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?

FILM, FEAR, FUCK-FEELINGS; The Matrix, Lords of Chaos, The Witches, Tom of Finland

I hate that the Wachowskis have had their legacy (The Matrix films) acquired by alt-right fantasists. The term ‘red-pilled’, an official terminology between the various demographics using the Lingua Franca of Q-Anon, refers to successful evangelism (so to speak) of respective conspiracy theories to the masses; it means having made a convert of someone, of having brought to illumination someone who was previously a somnambulist to the deceit of mainstream narratives and accepted rhetoric. It means a person has been successfully welcomed into the fold of more extremist views than the accepted party-line.

I remember seeing The Matrix films as a kid and becoming obsessed, loving the hyperstylised visuals. These movies helped with my cinematic literacy, introducing me to the notion of aesthetic languages generally; how ideas could be disseminated through not just the more expositional manoeuvres of content, but also form. That in fact the communicative possibilities of form were potentially more exciting than the mechanics of writing alone for being less limited in scope (there are always exceptions). Reductive to binarise writing/aesthetics or content/form in this way I know, seeing as in cinema especially ‘successful’ execution is determined by their synergy, their relation. But again in a medium like cinema, which is primarily visual, for me personally form assumes a primacy. I mean, thin writing in a movie can be glossed over with curated visuals, can be transformed into an epic minimalism or high-camp by clever editing or rigorous visual signatures.

The Witches by Nicolas Roeg. Perhaps my all time favourite film from childhood. Commendable for it’s amazing practical effects courtesy of Jim Henson, along with a gloriously unfiltered translation of Roald Dahl’s deviant themes and images, where other Dahl adaptations (especially later ones) have gone the way of Disney; as in, sanitising Grimm stories from morbid cautions into all-singing all-dancing family friendly fare. Roeg’s version definitely found a place in my subconscious. I had an obsession with witches, probably because between Angelica Houston’s turn as the Grand High Witch and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, being an evil witch seemed like a glamorous fun and empowering existence, where the do-gooders seemed repressed, limited, comparatively lacking in imagination. I mean, if esoteric powers were really at hand then domination of one’s environment seems obvious. Rewatching The Witches now, and having yet to watch the recent update with Anne Hathaway (a sadly anodyne version, apparently), I can’t believe how contemporary kid’s movies shy away from violence, pathos, sex, when I can list any number of eighties and early nineties examples which have no problem collapsing the usual thematic partitioning of kid and adult entertainments towards refreshingly subversive fare.

Several writers I like talk about the importance of boredom and how critical thinking is impossible without it, particularly Zizek whose take is that without boredom we cannot question our world, that we’d otherwise carry on with our lives like stupid contented animals, like cattle given sedatives for the march from pen and pasture to proverbial meat-grinder. I’m as allergic to boredom as anyone else. I watch horror movies and have a reasonably under control porn addiction and even now I’m writing while Jonas Akerlund’s Lords of Chaos plays in the background because my insatiable media consumption is so fragmented and contrary and heavingly disparate, that watching a film isn’t enough; I have to be simultaneously processing every other thing, skating on the surface of a movie which I’m convinced I’m getting the gist of from the tropes and cliches in my periphery (including some unnecessary compulsive heterosexuality, completely fabricated apparently), while writing just as compulsively because generating real-time commentary is what my socials programme me for. Nothing has inherent value, everything only has comparative value as a reference, as a hyperlink.

Depth of perception has less and less credibility, the hefty the multidimensional the weighty the momentous means nothing; ‘things’ and their thingness only have networked value. The intertextual having become hypertextual becoming a sort-of Akashic record, a sorting and storing of information for it’s own sake without any singular organising principle because these positional singularities were evacuated with the ultimate troll of Post-Modernity, in which we were allegedly freed from the theistic oppression of a single point of reference; when in reality, consumer-boredom was born as a crowded flatness of endless and endlessly monotonous possibilities. A new god more powerful for transcending a fixed address, for de-materialising into everything. Revelations called it Legion, the many-faced antagonist.

