Category: media

The Atlantic’s Survivalist Problem

Bullets look for targets. Hammers look for nails.

The survivalist problem is the US Marine Corps Scout Sniper School problem. You’ve expended an immense amount of time, energy, and resources to be prepared. You’ve made personal sacrifices to become engaged and proficient in a wide range of highly practical, exclusive, hard-to-acquire skills. And you’ve done this in response to something that seems more or less inevitable.

You’ve been taught that there’ll be a cataclysm, a collapse, a threat, a danger to life, to loved ones, to the social order, even to the political abstraction that raised you and put a gun in your hand. And you’re convinced that you’ll be called on, possibly by superiors, but certainly by circumstances, to begin pulling the trigger.

Maybe so. But what the trigger will feel like before, during, and after you pull it remains to be seen. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You just have a sense. There’s a vague blur, somewhere in the indeterminate future, hiding exactly how it’ll all play out. But you know something’s bound to happen. You feel the weight of it bearing down, emerging from the fog of cultural spite, social tension, and violence you read about every day in the news. Something’s got to give. We can’t go on like this.

And maybe, though in the light of day you’d hesitate to openly admit it, you want hell to break loose. Otherwise, what was all that planning for? Bullets look for targets. Hammers look for nails. Train someone up to do a thing and it becomes their raison d’être. Place a gun in someone’s hand and the fingers will close.

As Mendes’ Jarhead puts it, “If you are lucky, in that window will one day emerge . . . the figure of the enemy. The JFK shot. The pink mist.” If you’re lucky, fate will one day conspire to fulfill what has become your reason for being. The unlucky ones are sometimes called “preppers” in the sense that they are always preparing, always in a state of frustrated training and unfulfilled belief. But you—one day luck may smile on you in a moment of satisfaction: the pink mist, the apocalyptic moment, redemption, validation.

Apocalypticism has a long history in the United States, closely associated with exotic forms of Protestantism, then skewing into UFO abduction cults and transdimensional disembodied reptile prophecies from ancient Lemuria. But it’s all of a piece. Mythologies and reasons can be goofy, can emerge from a Star Trek cargo cult as easily as from an established religious body, because the survivalist problem isn’t about reason.

It pretends cause and effect, but it’s really just emotion, often with an opportunistic subtext. Interestingly enough, the highly trained 22-year-old with a Mk22 Mod 0 Advanced is also fairly low on syllogisms. His trigger’s greased. 7.62mm. He doesn’t have to think about it. He’s just having certain feelings while he waits for the word.

The survivalist problem is also the media problem. The first USMC Scout Snipers go back to 1943, but the media problem goes back to at least 16th-century Venice with the first avvisi. The survivalist problem likely began as early as the rise of agriculture and got markedly worse with the Industrial Revolution. But the DNA is always the same: the existing order is corrupt, immoral, lost, and there must be a purification—messiahs, flagellants, fire-and-brimstone preachers, broadsheets, social activists, op-eds, Atlantian ghost masters, and angels of vengeance notwithstanding. The Big One’s coming. We brought it on ourselves. See page B-5.

So it’s not surprising that The Atlantic, a publication named after the lost city as much as the ocean, is trying hard to regain some of that sweet Trumpian dread that goosed up their readership back in 2017. They seem to have resumed publishing unapologetic apocalypse pornography in spite of the Biden Administration sedation. Now that Trump has returned and is performing electroshock on the federal bureaucracy, The Atlantic’s back to prepping with a quickness, the only thing left being some sort of culmination, some apotheosis of all that frustrated desire.

Aziz Huq’s “America is Watching the Rise of a Dual State” (originally “A Warning Out of Time” in the print edition) is a fair example. Huq is a solid writer, a law professor at the University of Chicago, something he mentions in his second paragraph, and his op-ed exudes a kind of spectral reasonableness in spite of the fact that it’s built on a thin historical parallel with the rise of Nazi Germany.

When he declares that Trump is trying “to construct a prerogative state where cruel caprice, not law, rules,” he’s too canny not to immediately follow with “By no measure does the extent of federal law displaced in the first few months of the Trump administration compare with the huge tracts of the Weimar’s legal system eviscerated by the Nazis.” Ah. Good. I was worried for a moment that we’d descended into Man in the High Castle.

Still, he continues, “it is striking how Donald Trump’s executive orders reject some basic tenets of American constitutionalism.” Maybe or maybe not, depending on how transparent Professor Huq wants to be about the inevitable legal firestorms at the state level contesting the validity of these executive orders.

For example, Washington state is currently trying to prevent the implementation of an executive order to end federal research and education grants focusing on gender affirming care. For the time being, the Western District of Washington has enjoined the enforcement of the order and thereby prevented the federal government from acting on it in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, and Colorado. The court system isn’t asleep. The legal system is designed to prevent executive overreach and is, in fact, doing that. The courts have received a certain amount of voltage. And there is no sign that this is going to subside anytime soon.

