person might be an vapid influencer or a political radical or someone who isn't just suicidally depressed but <em>actively addicted</em>, in a deeply disturbing way, to suicide as a concept. Or all three! But make no mistake: this is what the algorithms are designed to produce, regardless of whether or not their creators are smart enough or willing enough to anticipate the end results. The monstrosity isn't an unintentional byproduct—it's the precise thing these sites want to generate, even if they'd rather limit it <em>just</em> enough to maintain plausible deniability or even a good night's sleep.<br><br></div><div>As the economy crumbles and the social safety net falls away, and as younger and increasingly poorer generations are taught that the only way out is to hustle, their livelihood and their future starts to look exactly like social media. Whether it's driving for Uber or posting on OnlyFans or living in a TikTok influencer house or, hell, trying to invent the next big social network, you're just trying to be the one person who does well enough to destroy all the others, as you cross your fingers and pray that the algorithm doesn't abruptly change and pull the rug out from under your feet.<br><br></div><div>Because the algorithm wants engagement. It wants you obsessed with other people and obsessed with yourself—and it wants you to hate both them and yourself. That's the algorithm's version of perpetual motion, and it leads to Bored Apes and murders and suicides and not much else. </div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/232762022-09-25T23:57:05Z2022-09-25T23:57:05ZThe tangible lie and the intangible truth.<div class="trix-content">
<div>It's hard to talk about <em>The Basic Eight</em>, Daniel Handler's debut novel and the only one he wrote before publishing <em>A Series of Unfortunate Events </em>as his better-known alter ego Lemony Snicket, without spoiling it. Which is a shame, because it's a book that I hold dear to me, and it's also one that I refuse to spoil. So we're going to open this up with a long, redacted passage, and I'm just going to hope that it can hold its meaning even after half of it has been removed. <em> </em> <br><br></div><blockquote>To go back and edit a journal, to find <em>[redacted]</em>, impossible to ignore, undeletable, breaks my heart. I can’t do it. <strong>Too much in my life has been reread like that, dramatically reinterpreted, and it always puts me in a bad light.</strong><em> </em>It’s like finding a trail of <em>[redacted]</em> dropped across early October, until you have to conclude that Adam was always going to be <em>[redacted]</em>, and never <em>[redacted]</em>, until just before <em>[redacted]</em>. It’s like having your sloppy handwriting on an all-school survey blown up and projected on a wall, the typed questions rippling on the arm of the prosecutor as he picks out his favorite parts while you, by law, must remain silent. It’s like Dr. Tert holding up a <em>[redacted]</em> that she stole from your top shelf and talking at length about talismans. Leaders of Satanic cults, you see, often horde personal items from all their acolytes so they can cast spells on anyone who disobeys them. “The <em>[redacted]</em>, obviously, belonged to Adam.” <strong>When you hear the new explanation all the original ones slip away, intangible, until you can’t remember </strong>why you had all that stuff on your shelf in the first place, or exactly who it was who took the <em>[redacted]</em><strong> </strong>and <em>[redacted]</em>. It’s like going back to your locker, opening it and dropping everything into your gaping bag until it bulges at your side. Once, all these things in your locker meant something—that economics textbook you’ve barely touched since you covered it, that shiny flask you borrowed from your best friend, that long-overdue library book—but now I was just emptying my locker. Now they were just all the things I was taking home with me as I left school for the last time.</blockquote><div><br>(Emphases, as well as redactions, my own.)<br><br><em>The Basic Eight</em> is a high school novel. It is not aimed at high schoolers, though discovering and reading it in high school was profoundly meaningful for me—albeit disturbing. It was my introduction, in a fuller and darker sense than the admittedly-surprisingly-deep <em>Series of Unfortunate Events</em>, to Daniel Handler's threefold obsessions: moral dilemma, blithe misinterpretation, and combining the two with such a virtuosic and disorienting writing style that reality and illusion intermingle, and it starts to feel like being alive is just a series of the world you thought you knew rippling and changing like a mirage. A card trick that would astound and amaze were it not so upsetting, so menacing, so infuriating and anxiety-inducing, so pit-of-the-stomach nauseating.<br><br>Flannery Culp is in jail for murder. The murder she committed was so spectacular that it drew in a media frenzy—enough of one that a publishing company has decided to release her senior-year diary as a true-crime thriller. From her jail cell, Flan—pronounced "flan"—rereads and edits her own story for public release, though she spends just as much time complaining about the media's interpretation of her, particularly where right-wing hacks and pop psychologists are concerned. And she warns us in advance that, should she decide that what she wrote was not what she <em>actually</em> felt, or what she's decided she <em>ought</em> to have felt in retrospect, she'll have no qualms about changing up the story altogether, to serve either her needs or our own.<br><br>At times, Flan is as pretentious a seventeen-year-old as you've ever met—insufferably so. At times, she is righteously outraged about the monstrous idiocy (and worse) of the adults in her life, both during this year of her life and after her incarceration. And at times, she is deeply, deeply unsettling, a combination of calculated and furious and cold and vicious and <em>just plain unhinged</em>. What's unsettling isn't that she is capable of being these things. It's that, the more she dips into these abrupt and dark and shocking places, the more you wonder how much of the rest you can believe. The more you wonder how much is happening without your realizing it—how much of her seemingly radical honesty is actually just another layer of manipulation.<br><br>Yet despite all that, somehow, you never once walk away feeling like the talking heads might have a point.