Phone Home: What Disclosure Day Discloses

E.T. The Extraterrestrial 

Can set design make or break a film? In general, probably not, but it made one film for me. I remember seeing E.T. The Extraterrestrial as a kid and seeing the image of a television set with an Atari 2600 stacked on top, and cartridges underneath. It was the first time that a movie looked like something I recognized, like it could have been my house, my television. This is true of the whole film, with its middle class messiness of action figures and toys strewn about. Of course as a kid I was not exactly looking for realism in film. I saw the original Star Wars thirty some times by my last count, and spent the rest of the late seventies and early eighties searching to recreate that experience.

Through A Google Glass Darkly: On The Draw

 

Marx wrote, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living," but he neglected to add that it is the nightmare of traditions that weighs the heaviest in moments of crisis. Ever since 2016, we have seen a revival of some of the darkest moments of the imagination, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower has made the best sellers list, and 1984 has been reread, made the subject of a documentary, which I have not seen, and also to some extent remade, as The Draw, which I did see. 

Untimely Dystopias: On The Long Walk and The Running Man

 

2025 will probably go down in history as a pivotal year in the US's decline into a particular kind of media driven twenty-first century fascism. It is the year that Trump got his paramilitary force, in ICE, it is also the year in which we saw the fourth estate capitulate to the administration, turning over CBS news to a bootlicking blogger, firing comedians, and gutting journalism to pour money into a fawning documentary about the first lady. The times would seem to be ripe for a film dealing with the combination of authoritarian power and media spectacle. We got two, both based on books by Stephen King. Books written over forty years ago. 

The Spectacle Goes to the Movies: The Pop Life of Debord

 

As someone who teaches philosophy at a regional public university, which is to say a school without a lot of students who could ever imagine majoring in philosophy, I have never found a pop culture reference to philosophy I did not like. I have talked about Breaking Bad and work, Fight Club and alienation, and Get Out and W.E.B. Dubois to name a few. I have never done anything with The Matrix though. I have never shown it or screened it. 

Indentured Fan Service: On Alien: Romulus

 

I once heard someone remark about Alien that during the Reagan era the capitalist hegemony against workers was so complete that the only way to represent the struggles of working class was to set to set it in space. Such a comment is not entirely accurate about the film, it came out in 1979 after all, but does say something about its place in popular culture. Alien introduced the space worker, worried about the bonus situation and struggle with a company that deemed him or her expendable.  The space worker has appeared again and again in film, in Outland, Moon, and The Expanse. 

2 Apes 2 Planets: On Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

 

The recent Planet of the Apes films can be defined by two questions: one internal to the films themselves, to their own universe, albeit with allegorical dimensions, and the other external, to their status as commodities in the culture industry. The first question is what is the nature of the conflict between humans and apes? Is it a natural conflict, a conflict between two species for domination, or is it a political conflict, a conflict between different ways of living. The second question is will audiences watch and identify with apes, with CGI characters, rather than humans played by human actors.

Between Legacy and History: On Peele's Nope

Seeing Nope at the Bridgton Twin Drive In 

Movie critics, even amateur ones, love puns, love working the title into their reviews in some sort of play on words. So it takes a certain amount of confidence to call a film "Nope". It just invites too many titles for negative reviews, say "Nope to nope" and so on. In the case of Peele that confidence is earned. It is the third movie by a director who is developing his own vision in an era where such things as vision or style, even directors as auteurs, are increasingly obsolete. The title of Nope recalls the title of Peele's first film, Get Out  which was an homage to Eddie Murphy's bit about how a haunted house movie would never work with a black family, they would Get Out at the first warning.  

