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Digital footprint (non-indexical index)

  • Desensitized Young Man

    As far as I know, 9/11 may very well be the first thing I ever saw on television. My father has told me on an occasion or two that I was sitting on his knee, an infant having only known consciousness for mere months, in front of the screen as the World Trade Center crashed into the streets below. I’ll never know if it went exactly like that, but it might as well have.

    As children, my brother and I weren’t permitted to watch TV, save on Fridays when we’d veg out after school on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network. Luckily, when The Clone Wars aired, it was on a Friday night, where it quickly became a weekly tradition for the three of us. That same day President Bush bails out Wall Street for 700 billion dollars.

    When I was born my grandma made for me a time capsule from that year with artifacts: a red-white-and-blue Beanie Baby, a US Mint proof set, an issue of National Geographic. Every time I rediscovered it, the item that fascinated me more than any other was a videotape—along its spine: “September 11, 2001.”

    I graduated from college in December and went back to visit my father and stepmother. The top shelf of the closet in a bedroom that is no longer mine still had the cardstock box that grandma had curated for me. I fished out the tape for when I returned from my final winter break.

    It was while on a second date—where we first stopped to borrow a DVD from the library—that I saw the perfect opportunity to finally watch the tape on the only VCR around. Images I have lived the effects of that I had never actually sat down to take in in themselves. I inserted the tape into the slot at the bottom of the small box. No matter if wound forward or back, the display only remained blue. Somewhere in between two decades, it had been wiped. Things don’t exist in themselves.

    Pandora’s box had already been opened. The images unconsciously burned onto the hivemind of a nascent generation. A digital Ludovico technique early in the stages of psychosexual or prenatal development. And ever since, those same kids have been chasing the cultural contact high of the greatest cinematic event in human history. The Holocaust wasn’t so lucky as to have video cameras, live broadcast, or satellite TV, and is thus ineligible.

    The Holocaust was a hole in history, a blindspot. For Godard, the monumental failure of the moving image. The cinema did nothing to prevent the extermination of millions. However, this failure to represent and thus reckon with the greatest human atrocity was only one of cinema’s many trumpeted deaths. It would also later be killed at the hands of the television set.

    As it unfolded, the Holocaust did not have the inundating novel forms that would come to epitomize the era surrounding the birth of the new millenium, like massively multiplayer online gaming or reality TV. The big bang of the global century was characterized by the overabundance, the over(re)production, the replayability of the traumatic image and from every angle and at every time slot. In case you even thought about it, they made sure you never had the chance to forget.

    And so, while it took several decades for a new tragedy to come along and be added to the pantheon of those worthy enough to never be forgotten, it took exponentially less for the events of September 11 to be scrutinized, ridiculed: its plot full of holes, its shock value diminished. Like any other, it just became one more thing that just was. It was the butt of a constantly running joke, like on a date with a friend of a friend of a friend asked out over Instagram—blissfully unaware that we were really only ever in pursuit of that first hit.

    After a certain age, the taboo of TV wore off in my household. My parents were still playing by the rules of their own generation and that of their parents, failing to recognize that the box in the living room had lost its awe for us. The television hardly took center stage at sleepovers either, unless it was Project X or The Wolf of Wall Street or Zoey 101 reruns on Nick at Nite, but even so, we watched them so many times until they dissolved into quotable background noise.

    On nights spent with the kid across the street we’d look up pictures of naked girls on our 3DSs or his mom’s iPad 1, and be baffled at why it was so difficult to find any that were our age. Around that time he introduced my brother and I to his friend in the neighborhood across from us. That first time was my introduction to Omegle and Chatroulette: two preadolescents awake before anyone else, me and the boy across the street and a laptop, treading a sea of dicks to ask grown women if we could see their boobs, and somehow with moderate success. My first sexual experience.

    Back at my house, we finally bought our first laptops. On the nights spent over there, we ventured into Lemon Party, Meatspin, Blue Waffle, Tub Girl, 1 Man 1 Jar, 1 Man 1 Screwdriver, and gagging at the infamous 2 Girls 1 Cup, intermittently slamming the Lenovo clamshell shut before returning like it was nothing to song parodies and Jerry Springer clips on YouTube or inviting our Club Penguin girlfriends back to our iggys. Just more fodder for lunch table debriefs with my school friends.

    As we matured and honed our skills in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber of chatroom cyberspace, the game evolved. One could asl their way into titty pics from some teenage girl a few years older by moving from anonymous online chatting to Kik instant messaging. It felt like landing a fish, and in these cases we really were catfishing. And it often was required to have first swindled a grown man out of his dick pics to lend credibility to the aims of the primary sock account. All’s fair in love and war. It was a sport, played for the love of the game and the admiration of your fellow athlete.