Huq’s facade of reason collapses when he overstresses his historical parallel: “it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump’s lawyers—despite running roughshod over Congress, the states, the press, and the civil service—were somewhat slower to defy the federal courts, and have fast-tracked cases to the Supreme Court, seeking a judicial imprimatur for novel presidential powers. The courts, unlike the legislature, remain useful to an autocrat in a dual state.” Now we really are in Man in the High Castle.

How we got there in two paragraphs after “but this is no Weimar collapse” is a bit mysterious, but here we are—along with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s “Americans Are Buying an Escape Plan: Is it time for a second passport?”, Russell Berman’s “Musk Comes for the Third Rail of American Politics,” and Timothy W. Ryback’s, “What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler: Journalists accurately reported that the führer was a ‘Little Man’ whom the whole world was laughing at. It didn’t matter.”

At first glance, we might conclude that the magazine has a Hitler fetish. But it’s just the survivalist problem in an SS uniform. The Atlantic is yearning for the pink mist. The trigger’s greased. The figure of the enemy has emerged. They’ve been prepping for so long. Now they’re just having some feelings and waiting for the word.

 

The Adderall Diaries Revisited

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time alone.  I was an underachiever and a social outcast, who lived primarily through his imagination, and I read constantly and widely.  I’d impersonate my father in order to call myself in sick—my father rarely ever knew or cared when I was sick, but the school secretary had a different impression—then head down to the public library’s central branch to read all day.  I learned more that way, mostly about arts and humanities subjects, than I ever did in my depressing cliquey high school.

One of the books I encountered was Dali / Miro: Masters of Surrealism.  It was a good read and I thought Dali was weird and cool.  Like a lot of teenagers just learning about art, I thought you had to be weird and cool to be an artist.  And when I read the book, the idea that artists were different made sense to me on a higher level.  They were a unique species.

by Paul Walton, Tudor Publishing, 1967

Both of my parents were serious artists (my father a writer, my mother a painter and sculptor) and they were definitely not weird and cool.  They were just mom and dad.  I didn’t put them in the same category as someone like Salvador Dali, Buckminster Fuller, William Burroughs, Joan Miró, Hemingway, HP Lovecraft, Picasso, or Jack Kerouac—all illustrious weirdos on whom I’d developed a teenage obsession at some point.

Also, less illustrious but no less weird: Robert E. Howard, Jim Starlin, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Robert Aspirin, Lynn Abbey, Dave Sim, CJ Cherryh, and many other sci-fi / fantasy people, who were great in pop-culture, but who were a bit too lowbrow to garner respect from anyone in my family.

To be fair, like any teen, I didn’t understand that these “names” were the product of intense cultural mediation, specifically economic and industry concerns, their greatness established and maintained, by multinational media organizations.  As Foucault writes in “What is an author?” “an author’s name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. . . . [I]ts status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.”

Instead, I mistook marketing for mystery and felt the answer to my suffering was somewhere far away with these special people—maybe in a comic book, a fantasy novel, or whatever esoteric elephant vapor held up Dali’s melting art chateau.  I had to Find The Others.  But at that time in my life, I would have had to borrow the car to do it.

One day, I asked my mom to explain the weirdness to me and why she wasn’t like that.  Her answer was something I’d never forget.  You can’t generalize about art and artists because everyone is different.  But there are such things as posers and they are numerous.

A poser is someone who takes his creative energy and puts it into his appearance and identity instead of into his work.  She added that some people are posers and artists at the same time.  Warhol, Basquiat, Hemingway, and Dali are good examples.  Others are just framed by the media in colorful ways for author-branding purposes.  Hence, the Hollywood image of the artist as a flamboyant weirdo.  Hollywood understands this pose because the poser-weirdo artist is an evergreen role that makes conventional Joe Sixpack comfortable.

Artists are people willing to dwell in the imagination.  They’re indulgent, often emotionally arrested in some ways and hyper-developed in others, and they’ve given themselves certain inner permissions to an unsettling degree.  This might be generally true.  But if we can put them in a container, labelled FREAK, we can feel less threatened by their existence.

At least from the standpoint of values and expectations, this is what Hollywood is usually about: reinforcing dominant social attitudes and trends and making lots of money as a result.  Sometimes, Hollywood stumbles into art and makes something amazing.  But most of the time, it recycles garbage.  And one of its often-recycled garbage products is James Franco playing a writer.

Poser?

It seems like he does this far too much.  He’s an actor, so a creative person by definition, and he actually does have an MFA in creative writing (not making him a writer by definition, which is something for a different essay), but he seems to be suffering from the actor who really wants to be the thing he portrays syndrome.

Yes, Franco has published multiple books.  And I feel sure it was as difficult for him to find a publisher as it was for Jewel, if anyone remembers her as a literary sensation.  Some of his material might be good.  I haven’t made a definitive study of the Franco corpus.  And I don’t want to bag on him as a writer or as a person.  But I do think he does a disservice to the discipline of literary writing by reinforcing Hollywood’s poser-weirdo artist stereotype.  Then again, he’s an actor.  Posing is his primary skill.

Please stop this.