<br><br>That queasy combination <em>is</em> the point. Flan is Handler's Platonic ideal of an adolescent: she's miserable, she's confused, she's feeling all manner of conflicting feelings, and she's surrounded by horrible people, which of course brings out all of her worst and most horrible tendencies. She cannot be trusted to do good. Yet the adults who surround her, the people whose responsibility it is to <em>help her become what she ought to become</em>, betray her in every possible manner: you have the misguided and apathetic, you have the asshole disciplinarians, you have the genuinely predatory, and, finally, you have the ones who mean well and can <em>do</em> well, but who either can't help enough, or who—because of all the worse ones—Flan simply cannot trust.<br><br>Daniel Handler is not a big fan of stating his themes or philosophies outright, but one seems to be: it is the job of authority to see clearly, and to act upon that clarity. And abuse of authority begins with an inability or an unwillingness to see others fairly or correctly. It is one thing to act uncertainly, or to have doubts about whether what you're doing is right, because you don't know as much as you wish you did; it is another thing altogether to act with <em>conviction</em> when you're much too foolish to deserve the power that you wield. <br><br>(On some level, this is perhaps a very Jewish way of thinking—Jack Miles' <em>God: an Autobiography</em> revolves around the idea that the Old Testament God tells a tale of an Authority convinced that he comprehends humankind just because he created it, and who slowly comes to terms with the idea that only humanity has the right to tell its own story. Handler's Judaism is always present, invariably stated out loud, but never commented on further than that, in part because it feels like Handler always wants to subvert his own authority as best he can.)<br><br>In Daniel Handler stories, there are rarely clear-cut Forces of Good. There are only confused and uncertain individuals, most of whom are capable of doing terrible things, and then there are blindly confident ones, nearly all of whom are <em>guaranteed</em> to do terrible things. <br><br>In <em>A Series of Unfortunate Events</em>, adults are just as destructive in their ignorance; even the good ones, invariably, fall short. And while the Baudelaire orphans at the center of the series start out seeming like the intelligent, charming, well-intentioned foils to the rest of the world, they increasingly find themselves needing to make morally ambiguous decisions, often hurting innocent people and loved ones in the process. Towards the tail end of their saga, they increasingly find that they, or their parents, or their noblest guardians, resemble the worst of the villains they've encountered. The series culminates in an amazingly nuanced retelling of the Garden of Eden, in which original sin is replicated, a poison sweeps across humanity (to which an antidote may or may not have been provided), and the Baudelaires sail into the unknown, more aware of the buried secrets and tragic legacies and ethical uncertainties inherent to life than they've ever been before.<br><br>This is as close to a moral as Handler has ever come—likely as close to one as he'll ever get. It is impossible to ignore how difficult and how hard it is to be human, he suggests, so the only resolution is to simultaneously pursue wisdom and accept that you will never be wise. So it's fitting, or perverse, that <em>The Basic Eight</em> tells a somewhat inverted version of the story in <em>Unfortunate Events</em>, in which things only get worse and worse for a young woman until she commits the worst of all possible crimes, and we are left as uncertain as she is about the nature of her actions. The only interpretations we <em>are</em> left with are conspicuously wrong. <br><br>There is another theme running through the center of the story, however, which mirrors its obsession with tragic operas. <em>The Basic Eight</em> is a book about betrayal. And it is Handler's deft knack for portraying it, and the relentless way in which he returns to it again and again, that makes him so good at getting us to feel outrage—joyful outrage at his own stylistic trickery, and furious outrage at each and every character who does one of his protagonists wrong. (If there's a single thing that got people invested enough in <em>A Series of Unfortunate Events</em> to make it a spectacular bestseller, it's the way that the miseries it inflicts are <em>so unfair</em> that you find yourself hellbent on letting these kids see some fucking vindication.)<br><br>Betrayal sometimes takes the form of lies and manipulation, concealed emotions and hidden schemes. It sometimes means characters acting with disregard for one another, and knowingly allowing each other to come to harm. Perhaps the profoundest form of betrayal is self-delusion, a person's inability to come to terms with themselves, in a way that winds up screwing with reality itself. (Handler is not at all Lynchian, but the plot of <em>Lost Highway</em>—in which a man murders his wife and then goes into such denial about it that he literally transforms into another person—feels like it could have easily come straight from a Daniel Handler novel.) But the form of betrayal that Handler returns to more than any other, the one that defines both <em>Unfortunate Events</em> and <em>The Basic Eight</em> down to their core, is the <em>willful</em> replacement of a real person with a false narrative, sometimes for Machiavellian or ideological purposes but oftentimes for sheer convenience's sake.<br><br>As a child, I struggled painfully with my sense of self—not just with knowing or understanding myself, but with my fear that my private experiences and feelings were somehow false or misleading and inaccurate, and that other people's shallowest interpretations of me were truer than my own experience of myself. As an adult, I have learned that this remains one of my deepest struggles: to trust myself enough to know when to ignore what other people think of me and when to listen, and to recognize that people's motives color their perception of me, sometimes to the point of bad faith.<br><br>It is hard to be vulnerable and inarticulate and uncertain and still trust yourself. It's hard even when you have people in your life who believe in you, who trust you, who encourage you to have faith in yourself. It is vastly harder when you are confronted with people who are as confident as you are doubting, as strident as you are vulnerable, as articulate as you are wordless, and whose main point is: <em>you're wrong.