Now I’m feeling sick because I only had the vaguest idea of what Lords of Chaos was really about, and I just saw the twitter feed for Varg Vikernes which I regret pursuing (feeling more sick for doing so), knowing that he exists not as an isolated fringe-provocateur but as a symptom of a Europe that regresses to a mythic insidiousness when faced with economic hardship (if history serves). Vikerne is an older man now. The film attempts a depiction of his youth, one he has since denounced not for exploiting his crimes (arson, murder) but for it’s apparently unforgivable lack of verisimilitude. Go figure. I see boredom as a major ingredient in Vikerne and company’s sort of purely aesthetic embrace of satanism, and beyond this a unique set of ingredients and circumstances resulting in Burzum’s specifically tragic outcome; toxic masculinity, inter generational disenfranchisement, rebelling against an oppressive Christianised culture of manners and ‘decency’. Teen horniness. Ever a factor in teenaged criminality; hormones.

Vikerne says that Euronymous, frontman for Mayhem and Vikerne’s vaguely homoerotic rival, was a closeted homosexual. He goes on to say there was an absence of partners around him by which we can assume Vikerne thinks that Euronymous’s lack of avowed heterosexual interest made him closet-gay (one thing Vikerne hasn’t denounced from the film yet is his teen self’s voracious and frankly misogynistic interest in women, with which he’s probably satisfied his straightness is comparatively exemplar).

Over the break I started reading Going Dark, Julia Ebner’s chronicle of infiltrating extremist groups both online and in real life. At the time of writing this I’m halfway through the last chapter, a tacked-on perspective on the New Zealand Mosque shooter and his gamification of terrorism, the live-streaming and very marketing-savvy release of his manifesto The Great Replacement (to clarify, The Great Replacement is a bottom-line suspicion of the white minority that their ethnic dilution/replacement is a government conspiracy, a strategic erasure of whiteness as opposed to a natural outcome of a technologised-globalised world; from which we all benefit to some degree). It’s been a horrifying read and places me deeper in an ambience of white supremacist toxins, to the point I feel surrounded, which is probably an anxiety-fuelled paranoia; or is it? It’s an awkward sitting-position, being member to the virtue-signalling left and deploring it’s educated arrogance, it’s superiority, while becoming gradually aware of the specific type of loathing due us by a far-right that feels increasingly disenfranchised, their whiteness which at one point was a calling card, an affluent membership, suddenly less valuable in the mainstream as the popular imagination dissects and appraises how power has been historically disseminated.

Contrary to what ‘victims’ of this scrutiny of whiteness fear, being white hasn’t suddenly become the pariah-making characteristic those contemplating ethnic replacement take it for. If anything, whiteness is simply finding equivalence with the existing ethnic-metric, in as much as races and cultures circulate with equivalence in a system primed for trade, in a system in which difference is capital, novelty is commerce, identity is currency. Obviously, if you have something of value in a rivalrous climate, you defend it. As the value of whiteness shifts (lessens, becoming horizontal rather than vertical), it’s historic value as a master signifier is being defended, even while the world shifts and attempts ridding itself of the need for master signifiers generally. It’s nothing personal whites, it’s just that we’ve lost our stomach for servitude. I’m sure you feel the same way.

I wince when I think about the fact that people exist who need me to die so they can properly inhabit their lives. Partly from my own sudden (and to some extent illusory) sense of being in danger, but also partly from pity; pity that whoever does operate in such a mode of heightened and prolonged angst will probably die prematurely of diseases related to hypertension, who have fortified their minds to such a degree that critical thinking beyond egoistic reinforcement is literally forbidden. It’s the equivalent of Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall staying in the off-season Overlook Hotel, all those rooms available and they restrict themselves to the service quarter for fear of what they might find anywhere else (admittedly Room 237 has a nasty surprise but every remaining room is probably worth exploring).

