NON-REPAIRABLE

I barely wrote in any sensical way in 2023, distracted by a brutal workload and ebb-and-flow of interest in serious or sustained analysis of movies or books or culture. That sounds like clinical depression, but as I’ve gotten older, the firmaments of a creative, progressive life have felt more and more disposable and naive. Rather than finding meaning in art, everything goes in one ear and out the other, and the massive financial institutions and corporations that control publishing, marketing and entertainment writ large appear committed to mediocrity. Hyper-aggressive greed and competition dominate society at every level and bohemianism is quantified and traceable, a disappointing solipsism. I harp on these same points all the time, but the artists and craftsmen that make good work and improve our inner and outer lives are less reliable and vital within the current climate of acquisitive complexity and empty political posturing. Nonetheless, life is beautiful, or whatever.

The most repugnant trend that continued this year appears to be the business-bro Elon Musk fanboy. I’ve been off Instagram for years and use Facebook only for work, but the Joe Rogan-esque bodybuilder-investors and motivational hustler content has become grating on the senses. Employing a dramatic speech pattern about grit, struggle and “gains”, along with impossible workout and lifestyle routines, there’s a flood of snake oil salesmen gathering clicks and attention for content, fed into a slanted algorithm that thrives on desperation. TikTok videos are engineered to induce disgust, content as the cynical mantra  “any press is good press”. Combining laissez-faire “grindsets” with our current iteration of techno-hypercapitalism is another indicator of the dying of the internet, the former vibrancy and alternative caverns one could find giving way to the ugly desire for profit.

It was also a further stranglehold on critique in general- with so much going to shit, the discourse favors one upmanship, linked to an elitism and selfishness that has people more concerned with appearing clever or quick, rather than correct in any way. Trends in publishing are grim. Novelists appear to have little to no traction in the culture at large, and every new person I talk to lists Harry Potter as their favorite series- the small number of people still invested in consuming novels has been spoiled by obdurate politics.  A novel that I read that was evocative of these terms was Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. It’s a story about a Chinese-American Ivy League novelist, a clear stand-in for Kuang, herself a Yale graduate. When the Asian novelist chokes to death in the presence of her white friend while they’re drinking wine and catching up in the novelist’s beautiful apartment, her white friend steals the unpublished manuscript before calling 911, and goes on to publish the novel as her own. Kuang invents a bogeywoman of white greed and selfishness, establishing herself as the victimized genius threatened by thieving, privileged white folk. The novel is bland in its prose and juvenile in its treatment of racism, a topic now considered fair game for even the most commercial entertainment. Yellowface received widespread acclaim, the norm for these types of novels that the Big Five have been churning out, though I’d endeavor that like most fiction, the book didn’t sell, as even major publishing events gross significantly less than the local Ford dealership during their annual President’s Day Sales Event. With the collapse of any kind of democratic monoculture, the void we’ve been left in literary fiction is dire. 

On the other end of that spectrum, Celine Song’s film Past Lives was a pleasant surprise amidst a spate of on-the-nose releases. The script still includes clumsy racist tropes, i.e. a Korean woman reconnecting with a male friend from Seoul while presenting her white American husband as a useless nebbish writing “white guy novels” and playing Xbox, but it’s deft examination of the passage of time and of meeting people at particular, fleeting moments in life. It’s odd to me that during our particular moment in history, institutional art products have to denigrate white people (for example) while propping up the marginalized or immigrant identity du jour- it is a disservice to all involved, plucked from fashionable online rhetoric: when cool, smart people get together and converse, it tends to fall into hyperbole and faux-radicalism, and thus not necessarily indicative of broader societal trends. Despite some of the unnecessary and obtuse caricature, the structure of the film, unfolding over Zoom calls between the two friends progressing through different points in their lives and achievements, encapsulates the mid-2010’s flow of jobs, self-development and renewed interest in cultural authenticity across the global market.