    At any gathering of enough boys it’s only a matter of time before pornography makes an appearance. Typing random phrases (like “night vision” or “monkey costume”) into Google then adding “porn” before hitting enter, or flipping channels until stumbling upon the finale hot tub scene of a porn film underscored by a song, sounding like a bizarre parody of Kanye’s “Flashing Lights,” called “Bouncing Boobies.” You can imagine our reaction when we came across the same film channel surfing another night.

    In high school, now going steady with my school friends, ISIS beheadings watched in a Discord call on a $2,000 gaming PC were more la prise du jour. I’d had enough of T&A—that stuff was for kids—watching Muslims obliterate town squares or Asians eat bowls of live baby mice was now where it was at. We simply weren’t interested in girls like that anymore.

    In less than a decade and a half I’d seen more disturbing things than my father had in his almost four and a half, and with him none the wiser. I never felt any kinda way about it. I remember the big stink one morning when I casually admitted to having just watched Not Another Teen Movie on my laptop. What’s the big deal? I’ve already seen the world.

    Yet we pretend like all this did not happen. The latchkey generation don’t want to take the blame, but that just won’t do to satisfy the vindictive bloodlust of the digital natives. As if exhuming the crimes of those who came before will wipe our own slate clean. All the devils are here. In this generational cold war, neither can bring themselves to confess. And at this point, what would even be the point? You can’t unsee what has already been seen; you can’t unrape a childhood.

    The moral panic over media violence was always a wash. Neither side can hope to pin down the other. Media figures and industry reps could debate concerned parents and psychologists over onscreen violence all the live long day on TV, while back at home the computer had already usurped each of their social functions, silently replacing both flesh and plasma.

    We never stood a chance; there was never a choice. There is no more undiscovered country through which to transgress. The romantic hero of old remains a trace within his memetic variant, the sensitive young man of today, a man no less violently impressionable or romantically inclined or socially alien than a Hamlet or Young Werther, but now plagued by the banal anhedonia of a boy who’s already seen everything there is to see, and in all that expanse, glimpsed nothing sacred.

  • Goldfish Bowl

    Woman before an Aquarium (1921-1923, Henri Matisse)

    It has taken me so long—writing and rewriting, revising and rearranging, rereading and rereading and rereading: incessantly so—because, I think, I have things I want to say, but they cannot be said honestly. What needs to be said are not noble words, but I try to wriggle out of my obligation, trying to twist them into such. I just couldn’t buy into them myself, those dulcet, discarded fragments. We have enough of those between us, and frankly, I am fed up with them. I don’t want to be the Romantic hero anymore. There’s a reason Young Werther killed himself. I’ve been trying too hard when less is more. Of course, I finally accept that only after having dedicated a literal novel’s worth of confession to you; however, I can’t put the bow on it and just be done with it. I can revisit, reflect on how I felt then, but I don’t know how I feel now. My moods keep swinging, and too frequently. Am I afraid of you like someone who avoids the sun, too scared of their own shadow? And so, no, I think it is me I am afraid of. I don’t know how I feel about you now, but I assure you, I think of you so much.

    I think I see part of the problem. I still cling to the notion of being liked, and I have convinced myself that it’d mean the most coming from you, so I am just as convinced that it’d hurt all the more to turn away from you for good. I got carried away in my rumination and I’m sick of seeing you splash about in yours and I’m sick of subjecting myself to watching you do it. For me now, reading something you wrote feels like what Moses must have thought to himself when he climbed Mount Sinai and was bestowed with those two stone tablets. Most of this is ridiculous and overwrought, but it is God after all, so we must be grateful. I really have no idea what to do, but whenever I sit down to write you, you always come out the other end a deity, clothed with the sun and covered in shit, making you all the more lovely to the compulsive dumpster-dweller. I know, in reality, you are shrouded in neither. I know you so well. I know you too much. You’re a sadistic fuck. I don’t know you at all. I have toiled tirelessly and with unparalleled devotion, having already staved off sleep night after night to dissect your open letter as if it were a bifurcated chest cavity upon an operating table amid an autopsy. I felt I had to work fast or risk losing my favorite patient. I was convinced you would grow bored and forget about, stop caring for, me and our covert, digital, no-contact, long-distance, sadomasochistic union. After all my efforts, I have nothing to show for it.

