BINGE EATING & ME; A New Years Address

Like most people living in Auckland my consumption of television has gone way up. I always have to have a snack too. There’s something profoundly lonely about watching television without a snack. It’s ritual now, after months and months of it (roughly four in total but who can remember). It’s almost like watching television without having a snack is equal to going to a party without cigarettes or a vape—obviously being a reformed smoker, my choice is vape; there’s a sense that in both circumstances, the party and the watching of television, without the consumable accoutrement as ballast you might not properly assimilate all the information coming towards you. Like if I’m not eating a bowl of noodles or protein and rice I won’t properly recognise all the dramaturgical sleights and ludicrous freights of whichever show or movie I’ve made some barely-informed decision to stream. Same at a party—without the ballast of cigarettes and/or vape, which isn’t to mention that universal lubricant of alcohol, there’s a feeling (speaking for my own) that you’ll either evaporate and lose the requisite substantiality for being a human being gathered with other human beings seeking nebulous communion, or that their missives will do something similar; that their words and gestures won’t catch or drift the way they’re supposed to. That standing there without the fetishised prop of a vape or cigarette, I will vanish in the noise of so many other human beings. That I need these props to properly perform being a human being, and that I need these props to match the successful performances around me.

Same with eating in front of the television. If I do not do this ritualised thing which every human being will recognise as indelibly human—the eating—then I am somehow less in the circumference of human experience which storytelling by way of streaming attempts to enclose me in. Like, I need to attune to the given animality of the human organism to properly assimilate the abstraction in front of me—The Sopranos, Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer—or risk missing the vestigial truth of that abstraction by failing to augment it’s intangibility with a levelling-tangible. It’s a simple math by which a whole system of consumerist relations, commodifying the visual as edible—by way of Cronenberg, sustenance for the New Flesh—has reconfigured how we see ourselves and each other, mediated not just through the descriptor of serials soaps and cinema, but as pilgrims in a terrain constantly shifting in hyperactive alignment with screens which proliferate like so much black mould. Every humid human endeavour has a correlation now in storying, in that nothing happens without a digital trace—enough of these traces metastasising into streamable subject matter, crystallised in a mirror ball of likes shares and re-posts/tweets.

If I wasn’t to eat something while watching something would I, facing my abject fear of not eating in front of the television, somehow escape the representative regime of streaming wokeness? Would I maybe, being one intangible meeting another intangible, drift somewhere outside the shared ground of identity (in the least critical sense of the word) and it’s vicious propagandas (I’m looking at you Netflix)? Should I perhaps experiment with watching a movie without the proverbial corn chips/ice-cream/fried-chicken/(insert junk preference here) and come back with notes from the other side? Maybe not. I’m too phobic at present. I don’t want to give any oxygen to my covid-related paranoia (which pushing myself to this particular limit would inevitably do). A paranoia I might add which is currently occupying the very last of my mental and emotional capacity for the year (which as I write this is eight hours away from closing out; blessed be).

Irony aside I can’t help but suspect the energy it would take to extricate eating from binge-watching would be equal to, if not greater than, the veritable atom-bomb it took for me to swap cigarettes out for a vape. I know there’s new research extolling the evils of vaping—pale next to huffing paint-stripper through a paper cylinder stuffed with tobacco weed—but I can feel the difference in my body. Life sans smoking is glorious (and yes I am hating myself for being a reformed-smoker-vape-evangelist but my testimonial is legit). That said my relationship with smoking was so painfully molecular that it took a breakup to galvanise a second divorce, one which I’d been contemplating for as long but which, which which which, took more from me than any Anne Hathaway rom-com had prepared me for. That being on the other side of a separation is a grief in miniature is something I hadn’t picked up from the laughing melodramas which constitute the majority of popular accounts—so far as I’ve found anyway.

Why am I marrying quitting smoking with quitting a relationship? Do I have a retroactive bias about the relationship being bad for me, quote-unquote “toxic”? Because taking inventory that doesn’t come through with it’s usual rouge flags—gaslighting emotional/physical abuse intimacy blocks etcetera—for all intents and purposes, we were just two people whose humours, previously aligned, suddenly misaligned. But then everything gets nominal value in hindsight. Impossible to archive something without evaluating it first, as any anthropologist or museum worker or internment-camp guard already knows. Even more spurious is to make sweeping value judgements about a relationship, like I have any objective notion about what a relationship is meant to do and be. I like to think that being ‘queer’ I’m somehow outside the normative protocols pressuring straights into certain behaviours and logics. But (that infuriatingly elusive commodity) hindsight is showing me otherwise—that I pang and aspire in the same deluded rubric, that culture really does operate via lines of squishy osmosis, and that consciously choosing not to assimilate a particle in the air, while I take great gulps of air, is as quixotic as it gets.