</em> And there are countless types of people who treat others this way: the arrogant blowhards who are so certain of their rightness that they see "conversation" as a way to pick a fight; the narcissists who think of others purely in terms of utility and convenience; the nihilistic and power-hungry sorts who couldn't care less about the truth, and care only about what they can get away with. Until you've encountered something better, it's hard to believe that something better <em>could</em> exist, because even your hope for "better" is dependent on trusting yourself enough that you let hope matter. And coming to that place of certainty gets trickier with each and every person who'd rather keep you UNcertain, because it makes you easier for <em>them</em> to handle.<br><br>There's a reason why the language we use to describe emotionally unhealthy relationship revolves around flavors of misperception and betrayal. Gaslighting is the most flagrant example: to not only <em>lie</em> to someone, but to convince them that <em>they can't trust their own perceptions,</em> is to shatter whatever genuine feeling lies within them, replacing something messy and formless and true with a paper-thin falsehood that persists <em>simply because it's concrete. </em>If someone tells you that your memories are wrong, that your <em>senses</em> are wrong, they are throwing down a gauntlet: agree with them, no matter how upsetting their version of "the truth" seems to be, and you get to share reality with them. You get to believe that at least you two live in the same world, and that they fundamentally <em>do</em> love you and care about you—or at least mean well. Disagreeing with them requires you to simultaneously accept that you may <em>never</em> see the world the same way as them, or agree upon a singular interpretation of events, while <em>positing</em> that they are actively, perniciously, constructing a narrative which they know to be fake, for the singular purpose of hurting you or destroying your sense of self.<br><br>It's the implicit meaning behind the classic child-abuser line: "No one will ever believe you." People won't believe you because your <em>abuser</em>, not you, holds authority. <em>They</em>, not you, have the ability to put forth a seemingly-authoritative truth. They have the <em>right</em> to declare what's true and what's not, whereas <em>you</em> are too misguided or too ignorant or too untrustworthy to know what's true from what isn't. You have no choice but to accept their authority, accept their judgment, accept what they decide should and shouldn't happen... and accept, beneath all that, the idea that <em>you should not trust yourself,</em> because you don't deserve to be trusted. Not even by you.<br><br>(A friend and I were discussing, recently, twisted logic of abuse: the way that "<em>I'm punishing you</em> because <em>you don't understand me</em> because <em>you don't care about me</em>" is a Möbius strip that posits the victim as the abuser; the way that an abuser gets upset at you for having been upset by them; the way that calling them out immediately yields <em>I just had a bad day, is that not allowed,</em> but calling them out tomorrow yields <em>Are you still on that? Why can't you let things go?</em> On some level, these are narratives wherein one person's feelings are honored while the other's are disregarded, but on another level, these are all cases where <em>one person's clear-cut lie negates the other's messy truth.</em> And it leads, in all cases, to intense doubt on the part of the person being abused, to the point where they often start to feel anxiety just for feeling upset at all, hating themselves for daring to imagine a story that contradicts the party line.)<br><br>The line that Daniel Handler likes to the, the tightrope that he tries to walk over and over, is where a difficult and unflattering truth meets a simple and unflattering lie. It's not that the people he writes about are <em>good people</em>, or that they haven't done terrible things. It's that, whoever they are and whatever they've done, there is still a truth to them—however unfathomable or unknowable or just plain unknown—and lies, at the very least, won't help. Adolescents are fucked-up and confused and awful and scared... and you can either see them truthfully, you can at least <em>attempt</em> to perceive who and what they are and why they do the things they do, or you can reduce them to something simple enough that judging them or punishing them or <em>solving</em> them becomes simple too, and in the process do more damage to them than you can possibly fathom. <br><br>The Tanakh or Old Testament is, in part, a tale of judgment: a series of stories about what it <em>means</em> to judge, about the <em>right</em> to judgment, about what happens when judgment is too swift or too harsh or too unwise. Learning to distinguish good from evil is what makes humanity <em>deserve</em> punishment, for they are now able to comprehend the consequences of their own actions; however, the <em>potential </em>to distinguish good from evil is different from <em>knowing how to do it</em>, which leads to a saga of people doing terrible things to one another and making terrible decisions, even as their creator gradually realizes that destroying cities and sending floods is not really his call to make. The right to pass judgment is a terrible thing; it is what makes us godlike, the Tanakh said, and it is also the root of every awful thing that we will ever do (and it's why God too can be terrible).<br><br>Handler's second novel, <em>Watch Your Mouth</em>—by far the oddest thing he's ever written—starts out as an opera, then transforms into a twelve-step program halfway through. It's about incest and murder and Jewish golems, but it is just as much a story about a young man trying to make sense of his life, and of a traumatic experience so bizarre he can scarcely comprehend it, and who can only think to reduce it to a well-known narrative structure, no matter how melodramatic or facile. It is a story about stories, about <em>interpretations, </em>about the idea that every story <em>is</em> an attempt to interpret something that might not be interpretable. Just as <em>The End,</em> which is the final volume of <em>A Series of Unfortunate Events, </em>is really about how narrative endings are untrustworthy and arbitrary, <em>Watch Your Mouth</em> starts off as the kind of outrageous story that your friend tells you, over drinks, about their summer, and ends on a more ambiguous note:<br><br></div><blockquote>It turns out that your life is made of specifics, no matter what you learn at college about Tolstoy: Each family is different, whether happy or unhappy. Their influence melts into you like ghosts, untraceable, imaginary. You can formulate something out of it, if you must; you can force things into a structure like librettists do, telescoping months of action into a four-act-farce, or like therapists do, stuffing all you think into twelve little steps like folded clothes in a duffel. Call it the Old Testament and scribble it on lambskin. But why? The truth just flows under you like a river. You can float on it but you don’t know where it’s going. </blockquote><div><br>I tell myself sometimes that Daniel Handler is perhaps my favorite novelist simply because he manipulates language in ways that continue to astound me.