    But you tapped the glass and spooked the goldfish, and it’s been the longest three seconds of my fucking life. I am swimming in frantic circles within the green-glass bubble that I cannot escape. After all this time apart, it feels like I’ve only ever known you in this way—even our time together being subsumed—through the eyes of a fish stuck inside its bowl. But I must admit, I am losing faith in you. I want to continue to glorify you, but I’m afraid it’s just not in me anymore. Nonetheless, my goldfish brain still desires your secular presence, even as I fitfully pore over the revived possibility, the subsequent consequences of—in all likelihood now—actually seeing you again. But I assure you, that is not to say that I don’t crave this reunion, that I have not fantasized about it endlessly, outlined elsewhere—in the waste—how I’d like it to pass.

    I think I know why I am so afraid, why I have been so hesitant to reply. I have nothing left to say according to the positions in which we have fortified ourselves: the woman who finds herself the torturer and the man who loves to be tortured. I am wiped out from the trip down memory lane. I yield. Yet, if you saw the thousands of words abandoned in pursuit of your eager reception, you would likely disagree. Look, there’s so much still to say. But there’s a reason I’m here and they’re not. Each attempt always overflowed out of control before it had to be dumped. It’s all just too much to bear. It seems you don’t await another story but a proper response—to unveil myself for you—and I have tried and tried, but I cannot write one that contents me and faithfully captures everything I want to tell you. I don’t know how to write that, I don’t want to write about myself; and I wish you’d write about anything other than yourself—your body and its organs, your desire and its past—because your words are wasted on you; but they needn’t be about me. I’m tired of seeing you like this, from within this fish bowl that refracts our vision and reflects our own images back at us. I cherish you, I do, for you have given me so much, but I have to return to the current, but maybe I’ll see you when you get here.

    I pervertedly miss you.

  • The Digital as Cultural Lifeblood; or, Why Was THE SECRET AGENT Not Shot on Film?

    After all, it is a worthwhile question. The movie otherwise faithfully and palpably recreates the Brazil of the late ‘70s through its locations-based production, set design, music selection, color palette, and so on. The filmmaking on display here is also clearly indebted to those who were working contemporaneously to the events depicted onscreen. The audience can easily identify traces of New Hollywood aesthetics: e.g., the “documentary sensibility” of a Friedkin,1 for instance, the split diopters of a De Palma, the recurring allusions to Spielberg’s Jaws. Thus, The Secret Agent (2025, Kleber Mendonça Filho) employs devices and conventions that can be traced to a particular moment of film history (or of history on film), but nonetheless commits to a digital imaging system, a digital aesthetic. As a result, the film produces an almost uncanny effect, a disjointedness in the form itself—vintage Panavision B series anamorphic lenses mounted to the self-professed “gold standard of digital cinematography,” the ARRI Alexa 35.2 So, why—ultimately—the refusal of the analog medium? For anyone who may have asked themselves this question, the curious and the purists alike, the film provides an answer within its very structure.

    After the first cut to the present day—halting, accelerating beyond the flow of Recife 1977—the audience becomes aware that this story is being constructed in a sort of historical mind’s eye via cinematic language: that is, it is being told from the vantage of now from an objective, impersonal observer—almost half a century later. This is what the film itself is. The Secret Agent is a fictional story being metafictionally constructed, calling attention to its status as mass media object (one about narrative mass media as social-political-cultural memory), to its status as constructed images about the construction of images. And so, the first image of this interlude that breaks the established projection of a past spatiotemporality is none other than a smartphone, something so unmistakably belonging to the next—to our century.3 It is only after this image that the new timeline and its new protagonist Flavia (Laura Lufési) can be properly introduced. As a student of history, she researches and sorts through archival materials, listening to tapes and reading newspaper scans from online databases in order to experience and understand the tumultuous “period of great mischief,” finding herself drawn to the story of professor-turned-political-dissident Marcelo/Armando (Wagner Moura). His story, his life and times, are diegetically and industrially created from 2025 Brazil. This is a story of/by/from the present historical moment.

    THE SECRET AGENT, (aka O AGENTE SECRETO), Wagner Moura (right), 2025. © Neon /Courtesy Everett Collection