Perhaps this newfound horror of not eating while watching television is from having watched television for the last seven years with a partner. And now a junky delectation is a substitute, and will be for as long as watching television—frequently alone (and especially these last four months)—induces pangs of nostalgia normally reserved for widows retreading the footsteps of intrepid honeymoons, or perusing wedding polaroids as they box up their once shared lives to relocate to a singles unit. Summer is a particularly sore time. I knew it would be. If only because in New Zealand the end of the year is a monstrous conflagration of Christmas, summer-break, New Years, and general annual fatigues; exacerbated this year by the void-ish anxieties of a lingering pandemic (I say lingering like it’s out-stayed it’s welcome, like there was some expectation that the world organises itself to deal efficiently with something like this; has it?). So this summer being my first without a partner in seven years, is also the first summer in as long that I’ll be bearing the full brunt of this scheduled orgy of consumption as a single, as one person, as an un-scaffolded shock absorber. As one intangible attempting to channel an unending barrage of intangibles, and tangibles—needing something to bolster myself with so I can better order every incoming message. Which I remember never having trouble with before said partner. But that was back before I knew the difference in gravity between life with and without a partner. Which isn’t to say one is better than the other. Only that I feel less substantial now, living in the stark difference. Like I’m not really awake. Like this whole year with it’s fifty shades of fuckery has been my own invention, a necessarily extreme distraction buffering a loss as yet uncounted.

There’s a word for this kind of magical thinking; solipsism (symptoms include social-media addiction and/or being under the age of 21).

I am feeling this distinct pain about the loss of my partner (months and months after the fact), this person who I had chosen—or through certain events the sense of volition had been successfully simulated—and in that choosing allied myself to our own unique variant of an existing sequence of systems-overlap and protocol. In that protocol a certain sheltering from the wider stimuli of the world was formed, continues to be formed—such is the lure of relationships. The status they afford for individuals in the wider community, the symbolic values coupledom embodies, and the individual attainment of these values which couple status signals widely. And then there’s all the affordances of this status, like the assumption that functional levels of maturity have been attained when a ‘long term relationship’ is kept and tended, regardless of the cost. There is cultural cache in the relationship, giving it value even outside of the more intimate meaning which committed relationships are meant to generate. Or so you’d assume that this kernel of profounder meaning is the vestigial agenda of relationships. So thought I before having one of my own. And certainly in the unpacking of hindsight there are so many features of personhood which prior to the endeavour were dormant in me, so many new gravities and textures which I’d have been blissfully unaware of were it not for this haphazard agreement—slouched into and fitfully sustained in varying degrees of earnest (weather permitting).

I will be eating in front of the television for the foreseeable future then.