¹ I sometimes disregard how deeply they affect me, or how much their messages and ideas have set in. In part, this is because Handler is so playful and tangential with his meanings that I don't take them at face value, or don't notice them for what they are; in part, it's because his books are so blatantly <em>entertainments</em> that it feels like taking them seriously, or reducing them to... well, exactly what I'm reducing them to here... is missing the point. <br><br>But on some level, I think, Handler writes the way he writes <em>because</em> he believes what he believes, and tells the stories that he tells because they deal with his suspicions about certainty and storytelling, big-picture ideas and capital-T Truth. His characters are storytellers and liars; they are hurt because of the stories others tell, and because of the stories <em>they</em> tell, and because of things which aren't stories that they turn into stories anyway. <br><br>Flannery Culp is a wannabe novelist whose pretensions mask insecurities and who tries, over and over again, to make sense of her life by the way she writes it down. She rejects one sort of trite simplicity—the trite academic slogans, the songs that sound like "greeting cards with guitar solos"—while pursuing love and romance, "real experiences," and above all <em>panache,</em> her best friend Natasha's main love language. What she's looking for, she's aware, is itself trite and too-simple, at least the way that she envisions it—but what she's experiencing is so overpowering and incomprehensible that she simply can't make sense of it in any other way. The more it overwhelms her, the more her story splinters, and the more every stray emotion becomes <em>the </em>sole story to her, for as long as it possesses her to act upon it. If the story stops making sense, it's because it can only be understood in fragments, with the understanding that these pieces only add up because they are the pieces that were there.<br><em> </em> <br>I think about the way that children are increasingly expected to be online, increasingly interact with their peers via semi-public social media personas, are monitored in increasingly-invasive ways, in a world that increasingly threatens to reduce them to a narrative, whether that's via the insane algorithms by which academic progress is judged or via the kind of digital drama that can lead a million strangers to hate you simply because there's nothing better to do. I think about how early <em>I </em>went online, and how quickly the Internet led me into spectacularly vicious fights with friends and strangers alike. I think about how young I was when I started to think of myself as <em>something perceived</em>, which happened plenty <em>before </em>the modern digital era kicked in, because youth is a hell of judging and being judged. <br><br>And I think about reading <em>The Basic Eight </em>in my local library for the first time, feeling such relatable outrage at the people who were belittling and ignoring and reducing Flan to talking points, at the friends who fucked her over even as she was busy fucking <em>them</em> over, while at the same time feeling increasingly unsettled and disturbed and afraid of her, unsure of <em>how</em> exactly to process what I was feeling about her. I remember finishing <em>The Basic Eight</em> and sitting there stunned, mute, struggling to find a simple narrative to impose upon what I'd just read, and gradually realizing that I couldn't. Among other things, it feels like a book that was designed to upend its readers' attempts to reduce it to something simple; it's only now, a decade and a half later, that it hits me how fundamental this is, both to why it meant so much to me and to what Handler, as a writer, seemingly seeks to achieve. <em> </em> <em> </em> <em> </em> <br>At the very start of <em>The Basic Eight, </em>Flan sends three postcards from Italy to Adam State, the boy who she will later murder. They are, conspicuously, love letters. At first she describes the dread she feels at returning to school—"Is this what next year will be like? Do I have enough around me of interest, or will I find myself with nothing to do in a country that doesn’t speak my language?" Then she has an experience with Michelangelo's David:<br><br></div><blockquote>It was huge. From head to toe he was simply enormous, and I don’t just mean statuesque (rim shot!) but enormous like a sunset, or like an idea you can at best only half comprehend. It simply took my breath away. I walked around and around it, not because I felt I had to, but because I felt like it deserved that much attention from me. I found myself looking at each individual part closely, rather than the entire thing, because if I looked at the entire thing it would be like staring at the sun. It was such an unblinking portrayal of a person that it rose above any hackneyed hype about it. It flicked away all my cynicism about Seeing Art without flinching and just made me look. I walked out of there thinking, Now I am older.</blockquote><div><br>"It wasn’t until [later] that I thought of my experience metaphorically," she goes on to say. The metaphor she intends, of course, is of David to Adam, and of art to love—a fatefully misguided interpretation that leads to death and incarceration. But it also, in retrospect, feels like an apt descriptor of what Handler strives to achieve within his novels. <em>The Basic Eight</em> and <em>Watch Your Mouth</em> only have themes inasmuch as they deal with the futility of trying to "look at the entire thing;" past that, his books seem to increasingly become about complex, unknowable things and people's attempts to reduce them to something simpler and false, and the various flavors of tragedy that ensue. <br><br>"When you hear the new explanation all the original ones slip away, intangible..."