So I watched The Adderall Diaries after a nine-year cleansing period.  It has not aged well.  The story, in case you wisely abstained the first time around, is that Stephen Elliott has writer’s block.  He’s on the verge of a big deal with Penguin for a creative nonfiction book on his late, abusive father and shitty childhood.  But it all falls apart when the supposedly dead dad (Ed Harris) shows up at a very posh, exclusive publishing-industry reading and calls Elliott out as a fraud.

Cue Cynthia Nixon, playing a literary agent but really just reprising her Distressed Middle Management Lady role from Sex and the City: no one wants anything to do with Stephen Elliott now that he hasn’t really been chained up in a basement like he claimed and his dad is still around.  He’d better produce hard evidence that he was a messed up kid and fast.

Then we get Amber Heard, a spectrum of drugs appearing out of Elliott’s pockets, and multiple S&M intercuts with hookers throughout the greater New York metropolitan region, representing to Joe Sixpack the Decadence And Depravity To Which An Artist With A Wounded Soul Can Descend.  In movies, you never see an artist washing the dishes unless she has a needle hanging out of her arm.  And yet, the dishes do seem to get washed.  Who does them?  Maybe “Dobby the House Elf,” since this is about as realistic as Harry Potter.

You never see the high cost of the rock-and-roll lifestyle supposedly led by creative people because, much like me as a teenager, Joe Sixpack must have certain assumptions reinforced.  Artists are “other.”  The normal rules of human life don’t apply to them.  If they debauch themselves, the consequences are largely aesthetic, quickly forgotten by the next scene.

They drink whiskey like it’s apple juice.  They’re pursued by modelesque beauties or hunky men, who find them incredibly interesting.  They engage in a smorgasbord of extracurricular porn sex.  And they rarely need to consider whether such a lifestyle might interfere with their writing.  In reality, if you’ve got a headache, you’ll notice you typically write fewer pages that day.  If you’ve got a hangover, the manuscript can wait.

James Franco is an attractive man and Amber Heard, even post-Depp, is gorgeous.  I have no doubt they are in the right field.  They should be looked at for money.  But being able to strike a pose is not the same as being able to work with lousy source material or function effectively as a different type of artist.  It’s definitely not enough to turn you into the real thing.  The difference between Franco and, say, Salvador Dali, Hunter Thompson, Charles Bukowski, or Andy Warhol is simple.  They were exceptional because they had enough creative energy to weave self-aggrandizing image-myths while also making real art.

But most artists want to live quietly.  They want their energy and attention to go toward one thing.  In the meantime, the movie industry (and, to a certain extent, the publishing industry) chugs along, recycling comfortable stereotypes so that everyone can feel a little less bad about the poems they wrote at age 14.

How to Be Good

Black Swan is Midsommar.  Stop talking, Winston.

Hollywood has never seemed more Orwellian in its insistence that it is the repository of everything admirable in culture and that it represents the right side of history.  We know Hollywood will hold its own mother down and pull the gold out of her teeth with a pliers, but it prefers to pretend otherwise. And no one wants to dwell on this as long as the entertainment keeps coming.  With streaming, the rapaciousness of the entertainment center of the world is even harder to see.  Hollywood says it’s your friend.  In reality, it’s INGSOC conformity and you’re awful if you disagree.

Streaming technology is as 1984 as it gets.

The tragedy of streaming content is that it never goes away.  It’s in your house, up in your perceptual field, at all times.  Even when you’re not watching, you’re getting emails reminding you to log back in.  Back in the halcyon days of Blockbuster Video, a pretentious, emotionally manipulative stinker might show up on VHS, but there was a bit more personal agency involved in renting and watching it.  It wasn’t accessible unless you physically sought it out.  It was a tangible thing and you weren’t quite such a passive blob of content consumption—seeing the movie demanded that you get up, at least temporarily, from the couch.

You also didn’t have the same plausible deniability if you found yourself watching a lousy film.  At some point, from the rental store to the final credits (if you made it that far), you had to remind yourself that you put down good money for the thing and brought it home.  You did it to yourself, friend.

In the worst cases (Tree of Life?  Vanilla Sky?  The English Patient?  Legends of the Fall?  Crash? Life as a House?), you may have admitted that you were powerless against the overwhelming pretentious hype-suction and were thereafter drawn into a vortex of melodrama against your will.  Then you may have made a searching and fearless moral inventory and resolved never to relapse again.  Sometimes, bringing back drippy garbage from Blockbuster could be a cathartic, healing experience, like going out with the guys while on Antabuse.  The best lessons are the ones we teach ourselves.

But now, with streaming television and movies, everybody’s on the juice 24/7 and done learning.  You can now quietly demean yourself with bullshit Hollywood affectation and faux-political posturing every month for a discreet subscription fee.  Nobody has to know.  You don’t have to look the Blockbuster cashier in the eye and say, yes, I want to rent The Fountain.  You can violate yourself, from beginning to end, with all the pungent streams you desire in the privacy of your home.  Draw the curtains.  Click on I Am Love.  It’s okay.

You might occasionally feel a twinge of self-criticism—why have I watched Babel 15 times and The Maltese Falcon only twice?  What does this say about me?  But there are certain politically coded stinkers that remain beyond criticism, no matter how fetid and endless their streams may be.  Those are the films you are permitted to enjoy without needing to painfully reflect on why you are doing it to yourself.  Or if you do happen to wonder, the Party has provided a simple thought-stopping idea: because I am a good person.