MY HEAD IS BROKEN I KINDA WANNA FUCK EVERYONE AND MY HOMETOWN CAN BURN LOL

Coming out of lockdown and re-entering society has been rough. I’m speaking on behalf of everyone out there who I’m assuming have met the same existential difficulty of socialising in and around an exponentially malleable world, shaping and re-shaping in accordance with an equally fluid contagion. If we thought the vampiric fluidities of late-stage capitalism were bonkers enough, I feel like a pandemic has only reiterated the best and worst of our situation so that now, waking up every morning and ‘doing life’, is sans drudgery—instead, there’s a baseline of crippling anxiety. But also exhilaration. It’s like the most mundane things now are filtered through a funhouse mirror and splashed with bacterium invisible except for under black light (a virus like an unseen spectre, like the angel of death snatching Pharaoh’s first borns), like we went from living in a concrete world to the return of ghouls and spirits (Fanged Noumena) overnight; like the finale of Legend of Korra, a harmonic convergence which draws the veils of the physical and spiritual worlds together to unleash a Lovecraft-pantheon on industrial cities. That’s what being in a bar feels like now. So say I. And this unholy pressure we get in December when summer brings everyone to a low boil, coupled with the usual end-of-year fatigue and financial disarray of vacation-time and orgiastic consumption, now paired cruelly with masses who’ve regressed to adolescent navel-gazing and social naïveté from our (horrifyingly) extended isolations. It’s a lot. It was always going to be a lot, but I’m really feeling now in this prickly coming-down-from-a-bag-of-speed moment that IT’S A LOT. There is now the question of therapy which I have been humming and hawing over. Which I had actually decided against. But after weeping openly in a bar for, so far as I can remember (which isn’t much, and with difficulty), no reason at all, it’s a question I am putting to myself again. That said, perhaps the mean-average of ‘wellness’ and our expectations thereof should collectively pivot to accomodate the abject dissolution of security, of failsafes and fealty to a government which alleges it’s providence. I don’t personally have anything against with the way things work (not an anarchist or Marxist by any stretch), which most likely points to intellectual lethargy and desensitisation—definitely not masquerading my own apathies as a ‘cure’—but I can feel my most basic assumptions about the way things are organised shifting/sliding. This used to be an intermittent feeling but now I have it with me constantly, along with my phone and lip-care which I’m also never without. I’ve accessorised it, which I guess is how ideology works; ideology being the word for these very assumptions. Little facts that become the scenery in a person’s world-picture. Innocuous enough. But as anyone who exhibits their few critical theory books in the living room as clout-giving prized possessions will know, it’s the innocuous and the given which should elicit the most earnest interrogation. If only for the ambient influence of the innocuous, as constants which direct attitudes and behaviours in sometimes nefarious and clinically subtle ways.

I don’t make a habit of crying in bars . And yet I can think of three times I’ve done it this year. Does that a habit make? I’m doing a psychic inventory before this becomes an established precedent. Nipping it in the bud etc.

The current mess of misinformation is something gradually assimilating, becoming scenery and thusly expected of reality the longer we coexist with it. This is something we know. And yet what’s to be done? What does the insidious subjugation of a singular (mostly-)democratic narrative with exponential unverified tangents actually signify? Is it systemically closer to the plurality and impossible universalist-girding of the democratic project itself? Or is this a veritable red-herring, a mimicry or caricature of decentralised dialectics only. Meanwhile the content which this smoke-screening traffics—volubly advocated by libertarian defenders of ‘freedom’ who are pitted against a (mostly-)imaginary foe-state—undercuts it’s own assertion of freedom by espousing the primacy of certain identities over others, endorsing hate as the purest expression of an immovably reified individual liberty (which is mostly consumerist in it’s meaning). Cue populist violence and genocide. Again, this is something we know. As ideological scenery freedom is the very fucking worst set-piece. I hate it. Or I hate when it shuttles hate into mainstream discourse.

If I ever cry in a bar again I want it to be for reasons of national security. Just kidding. I don’t even know what that means. I just wrote it down because the words felt right together.

When I’m around my friends now I can’t help but find them all so beautiful. There’s this glitching logic I land in sometimes, when the third or fourth glass is working it’s magics, in which I hope that I’m as beautiful as they are—as tribute, as their due. This is obviously absurd and piggybacking lockdown-specific dysmorphia which I’m having a harder time shaking than I thought I would; naturally, after months of having nothing to do but scrutinise self. My most consistent relationship since August has been the one I had (have?) with my mirror. Thus completing a round-trip of juvenilia which started when I turned thirty (approximately, it’s hard to say) and which I’m consciously ending here, with our third and longest lockdown as an unfortunate accelerant, bookending a period of carnivalesque flail replete with flagellatory drinking and suicidal flirtations with straight boys. I’m consciously making disordered eating my lucky last notch in this nostalgia tour of teenage habits—which in hindsight I can guess was some kind of knee-jerk prophylactic against the brevity of my twenties (farewell to that decade of romantic misadventure and squalor—hello to a decade of erotic earnest and expansion, and hopefully more money than twenty-five year old me would’ve known what to do with). My friends are beautiful, or other people are beautiful, more so to me now than ever before. There’s also the livid contrast of proximal mortalities (death death death), more distant two years ago but icily near now, near enough my body is always prickling with it, constantly caffeinated with the inevitability of it; my sweet lovely death which can reduce any convoluted dramatics to manageable simplicity in an instant. Death as a luminous prime amidst fractions and decimals, a steel knife in a drawer of plastic spoons. Industrial-noise on a country playlist. Such a leveller, and by any and all poetics the only universal in thinly veiled pyramidal class-structures. But even then, as pandemic times show, Death gets weaponised in the theatres of late capital—namely, experiences of death and dying varying relative to socioeconomics, access to healthcare etc. Accessibility blah blah. It hurts to be awake because it feels like there’s more and more to take stock of, the act of centring in a single verifiable reality becoming a more difficult task by the fucking day.

