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.

Eating myself to death in the age of netflix (my couch sees more of my ass than grindr does which is saying something) #anxiousdepressionbingetelevisionandyou

I dont know if I would be diagnosed by a professional as an emotional eater but there's definitely something that goes beyond nourishment in my habits. I eat to 'cosy' (as a verb), to fill the spaces of a room in a house that's a home, allegedly. To fill space where I otherwise feel I am not enough without the literal 'filler', that hackneyed adage of filling inner emptiness; but it's more than that. I eat to substantiate the otherwise void-ish pock-marked streaming of time, a current which passes sometimes without that immaculate feeling of completion, passing without that feeling of being airtight. Like to be anxious, to have cloudy thoughts and the inevitable sinking of the stomach which comes with dire thinking; those things take chunks out of the passing of time, create vacancies which I need to retroactively fill by eating, in proportion to the negative-strength of the thought and the damage done (which I alone can intuit; there is no objective measure for this devastation, only the lingering sense of things not being right).

Having the television on while I eat isn't the purview of the lonely, because I live with flatmates AND a loving partner. No, it's definitely more than this. If there's anything it's resonant with it's David Cronenberg's gestures in his movie Videodrome, namely the idea of staging cultural repatriation of the homeless with shelters that specifically cater to each transient's lack of televisual access. In the movie there's something hammy about cathode rays specifically, the then current television technology; like this fed a neural function directly, an empirical hokey-science McGuffin to better persuade audiences of the outlandish mind-control possibilities the movie explores (still outlandish even now after CIA papers were declassified detailing every lurid and very real MK Ultra experiment, no longer explosive speculation of the paranoid but after careful disclosure somehow just banal fact; go figure).

Obviously we've come a ways since cathode rays, we have LED and whatever is coming after LED blah blah blah. There's 4K whatever that is and HD, and Ultra HD which I think is less cutting edge than 4K. Anyway, the point is that the connection between comprehension of culture and a phylogenetic assimilation of cultural tenets and credos is not reliant on the tech. It's the memes themselves, it's language itself which inseminates the mind, which then seeds physical responses in the nervous system, which persuades the body to facilitate new forms, to bloom discordancies like cancers.

Videodrome got it half right.

But what do I know; maybe there does exist a frequency or tech which can emit instant mind-shaping rays or emanations. Like in Joss Weldon's Doll House.

Everything comes back to media, to television shows or memes or movies, their mythos and pathos shaping my sense of self, allowing me to even negatively locate myself in this miasma of warring pre-existing territories both internal and external. And I find myself taking comfort in eating in front of the television because, like in Videodrome, the food gives me a literal prop for what the images are doing. I am nourishing and strengthening myself, I am eating products of a certain world, this one, which will bolster my presence in it. Memes and cultural artefacts are metabolised by that part of myself which is member to a network of precepts, which collectively generate this sense of reality, life, society; it's the wider consensus, the great Jungian mesh which is living, responsive, and yet tirelessly normative in that it takes vital shape by a sort of passive majority rule (unconscious is the word). The minority report is a surplus, an excess. An unthreatening speck.

That 'surplus speck' is reified in the canon of underground, liminal, Avantgarde, where it's either starved into non-existence or brought back later on once the whole can assimilate it's code (so long as the functionality of the majority-construct isn't too disrupted, which it never is).

This is what it means to eat the spirit, partake of the sacrament of the flesh and blood of the lamb. Eat the sign. That is why I eat in front of the television.

Because it is godly, Eucharistic in it's implications. Sign becoming matter, of word becoming flesh. Episodes of Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (in my opinion superior to Riverdale which it shares a universe with) transcending it's commercial and even technological confines as I partake of ramen and corn-chips and bags of microwave popcorn. These things inhabiting the same sacred function as those little wafers and sour red wine at mass.

Whatever is on screen I take into the spoonful of ice cream or mouthful of pizza and then of course into myself, assimilating the mythos and pathos of an adolescent devil worshipper who just wants to straddle the mortal and immortal world equally, aspecting with Emily as she takes Paris, physically invoking the True North and the first scintillating signs that winter has finally come. All through otherwise plain foodstuffs made profoundly substantial through the magic of story (which as magics go apparently isn't strong enough to remedy acid reflux).

Mea Culpa.

PARIS FUCKING HILTON; some thoughts on recent doco This Is Paris

I don't know what I was expecting starting the Paris Hilton documentary, whose release seems tone fucking death in this the absolute year zero of American empire. White fragility during a major overhaul of our structural racial prejudices? Or at least on paper this seems like an audacious move.