The Party tells me I enjoy Magnolia for its drawn out emotional exploration of human meaning and compassion in the San Fernando Valley, a concept which, in itself, is astounding.  Thankfully, it’s streaming right now on Netflix.  I watch Magnolia because I am good.  It provides an emotional release and ultimately represents the best parts of me.  I enjoy what is good because I am a good person.  War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.  Thank you, Netflix.  I feel happy.  Let’s watch it again.

What’s going on in my brain?  Why is George Orwell haunting my laptop?

Ideally, a movie will go through a production funnel that starts with a compelling idea, and ends with a completed feature. Along the way, there will be setbacks and workarounds, windfalls and compromises. And as Rachel Ziegler, the most likeable actress in Hollywood, has so famously put it, “That’s Hollywood, baby.” *  But we do not live in an ideal world, which means the “completed feature” can come into being before its concept.  That, too, is Hollywood, baby.  In fact, that’s even more Hollywood than Hollywood. **

A film is sometimes made and then the hype apparatus around it tries to make it into something.  Is it a trenchant commentary on the state of race relations in inner-city schools?  It could be.  Is it a masterwork of ironic feminist critique?  It could be.  Is it a moving historical epic in which unrequited love is cast against a tapestry of chaos and war?  It could be.  Let’s see.  And if we can’t “position” it—

A book publicist once asked me how I’d position my second short story collection, Cruel Stars.  I said, “Wut?”  She took a deep breath and said, “What are the books on either side of it in the bookstore?”  Then I took a deep breath and said, “Well, the one of the left is, of course, my first collection, Gravity.  The one on the right is the collection I’m just finishing, Living the Dream.”  She nodded slowly at something over my shoulder.

—does it even exist?  Art is nothing without the marketing because marketing is what communicates The Message, the values of the Party.  It explains why you are good, why certain things should make you feel happy and sad, and why this should matter to modern audiences.  And if such an explanation is impossible or requires too much scaffolding, the Party might want to delay the release or even consign it forever to the vault.

But those of us who are not Party members, who are not on board with what passes for the New York Times concept of the right side of history, may object that this seems untoward for everyone concerned—like pushing a baby back in so the birth might be restarted more strategically, in a more profitable and impactful time.

Most unfortunate. When something is created, you can’t uncreate it so it can hit the zeitgeist more advantageously. You can only change it. And generally the more post-hoc changes and delays you make to a creative product, the more it becomes a horrific golem, an accidental parody of a commercial concept, instead of a coherent piece of art.  Put differently, one usually does not do a thing and then justify or position it without making a mess.  No, no, I’m not criticizing the Party.  Don’t look at me like that.  I’m merely making a small, harmless observation . . .

This brings us to the example of Black Swan and Midsommar, which is the same horrendously pretentious, emotionally coercive movie.

Black Swan is now available again on Netflix.  We might say it’s been raised from the dead one more time thanks to the always-already necromancy of streaming video.  It’s definitely a film approved of by the Party: a break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character, Nina, is romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out.

There are certain inchoate feelings loudly expressed.  There is a certain amount of weeping and there are various episodes of emotional violence that we are encouraged to think must mean something.  Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) means you are good.  You get the message.  You are indeed on the right side of history.

Midsommar is the same break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character is also romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out.  Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) also means you are good.  Criticizing this Frankenstein’s monster of highly telegraphed political position statements means you are a counter-revolutionary, a subversive, not of the Party. You are bad.

To be fair, there are some hapless men who travel through the scenes of these movies like runaway spaceships soon disappearing beyond the rings of Saturn, behaving awful or squeamish or unreliable according to the plot-furniture needs of the moment.  At least one of them is immolated in a bear suit, which might be interesting if we could bring ourselves to give two shits about him.  Instead, we think, well, there he goes.  He’s a crispy critter now, kids.  Woo.

The reason Black Swan-Midsommar is a good example of Hollywood’s shallow, monosyllabic politics is that these films (or we might say, this film) are actually very overt in their need to seem right and to make you agree that they are.  They’re the same yoked-up melodrama we’ve always gotten only now repositioned as edgy and essential, now back in our homes, telling us about politics and social justice, and not going anywhere.

They’re pretending to be one thing (folk horror) as a container for another thing (third-wave feminist critique) and are actually neither.  They’re telling us that if we like this, if we watch it many times, if we digest it, if we approve of it, we “get it.”  We’re in the know.  We’re correct.  And so we are good human beings.  2 + 2 = 5.  Of course, this is abject bullshit.

Why is Florence Pugh having a hysterical meltdown throughout the movie?  Stop talking, Winston.  It doesn’t need to make sense.  Just go with it and you’ll be safe.  There is no need to think critically or make small, troubling observations.  All you need to do is accept that she is sad.  You may cry with her if you wish.  That shows solidarity and that you are loyal.  Yes, you are a true believer . . .