I’d like to keep this avenue of writing going, so far as it is helpful to dash some ideas across a page that hopefully no one reads. There are of course releases all the time that are enjoyable, and that either play to my preferences or are objectively well-crafted. In many ways I agree with eschewing the middle-aged white man protagonist perspective, because it is a bit tired and because there are so many more interesting voices and perspectives. Still, another important rewatch that I undertook, and completed in a suspiciously quick amount of time, was The Sopranos, the greatest long-form television show in history and notably centered on a white male  (though he is Italian-American). Whether the show could have hit quite the same psychological depth with a different protagonist is unclear, and I’d argue that the show rests on James Gandolfini’s considerable shoulders. Yet shows like The Sopranos, and even newer hits like Succession, still use the almost blank quality of whiteness to stand-in for universal concerns of family, ethics, greed, and the contemporary humiliations of being alive. It is the artistry of The Sopranos to make the personal into the universal, and it is a purpose of art that I see less often in today’s entertainment industry. We are at once more politicized, more radical and demanding of our art to further political aims, and moving further away from finding significance from our visual entertainments beyond echoing self-serving demographic concerns. I hope moving forward we’ll see more water-cooler worthy entertainment again, as the segmentation isn’t serving anyone any good.

NOT SATISFIED

Over the last few months, Boston has experienced a steady, gloomy drizzle on weekends, a weather pattern that allowed for indoor relaxation. Keeping with my unfortunate Twitter (X) habit, I checked my feed many times, noting the trending memes, politics and culture, as I’m sure millions others have– a skewed window into a simulacra. Recent events have offered a stark look at the state of the internet, a collection of unvetted influencers advertising different aesthetic combinations, text and images streaming in a continuous flow which no one knows how to critique. The algorithms and feeds quantify content, a post-hipster leveling which has reduced cultural commentary to PR when it used to be fun, at least.  It’s another season of entrenchment in self-serving poptimism and hypocrisy, another strike against humanity. 

Internet culture has been harmful to American life. Cycle after cycle, the evidence pours in: a geyser of content with confusing moral or logical perspectives, backed by fraudulent business schema that prop up inflationary wages, employment numbers and metrics to control the impression of demand. It’s rare to encounter anything online that feels “solid” or self-affirming, as digital content has become even more ephemeral, the novelty of internet irony absorbed into the mainstream. A masterstroke of dominant ideology is to excuse untenable consumptive habits: selfie narcissism, vapid slacktivism, radicalism disconnected from reality. Political discourse is wielded by the professional managerial class, knowing that true leftism will never take place within these conditions. On top of a deluge of amateur political punditry, the arts are merely content as well: screenshots of films, film factoids, and Hollywood news come at us in a never-ending blast, as if watching movies is an assignment you’re always behind on. You haven’t seen Diabolique? You didn’t go to the theater to see The Boogeyman (because it’s the only way to enjoy it fully)? The joy of discovery has been snatched away because “content” is leaden, a reminder of limited time and overly-monitored productivity, a constant need to generate FOMO.  

The information exchange is a fast-flickering slideshow simulating movement. New content appeals to a readership of coastal dwellers in bungalows and well-appointed apartments, exorbitant rent cementing the foundation of exclusive ivory tower access. In The New York Times, daily articles about health and nutrition accuse the reader of living incorrectly, employing the generic term “wellness” alongside a fluctuating spout of standards, scientific evidence and trends, obsessed with the minutiae of private habits, preying on muddled attention spans. Corporeal existence and unmediated pleasure still offer hope, as our personal choices and idiosyncrasies resist complete domination by market ideology, but the need to float down the river of performative culture is too tempting for most people now– it’s also the easiest option. The visual medium of Youtube, TikTok and Instagram encourage two-dimensional spectatorship that turns life into a consumer product. Working alongside the self-perpetuation of social media networks, journalists mine the internet for low-hanging content, everything a source of hierarchical gossip or status symbolizing– which celebrities went to a particular fashion show, what TikTok trend might be “best for you”, or the best Bellini in Milwaukee, who’s the “it girl”, etc.