It’s an interesting proposition; that your life can only have value in as much as it is spent denigrating and, hopefully, annihilating a loathsome Other. It’s a shame that white supremacists are so deaf to the wisdom of cultures unrelated to the aryan tree, otherwise they might’ve acquired Beyoncé’s frankly life-changing tidbit, for the better; ‘always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper’. There’s something neoliberal about this, yes, for sure; it aggrandises success as a spiteful pseudo-spiritual pursuit, success as a way to vanquish enemies rather than success being parcel to fulfilling experiences of Self, seamless integrations of the ego with environment. Existential affirmation transcending market value, transcending monetary incentives by way of being a mirror. You are here. I’m personally more in favour of a neoliberal rat race than I am of having to martial myself against lethal prejudice. Even better would be a world in which the poor aren’t being exploited, where disparity is mended and no one is left feeling so criminally neglected that they weaponise themselves against an imagined foe, whether Islamic, Jewish, LGBT, whatever.

I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw Tom of Finland, but I remember it changing my life. As most fags will tell you. Even more than seeing my first rain-soaked game of rugby, the sport’s channel camera-eye switching lasciviously from field to locker and back again like it was nothing; like glimpses of unadorned rugby-physiques in tantalising repose couldn’t be a more nonchalant thing (it definitely isn’t). I feel differently about it now having realised the Tom of Finland aesthetic is lifted from the chrome and leather finish of Reich-era fascists, privy now to a confounding appreciation for/fetishisation of nazi-aesthetics in gay culture (that every gay district has an Eagle bar?). Which makes zero surface sense (seeing as homosexuals were specifically hunted by Hitler), but which I’m beginning to understand in the wider erotics of BDSM and fetishised power-dynamics generally. What better way to psychologically manage a threat than to render it sexually appealing, by literally fucking it? It’s not a stretch, the distance between affects of fear and desire deploying similar signals in the body, viscerally gauged categories which a mind-trick could easily shuttle subjects between. I’m thinking of it now as a reclamation, as a (potentially problematic) affirmation in the face of historically death-dealing forces. An eroticised satire of the antagonist, hereby making him/her/it more digestible.

Erotics as soma (isn’t it?).

ALT-RIGHT TECH AND OTHER SCARY STORIES; Soul, Possessor, the storming of congress etc

I’m loathe to say anything about what’s happening over in America because I’m weary of mentioning white supremacy/alt-right presences at all, because under the Q Anon umbrella they’ve unified in ways the ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ affiliates have failed to, finding an albeit murky common denomination within the manipulations of (probably strategically seeded) alternative-histories (read; Conspiracies); and mostly, I’m not so naive to think New Zealand lacks a similarly deranged number in our population. What’s worse, they now have an insurrectional model. In fairness a shoddy one, and as militias go the storming of congress was one of the least cinematic coups I have ever seen (apart from the shaman).

But aesthetics aside the prospect of hate-oriented extremism, feeling represented by Trump-era laissez-faire and emboldened unlike before, is living, breathing, near to me in ways uniformly liberal-minded Hollywood movies kept telling me would never happen again; if I wasn’t mortified by 2019's mosque shootings then I am now. Because on the basis of that tragedy the rats came out of their dens, sniffing the air, sensing a shift in what mainstream portals will and will not platform. The polarised climate of both resistance to and simultaneous tolerance/allowance of ‘hate speech’, frequently camouflaged in disinformation and coordinated trolling (diverting liberal focus to some clever redundancy), shocks me still even though it’s lingered long enough to be considered a new normal. Horrifyingly, depressingly.