Unintentional Orwellian patterns are ubiquitous, especially in the pop-culture mediated by Hollywood, which is most pop-culture.  Orwell wasn’t just concerned about totalitarian communism, his deeper project was criticizing thoughtless social conformity in general.

For example, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, one of his largely forgotten novels (perhaps because it cuts a little too close to middle-class status anxiety and the obsession with money), the protagonist, Gordon Comstock, gives up on art to make a modest living in advertising.  What is art without marketing, the novel asks?  In the end, when he discards his poems, Comstock concludes it really is nothing.

Ultimately, there is no accounting for taste.  There is also no accounting for technology.  And when taste and technology coincide, there is no accounting at all.  Black Swan and Midsommar would have flashed through the pan with a lot less “positioning” had the big streamers not put them in perpetual rotation—unlike many far superior and less ideological films, which blink out of existence on streaming platforms all the time.

We hope Hollywood goes on a retreat in the mountains and finds itself,  comes to terms with its pathological need to always be class president, and decides to stop bullying its audiences.  But the aspidistra’s airborne and, let’s be honest, nobody knows how to land.

—

* Interestingly, it’s the same when writing a novel, only you get to create all your own obstacles, betray yourself, meddle with your own story, make all the compromises, and know from the beginning that you’re not going to get paid.

** There is no point in arguing that a particular production “isn’t mainstream” or isn’t influenced by Hollywood in whole or in part.  The global movie industry in general and streaming technology in particular has had an enormous centralizing effect on film.  “Indie” is now a flavor.  It is not a substantial alternative.

The Killer is Disturbing and Excellent

Michael Caine once said he thought Tom Cruise was an excellent actor but wouldn’t be acknowledged for this until Cruise got older and stopped appearing in teen heartthrob roles.  Caine was pointing out how Hollywood tends to appreciate actors for looks first and artistry second—part of a self-deprecating explanation for why Caine was considered a “great actor” early on.  Whether or not this is true, Michael Caine certainly belongs to what we sometimes think of as an earlier, classier generation of actors, many of whom were English and seemed to be good as well as good looking.

It’s not hard to think of Michael Fassbender in that category, an Irish-German trained in England, capable of a decent Macbeth as well as many supporting roles in sci-fi films.  And even if Fassbender couldn’t be more different than Cruise in terms of affect and culture, he still gets a lot of Cruise-ish work.  David Fincher’s The Killer is a recent example.  We can easily imagine Cruise’s “Vincent” from Collateral as the nameless hitman in The Killer; though, Fassbender’s voiceover is more like Ed Norton in Flight Club (also a Fincher movie) and less in the Heat–Collateral tradition of Michael Mann’s stylized noir.

Fincher loves to generate dramatic tension by starting off in an undramatic way, even in a thriller about an international assassin.  Routine and mundanity is a Fincher signature and he does this better than anyone, which The Spectator’s Alexander Larman points out, calling The Killer “a black-comic masterpiece” on par with Fight Club: “If you found Fight Club and Gone Girl funny, you’re going to love the similarly bleak tone here.”  Maybe it’s bleak.  It’s certainly laced with black humor, but it also shows us something slightly new, diverging from the formulaic morality play that hitman films usually seem destined to become.

Larman mentions “Early hype suggested that The Killer would follow the exploits of Fassbender’s anonymous assassin as he (inconveniently) develops a conscience, presumably setting up an existential quandary,” which sounds straight out of assassin-film Central Casting.  Thankfully, this is not what The Killer did.  Fassbender’s character never develops a conventionally moralistic conscience.  Nor are we encouraged to see him as a product of his environment, a beleaguered anti-hero merely playing out the hand he was dealt by circumstances and fate.  Rather, he tries, with varying degrees of success, to adhere to his personal philosophy: “Anticipate; don’t improvise.”  His highest value is not redemption in the eyes of the audience but job efficiency, which is what makes The Killer different and interesting.

Contrast this with Jessica Chastain’s character in Ava, another international assassin film, released in 2020 and directed by Tate Taylor, who, for all his ostensible qualities as a director, is evidently no David Fincher.  Ava is an assassin struggling with addiction, tormented by family drama, and for some reason never fully explained, roundly hated by one of her handlers to the point of him trying to eliminate her.  It’s a movie doused in conventional morality and reeking with guilt as the protagonist meanders through the emotional wasteland of her career between unpleasant family visits and AA meetings.  Essentially, Ava is a movie trying to get us on the main character’s side, trying to motivate us to put an arm around her and say, yes, you kill people for a living, but you really shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.  That is also very funny and absurd, but unintentionally so.

                 Ava: guilt, self-loathing, and family melodrama.

The Killer is different.  It’s a movie that takes its ethos not from soppy Hollywood morality but from the mission statement of an Amazon fulfillment warehouse: efficiency is job one.  It’s bleak because we’ve come to find that perspective vaguely horrifying in an era of technocratic, anti-life post-industrial culture, where STEM has bludgeoned the humanities into Peking opera irrelevance and artificial intelligence has grown increasingly monstrous in service of profit.  It’s an echo of Black Mirror’s “Metalhead,” where a woman robbing such a warehouse gets hunted down by a killer robot that goes far beyond the bounds of anything resembling fairness or reason.  Human concerns like restorative justice, punishment fitting the crime, and personal honor have no place in this brave, new Gradgrind-ish corporate utilitarianism—which may not be that new after all (thank you, Charles Dickens).