Two Versions of an Extinction: Prehistoric Planet and Jurassic Park

A similar image of dinosaurs in the snow circulated at about the same time from two very different sources. The first, above, was from Prehistoric Planet as series on Apple TV, and the second was from the trailer of the latest Jurassic World film. These images reflect the changing scientific theories of the dinosaur which have shifted from slow scaly reptiles to what are now considered smart, fast, feathered, warm blooded animals. This is especially true of the former which uses CGI and paleontology to produce a kind of Planet Earth for the prehistoric world (complete with David Attenborough providing narration). The latter is less fettered by science, but has used some recent discoveries, smart velociraptors hunting in packs, T-Rex's that walk with its spine parallel to the ground like land sharks, and so on when they have served the story. 

Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance

 

I was slow to get to Severance. Partly this has to do with conditions of contemporary cultural consumption. The shift from movies to television and from television to streaming, accelerated by the pandemic, has raised particular hurdles to watching new television shows even as everything can be viewed from one's home. Every new show comes with the subscription to a new service (or a way to work around it) and the proliferation of these services with their own branding and marketing enough to make me miss the catholic nature of movie theaters. Of the different services I had particular disdain for Apple TV, mostly due to the cross brand marketing and the lingering aftertaste of itunes as an app. Anything that could immediately disseminate a U2 album should not only be shunned but the people who made it should be banished. 

Get Meta With Me: On Matrix Resurrections

 

The Matrix is a film about work. Long before Neo escapes the matrix he has to break out of a much more mundane space of confinement, the office cubicle. The film is thus part of that odd series of films that came out in 1999 that were about the confines of the cubicle and the working day, a list that includes Office Space, Fight Club, and American Beauty (and Being John Malkovich). It was an odd year, in the midst of the dot-com bubble and the Clinton third way, a year that on the surface was good for capitalism, the movies were telling a different story, a story in which work and the office was sucking the life out of people. An idea which The Matrix made literal in its dystopian future of energy sucking pods, in other words, cubicles 2199. 

Everybody is a Troll to Somebody: On Chris Beckett's Two Tribes (partially)

 

More than once I have made the joke that if philosophy really wanted to go back to its Platonic (or Socratic roots) then it most recognizing trolling as the new sophists. Trolling seems to be a more relevant form of "anti-philosophy," to use Badiou's term, than Wittgenstein or Nietzsche if only because the former is more prevalent, shaping the arguments that make up what passes for the public sphere, and not just a few philosophy classrooms.

Pop Culture Prophecy: Empire's Decline from Fantasy to Reality

All panels and art from Tim Truman Scout, Eclipse comics

During the odd grifter's interregnum of the last few weeks a particular image came to mind. The image, reproduced above, depicts the President of a dystopian American turning into a monster and clinging to power. I am not sure how it was jogged from my memory, but it seemed to fit the last few weeks since the election. It is from the comic book Scout written and drawn by Tim Truman and published by Eclipse Comics from 1985-1987. It was one of my favorite comics growing up even though judging by its status today, and conversations with other comics fans, it has been overlooked or forgotten. I haven't been able to forget it, and in many ways it seems to be a better guide to our present than the superheroes from the same era who have only become more central to popular culture. 

Doppelgängerland: The New Monster is Us

Monster come in cycles. Werewolves wax and wane in and out of cultural visibility, and even vampires disappear and return. There might even be an end to zombie movies someday. Perhaps the current period will be known as the year of the doppelgänger. I am referring not only to Jordan Peele's brilliant Us, but also the return of the mirror universe in Star Trek: Discovery and Counterpart on Starz. If one wanted to add a literary reference one could include Ted Chiang's story "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom." (I know that there might be more stories and novels, I just reading Exhalation now and cannot resist plugging it).

Cold Call Man: On Sorry to Bother You

There is no film this year that I have anticipated more than Sorry to Bother You. I have been a fan of Boots Riley since I first learned about The Coup years ago. I have heard about this film for years; bought the album but eschewed reading the published screenplay. The latter seemed like admitting defeat and I desperately wanted to see this film get made. The first rule of movies, at least in Hollywood, is that anticipation is the enemy of enjoyment. Of course this is usually because most films fail to meet our expectations, the trailer would have been enough; it is rare that a film not only exceeds our expectations but calls them into question. 