I don’t think it’s naïveté. I’ve known, everyone’s known. For example Christchurch has long been a punchline to me and mine about lingering colonial prejudices, as a hotbed for Norse-themed white supremacy and appropriations which I keep telling myself Tolkien would not have endorsed (but do I know that for sure?). By which I mean we’ve known that beneath New Zealand’s myriad insecurities and blindnesses, like the one where we think we’re too small and inconsequential to have anything historically significant happen here; like the one where we think that because Maori have representation at all we’ve somehow ‘clocked’ the societal snafu of racial tension, that because we lack visible organisations committed to ‘purifying’ the population (like the Klan) we’re consummately absent white supremacy (except for where it’s only institutional which is tots chill); like the one where we refrain from having difficult conversations because decency wins out, the fear of impoliteness staggering, paralysing, like the threat of the cosmic void itself.

Yes, I’m not so naive to have believed the stories we’ve told ourselves to date, that this country has spun about number-eight wire and fair-dinkum which is basically a less-sycophantic version of the American Dream, a fair-dinkum that couldn’t possibly perpetuate or allow the racist biases of our settler-forebears; a fair-dinkum that would gladly have us assume the dynamism of capitalist society as if it was an historic tabula-rasa. The notion of ‘post-colonial’ was never a concretion; it’s aspiration. A dream prolonged by the tortured hopes of a long-suppressed white guilt. Fair-dinkum my big brown pussy!

I saw Possessor the other day. It’s a film by David Cronenberg’s son, Brandon. It’s the guy’s second film to date, the first being Anti-Viral which starred Sarah Gadon and some other hot as fuck Canadian people who the family seems to have an exclusive contract with, because I don’t see them on anything else. Meanwhile Possessor stars Andrea Riseborough and Michael Abbot (the titular Mandy from Mandy and Charlie from Girls, respectively) and is all about an assassin called Tasya who can hack people’s minds and takes out her contracts while pretending to be somebody else. Just off the bat, this film’s fucked up. In the best way possible.

By fucked up I don’t just mean gnarly and violent (though it is both of these things, aggressively so), but also fucked up in how it delivers it’s subject matter; there’s no moralising about the innate wrongness of commandeering someone else’s life to inevitably implode it by committing homicide in it, only an icy observation, the growing horror stemming not from the possession itself but from the anomalous merger of minds which occurs when a job goes wrong.

As if to say the viewer is already familiar with this dystopian world where contract killings happen, where corporate espionage is not above clandestine coups and murder, not above hoarding and keeping technology from the general population to give itself an edge. In this way Cronenberg’s vision is deeply cynical. There’s no question of the world being a horrible place; it incontrovertibly is horrible. It’s a place where anyone and anything can be corrupted without exception. His horror, and perhaps his guarded moralising (if there is any) orbits the purity of self, the individual container of being and how this is the last neutral ground being imperialised even now (through surveillance and data-mining), making Possessor a cleverly veiled cautionary tale. A very adult fairy-story about evil sorcerers (witches?) and how to best their seductions, maintaining the integrity of selfhood when they come knocking for your soul.

Which is interesting. The integrity of the ‘soul’, or at the very least the mind. Recent Pixar release Soul renders intelligence as a prepackaged monadic spark that enters bodies to commander them like meat puppets, and only perfunctorily skates more primal themes of the body having it’s own directives. We could categorise it as Cartesian in as much as it plays to the classical mind/body split.

Possessor on the other hand seems to speculate the opposite of classical Cartesian dualism, exploring an embodied-ness, pitching that the catastrophic merger between Tasya and one Colin Tate was only possible because mind is a byproduct of physicality. Whereas Soul sees bodies as mere consoles and mind-entering-body as users, this gamified hyper-computational metaphor is flatly denied by Cronenberg; to him mind and body are dually enmeshed facets of a single entity, one which the sterilities of computation could never fully quantify. As evidenced not just in Tasya’s calamitous merger with Tate, but in the various ‘calibrations’ she’s forced to implement when in a host body, which is namely running the gamete of human emotions through an electrolysis. Resetting the terminus, which is both console AND user. Pairing is not slickly blue-toothed. It’s entangled, primal.