Humans do not need such an avalanche of data and information. The term “neo-Luddite” describes anti-technological thinking, and while used as a pejorative, the movement deserves more attention. In The Culture Industry, Theodor Adorno lays out the contradictions of liberals propping up mass entertainment in the spirit of democracy (with parallels to the current obsession with Taylor Swift, Harry Potter and Disneyland, though he was targeting jazz): “if regressive hearing is progressive as opposed to the ‘individualistic’ sort, it is only in the dialectical sense that it is better fitted to the advancing brutality than the latter”. Rolling Stone and Pitchfork used the pandemic to retcon music history, and bot-filled platforms are busy turning aesthetic taste into reductive memes. Adorno’s worst fears have become realized and the ability for the monoculture to coerce consensus has become unstoppable. The closing of mainstream discourse to formal radicalism, opting instead to exalt emotionally-driven superficiality mediated by an expensive latticework of screens and trillion-dollar platforms, is an obvious dead-end- when value is entirely subjective, nothing has value.

The willing compliance with “the way things are” as prescribed by appointed influencers, both in the academic and cultural spheres, has created an unstable zeitgeist that perpetuates violence, anger, depression and confusion. A society obsessed with one-upmanship, hacking at the legs of opposing viewpoints, stereotyping the endless array of “others” as if there is some hermeneutic that a particular clique has been given access to is absurd. An obsession with status, victimology, and conformity masked as piercing insight are as much a reproduction of “oppression” as the abstractions like patriarchy and racism that are blamed. In a country with such deep-seated egotism, it appears near impossible to operate outside of those invisible boundaries to exercise the potential for sociopolitical advancement. Politicians are advertisements in futility.

With year-end lists coming due, I look back on 2023 as being a bleak year for aesthetic development and/or signs of a healthy world: an overemphasis on authorship,and lack of attention to the material seems to be a trend across cinema, literature and music. There is too much fear of confronting the real issues, i.e. despair, loneliness and social strife, instead encouraging everyone to segment and orient themselves as an in-group against an artificial boundary separating them from an out-group. The result has been clumsy artists making art for predetermined audiences and commercial demographics, failing to approach the sublime or universal and thinking only in terms of self-serving reflexivity. Institutionally-backed artists are careful not to denigrate their colleagues, which means that criticism is softened to the point of irrelevance within the world of mainstream entertainment and art. Perhaps we need to bring back more potent negativity to achieve a positive result, otherwise we’re headed, much like actual reality, down a polluted river to be drowned at sea.

WE ALL ATTEND CON-CON

The “current thing” for several weeks of February 2023 was ChatGPT and AI, the concept of auto-generative robotic text that sounds similar to a human and can pass the Turing test. We’ve divulged everything, offering both the map and territory to the world’s corporations and bots and crawlers, who can pick apart irony and art and dreams and regurgitate them in misleading, counterproductive ways. Armies of diverse programmers are creating manipulative code to obfuscate the reality behind what we see online. Slack-jawed, we’ve stared at computer screens for twenty-five years and have a more intangible and corrupt economy than ever before. I think of the most famous New Yorker cartoon, where a dog tells another dog, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. No one knows you’re a robot, either, but also, no one really knows you. Accounts are just an amalgam of specific takes and demographic statistics, often slathered with so many layers of self-promotion that it becomes difficult to find the humanity even in human accounts. ChatGPT and AI also demonstrate the recent push to have tech “trends” and “discoveries” dominate the news cycle from the top down, a baster filling up the content mills for the week or month, a referent to tether audiences to an imaginary present. 