<br><br>The stand-up comic Daniel Kitson has a show—<em>After the Beginning, Before the End</em>—that revolves around a friend's telling him a story about himself that doesn't seem to have any bearing on reality. Somehow, either because Kitson forgot about it or because the friend got something errant in her head, a disconnect has emerged between the story and the truth. Over two hours, Kitson talks about his relationship with fame and his relationship with himself: the strange lies he's heard strangers tell about him, but also the lies he realizes he's telling <em>himself</em>, and his disturbing realization that his idea of truth, his idea of <em>reality</em>, is built upon layers and layers of stories that he's ingested without realizing it, some of which were told to him intentionally, some accidentally, and others merely conclusions that he reached completely mistakenly and entirely on his own. Not only can he not control other people's ideas about him, he concludes, but he can't control his own idea of <em>himself</em>—because he's not sure he can trust himself any more than he can trust a total stranger.<br><br>Perhaps wisdom, perhaps being older, means coming to terms with this, and accepting it, and letting go of your stories about yourself as much as you let go of your stories of others. And perhaps we don't do this because of all the stories we've read or the shows we've seen or the social media we ingest and regurgitate. It's in our nature to tell tales, however sincerely or insincerely. And there's no singular way to become knowledgable or wise. (There's a whole culture of people who fetishize "science" and "research" and "data-driven" and "logic" who are totally unable to differentiate meaningful information from bullshit, just as plenty of atheists recreate the worst dogmas of faith and plenty of "radicals" accidentally rebuild traditional conservatism. If wisdom is inherently nuanced and doubting and above all <em>hard</em>, then it follows that any straightforward or confident or simple path that claims to lead to it is by definition not going to be very wise.)<br><br>If all that's true—and it <em>feels</em> true—then perhaps it explains why <em>The Basic Eight</em> means as much to me at 32 as it did to me at 16, and why I feel like some of the things I struggle with the most still feel like they have their roots in that novel. When I worry about trusting others, it's partly the fear that they'll take what I reveal to them and use it as ammunition against me, excuses to judge and condemn and misinterpret. When I struggle with how I treat other people, it's partly a worry that I've misinterpreted <em>them</em> somehow, whether too harshly or too kindly, and partly a worry that I am misrepresenting <em>myself</em>, feeding them a story that I know they want to hear. The things that most outrage me are not necessarily the worst or the most brutal or even the most evil—they're the things that feel the most unfair, the most bad-faith, the most intended to deliberately misrepresent. I have moments in which I am wise, and moments in which I am adolescent, determined to be the sole interpreter of who I am, determined to deny every unfair or inaccurate thing which is said or believed about me, determined to <em>set the story straight</em>—even as the story falls apart in my own mind, and every detail suggests that either I don't remember it as clearly as I believe or never understood it myself.<br><br>I don't know how Daniel Handler does it: how he writes stories that feel like halls of mirrors, each part reflecting the others so kaleidoscopically, every trope and archetype finding a way to betray itself while somehow suggesting that that precise betrayal was the point of the cliché all along. His stories are all so simple yet so elusive; they end so surprisingly early that it takes a reread just to work out how they walloped you. He writes sentences that undo themselves, uses words and phrases that are so deliberately vague and imprecise that they somehow land with tremendous precision. <br><br>It's fitting that <em>The Basic Eight</em>'s language is as close to "writerly" as Handler ever got—and that his narrator is a teenage wannabe writer. (Ever since then, he's sprinted rapidly away from "writerly" in every conventional sense.) And it's fitting, too, that <em>The Basic Eight</em> is a story about someone who uses storytelling and language, in part, as an attempt to craft her escape from everything that makes her suffer—and who is undone, in ways both metaphorical and literal, by the stories others tell, and by the stories she tells herself. There is the story told about Flan, the story Flan wants to tell, the story Flan <em>does</em> tell, and the story Flan knows she should tell but can't—either because she can't bring herself to look at herself that way, or because she doesn't trust us, the mass-market reader, with a story that meaningful and that volatile. And then there is the <em>real</em> story, intangible and unspoken and likely unthought, and the <em>whole</em> story, which is all of these at once and more. The story as it might be told by other people, though they too might accidentally get it wrong, or <em>purposefully </em>get it wrong, or who shouldn't be telling this story at all, or simply won't, or simply can't.</div><div> <br> <em> </em> <br>____________<br><br>¹ Ironically, given this essay, <em>The Basic Eight</em> and <em>Watch Your Mouth </em>are the two books of his that feel cruder and plainer, and whose word games are more frequently fun than sublime. His follow-up <em>Adverbs </em>was the one that blew my mind, and kept me blown ever since. Which isn't to say that <em>The Basic Eight</em> doesn't pull a few dizzying moves, or that <em>Watch Your Mouth</em> isn't ongoingly spectacular—just that before <em>Adverbs</em>, I could never have conceived of Handler as my or anybody's favorite writer, and that ever <em>since</em> <em>Adverbs, </em>I have struggled to conceive of any other writing meaning as much to me as Handler has.</div>
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Roryhorses@hey.comtag:world.hey.com,2005:World::Post/232062022-09-22T14:12:45Z2022-09-22T14:42:03ZWhat's in a map?<div class="trix-content">