Somehow cycling through volt-induced emotions brings the host and possessor back into alignment and has to be done regularly before the ‘job’ gets done, insinuating that the possessor-process is more immunological, unstable, akin to a contaminant in which immune-response must be managed; or even a parasitical relationship. Which is referenced later when Tate realises something Other has taken up residence in his mind; breaking into Tasya’s family’s house and butchering her husband and son saying ‘do you believe in parasites?’ (or something to that effect), further asking the man if he thinks his wife is a predator, does he think she might’ve gotten a worm in her brain from cleaning out the litter box etc. That such trauma is the result of attempting a coup on someone’s mind points to Cronenberg-junior’s thesis. That mind and flesh are one.

In the vein of Possessor technology being hoarded terrifies me more than the strategic hoarding and vertical-valuation of resources (perhaps the same thing; technology is definitely a significant resource). It’s probably why bit-coin’s doing so well at the moment, because as a cryptocurrency it vets the shadowy networks in which alt-right groups manoeuvre; or at least had been forced to manoeuvre until recently, when Trump’s refusal to disavow white-supremacy all but mainstreamed them. Overnight, going from a problematic but negligible minority to a bonafide movement attracting new followers on the basis of a nearly spiritual malaise, anxieties of a vanished middle-class, plummeting living standards, general disenfranchisement, lack of education; all of these things having brewed for so long, fomenting darkly, finally coming to fruition. A strange and noxious fruit indeed.

All of these things having gestated; deliberate immiseration of society’s most vulnerable, a popular tribalism deployed aesthetically and politically, ideologies that foreclose upward mobility even if the cultural emblems of such movement (falsely) remain. Such misery, such pain. An industry of pain, enough for everyone, running in the streets, pouring from the sky.

No wonder it’s appeared now as an extreme movement, suffering that’s been ignored for decades and with it a malign habit of irrational-scapegoating, something presumed extinct as it receded. But only receded like the tide before a tsunami. Only to return with vengeful reinforcements, a tenacity thought to be the reserve of liberal-dynamos and young executives now practiced by the compulsively downtrodden, an affective surplus to mainstream political discourse and academic insularities. The lost-middle, the working-poor. Pain is never just a remainder. A wound left long enough can conjure demons. Silent Hill anyone?

DEPRESSION 2021 and Disney Pixar’s SOUL

I feel increasingly estranged from the world, or the picture in my head I had of the world; which can only ever be a limited impression, a deliberately miniature diorama, a petit tableaux in which to place myself. In a microcosm finding myself more empowered than a more extensive consideration of the ‘facts’ could ever allow. Anyway. The world I’d been living in, with it’s hard-earned absolutes and textures, is changing, I can feel changing, in as much as it’s rules and pulses feel more opaque to me, less legible. The things which used to operate as it’s determining attributes, it’s calling cards, seem less obvious. I have to painstakingly remind myself what certain feelings and behaviours matter, and how they matter. It’s that seasonal reflexivity I’ve been waiting on, which I’ve been looking out for like a sage scarred warrior keeping guard on an embattled pa-site (which isn’t to conflate being of Maori descent with some martial code or spirit; ugh). Suspicious of the calm which has lasted a supernaturally long time (I am). My brushes with depression to date have been camouflaged, mostly. Hidden by external dramas and dynamics which I have mostly been the architect of (except the death of my father obvi). Foresight, prevention. Premeditating causes with theatrical habits, generating so much noise that introspection becomes impossible. These things have been my m.o.. That’s the craven beauty of something like grief. The reasons for sadness are evident, sanctioned. It’s responses and rip-tides are known, are socially acceptable. Hideous as grief might be, it’s legible, it’s canon. But what about when a crippling sadness or despair strikes without warning, even without reason, stronger for being so divorced from evental-logics, for being so disembodied; for lacking graspable context, becoming demon, becoming spectre. Some (most) would argue that this year has been disruptive enough that a vague darkling resignation to the entropy of the universe, an apparently rootless depression, is a sensible and even expected response. That mental health would obviously collectively dive considering the wrenching transitions we’re in, the harrowing uncertainties whereby the western world’s presumptive ownership of the future is, for the first time in a long time, not set in stone. Up for grabs even. *clear stage for potential super-powers to audition their leadership capabilities, which have less to do with benevolent governance and more to do with willingness to exploit, systemic disparity, undermining of public discourse and other preventions of democratic dissent (if only for the American-lead example).