If there is such a thing as freedom then perhaps crying in a bar—taking one activity reserved for private moments or ritualised in the coddling dark of a movie theatre, and placing it where it unanimously doesn’t belong—is an expression of freedom du jour. More so than misguidedly demanding volition around a vaccine, where any preservation instinct would decree a big fat yes to the jab and denounce exercising choice here as bonafide insanity. I mean, freedom is all very well. But what’s the point of retaining individual liberties if the terrain in which those liberties allege themselves is a ruin? It’s that difference between freedom to and freedom from, the tensions between rights and emancipation which might be adjacent in discourse but nonetheless remain crucially distinct. Like, freedom TO focusing on maintaining a periphery of action, tending the sanctioned rights of individuals as they navigate the fundamental curtailments of collectivity—and freedom FROM, when those curtailments produce intolerable affects and/or environments (which includes the pending disasters of our metabolically disrupted ecology) and emancipatory moves must be made. Anyone can see the rollout of a vaccine in response to a contagion is an effort towards levelling out a potentially intolerable reality, putting it in the camp of freedom FROM; because a lassez faire approach would produce an environment in which defending superficial rights would be neither legible nor desirable. I’m embarrassed for some of my friends up north, many of whom are VERY educated, insisting on freedom TO stances as if they were staring down the barrel of state violence and oppression. What a fucking lol. That said, months of lockdown has left me without the will or capacity to pluck up and persuade them back to a consistent line of reasoning. Chrimbo is pressurised enough, you know?

So at this point I’m just cutting my losses.

Thoughts and feelings I had to pull out of me before they gave me blood poisoning lol

Hurtling towards death, the synthetic reconfiguring of time etc.

Our networked being flattens objects which would otherwise proffer a slowing gravity in our experience of time. Objects here includes people in as much as we’re reduced—and actively reducing each other—into thumb-nailed presences-without-presence. Bodied matter is divorced from it’s bodied-ness, stripped of presence by way of our inability to linger. Distraction and convenience as primary values coalesce into rapid momentums against lingering. As Buang Chul Han says, lingering or contemplation are what give bodies and things their gravity, their presence. It is how we attribute what Badiou might name the objectal or evental—that which disrupts a continuous or smooth gaze and holds attention, mapped as momentous. Think also that Deleuzian-Guattarian trope of smooth and striated vectors of subjectivity, the specific textures of psychically traversing phenomena. The act of worlding, or creating a world picture in which the subject (that’s us) then feels confident it can move-think-act. ‘Creating’ is perhaps too active a word, when a lot of the time this process is unconscious. We are generally hardwired to rapidly block superfluous stimuli, this filtering process itself coded from formative experiences which become gradually more entrenched—and in that entrenchment, notoriously difficult to re-programme. It takes a shock, or what’s known in the Tarot story as a Tower moment—the frequently cataclysmic encountering of some truth which our perceptual biases have refused to confront, the lagging result being gratuitous energy invested in patterns and behaviours which are perhaps no longer serving us. The Tower, though painful, practically releases us from those tired citadels, enabling us to expand and evolve towards a more integrated and fulfilling modality.

Mental structures which contain us, leaving us to flounder in the confines of limited perception, are akin to prisons. The crises which ensue from those unconscious parts of ourselves sniffing out potential beyond our thankfully porous limits, have been both canonised and demonised in the most literal ways. At least their agents have. Think the demonic angels from Jacob’s Ladder, by which I mean the supernatural thriller from 1992 (94?), in which the titular Jacob experiences reality-bending encounters with scaly deities who are able to insinuate themselves into his life in human form, influencing the course of events towards a reconciliation of everything he’s been letting block him from forward motion—towards death. In the end he’s been on a hospital bed the whole time having a really bad DMT trip. The takeaway is that these beings were simply figurations of his own mind trying to resolve it’s own cognitive deadlocks with a sort of solvent-narrative. Maybe narrative and story itself is an evolutionary tool towards wider cognition, which definitely informs modern schemes of ‘authentic living’, but also primes our ability to adapt and thus survive.