I recently rewatched Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and found the financial fraud and hedonism, as well as the film’s commercial saturation, an accurate depiction of a large swath of our current market participation. With inflation rampant, the average user is inundated with scams du jour, the squeals of a dying tech sector that has overextended, with no choice but to devour itself (AI simply the newest iteration). Jordan Belfort, played with an existential charm by Leonardo DiCaprio, displays mastery of the scam, generating urgency in bogus penny stocks in unwitting but gullible customers over the phone. The speculative, risk-taking nature of the stock market relies on generating demand where there was none previously, marketing products you don’t need to solve problems that don’t exist. Most film and television operates with that same logic, promoting future releases and capturing spectators (me) in a position of desire and consumption, hoping to either a) increase social/cultural capital or b) be entertained ala a child with a rattle. Wolf of Wall Street was released in 2013 but hatched in the years following the recession, when many were forced to accept demeaning work and watch as the financial criminals responsible for the collapse were rewarded with bailouts and minimal prosecution. I would say that Wolf of Wall Street fails as political critique, but reveals the worst impulses that drive our modern professional managerial economy. 

DiCaprio’s portrayal of Jordan Belfort, who made tens of millions through the shell company Stratton Oakmont, is a winking portrayal given DiCaprio’s elite level of fame and notoriety. Humans quake at daily slights, like a rude barista, getting cut off in traffic, or the countless posts we see online. The pressure required to be as famous as Leo appears almost more challenging, albeit with the luxury of unlimited wealth and popularity– he embodies contemporary notions of “alpha” and in paparazzi photos surrounded by supermodels, does not do much to dissuade from this belief.  The art of recognition is both enhanced in our hyper-technological society and a consistent attribute of theatrical talent throughout history. Leo enjoys the luxury of being himself, the unknown reality of his actual life and the fictitious portraiture in his films, his public persona obfuscated yet personal. The Wolf of Wall Street imbues Belfort’s goings-on with signification, a tribute to Martin Scorsese’s visual and narrative style, yet the film occupies an odd space, both noxious and impressive, disposable and more vital over time. A power lunch scene with Matthew McConaughey and the young Belfort explains how Wall Street really works (“it’s a fugazi, it’s a wazi, it’s a woozie”), is both absurd and revelatory, the epiphany about the corruption and laziness underlying finance, the foundation of our world.

There is a deeper irony to the whole production. As capitalism becomes even more individualistic and demanding, made most apparent through the “hustle culture” and other distorted masculine marketing segments, a film like Wolf of Wall Street echoes that unpleasantness, emerging from the liberal but opportunistic system of Hollywood production. Is the film a satire? DiCaprio believed it was, whereas Scorsese doubled-down in a Charlie Rose interview that the film was to be taken seriously. The obvious references to Scorsese’s trademarks, like non-diegetic 60’s and 70’s rock music, voiceover and heavy use of montage, cater to the lowest common denominator audience, and Wolf of Wall Street proved to be one of his most lucrative films. It is that deft mockery of dumber viewers and especially those “finance bros” that think simply hustling, selling a pen on the fly, amounts to a valuable or wise life, that makes the movie essential viewing. It is too long, and it revels in itself far too much. Yet in an age of grandiose vision and diminishing corporeal satisfaction, selling a pen appears to be one of our society’s only workable grifts.

What makes Wolf of Wall Street postmodern to the fullest, a map covering a territory, a more Real fiction, is the production background. The film was produced by Red Granite Pictures, which was run by a Malaysian named Riza Aziz, who went on to be implicated in a massive financial scandal with his home country. He’d stolen hundreds of millions from the 1Malaysia Development Berhad, a sovereign wealth fund in Malaysia. He was also good friends with Leonardo DiCaprio, partying at exclusive establishments and promising further funding for projects. So a film about fraud was funded by fraudulent funds. At a time when I question the tenets holding together our fractious, infinitely complex financial system, an irony such as that is an emergency light flashing. We will keep producing Jordan Belforts, Riza Aziz’s, Leonardo DiCaprio’s, Wolf of Wall Streets’s, and no Democrat or Republican is inclined to stop it. The beast is too large, too entangled in history, private property, in human ego, in schadenfreude. The tendency shown in the film to valorize absurd wealth and luxury is a thread running through Trump, Elon Musk, “rise and grind”, and the rampant speculation of cryptocurrency, social media influencers and disposable, poor quality products. It’s a trend that points to the hollowness of greed but also the hollowness of our opportunities. The obsession with wellness and Robinhood and “getting those rookie numbers up” is untenable- too many cooks in the kitchen, and too many rats as well.