The unconscious is a thing so obviously when a feeling or ambient state strikes and reasons seem initially opaque, then some enquiring excavation of latent factors is a good idea. The ‘talking cure’. I’ve never had therapy because it’s always been out of my budget. And whenever I have brought this up socially some people (richer ones who can afford lives of navel gazing and fifty dollar vanilla-scented candles for the guest-rooms) always scoff and say ‘if you were really serious about it then you’d find a way’, as if prioritising rent and groceries over good mental health was some sort of character flaw, as if my limited means were a flimsy excuse, proof of some inherent pathology lurking in my otherwise benign demeanour of lower-middle creative-class (lol). One of my favourites is when people recommend I get on the sickness benefit and then therapy is free, as if performing debilitating instability, stressing fictitious traumas for the medical panopticon, were nothing more strenuous than early morning yoga at the local rec-centre. Jesus fucking Christ. I’m not a car, requiring a ‘service’. Neither do I so readily embrace the neoliberal agenda lurking in wellness, the embrace of many credos and services which preach optimum health/experience which actually mean optimum productivity, that wellness is exclusively measured in profitable economic contribution. Sheer nonsense and lacking in discerning, this approach; the imperial histories of our success paradigms somehow matter less than excelling within them, or perhaps only matter when their doors of affluence/comfort are closed. That everyone’s a naysayer until their own wealth arrives in life’s nepotist lottery is the cynic’s assumption. Though I’m sure in some cases this proves true.

Disney Pixar’s Soul was great. Seemed slightly thin on the first viewing but by the second I’d had long enough to contemplate beyond it’s saccharine pretences. Which I know is how Disney operates; an unspoken assurance to the more surface viewer that any film bearing the proverbial beast-mark will be light, joyous, asking nothing more of an audience than gentle suspension of disbelief and love of the cute. But Pixar, with plenty of commercial success, has also pioneered the art of subtle subversion, less as a radical statement around childhood and the genres we use to coddle and uphold kids in an arguably arbitrary construct of ‘innocence’, and more as a necessary subterfuge of execution and delivery to elevate the usually one-track Disney standards of production to something more textured, nuanced, and decidedly adult. The film’s about this guy (as most films are) called Joe who is unhappy in his life, a jazz-musician who hasn’t achieved the swinging heights of dancehall fame his younger self coveted; instead he’s a middle-aged music teacher for middle-school kids who are mostly despondent, resisting his obvious passion for the swagger of indifference. Such is youth culture. Finally Joe gets his dream gig with the effervescent Dorothea Williams . . . only to die prematurely (stepping blindly into a manhole, doi!). Finding himself in the afterlife literally surging towards the holy light of The Great Beyond, Joe finds the realm’s clerical workers and strikes a sort-of deal, agreeing to ‘mentorship’ of young souls who require a full license before they can commandeer a body on planet earth. If only to serve his own end of stealing this license from said-soul so he can ride the pass back to his own earthly body. Easy enough. The only problem is his assigned soul (the defiantly indifferent 22, voiced by Tina Fey, who neatly resembles the grumbling kids in his music-class) has famously never completed the process of getting her full earth-license, despite having been mentored by some of earth-history’s greats (Abe Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, the freshly guillotined head of Marie Antoinette). 22 is apparently a soul that cannot grasp the novelty of taking up residence on the earthly plane, who has adapted nicely to the endless transit of The Great Before, and feels no urgency to move in any direction. An existential stasis of the most literal kind.

