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?
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