<div>I've been finding myself playing <em>Ocarina of Time, </em>in the same compulsive manner that a salmon returns to its place of birth. In part, that's because Nintendo has managed to set the standard for game design for literal generations: time and again, it finds ways of expressing <em>what gaming could and should be,</em> and its expressions often wind up defining entire eras of game design.<br><br>In every one of those generations, Nintendo has been criticized for being conservative, overly traditional, too focused on its game-as-toy origins, too <em>dis</em>interested in games as rich experiences or as an artistic medium. People have complained for twenty years about how little they seem to care about voice acting, about "immersive worldbuilding" like actually writing text onto its games' signs, about how slow they are to incorporate "cutting-edge" techniques into their games. Every so often, they briefly catch up with the modern trends—as they did with <em>Breath of the Wild</em>—but they tend to establish a style of gameplay and then stick with it, gradually broadening it for what, in gamer time, feels like an eternity.<br><br>And none of those criticisms matter, because I look at the Hyrule overworld map in <em>Ocarina</em> and remember that Nintendo is, very simply, better at caring about <em>the fundamental art of crafting games</em> than anybody else is.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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</figure><br><br>Here it is, if you've never played (or haven't played for a while). Take in that soothing, minty green. Familiarize yourself with its lo-fi "smoothnesses," its curves that are barely curves. Back when 3D gaming was barely a pipe dream, Nintendo came out with this masterpiece and invented the open world. No, it doesn't feel particularly "open" nowadays, where the thought of <em>breaking a game down into separate maps</em> feels practically barbaric. But everything you need to know about open-world design is baked into this map—and everything about what makes Nintendo brilliant can be found here too.<br><br>Explaining why is as simple as 1-2-3...4-5-6-7. By which I mean: you just need to look at all the places where this map can lead.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/f9499851/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRjZrb3pnPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--ec9f22ed253f48692995b72a4b9cbd2c4f8d05b6/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJYW5CbkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--0b5e092e6240e14fab357b4c1013c9a0c881ff87/FullSizeRender.jpg" alt="FullSizeRender.jpg" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/f9499851/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRjZrb3pnPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--ec9f22ed253f48692995b72a4b9cbd2c4f8d05b6/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJYW5CbkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--a8a2bb6a9884c661ef30854054544882621a1752/FullSizeRender.jpg 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/f9499851/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRjZrb3pnPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--ec9f22ed253f48692995b72a4b9cbd2c4f8d05b6/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJYW5CbkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--9b7ba00c32731d121dd7ff5706d31cc3652788dd/FullSizeRender.jpg 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br>You first emerge into this world at <strong>Marker #1</strong>, nearby the red arrow. That arrow, incidentally, is used to indicate <em>where you entered this map from,</em> while the yellow arrow represents where you currently are—a useful tool for keeping yourself oriented, as you stumble around trying to get your bearings. Beyond Marker #1 lies the Kokiri Forest, where the first chapter of the game—the first residential "town" and the first "dungeon"—takes place. Leaving it, you encounter the broader world for the first time.<br><br><strong>Marker #2</strong> denotes Hyrule Castle Town, which is your next intended destination. The entirety of northern Hyrule consists of a single huge castle wall, in case you needed help figuring out where to go next. But it's not just the bigness of the wall, or the way you're introduced to this space with a camera pan that starts there and lands on the forest where you've emerged. <br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/f9499851/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQS9zb3pnPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--3edd9658b0b3f95780c6a5438c1925b30236f783/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJYW5CbkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--0b5e092e6240e14fab357b4c1013c9a0c881ff87/to-castle.jpg" alt="to-castle.jpg" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/f9499851/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQS9zb3pnPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--3edd9658b0b3f95780c6a5438c1925b30236f783/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJYW5CbkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--a8a2bb6a9884c661ef30854054544882621a1752/to-castle.jpg 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/f9499851/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQS9zb3pnPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--3edd9658b0b3f95780c6a5438c1925b30236f783/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJYW5CbkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--9b7ba00c32731d121dd7ff5706d31cc3652788dd/to-castle.jpg 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br>Look at the way you exit Kokiri forest: through a brief narrow passage followed by an angled opening. That angle lines up almost perfectly with the Castle Town; in fact, it leads you right to the "gutter" on its western side (the bright-green bracket to the left of Marker #2). Travel precisely as the map lines you up, and you get caught right in the pocket that you ought to be in. But wait, there's more.<br><br><strong>Marker #3</strong> takes you to Kakariko Village, beyond which lies Death Mountain. On the overworld, you can see Death Mountain's volcanic smoke ring towering above you, letting you know there's something worth seeing there. But there's also a slight preventative measure: much as Kokiri Forest's exit angles you towards Hyrule Castle Town, the entrance to Kakariko Village is tucked <em>away</em> from you, concealing the stairway that leads up to it behind "scenic" walls that merge together from afar. It's easy enough to get to, and it's nearby enough that you might be tempted, but you're given less of a <em>direct</em> visual marker than you're given of the main town. <br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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</a>
</figure><br><br>That changes when you're looking at it <em>from</em> the Castle Town: suddenly: you have a direct line of sight that includes the tucked-away staircase.<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