I was struck by several things in this movie, but maybe most interesting was the bureaucratic efficiency of an afterlife which resembles a video-game in it’s slick topography and cool synth-soundtrack pairing. Overseeing The Great Before is Gerry, a constructed interface without which Joe’s ‘feeble human mind’ would not be able to comprehend this soul terminus where fledging souls are readied for the adventure of life. Gerry describes themselves as a profound unifier whose comprehension transcendently straddles both space and time. But they are not alone in operating this Before/After-life. In fact, there’s a team of Gerrys and an accountant Terry who might present as unique beings but which I got the impression were folds in a singular fabric, their treatment of one another as separate entities a mere performance for their human witness. The Great Self splicing itself into smaller Selves, a heavy self-alienation only performed to enrich the Whole, eventually. In this way, the transcendent Whole splits itself to gather data, generating that data by traversing self-inflected void (the illusion of separateness, of individuality), strengthening itself to chart that which remains uncharted as the universe expands into the unfathomable scale of un-being. Souls themselves, like the bureaucratic agents of the soul-mentor program, are broken-off gradients of this vastly and inconceivably-sentient Whole, only unlike the debatably angelic Gerry’s human souls will synthesise the distinct alienation and resistances of matter; presumably generating a richer data for harvest.

This type of metaphysical ambition is not even new for Pixar. Remember Inside Out? That was another story which split it’s setting between hypothetical ‘inner’ space, visualising mechanisms in a substrate which evade consciousness (and even time as we materially know it) and the Real World; except of course Inside Out depicts the emotional life of a young pre-teen girl, and Soul the neuronal-storm of death; the mind having it’s lurid swan-song, the proverbial DMT-trip etc. It’s a family-friendly Jacob’s Ladder.

As his mentorship commences Joe takes 22 into the Everything Room, hoping that here they will find something that enthuses the young soul enough that they’ll get their full earth-licence, what’s termed the Spark; it turns an unfinished stamp-wheel into a sanctioned ticket to the earthly realm. More on the Everything Room; the idea is that new souls are chaperoned in this spatially impossible hall where literally everything you can have/experience on earth is represented, and hopefully from this living archive some ‘thing’ will imprint enough that it translates as that soul’s Spark. We see new souls playing basketball, exploring the intricacies of food, navigating space in a rocket ship; doing things which ironically, 22 notes, cannot be wholly grasped without a body. The archive only offers pale imitations of these earth baubles. Without a body they’re mere suggestions, confused indicators of categorical goods premised on a consumerist metric of interest/taste. Holding none of the magics which Joe expounds lyrically on when discussing his relationship with jazz music. Their profundity is inaccessible without the bodily instrument.

It’s interesting to note here where a profile of evil might fit into Soul’s almost computationally efficient theology. For example; is evil really an aberration, or do souls with a penchant for violence and harm find these directives in the Everything Room before arriving on earth through the earth-portal? Or is evil perhaps born of the soul’s latent frustrations that between their experiences in the Everything Room (an unconscious imprint after the trauma of birth which is mercifully erased) and the material counterpart of their Spark in reality, there’s a dissonance. Perhaps, a will to evil is born of this bodily trauma, the trauma of a soul falling into the body which can never be replicated in The Great Before, only hinted at, palely indicated. Evil as a metaphysical mal-adaption to the physical. The film itself seems to point at this.