There’s a scene in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia where Justine and her new husband, freshly married and being driven to their own wedding reception, cannot manoeuvre the limo around a bend in the drive up to the venue. Contrary to this above idea that all cul de sacs can be reconciled with crisis, this particular scene and the rest of the film seems to rebut this as naive optimism. According to Von Trier there are some ontological discrepancies which cannot be rectified, even with the assist of angels demons or respective Tower moments—whatever form these might take. Depressions that cannot be filled, impossible tasks and imbroglio which cannot be out-manoeuvred. Just lay down and die I guess?

I sometimes feel sick of being myself, which I think in this climate of intense self-scrutiny and promotion, is catching (and if it’s just me, meh). I sometimes feel sick of being this one thing and having to wait until I die to be something else. Is it illusion thinking that I’m one consistent thing. I know on a cellular level we are constantly dying and regenerating so that moment to moment we aren’t the same vessel, physically speaking—but that’s become a pop-science platitude sung-spoke to sooth the ennui of modernity which, so efficiently, has mostly sapped the mystery from life. If only by subjugating the fact of life and it’s comprehension—including the occluded margins of our cognitive faculties—with neoliberal directive, with convenience and distraction, with a loathing of any and all friction. You can’t post away uncertainty. You can’t fuck away anxiety—though as a palliative there are worse options generically available. But I feel Iike everything around me is telling me that I can do these things, that the friction which otherwise generates life’s meaning can be effortlessly surmounted, and worse that it should be. Maybe being opposed to friction is the same thing as being opposed to meaning, a declaration of war on the more profound coherence earned via duration amidst adversity. Not saying we should go out and seek crisis, drama, cataclysm, because it’s objectively ‘good’ for us. Just saying suffering shouldn’t be flailed at or hastily smoothed over. I like to sit in it, wait til it turns nourishing. I think that’s a vibe.

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT AUCKLAND (which I’ve said aloud too many times recently so if you’ve already heard me rant about this, apologies but AAAARGH!!!)

The shame Aucklanders have about their city is entrenched, but no less laughable for being so entrenched. I can’t help but see a unique confrontation here in the Auckland identity between the national character of humility (feeding into the proverbial tall-poppy antics we all know and love) and more cosmopolitan aspirations which, for whatever reason, we will not allow ourselves the courtesy of seeing as anything more than aspirations; fucking pipe-dreaming even. As if to say the urban infrastructure and trafficking of wealth happening before our eyes weren’t ‘real’ like it is overseas, but some sort of collective hallucination. An antipodean mirage.

It’s not humble, or cute.

In fact, this insistence on ‘humility’ expressing itself at best as a realistic approach to the ambient bombast of neoliberal society, and at worst as a totalising resentment of peers and contemporaries (who dare to discern their own talents and act accordingly), blocks any sort of criticality we might otherwise have about our placement in a larger global society. Anyone who thinks New Zealand is cleaved enough (socially, culturally, economically etc) from the rest of the planet to be outside hegemony has miserably failed to grasp the moment, and it is a moment of infinitely networked being and event, a moment of chaos-theorem made mundane by the micro-tethering of big-data and a sort of rapt mutual surveillance.

There is no vacuum for New Zealand to inhabit anymore. The draconian omniscience of tethered media is exactly that; omniscient. As well as omnipotent.

I would hope anyone with any kind of social media account knows that with the digital medium, cutting through the affective noise of virtue-signalling and righteous infographics and thirst-posting, there is the real-time collection of usable information vectors which are immediately purposed to filter user-worlds through diminishing lenses of consumption and opinion (opinion as consumption). Yeah, this is stale news (and anyone who needs me to explain the consummate effects of media saturation, you’re probably not even reading this because you’re too busy turning ground for next season’s kumara harvest at the commune). But what’s fresh is this nagging feeling I have that the Auckland character needs to play catch-up and relinquish this self-imposed apathy which says we bow to parochial conceptions of a) urban planning and b) our lives in that plan.

Most of the habitual Auckland profile stems from a non-synchronous time in which our movements weren’t immediately universalised as data, and they subsequently have no validity any more. Like, bending ourselves to a national character that insists on property ownership as the marker of mature/stable adulthood du jour.

What fucking nonsense.

If we insisted on an overhaul of renting rights and made renting an experience which could enclose the same types of imagined security people claim resides in a mortgage (lol) then we could conceivably ease the current market back from it’s frankly insane extrapolations. I know one of Auckland’s routine conversation topics no matter where you are (bar, restaurant, sex-party in Point Chev) is property, and I hate playing to type, but seriously; bolstering renting as an equally glamorous or viable (or whatever) option could displace the annoying centrality of housing in the Aucklander’s spiritual makeup. Just make it accessible and suddenly housing is a non issue! Imagine all that mental and emotional space which would get freed up if we could go somewhere and talk about something else, something besides the mythic tensions between landlords and renters, something more constructive than the coded class-violence which these conversations are so often guises for; something closer to lived experience, something we could actually share on an interpersonal level (I prefer my dinner parties to be transformative, actually).