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<img src="https://world.hey.com/horses/f9499851/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQzV2cERnPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--4549eccc45a677c98099ae4a1ce592b9422da679/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUIya0NBQVU2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwU3pvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--946116ea0c454412635aa7309bd9472bf633014c/Screenshot%202022-09-22%20at%209.13.02%20AM.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-09-22 at 9.13.02 AM.png" srcset="https://world.hey.com/horses/f9499851/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQzV2cERnPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--4549eccc45a677c98099ae4a1ce592b9422da679/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFJQUQya0NBQW82REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--8c0bbbd8bfe72a73b222ec1c20265f8631973dc9/Screenshot%202022-09-22%20at%209.13.02%20AM.png 2x, https://world.hey.com/horses/f9499851/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCQzV2cERnPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--4549eccc45a677c98099ae4a1ce592b9422da679/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDam9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RkhKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5c2FXMXBkRnNIYVFLQUZta0NBQTg2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUERvTGJHOWhaR1Z5ZXdZNkNYQmhaMlV3T2cxamIyRnNaWE5qWlZRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoidmFyaWF0aW9uIn19--d2fed6b5089e475a3013538949ec7f311ac6e345/Screenshot%202022-09-22%20at%209.13.02%20AM.png 3x" decoding="async" loading="lazy">
</a>
</figure><br><br>Now, it's worth pointing out that these aren't the <em>only</em> layers at play. Kakariko Village offers a number of things for you to immediately do, should you arrive at it before you go to Hyrule Castle Town. In fact, its design consists of three layers of gates: the village itself is fully accessible at any time; Death Mountain is only accessible once you've met Zelda at the castle; and the graveyard in between is instantly available, but holds a particularly juicy treasure if you approach it after you've met Zelda.<br><br><strong>Marker #4, </strong>Lon Lon Ranch, serves one immediately valuable purpose: it closes the map. Areas 1-5 form a self-contained region of the world; areas 6 and 7 are mostly excluded from the game's first half, and don't need to be visited directly until much later. (There's one minor exception, which I'll get to.) By placing the Ranch at the center of the map, Nintendo keeps you from wandering too broadly away, while offering you an inner realm that's rich and open enough not to feel limiting.<br><br>Once you visit Zelda, the Ranch offers a few things for you to explore: a mini-game, a song, and seeds for future stories. It's also got one treasure, a Piece of Heart, that you can technically get to <em>without</em> meeting Zelda first, but it's placed at the far side of the Ranch, with a lot of emptiness in between—hinting that you should wait to come back later. You meet two of the three main residents of this place en route to finding Zelda; encountering them there is what gets them to come back here, which also gives them a chance to explicitly <em>invite</em> you in. <br><br>(And, of course, that invitation is reflected in the way that Lon Lon's entrance is pointed subtly away from Kokiri Forest, while presenting itself immediately as you exit the Castle Town itself.)<br><br><strong>Marker #5</strong> takes you on the winding path towards Zora's Domain, the third of the three lands you need to visit before you finish the "child" portion of the game. Geographically speaking, it's the <em>closest</em> possible destination to Kokiri Forest, though it's the most weakly indicated: the river flowing towards it is a quieter landmark than the others I've mentioned. And it's the only intentionally opaque landing of the five—when you first get to it, there's almost nothing you can do, apart from buying seemingly-useless magic beans from a nearby loafer. You have to make it a fair chunk of the way into Death Mountain before anything else becomes possible. <br><br>As a result, this route gradually forms the initial <em>mystery</em> of the early game: the place which you can't access and don't understand <em>how</em> you'd access, pointing somewhere that—unlike Death Mountain's conspicuous presence—doesn't hint at its own nature. The eventual reveal of Zora's Domain, which is crystalline and ethereal in a way that feels less earthly than Kokiri Forest or Death Mountain, rewards you less materially than viscerally, by offering you a place that feels more explicitly magical than anywhere else that you've seen. And because you're offered a plethora of other possible outlets, the inaccessibility of this space doesn't feel limiting, and it doesn't diminish the overall sense of non-linearity to this world. It becomes your final destination as you gradually see that no other destinations are left.<br><br><strong>Marker #6 </strong>leads to Lake Hylia. It's about as far from Kokiri Forest as Hyrule Castle Town is, which might be why you're angled so sharply away from it at first. In fact, its entrance runs <em>literally </em>parallel to your initial exit, emphasizing that this is not the direction you ought to take. <br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--jpg">
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</a>
</figure><br><br>Furthermore, its entryway appears to be blocked off at first, unless you do some snooping and find a ladder tucked away in the opposite direction from your approach.<br><br>But it's not entirely forbidden. In fact, it offers you more to do than the route to Zora's Domain does. Lake Hylia is one of the larger open regions of the game, and offers you a number of people to visit, secrets to explore, and the fishing minigame, which might be the most involved minigame <em>Ocarina</em> has to offer.<br><br>You do visit Lake Hylia once as a child, but you enter it directly from Zora's Domain. Does this make geographic sense? Not entirely! But that doesn't matter, because your proximity to water in both directions makes the two feel logically connected. If you visit it before you arrive at Zora's Domain, your visit "pays off" with the recognition that you're returning to a place those purpose you didn't fully understand. If you've never visited it before, that's fine too, because you technically never left that northeastern enclave. (The magic of teleportation!)<br><br>When you return to this world as an adult, Lake Hylia is suddenly inaccessible. The mystery of why you can't get to it is one of several jarring shifts in the landscape seven years on, and turns this into a more central object of mystery—one with a visually-striking payoff.<br><br><strong>Marker #7</strong>, meanwhile, leads to the Gerudo Valley—by far the most forbidden part of the landscape, as well as the most geographically inaccessible. I mean, look at this density of obstacles:<br><br> <figure class="attachment attachment--preview attachment--lightboxable attachment--png">