Fassbender’s character embodies this, subscribes to it, aspires only to peak efficiency. He explains, “If I’m effective, it’s because of one simple fact.  I . . . don’t . . . give . . . a . . . fuck.”  He isn’t hung up on the usual human concerns.  “Luck isn’t real,” he says.  “Nor is karma, or sadly, justice.  As much as I’d like to pretend these concepts exist.”  There’s only job performance and production standards, which he pursues with the exactitude and precision of a killer robot, even when an unforeseen twist forces him to turn against his employer.

Ava turns against her employer because she feels like she’s bad and wants to be good.  The Killer’s narrator does it because that’s the best practice indicated in the job manual.  The former is a clichéd, forgettable film we’ve seen a hundred times.  The latter is an interesting, disturbing comment on an emergent aspect of our cultural mindset.  And that is why The Killer may haunt us long after we’ve moved on to other, far less insightful, entertainment.

Don’t Weep for the Oompa Loompas

I loved Roger Ebert’s wit and lack of pretention.  His movie reviews in The Chicago Sun-Times often struck a delicate balance between honesty and generosity.  He had a great sense of film history and he’d contextualize Hollywood stinkers in ways that made them interesting as artifacts of a silly and unforgiving industry.

Over time, I found his approach to be applicable beyond the movies: first accept that there will be a lot of garbage in a given field or system.  Then understand that garbage can teach you as much, if not more, than quality if you’re willing to pay attention.  That is, if you can continue watching, if you can manage to withstand it and keep your lunch down.

Sometimes, I have a near visceral reaction to pretentious media, especially when it comes to literary fiction and nonfiction.  I can trace it to when I was getting a master’s degree in writing and every other literary novel seemed to be about an attractive young woman on the east coast exploring bisexuality and working in an art gallery.  Most of the stories submitted in my workshops were also about that or something very close to it.  I spent my MFA depressed, alienated from a literary scene steeped in cloying trendiness.

Besides, I didn’t know how to write about that stuff, even if it was required reading in my classes.  My characters, as one of my instructors put it, were rather from the “low end of the service economy.”  And that dog wouldn’t hunt if I wanted a career as a writer.  So she hoped I had plans after graduation.  Maybe sell some insurance or, you know, the Navy.  Half-drunk at a faculty party, I laughed and said something like, “Don’t do me any favors.”  She didn’t.

The formula was ubiquitous in those years and seemed to whip my professors into a lather whenever one of the Big Six offered up another clone—probably because my professors were working writers trying desperately to stay in step with what their agents and editors demanded.  Then Candace Bushnell anthologized her New York Observer columns, which applied the formula to a type of harder-edged, jaded, status-anxious Manhattanite and everybody wanted to be Carrie Bradshaw.

I tried to channel my inner Ebert when writing critiques of the new Bushnellian short stories coming across the table.  I drank my Milk of Magnesia and tried to learn.  And I did learn at least one thing: marketing is rarely about art even when art is being marketed.  But the artists don’t always realize this.  Everyone’s just trying to do their best.  Everyone just wants to be loved in a world that won’t love them back.  So what’s it gonna take?  Go ask Candace.

By the time Sex and the City hit HBO, 9/11 had already seared itself into the national consciousness.  So naturally the usual illicit love triangles, existential crises, career failures and ineffectual husband stories that had been previously set in five-bedroom homes, fancy restaurants, galleries, and uptown lofts—with an odd chapter sometimes taking place at a resort in Vail or, saints preserve us, on a boat off the coast of Mallorca—now featured explosions.

I was advised to rewrite my current novel and make the protagonist a fireman.  A well-known British novelist, who I’d previously considered above all this, published a divorce novel almost identical to his previous divorce novel, save that the new one was set not far from ground zero at the World Trade Center.  My former classmates, now selling insurance, preparing to ship out on aircraft carriers, or working in the low end of the service economy, were suddenly writing stories that read less like quotidian Nobel Prize Alice Munro and more like overheated radio dramas from the 1940s.

Maybe Ebert got his compassionate take from “Sturgeon’s Law,” formulated in 1957 by science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who declared in a column for Venture Science Fiction that “ninety percent of everything is crap.”  Subsequent writers reformulated this as: ninety percent of everything is garbage meant to hold up the ten percent that isn’t.”  Sometimes, this is referred to as “landfill theory.”  Still, if we’ve learned anything from modern horror movies—a genre that seems densely compacted with trash—one does not take the landfill for granted.

So I tried to embrace the new NPR-coffee-table terrorism fetish like every other young writer planning on attending the next AWP conference, but it was hard.  Hard to keep down.  Hard to contextualize as just another trend.  Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close helped because I thought it was really good.  Maybe I’d read it differently now, but I remember thinking Foer’s 2005 novel was the only good thing I’d read with 9/11 as a backdrop.  I started to wonder whether the New York publishing industry had the potential to become less squeamish, less trendy, less risk-averse.