Because talking about housing is so supernaturally boring that I want to kill myself by the appetisers (and if it happens to me again this coming summer, I’m putting cyanide in the punch).

I LIVE MY LIFE; some confessional shit which segues into an ode to Buffy

I live my life as I have always done. A sort of slouching, an impassioned lament, equal parts wilting flower and knowing (not necessarily successful) seductress, the lead girl in the chorus line, the one in the tassels and top hat (or so I imagine). Maybe a little too hungry to play lead, a little too hulking and sweating and filled with the primal urgencies which exist as murky antagonistic forces to the formation of narrative; story itself was born of the Hero archetype, a civilising force bringing lands together by allegiance or genocide (willing supplicants take your pick).

I live my life like a pig at a trough, I have very little patience and my bodily satisfaction takes an enormous precedence in my list of priorities. Whether that’s food, sex, or the violent gratification of a vengeful feeling. I hate easily. But I also love easily. I generally assume people just wanna have a good time. Like myself. It’s difficult to imagine a subjectivity primed to manipulation, to the kinds of toothy cunning you hear about on a true crime show, or see on a movie about deranged teenagers in contest for most popular.

I live my life the only way I can. I see other people doing things differently and that’s okay. I see other people having more success when it comes to imposing their will on the status quo; but thats okay. There’s a valuable and oddly satisfying thrill in experiencing the kinds of slippage between one’s will and the wily configurations of reality that convention deems failures/tragedies/resistances, which apparently flag a lack of nerve (more likely resources) towards mastering what’s around you to better reflect an ideal; a metaphysical sustenance by which reality is constantly appraised (defined?). The dissonance of failure, the ambience of suffering and not getting what you want speaks volumes on the metabolism of the universe, and our place in it as sentient beings (as gut-worms in the cosmic intestines). Certainly says more about the nature of reality than always getting what you want.

There’s that riff from The Matrix where Agent Smith has Morpheus tied to a chair describing the different versions of the original system which ultimately failed because the worlds were too perfect, and in their unlikely perfection the human subjects recognised the simulation for what it was, rejecting it like immune-responses self-immolating against contamination. He insinuates that the flaw of each failed version was it’s absence of suffering, that human subjectivity requires acceptable levels of negative stimulus from it’s environment otherwise risking neurological atrophy; an impasse of the evolutionary-adaptive impulse, a total organismic failure. If that were true then utopian paradise would secretly be everyone’s worst nightmare. Perhaps the reason we’ve never achieved it as a society is because a cybernetic collective subconscious is more than aware of this fact, and accordingly sabotages every manoeuvre that would see us there.

I live my life as if the world would be poorer if I didn’t commit myself to living my life. I live my life because Buffy the Vampire Slayer was basically a tableaux for navigating endgame capitalism, and it’s campily rendered mythos around the drudgeries of a neoliberalised existence better prepared me psychologically (dare I say spiritually) for the real world than school ever did.

After season four of Buffy there’s a drop-off where the show becomes miserable, too much so for some. At the time the criticism from longstanding fans and casual audiences alike was that the show had swerved too hard from it’s existing formula of buoyantly killing the rats when and as they appeared, the teenage dramatics only woven into the B-movie action with the gentle didacticism of a fairy story. Between Buffy and real life the similarities were entirely allegorical. And then Buffy’s mum dies.

Suddenly the show’s tone shifted and though retaining its supernatural elements it’s verisimilitude with reality, it’s crushing emotional realism when dealing with subjects like worker angst or grief, started feeling less Scooby Doo and more HBO. Which to anyone invested in adventurous writing and popular entertainments that push on what’s expected of them, was and remains very exciting. Yes, Buffy seasons five through to seven is miserable. And yes, these more dulcet later seasons contain some of the best television I have ever season, including arcs and themes which lesser shows have tried replicating time and again. With ever-diminishing returns. Basically every contemporary vampire motif post Anne Rice is a Buffy riff; Edward Cullen is an Angel knock-off, Sookie Stackhouse’s telepathy setup is borrowed from a Buffy episode in which the slayer’s bitten by a demon and leant it’s mind-reading abilities, Buffy almost singlehandedly made contemporary the notion of musical tv so you’re welcome Glee. The list goes on (no one does it quite like Joss Whedon).