But actually watching it, expecting to find very little which would resonate with me, expecting to see nothing at all to identify with (because what common factors exist between the lives of a low earning brown gay guy and a hyper-affluent Caucasian heiress, respectively?); yeah, watching it I was more than surprised. By the end I was pretty much gobsmacked, crying, put into a melancholic and meditative mood processing anything from the markedly different expectations we have of male celebrity versus female celebrity, processing how desire speaks with traumas held in the body by which our wants are subsequently shaped and moulded, thinking about how ambition can often be an armouring against a world we perceive to be threatening. The documentary left me thinking about all of these things, and more. As good documentaries should.

A solid entry acts as a provocation, starting with the smallest aperture and expanding with persuasive realism, planting it's subject in universal themes. Which is technically also a strategy for broadening potential audiences and subsequently adding to the value of your product. But in this Netflix era are there any storytelling conventions unmarred by the minimising of profit logistics?

Anyway, the 'universal' themes of trauma in This Is Paris got me thinking; maybe rich people are just scared, like the rest of us. Which doesn't excuse the frequently bigoted conservatism that comes with wealth, the partitioning of themselves as a class from the labouring majority. Nothing ever excuses class violence. But Paris did get me thinking . . .

Obviously it's hard for me to sympathise with very wealthy people, and I know that seems ratchet; like, they're human beings too. It's just the struggles of highly 'successful' people (if being born into established lineages of inherited wealth is considered a moo-point in the category of success) are alienating, unrelatable because those 'struggles' often entail making difficult decisions around the handling of enormous resources the likes of which normal people will never see; let alone divvy up among tiers of a 'self-made' empire.

Nostalgia is very similar to dreaming, in as much as nostalgia locates and territorialises artefacts belonging to a certain time and place, characterised by a feeling. The similarity here is that dreams, their objects and settings, are rendered in a subjectivity unique to the dreamer; subsequently, their legitimate translation is almost impossible. Note I say translation and not decipherment, the possibility of the latter having been long assimilated within a pop-psychology zeitgeist thanks to Freud and Jung.

Paris Hilton represents a nostalgia for me, and it's one I find latching onto me and dragging me back to a whole memory-canon with more and more violence the older I get. It's that early to mid noughties era which isn't so unusual seeing as it was then that Paris first bloomed into mega stardom crested by a few good PR decisions around a leaked sex tape and a resulting reality-television series. With the effervescent Nicole Ritchie, who I still think is more charismatic than Paris. Maybe she's not 'more' charismatic; maybe the essence of what makes Nicole Ritchie watchable is just different. Anyway, in the interim many of Paris's celebrity practices, micro documentation to reality-television self-exposures and lucrative omniscient branding, have become not just a standard for the famous but arguably a measure by which everyday people live their lives, plugged in as we are to the carnivalesque panopticon of social media. The gaze of celebrity has moulded itself to the civilian, piggybacking the anxieties of a post-9/11 world which was already gestating and experimenting with invasive surveillance methods. Reality television is perhaps a concomitant and disingenuously benign symptom of this surveillance aesthetic, by way of which the latter was normalised practically overnight.

Carrying all these impressions for me in a conveniently self-minimised bundle of Paris-ness is Paris Hilton; and it's come to my attention, after seeing her documentary, that she perhaps enigmatically signifies similarly discordant themes (as a meme, as an idol) to the wider public. It's not just me that can't look away when she appears on my feed, or when I rewatch episodes of The Simple Life to see if her face is as quietly transfixing as it was back then; maybe even more so now because of it's waxen quality, what with being preserved in numerous difficult-to-pronounce unguents and drawn tighter than dick-skin with the surgeon's knife. Oh no. In fact, I suspect her appeal resides not just in the glorification of conspicuous consumption which Hilton and her ilk have come to signify as per a more conventional celebrity party-line (Kardashians, rappers and semi-professional bombshells etc), but most probably consists in large of a sort of po-faced dystopian mystique; the beautiful face of our demise, the siren with the scythe. The first symptom of a societal self harm which is equal to collective psychosis.