I’ve been struggling to write here often enough, but I intend to continue putting together my thoughts. It appears to me that writing and publishing nowadays has been overcome with a fear of the real, of really existing pain and discomfort- the discomfort of an overlong commute home (replaced instead with nagging about public transpo), or relationships (you’re not going to therapy enough). That desire to smooth over edges and instead feature mostly thin, well-educated female writers in floral dresses in the New Fiction section is a move in keeping with the Wolf of Wall Street trend. In order to keep the financial fraud going, institutional power has conjured up more abstract, intractable problems to write about. Something is actually rotten, a poisoned carrot on the stick. The conformity being pushed is also being tied to financial opportunity- tow the line, go along with the rapidly unfolding, unspoken social rules, and you won’t be ostracized. Fail to adhere to them, and you might find yourself getting rebuffed, or worse yet, called out by one of the social judges, who in their strict yet hypocritical moralizing are the Gestapo of our fraudulent financial system. Everyone’s got a nest to protect, but it’s built on cheap, fake straw made in China.

A WHALE OF A TIME

It’s a busy time for movies, and as is my usual tradition, it’s time to become further disillusioned with the bubble economy of contemporary filmmaking. The inevitable Nepo Baby article in New York Magazine confirmed what I’ve noticed since first Wikipedia-surfing in middle school: Hollywood and the entertainment industry is, for the most part, a closed loop posturing as a meritocratic expression of life. Those born into wealth enjoy a streamline to success, which is a matter of checking the right boxes and pulling the right strings to find oneself in the position of a cultural tastemaker. A bit of digging on the majority of artists and creatives and writers and intellectuals reveals a bland consistency to the whole system, a predictable structure that silences voices outside of the approved discourse and relies on inherited wealth and institutional gatekeeping. It is rare to see a genuinely radical movie with widespread appeal.

The last emergency-level vestiges of the pandemic have waned (except they never will), and the theater-going experience has returned as a recreational activity. The coverage of theatergoing is overwrought, with self-congratulatory patrons ruing esoteric patterns of distinction, but at least the theater forces you to pay attention. An audience adds a variable. Film continues to be the main topic people enjoy discussing, but the limited scope of “movies” is apparent in the face of proxy wars and digital manipulation and extreme political polarization. It’s more screen, more artificiality and escape. Film coverage is always about the upcoming thing, just over the horizon, asking consumers to outsource their enjoyment to a future release date, while millions of hours of backlog await. Anticipation has become a fetish, as has nostalgia, while those involved with Hollywood  live the lives we wish we could, or at least advertise them, in between filming the movies that provide us slices of temporary meaning. 

The spark of inspiration that I hope to gain by watching movies has felt more contrived, a result of getting older and having such a vast array of options. A film that emerged with strong word of mouth from the film festival circuit, Darren Aronfosky’s The Whale was set to be a dark horse, but the press all but stopped covering it after institutional response accused it of “fatphobia”. Notable for the return of Brendan Fraser in combination CGI/prosthetic morbid obese-suit, the film takes place in a second-story Idaho two-bedroom apartment where English professor Charliev(Fraser) teaches classes over Zoom to disinterested students. He lives a life of hidden anguish and repulsive indulgence, gorging on the processed fat of American fast food as he hides from the real world. 

Unaware of the criticisms going into the movie, I found it a well-constructed rhythmic and spatial exploration of the pathologies of American life, and appropriately dour for our current moment. Charlie refuses to show himself to his class via webcam. He has a pizza deliveryman who drops his orders at the door and picks up the tip in the mailbox with no face-to-face interaction. Hermetically sealed, he’s a Good Person and a considered thinker who stews in his own delusions, enabled by a friend and nurse who brings him jumbo meatball subs and helps him get up from the couch when he needs to go to the bathroom or bed. The plot is driven by the arrival of his daughter into his life, and the exploration of his past trauma, but those motivations, while moving, serve as a rationalization for his state of being, which is most frightening because it needs no traumatic justification. He’s barely able to walk and not interested in getting any better. His absurd body, holding a kind man underneath, is an embodiment of the ecstatic and sublime within, suffocated by corporeal limits, waving the white flag and surrendering to the most base urges..  