I personally think the show has had staying power for it’s commitment to exploring much darker themes than the genre warrants. I mean, for a show in which a pornishly hot blonde is fighting rubber-suit demons on low-budget sets, you wouldn’t imagine it’s characters to also be grappling with the industrial-military complex and how it interfaces with both their own university and institutions generally, or the rigours and humiliations of making mortgage payments in the wake of a breadwinner’s unforeseen death, or the psychological minutia of trauma and how individual problems might effect the wellness of the collective.

It’s this emotional realism which has translated from one generation’s cultish Buffy following to the next. But also, the show’s endurance stems from the source of all antagonistic forces big and small which Buffy arguably attempts to prepare it’s audience for, acting as a sort of ‘How To Survive Capitalism’ tutorial, lessons aimed at the high-school student which are intended to walk with them as they matriculate and are eventually ushered through tertiary level education and finally, find themselves in the Big Bad World. Seasons five through to seven are miserable because they represent this transition, moving out from under the skirts of mummy institution into the adult world. A loss of innocence, The Fall, whatever you want to call it; this archetype has more sexual connotations in puritan literature, but in the Buffy-verse it means exposure to the inherent nature of the world which pedagogical relationships often inadvertently shelter us from. The demonic hoards in Buffy are not children of the biblical fall in the garden, but member to an ambience of violent resistance with which (contemporary) reality can be characterised. The darkness the magic, all of these players exist in the Buffy-verse to accentuate this fact, moving against the period’s ideological optimism in which America looked to be championing an endless and linear progression of liberal geopolitical expansion.

It’s as if Buffy knew the whole time that behind the American Dream was just another Big Bad waiting to be unleashed.

GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE; some thoughts on Marvel’s Disney-Phase and media-consumption habits generally

Marvel Studios has ‘revolutionised’ cinema. This hyperbole is often a substitute for the more accurate descriptor, influenced. More accurate because it’s without the historic connotations of revolution which make applying it to such a commercial juggernaut fallacious, galling even. Not that anyone is seriously comparing Marvel’s impact on popular culture to uprisings of the working class. Outside social upheaval the word generally applies to Avantgarde offerings which otherwise disrupt generic convention, establishing a new precedent.

In this respect ‘revolution’ is correct (sort of). But only in as much as the specific revolutionising of Marvel has been not so much a rupture as a synthesis, a gathering together of existing parts; each respective component more or less belonging to canon, tried and true commercial formulas which deliver a larger spectacle when synergised in the long-form of an Extended Universe. Under the tutelage of that behemoth Disney, both Star Wars and Marvel are having their universes not just expanded but also synchronised to a roster of profit, their respective worlds driven forward in maybe only inadvertently dynamic and innovative ways; inadvertent because obviously the studio is merely interested in developing properties for the company’s sustenance, as opposed to having critical or cultural incentives for doing so.

This said, the attention spans and interests of the public are fluid things, which the company seems to finally understand can’t be duped with tired recyclables. As so often happens, the interests of profit are being forced to coalesce with the more artisan interests of storytelling and mythology and (dare I say it) good writing. Which is to say, the company seems to be reckoning with an audience which is already so exhaustively invested in it’s properties that experiment is not just a less risky proposition, but also a necessary one (see Marvel/Disney’s Wanda-Vision). Of course to some extent ‘experiment’ without the risk of failure or the gestative ground of necessity is not experiment at all, simply the horizontal expansion of markets sniffing out uncharted windfalls in the commercially neglected thoroughfare of the abject, the uncanny, the non-linear; by which I mean ontologies/themes/provocations that have historically resisted cooption by the commercial production line, which have either fallen outside public sensibility or been incongruous with the more ideological agendas of commercial fare. These things are now fair game.

The irony here is it’s often commerciality itself which conditions public preferences. Obviously not singly, but certain conventional biases in mainstream cultural output cannot at this point be understated, nor their gradual effect on paradigmatic trends generally. Important to note that popular culture and ‘commercial culture’, if such a thing exists, are not the same thing. Certainly popular culture can be heavily influenced by commercial offerings, but popular culture has a more collective fluidity and can be susceptible to influences outside commercial kilns, or even to forms and phrases resuscitated from antiquity; mostly on a programmatic cycle of ten to twenty years, but sometimes quite literally (Egyptology?).