As the film progresses there’s a (typically comedic) mishap when Joe tries transferring himself back to his body. Eventually Joe finds 22 so incorrigibly indifferent to everything in the Everything Room, so contentedly malcontent, that he seeks an alternative route back to earth. 22 alleges that there’s someone who can help him. Enter the mystics, souls of the living that through their spiritual sensitivity can travel to The Zone, an overlap between the worlds. An In-Between. Here they do meet someone who says he can get Joe back. Only when he opens a portal Joe accidentally brings 22 with him, the latter falling into his original body while Joe dismayingly finds himself stuck in the body of a tabby cat. This is classic switcharoo which anyone familiar with eighties movies and the Disney channel’s compulsively remade Freaky Friday will already know, and presumably love. And Soul’s use of the device differs very little from it’s many predecessors, in that the switch leads both parties to profound appreciations for, and new perspectives on, their respective lots. The only difference is that 22’s lot is yet to happen, is seminal, in the wings; while Joe’s lot is not only well commenced, but as he observes 22 playing himself he realises his life has stalled, becoming stifled by what he thought was his earnest passion. Jazz. It seems that in his monomaniac’s romance with jazz music Joe has disconnected from everything else in life which might otherwise be meaningful and fulfilling; whereas 22’s brief time in Joe’s body forces them into close proximity with the fullness of physical being. And it’s apparently a heady flavour because one taste and 22 decides they’ll hijack Joe’s body until they’re satisfied, or at least until they’re in possession of a legible Spark. It seems earth-life has some appeal after all.

Kind of amazing that a kids movie could subtly introduce this type of higher thinking in regards embodied consciousness, beginning with a seemingly tired trope of Cartesianism in which ‘soul’ or consciousness is the mere driver of physical being, only to collapse this insinuated primacy of the mental over the physical by giving primacy to materiality instead; or at least stressing how synthesis is what matters. Not just of the idealistic with the realistic, but also synthesis of ‘mind’ with a preparedness for the messily exhilarating modalities of embodied being. It ends up being a predictably anodyne approach of physical pleasure in order to be suitable for younger audiences, but attempting such a coda for kids at all is to my mind properly subversive. The cultural value of this film lies between the lines, in the swirling channels between it’s high-resolution pixels. Between the seeming simplicity of it’s feel-good narrative and it’s cheery grappling of Death (as the organising value of Life). Rather than blindly prescribing a ‘better attitude’, it interrogates ideas about the value of life, saying without overtly saying that an existence deprived of pleasure is an existence not worth inhabiting. Period. It has more to do with Camus than it does anything preceding it in the house of Disney, concerned as it is with asking an inverted Sisyphus-question; not whether or not to take one’s own life, but whether one should be born at all. A fairly useless question to ask but for Soul’s fantastic multi-dimensional setup.

Another thing I wondered watching Soul a second time. The Everything Room (or what I’m now remembering might actually be called the Hall of Everything; meh) must be filled, by definition, with everything; thusly, it contains the benign pastimes in the featured montage (basketball, pizza etc.) but must also house recreations and vocations deemed illegal, unsavoury, and downright twisted. I’m wondering what the archives of murder and pedophilia look like, for example. This is assuming that Soul’s theology varies from the classical binary of Heaven and Hell, which it does, which the film even gases about when Joe first arrives to The Great Before. And this is also presupposing the idea that evil occurs in the world as a spiritual dissonance between embodied being and the soul’s expectations, from when it perused it’s options for earthly delights in the Hall of Everything. This would also be suggestive of morality’s metaphysical exemption, that the logics of the body are somehow different from those of the ‘soul’ and subsequently the soul’s culpability is nullified in the instant of death, when all that matters is being expedited to The Great Beyond for the soul’s earth-accrued data. Suck it, Old Testament God!

I had put off getting Disney+ for so long but here I am, mainlining monthly funds to a corporation that makes my skin crawl, whose omnipresence is reason to pause with holy dread. But perhaps I was over hasty in my demonising. Sure, the majority of product we’ll get from Disney hews to familiar codes and tropes, and even in Soul there’s a familiarity, a ghost of boredom in the pixelated shadows if only for the company’s compulsively maintained demeanour (smiles, hugs, clear protagonists facing off against obvious villains and everyone getting what they deserve before the credits roll). But whatever. If the world’s going to hell in a hand basket then I want to be able to watch Star Wars when and as I please.