There are millions of Charlies and proto-Charlies throughout the country. The brain retreats when it is scared, or when it senses risk- people have been humiliated one too many times, and with all the pleasures in the world available at home, putting oneself in risky social scenarios doesn’t seem worth it. There is more power from behind a keyboard. So many humans are the product of their upbringing and self-narrative, which is unreliable and random. Charlie’s daughter and a young door-to-door evangelical provide foils of the pains inflicted even at the high school age. People find themselves in specific lots in life without having had much say, but agency is employed to excuse a disappointing present with hope for a paradisiacal future. Combined with the unrelenting national narrative that you should be every positive trait you see is tiresome and impossible and pressure seems to bend people in disturbing ways. The Whale is an attempt to capture those conflicting human impulses and self-deceptions and the fundamental mediocrity of life, but that honesty has ruffled feathers and induced inevitable criticism from columnists who rely on moral obfuscation and the twinge of perverse satisfaction they get from contrarianism to sustain the status quo. A dismissive op-ed from Roxane Gay, who emerged to call the movie “fatphobic”, reflects a bourgeois distaste for the thematic elements of the film.

Roxane Gay’s Times essay begins with her stating that she finds “fat suits” offensive. Immediately out the gate we’re dealing on rocky terrain. Are all costumes and alterations to one’s physical appearance for a role “problematic”? She and so many other contemporary writers expect us to accept bullshit because they have institutional publishing on their side, but years of inappropriate problematizing has dried up, and it has flimsy moral and logical backing. She goes in for the kill after describing the evocative and bold approach to the subject matter by Aronfosky: “Creators are free to tell the stories they want, in the ways they want. But there are consequences. A movie like this will only reinforce the dehumanizing ways in which many people understand fatness.” It is unclear who she is speaking to, but she’s inventing a phantom rube and evoking the broad term “consequences” as threatening. There are absolutely no negative consequences to watching A24’s The Whale– it is clearly a surreal piece of art that shouldn’t need to be literalized, and has existed as a play for over a decade. Gay has made a career out of pedestrian observations evoking whatever opinion is located on the opposite pole of the white (whale) male while offering lukewarm, cookie-cutter takes.  

It is not a good sign for audiences if, in one of the most unhealthy and gluttonous nations on earth, we can’t reckon with negativity. Charlie deals with his guilt and shame by consuming to such an extent that he can barely breath. Americans sit behind their computers, as I am now, typing up takes and reactions and filming voyeuristic Youtube content, digesting and regurgitating and avoiding reality. In isolation, we can become gods bestowing significance, and it is comfortable and safe and easy. Aronofsky imbues Charlie with the weight of the world, as cinema is expected to, but he grounds it in on a stage (the apartment), a sealed-off world where “In this world I lock out/All my worries and my fears,” as  Brian Wilson sings on “In My Room”. The house is the manifestation of Charlie’s mental escape, but it is difficult to escape within the confines of four walls except inward (and then outward).

Rather than some offensive stereotype of “fatness”, Charlie is self-absorbed humanity on the ropes. Physical isolation can lead to ever-pronounced echo chambers, where preaching to the choir, even if it’s just oneself, has become more commonplace. The appetite for the ego, for snark, incisive, to induce a feeling of hurt or jealousy in our imagined audience from behind the safety of the screen, reveals a sadness and discomfort. Heartfelt performances such as Fraser’s show that content need not be politically right or left, upper class or lower brow- instead, by eschewing bullshit polarities and going for the gut, we can experience a catharsis at the movies. The tears in the theater, mine included, were genuine, regardless of what the haters would hope.

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