If anything has made popular culture even more fluid than it already inherently is, it’s the internet. Culture has always been technologically dependent, having a somewhat reflexive relationship with it’s medium; a subject on which much literature already exists, perhaps most famously Arthur McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. Streaming services are without question how the majority of us consume television shows and movies these days, there being a socialised convention of binge watching unique to the streaming platform; whereas classic network television saw the citizenry waiting for weekly episodic feedings of their favourite shows. The rate at which we consume and keep commentary on media now has accelerated, the ability to consume entire seasons in a single sitting meaning gestational periods of critical response (if any) have shrunk and arguably suffered as a result. The expectation with a general acceleration of consumption habits is that consumer stances/preferences are rapid and positional, algorithmic, becoming practically systemic as the platforms themselves harness data to curate suggested content to a conveniently narrowed aperture. Counting views/likes and giving you more of the same.

Where classic television offered a deliberately limited range of choices to negotiate ratings, creating singular content for viewers broadly, the intimate accessibility of content via streaming means the way those ‘broad’ interests are met now is by matching laboriously mapped consumer habits with equally numerous and detailed content options. With the rise of the personal device, media itself has proliferated so that each gadget might act as a window into profoundly customised worlds in which users (FKA viewers) can feel ‘seen’ with content that strongly reflects their own preferences and settings; the trade off being a comparative isolation, where scheduled network-instalments made for more collective viewings (even if synchronously separated by household).

Which isn’t to say a collective element doesn’t still remain in streaming/binge-habits. If anything, the replication of images and phrases from a show or a film synthesised with some higher (lower?) meaning and disseminated as a meme via social media platforms, is an intensely collective vector. Differently so. Where watching a film in a movie-theatre is obviously more collective than watching something at home, streaming did one better and rid us of scheduled programming for the sake of convenience; allegedly, but in hindsight it was probably to make consumer-relationships with media even more habit-forming than they already were. In this way our entertainments are accessible through the same personal devices by which we participate in social media, the social finding itself uncannily infiltrated by pictographic idioms spliced from popular movies and shows, a bespoke language being hobbled together (against copyright laws) premised on a sort of positional-criticality, in which one opinion or worldview is as valuable as another; which is to say not valuable at all, or only ephemerally. Because memes have seasons, phases, a moment of primary circulation and only two options when this comes to an end; termination, or recruitment as a popular format.

If the latter the meme finds itself enjoying a second life as a whorish canvas passing through various users and being adapted promiscuously, the best of these showing their versatility by being plastic enough to host a wide array of (exclusively positional) stances and themes. I can’t help but see the economy of memes as an urgent swan-song of what Frederic Jameson termed pastiche-culture, in which the possibility of radical rupture (the entering of the properly New) has been subsumed by a cut-copy compulsion, where even those offerings alleging themselves as novel are actually ideologically same; meaning that novelty is often merely cosmetic, because properly subversive material is anathema to the self-preservation of industry, whereby under neoliberal rule individual corporations are given the same rights as the citizenry. In reconciling consumer freedom with the need to regiment against critiques of itself, a commercially minded cultural-complex has become a fluidly adaptive commodity-making mechanism in which anything and everything (including anti capitalist sentiment itself) can be repackaged as benign. With the right marketing (basically anyone with a phone is a PR expert these days).

A story; I was trying to find something to watch because ‘something to watch’ is idiomatic in itself. A culturally mandated practice; tapping into the visual archive of entertainments which in their fluidly digital dissemination have become so much more than entertainments. They are identity. They monitor life by running alongside it, measuring it. They are modern day cave drawings, carrying their own sacredness; especially those nominated for canonisation (no matter how fleeting) as meme. An ever changing mirror, shifting and phasing indistinguishably with life itself until there’s no knowing who or what is the progenitor and who the acolyte. Are we the mirror, or have our delights taken up a greater residence than we thought them capable of?

What meaning do our delights have, how contained are they in the wider cultural stream? From where and what in history have they sprouted, like a multi-coloured mould spore? If we pulled them apart what surprises might there be, in the rolling credits, in the aspirations of respective parties coming together to execute the technically collaborative procedures around making movies and television?Collaborative yes, but ultimately so compartmentalised as to be like a headless machine depending on the competence and omniscience of the director. A heavy institutional precedent exists by which these things practically make themselves.

But then what of the occasional leaps and bounds within otherwise generic fare? Could the machine have a ghost?