Nevertheless, when David Foster Wallace killed himself three years later and Little, Brown, and Company jumped at the chance to publish his unfinished Pale King, it seemed like a new low.  The marketing around the book wasn’t about pushing units anymore or the possibility of an HBO special somewhere down the line.  Maybe no one knew what it was about.  Maybe the reptilian DNA of Little, Brown’s sales reps had finally asserted control and the lizards were running amok in a wild frenzy, fucking and consuming everything in sight.  Then again, maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention.

I had a Skype meeting with an agent around this time who looked very much like the students I used to see coming out of the London School of Economics when I’d get off the Tube at Holborn: impeccably clean, flinty expression, driven, deeply unhappy.  She asked me what the books on either side of my novel would be in the bookstore and didn’t smile when I said, “Well, that depends.  What bookstore are we in?”

I should have said, “On one side we have The Pale King.  On the other, of course, is Emperor’s Children—it culminates on 9/11, don’t you know.”  She knew.  I knew she knew.  And she would have approved. Messud’s Emperor’s Children is the Sex and the City of 9/11 literary opportunism.  For some inexplicable reason, I didn’t say anything like that.  We simply looked at each other for a moment and she wished me good luck.

We’ve come a long way since then; though, it seems like we’re doing the same dance to different music.  Much has been made of the wokification of publishing, whatever that means, and the censorship of Roald Dahl, whose work in its untreated form has now been adjudged dangerous for the youth.  I suspect this has something to do with Millennials and Gen Zs being really, really, really, really sensitive and therefore risk averse.  More than we ever were.  In some ways, I suppose it’s good to be that sensitive.  In others, perhaps not so good.  And Roald Dahl’s estate better watch out.  Because now they’re saying the Oompa Loompas are the “subject of some racial controversy” and I have no doubt they’ll be evaluating the corruptive influence of Switch Bitch and Esio Trot before long.

Still, the cynical insensitive Gen X voice in the back of my head says commerce will undermine equity, safe spaces, and sensitivity readers in the end.  The scaly reptiles of the publishing industry are mostly nocturnal, preferring to stay hidden during the day.  But when they catch the scent of profit, they invariably rise up and stop doing good so they might do well.

Then into the landfill will go yesterday’s social justice homilies along with the newly expurgated Bond books and whatever Dahl stories were rewritten by an administrative assistant at Penguin Random House using ChatGPT.   And there will be a new renaissance of insensitive fiction and non-inclusive speech.  Well, the grave’s a fine and private place.  If Fleming and Dahl are turning in it as a result of all this bad noise, who really wants to know?  Maybe the AI rewrites will improve between now and the next big thing.

I’m reminded of one of Ebert’s funniest reviews: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) which, in the first sentence, he called “a horrible experience of unbearable length.”  Unwilling to pull punches, as this seemed like one of the few movies Ebert really hated and resented having to watch, he wrote that “the movie has been signed by Michael Bay.  This is the same man who directed The Rock in  1996.  Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  Faust made a better deal. . . . The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal.”

That always makes me laugh.  Yet, this was not one of Ebert’s most compassionate reviews.  It was one where the balance shifted conspicuously from generosity to blistering contempt.  Maybe it was his age or the fact that he was definitely of a less sensitive generation, less concerned with being non-offensive, and it was starting to show.  But there’s no denying that his serrated wit could sometimes reach neoclassical dimensions.  And that may be why we read him—not for how much safety and inclusivity his ingenium could provide, but for how dangerous he could be.

Reading the News with a Gelid Eye

 
Sam: Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. That’s the first thing they teach you.
Vincent: Who taught you?
Sam: I don’t remember. That’s the second thing they teach you.
— Ronin (1998)

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, guess what? For all intents and purposes, it’s a duck. Constructively, it should be treated like one. We don’t have to ask if something’s really going on or if someone’s really behaving a certain way or if some horrific event is really happening according to plan and it’s all fine so just relax. We don’t have to probe for sincerity and reasonability. We only have to accept one truth: people hide, lie, and attempt to cover their horrific mistakes.

The truth gets obscured behind spin. Sometimes, people get killed. Sometimes, they disappear. Sometimes, Jimmy Hoffa gets buried under the 18th hole of a Florida golf course. It comes out years later, but by then, everybody just shrugs. Some things are so well concealed that we’ll never figure them out. And sometimes it’s better not to know.

We don’t have to waste time and energy speculating and trying to sift truth from falsity. All we have to do is look at intended and actual outcomes. If your partner comes home smelling like a strange cologne, you don’t have to ask whether she’s cheating or whether some bizarre twist of fate led to her getting sprayed with random eau de toilette on her way to the metro. You only need to note the instance and keep your eyes (and nostrils) open. If it happens a second time, it’s a case of “fool me twice, shame on me.” But let’s be honest: you already knew from the beginning.

It’s the same with political events. If it looks like someone’s lying or prevaricating or taking some other sort of evasive action, you don’t need to engage with the reasonability of their countermeasures. You only need to ask two questions: what does it look like on the surface? And who stands to benefit? Note the instance. Keep your eyes (and nostrils) open.