The Primitive Accumulation of Prehistory: On the Jurassic Park films

As a kid I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I know that there is nothing unique about this and that is precisely why I relate it. My obsession took place at a time before there was an adequate pop culture outlet for that expression. It was before the Jurassic Park films before even The Land Before Time films. So I sought out every dinosaur film I could whenever they played on the afternoon or late night movie, The Land that Time Forgot, The Last Dinosaur, Dinosaurus, etc., These films were hard to come by, and many of them are not very good at all. There is a story told in my family, a legend of sorts, of the night we all ended up in a motel while taking the yearly pilgrimage to visit the grandparents, flipped through channels only to stumble upon a showing of the  Valley of the Gwangi.  Not a great dinosaur film but one that nonetheless benefitted from the work of Ray Harryhausen. It was a different time, one defined by the scarcity of cultural products rather than their proliferation. Dinosaur films were hard to come by, and good ones less so, so a dinosaur obsessed kid took what they could.

Make Monsters Great Again: Timeliness and Untimeliness in The Shape of Water

Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water is an odd and improbable creature, a monster movie that is a critical darling. The critical responses for the movie have themselves understood the movie as a different sort of chimera, a combination of "fairy tale" and nostalgia film, something at once timeless and caught in its own relation to a vanishing past. 

Small Concept: On Downsizing

Matt Damon has the odd distinction of staring in two science fiction dystopias, one bleak action movie the other farce, that are absolutely confused on the role of work and capitalism. The first was Elysium and the most recent is Downsizing. The confusion is not just a product of the director or screenwriter's particular confusion, but is in some sense symptomatic of a more general ideological elision in which capitalism is lived but never named, or, more to the point, never named because it is lived--just like the proverbial fish in water. 

How Can It Not Know What It Is? On Blade Runner 2049

I think that I may have grown up watching Blade Runner. I do not mean that I watched the film several times growing up, although that is probably the case, but something happened when I first watched it that was integral to growing up. All of this is because I grew up, in the first sense, watching Harrison Ford play a hero; Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were a big part of my childhood imagination. I had the toys and I am sure I went as Indiana Jones one Halloween. So when I saw Blade Runner for the first time, I think on VHS, I expected the same comic book morality of good versus evil and the same wisecracking character (Let's just be honest and admit that Han Solo and Indiana Jones are basically the same character). The movie both thwarted and ultimately exceeded my expectations: in its failure to live up to my action packed expectations it redefined what made a good film. I do not think that I could watch films again in the same way; incidentally, I am fairly sure that it was my attempt to see the film on the big screen a few years later that drew me to my local art house theater, the Cleveland Cinematheque. It is not just that Blade Runner has a formal connection to film noir and larger film world, for me it had an anecdotal one as well. 

The Role of Revolution in the Transition from Man to Ape (and back again): On War For The Planet of the Apes

Perhaps the new ape films should be considered as one long remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Initially, this seemed to be limited to the first film, but the subsequent sequels have extended the revolutionary moment. Ape versus humans is no longer a chapter in the story, but the entire story. The first film, which seem like a risky one off when it was first released, had a few "easter eggs"alluding to a missing mission to Mars that set up the original films. With the film's success there was the need to continue the story, converting easter eggs to plot points, to provide the full story of the transformation of our world into a world of apes. This makes the recent ape films unique in the world of apocalypses and dystopias; the film does not present a new world already made, but the conditions of its making. That the final in what is now being called a trilogy comes out in 2017 on July 14th, hitting two revolutionary anniversaries, Bastille Day and the Russian Revolution of 1917, would only seem to underscore the point of revolution.They attempt to show how the planet of the apes came into being, revealing the causes and the contingency of what the original presented as necessity.

In Space No One Can Hear You Struggle: On The Expanse

I am not sure if this going to be much more than a long exhortation to watch The Expanse.