Because that's the takeaway from the documentary; that Hilton invented the vapid Paris avatar not simply as a means towards a marketable persona with which she could launch a bunch of product lines, but as a trauma response from a bad time she had in a 'troubled teen' boot camp her parents sent her to in Utah. We're given the gist of Paris's time at this facility in various animated flashbacks, and afterwards we're left with what's obviously meant to be something revelatory about Paris's authenticity, a notion of her at odds with the carefree and constantly partying bimbo which she's framed herself as for almost two decades. And yet there's something disingenuous about it which may or may not be the residual suspicion savvier audiences had ages ago that the Paris phenomenon was more constructed than we'd been lead to believe (not a stretch in itself; most pop artefacts are painstakingly manufactured).

And now the disclaimer.

What's somewhat off-putting about Paris's turn here is that in the midst of conversations about social media, how the compulsive documentation of oneself is something of a Hilton legacy, there's the uncanny feeling that Paris is simply updating the brand, giving it necessary depth only because the commercial barometer is suddenly pointing in a more woke direction. Thus the dissonance. If anything it resembles the most recent Netflix-Gaga collaboration Five-Foot Two, in which Gaga does a similar penance, alleging to dismantle her own artifice and give her adoring public a more candid glimpse into her life as she records her 'realest' record to date, Joanne (which is only 'real' aesthetically, in as much as it opts for country riffs over the usual electronic bells and whistles).

And yet like a fungi, like some bacterial culture beneath the costume and the suit, there's this impenetrability; perhaps the posturing of celebrities who are too far gone in their avatars, too used to fabricating human responses to properly expose themselves. Instead of actual 'realness' (whatever that is) we get a packaged version, 'real' as a performative affect. The marketable notion of realness only as a proportionate contrast to an existing brand's theatricality. It makes of Paris and her ilk sort of spiritual actors, like damned souls. The kind of profound loss of self that a real actor will arguably never know because it's always the other they're asked to enlarge, and not luciferic distortions of themselves. A written character who normal actors are lending their bodies and voices will rarely consume them like a warp-self might (despite David Lynch's contrary thesis; see Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire).

Gorgeous duplicity. That's what Paris Hilton represents to me now. The lucrative appeal of a life of lies, like a candy-coloured hyper-femme varietal of the espionage career otherwise demonstrated as aggressively masculine (spartan-miserable in John Le Carre, affluent-consumerist in Fleming). Her face hides both the collapse of the public sector crystallising in the impetus to self-objectify as the only means of salvaging a living from a collapsed economy, and also the airbrushed subterfuge of consumer society as a whole; pulled tight and painted seamlessly to hide the wrinkles, to hide the inordinate rot which the whole destructive-productive apparatus not only generates as a by-product, but arguably thrives on. I'm obviously becoming mythic and florid in my framing of a celluloid airhead now but perhaps the assumption of the banality of celebrity is a mistake; if Jung were alive he'd tell you about the magical thinking that orbits our investment in celebrities. And in this way, with A to D listers being member to a heirarchic pantheon of exemplar supermen, we can maybe position Paris Hilton as a figure of anachronistic femininity (a goddess of antiquity), nostalgic not just for being a synthetic artefact of the early noughties, but also as a surviving remnant of pre-feminist prescriptions for ideal female presentation and behaviour. A contemporary-aristocratic fantasy of the perfect woman.

Soft. Ageless. Utterly infantalised, sexualised, and finally canonised as the highest measure of womanhood. Even in the midst of 'wokeness' we are apparently not done with a collective appetite for The Marilyn. All she needs is a trauma and then presto; the new criteria of empowered female with a mind to reparative justice is met, though she remains a grossly entitled heiress whose primary concern always is branding. I think it's incredibly distasteful to be asking audiences to sympathise with an impossibly wealthy white woman in this, a time of such gruelling overhaul in which most people find themselves fully or potentially slippng through the cracks; if only because the ground has literally opened up beneath them.

I would sooner sympathise with the leader of North Korea.

I'm not saying that the rich don't share in a common humanity; of course they do. But the symbolic value of wealth in terms of discourse cannot be minimised. It's generally symptomatic of prejudicial distribution of resources (even if you consider it 'hard earned'), and most (maybe all) conversations around wealth right now should be primed for utopian builds, not ignored as the ambience of celebrity-in-confession. A confession which somehow justifies the broken systems by which that wealth was accumulated in the first place. It doesn't, bitch. And blinding audiences to the inherent cruelty of those systems by rendering someone who is so clearly not a victim, as a victim, takes up space where actual victims seeking empowerment through clarity might otherwise have a platform. Save the sob story for your weekly heiress-brunch sweetie.