If you do this, fake news has no power over you. Fake news is momentary lying and you don’t care about the lies of the moment. You only care about what you see over and over, which fake news cannot affect as easily or as consistently. Note that the accusation of “Fake news!” is also a form of media gaslighting and damage control. Whenever you notice people screaming that, look at them more critically than before.

But we don’t need to dwell on the concept of fake news. We only need “news” and a bit of critical thinking. Here’s an example from the Vietnam era (since Saigon just fell all over again): “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” a statement most commonly attributed to journalist, Peter Arnett.

  • What you should take away from this statement: the village is (probably) destroyed.
  • What you should disregard: “We had to” (abdication of responsibility for the decision) and “in order to save it” (moral justification).

Responsibility shifting and self-justification on moral grounds are classic rhetorical countermeasures when large groups of people have been or stand to be murdered for the sake of someone’s re-election strategy or financial profile.

Don’t you believe it. Read the news, but read for that nugget of information embedded in the spin. Just remember: ask what it looks like on the surface and ask who stands to benefit from it. Then disregard everything but what might be the facts. You don’t have to be a detective. You merely have to see the duck flapping away.

Maybe You Can’t Handle the Truth

Today, after all the Covidy Trump ups and downs, the questions about Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, and the hard questions about whether there should even be a VP presidential debate, I’m thinking again about Chris Beck’s excellent piece in Splice Today, “The Media Reports Narratives, Not Facts.” 

We all live online now. We look at the world through electrified windows. All we see in our non-digital lives is our homes and immediate neighborhoods. Maybe we travel some, but we don’t get much of an overview of what’s going on unless we use digital media.  This is good and bad.

The Good: we live in an information society where communication, news, and knowledge can be produced instantaneously.

The Bad: we live in an information society where communication, news, and knowledge can be produced instantaneously.

He / She / It who controls the location and size of the digital window (and do take a moment to learn about the “Overton Window” as well) controls what is seen. Is it true that the United States is collapsing? What does the New York Times say about it? More importantly, how, when, and to what end does the NYT cover the “decline of America”? You can’t just think about the content; you have to think about how it’s framed and marketed to you.

All media is a product. This is capitalism. And the truth (often much more complex than how it is presented in one “window” or another) is out there, but it is always, always beholden to the bottom line for any media platform. Of course, they all say they’re dedicated to the truth.

Is Fox News a legitimate news source? Sure. It’s about as legit as CNN. But it will seem more or less reliable depending on your assumptions about the world, your values, your community, and your culture. How about the Daily Wire? Take a look at it (especially if you consider yourself a liberal) and you won’t see a whole lot of variation between what’s in there and what’s showing on the Wall Street Journal on a given news day.

You might notice that certain stories are emphasized more than others or are framed to imply certain conclusions (the “secret message” in a news story that used to be called “slant” or “an angle” but which is now called “news bias”). But the Daily Wire is considered to be much farther to the political right on the American spectrum than the WSJ. Why? Probably because conservative pundit, Ben Shapiro, founded and until recently ran DW. But that really isn’t a good reason. It’s just perceptual media bias.

Do this comparison between The Washington Post and Mother Jones. How about The Daily Beast and Vox? How about any of these and Breitbart or The Drudge Report? Products. Marketing. Stoking controversy in targeted audiences. Know why I don’t watch Russia Today news? Google it and the reason should jump off the screen. Even search engines have slant, bias, implicit preferences that show the world a certain way. You can’t escape slant.

But you can do this: read conservative news if you’re a liberal along with your liberal stuff. Read liberal news if you’re a conservative along with your conservative stuff. Look at Media Bias Fact Check and search your favorite media sources there. Do this in order to see the world through more windows, even though you’ll never get a comprehensive view of anything.

Don’t let any media source trick you into thinking that what you’re seeing is the whole truth or the entire scope of something. You have to work to get that on your own.  As Beck puts it in his Splice Today piece: “It’s no surprise that Americans’ trust in the media is minuscule. The New York Times can’t even recognize third-rate journalism. As a consumer of media, the only way to be well-informed is to remain skeptical about the media’s competence, understand that they’re reporting a narrative instead of the facts, and get your news from a variety of sources.” 

Here are some questions to ponder for yourself:

  • Is there a problem with the stories on Zero Hedge? What might it be?
  • What makes The National Review a “libertarian” publication? Is it?
  • Why aren’t more writers for Quillette publishing in The New Yorker and The New York Times?
  • Is the NYT’s “1619 Project” history or speculative fiction? How can you tell?
  • What is the primary difference between Rachel Maddow’s and Ben Shapiro’s coverage? Why might this be a pointless question to ask?
  • I say above that “you can’t escape slant.” So why do all this thinking and reading about media? If bias is inevitable, why try to see past it?
  • Does believing a QAnon conspiracy theory indicate that you are intelligent, stupid, or just misinformed? How do you know? How about believing in the tenets of the religion of your choice? Smart? Stupid? How about believing that Critical Race Theory realistically depicts power relations in the world? Smart? Something else? What do these three belief systems have in common?