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</figure><br><br>You clear out three major dungeons as a child, and five major temples as an adult. The temple that lies in this direction is the <em>fifth</em> of those: you have to re-visit Kokiri Forest, Death Mountain, and Zora's Domain, at which point you can access a temple in Kakariko Village itself—via more convoluted time-traveling shenanigans than you've formally been asked to deal with—and at last you can visit the vast desert, the intermediary fortress, and the final temple that makes up the final broader region of the game. In the meantime, Gerudo Valley is largely just not possible to get to: you can't even think of traveling there until you've completed one of two major objectives as an adult, and even then your access is sharply limited until near the end of the game.<br><br>If the route to Zora's Domain serves as the looming mystery in your childhood, then Gerudo Valley serves the purpose in adulthood. And just as Zora's Domain rewards your patience by offering you a vivid shift in locale when you finally arrive, Gerudo Valley pays off in a big way: it's just as self-enclosed a space as the region of Hyrule contained within those first five markers, and offers up multiple storylines, a brand-new town, a set of mini-games, and a final temple that requires time-travel to both enter <em>and</em> complete. <br><br>Even its narrative is uniquely self-contained. Every temple is connected to a sage, and the sages of every other temple are revealed to be characters you've met before. The one exception is the sage of Gerudo's Spirit Temple, who you only meet upon finally entering the Valley—and her story is entwined with the Spirit Temple's bosses in a similarly unusual manner. <br><br>In your final leg, in other words, just as things might start to seem repetitive and you might start to weary of playing, you're finally given access to the one last place you haven't entered—and you are given a refresh on every possible level. New places, new characters, new stories, all told in a complex and interlocking manner that the rest of the game, <em>because </em>of its non-linear and recursive architecture, can't (and doesn't want to) match.<br><br>And all this—<em>the game's structure in a nutshell</em>—is conveyed the moment you enter Hyrule proper, and take your first look at your map. Everything, from the smaller realm you explore as a kid to the final payoff you'll receive as an adult, is not only foreshadowed but <em>mapped out</em> for you. The interlock between locations, the various possible calculuses of which places you'll choose to go and in what order, has been thought out down to the literal mathematical angle. And the byproduct of all this consideration, ironically, is that you <em>don't</em> need to think about any of this—no matter how you go about processing this information, your thoughts and curiosities are guided, seamlessly, by the way this world has been laid out for you. The trickiest part of analyzing how Nintendo did this, in fact, consists of realizing they did it in the first place.<br><br>We don't have to stop there. We could talk about the way that the Lost Woods in Kokiri Forest contains hidden connections between Death Valley and Zora's Domain, offering you ways to quickly travel between all three, even before you learn the songs as an adult that will teleport you directly to the mouths of each temple. We could talk about the way that each of these locations gets extended in adulthood, or about the different ways in which items you acquire unlock certain gates—more linearly at first, then in more open-ended ways as you go on. And, of course, we could talk about how endlessly the game introduces you to new techniques, whether it's the early dungeons teaching you new ideas about puzzle-solving or even just Kokiri Forest offering you a number of gentle ways to move about the world, before you've acquired your sword and shield and movement is all there is. (Hell, we could talk about how you <em>leave your room</em> at the start of the game and are immediately confronted with a ladder down, which introduces you both to three-dimensional movement and to the context-shifting A button that you can press to drop immediately down.) Pick apart pretty much any major Nintendo game, and you start to realize how thoroughly and thoughtfully it's been designed: how, on every conceivable level, it has asked itself both how a game ought to play and how its world ought to encourage that. <br><br>It's popular to assume that games are so much more sophisticated nowadays that early games must have been crude by comparison, in the same way that early cinema or earlier eras of music are gradually seen as pale facsimiles of what we have today. In truth, oftentimes the opposite happens: both the ease of creation and the bewildering range of possibilities leads people to cut corners, or to overlook possible considerations en route to working out a bigger picture. One reason that Nintendo increasingly lags "behind the times," I suspect, is that it spends far more time ironing out these details than most studios bother with; it's why games like <em>Super Mario Sunshine</em> or <em>The Wind Waker</em> are often met with derision upon release, only to wind up re-released on platform after platform, as successive generations of gamers realize what a joy they are to play. When they take on a genre of game that's only been <em>crudely</em> explored, though, as <em>Breath of the Wild</em> did with open-world environments or <em>Ocarina of Time</em> did with 3D worlds in general, their patience leads not only to unforgettable experiences but to revolutions in the medium. Over time, we take their achievements for granted, because their consideration feels obvious in retrospect—but it's only obvious because, as with the best toys, every piece fits logically together, every component achieves exactly what it should, until the whole winds up so compelling that we stop noticing the parts that added up to its sum.<br><br>Don't just take my word for it. It's all right there in the map.</div>
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