    However, like Flavia, eventually you have to return the tapes: for the audience and the filmmakers, the artifacts, the borrowed aesthetics of the past. If the first shot of 2025 itself did not clue the viewer in as to why cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova opted to shoot entirely on digital (electing to merely “[treat] the colors differently on set and in post”),4 then the final sequence in the blood bank certainly brings it all home. Flavia has tracked down the last living relative of this man she has been obsessively researching, Armando’s only child, Fernando, the boy now grown into a middle-aged man, also played by Moura. Flavia gives Fernando, now older than his father ever was by about a decade,—“killed at 43” reads one digitized newspaper caption—a flash drive with audio recording related to his father and the network of political subversives who lived alongside him and tried to aid their flight from the country. Flavia offers the son a digital copy of the father he can no longer remember, despite once being that same boy, who with stars in his eyes, ran up and hugged him, upon his return to Recife. That boy who dreamed of finally getting to live together with his only living parent after the death of his mother—for things to go back to a normal that never was and can never be. The drive, an externalized memory, as it were—a digital re-collection of these moments we have lived through as an audience for the past 140 minutes. (In much the same way, the film is itself a digital re-collection of late ‘70s Brazil.)5 And so, Fernando remembers the first time he finally got to see Jaws, but not his own father, nonetheless the memory of him is still there inside him, emphasized by the dual performance of Moura. A mirror not of space but of time, the film’s political resonance with international audiences—its Oscar noms, the Palme d’Or—no doubt enunciates this fact. As Armando tells Fernando in the nighttime car ride after their reunion, when you think about someone it is like they are still there with you. This sentiment is formalized by the insistence—the intrusion—of digital technologies present in the film(making). And while the digital subsumes (and thus erases according to its exclusions) (recorded) history, this film nonetheless asserts the other side of the dialectic, that is, its capacity to unearth the potentialities of the past snuffed out by the curatorial malfeasance of authoritarian regimes, and then to preserve and disseminate these lost threads of history to the masses: to reiterate the ebbing rhizomatic spirit of the digital world.6 It is how Flavia finds Armando, how she finds Fernando, it is how the audience finds these characters, it is how critics find readers, it is how readers become viewers. Even though the cassettes were forcibly recalled from Flavia due to the reclassification of the sensitivity of their information, she nonetheless makes a copy as a gift, a totem.

    The Secret Agent, like any other movie, first and foremost, is about its own time, the period in which it was created refracted through its cinematography, sound, plot, mise en scene, and editing. The cold sterility of the present—taking place overwhelmingly within the confines of institutions (civic, academic, medical), i.e., monumental records of human society, centers of collective memory—is hyperbolized by the flat, translucent sheen of digital video. Even still, some might then wonder, why not just shoot the past on film and the present on digital? Yet, such a stylistic choice would ultimately undermine the construction of memory and its transformation in the post-digital world for the sake of nostalgic pedanticism and a more robust contrast ratio.7 History has been subsumed into the digital, film as well, the latter revealed only to be no more than a filter to select from a drop-down menu rather than the ontology it was once taken for, flattened into sheer surface and uploaded as freeplaying signifier, ones and zeros to be plugged and chugged at will in the wake of a digitized cinema.

    The digital is irremovably a part of our physiologies, our psychologies, our pathologies; it has supplanted our ability to remember. Thus, it is no mistake that the grown Fernando, now a doctor at a blood bank, agrees (even half-jokingly) to accept Flavia’s request for an interview if only she first donates blood. This is the price she must pay for further information, for that which she has already gathered: with information of her own. It is payment for convening with the dead, no matter if they are digital—to give back life. A testament to the vitality of her living, an offering of such to the fact of the deceased. Blood is like memory. Blood is memory, passed down from generation to generation. It is filial and bodily at the same time it is digitized, now able to be offloaded, backed up into the regime of the digital. So then, both fluid structures of forensic information hold within them all that has happened and all that is to come. Like Flavia’s blood, memory—cinema as such—can be readily drawn, donated, transfused, and passed down into new bodies. According to Armando’s own philosophy, he is now with(in) Flavia after all the time she has spent getting to “know” him. After handing the drive over to Fernando, he can now be with him too, now able to refigure a mental image of the father lost to him, murdered at the hands of the state. This young orphaned boy, now an older man, can fuse the limited recollections of his father with the recordings, the scans, the photographs contained on that little thumb drive.

    They don’t call it the digital for nothing.

    Sangue por sangue.

    1. https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/the-secret-agent-cinematography-interview-making-of-1235161345. ↩︎
    2. https://www.arri.com/en/camera-systems/cameras/legacy-camera-systems/alexa-35. ↩︎
    3. The phone sits face up on the desk with its display powered on, prominently displaying the time, further signaling that the plot’s jump in time is mediated through digital technologies—the smartphone at once an increasingly sophisticated piece of imaging and networking capabilities, a signifier of seemingly limitless interconnectivity across time and space. Time is told through technology. ↩︎
    4. https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/the-secret-agent-cinematography-interview-making-of-1235161345. ↩︎
    5. This movie is shot with digital camera sensors that convert image data via light into binary code. Most films about the medium itself tend to explore the indexicality of the filmic apparatus, but The Secret Agent does so with the digital, treating it with the same amount of gravitas and respect. Flavia giving Fernando the drive full of digital files copied from increasingly inaccessible locations microcosmically sums up the entire film. The images we have been watching, according to the diegetic world and the production of the film, were generated by an omniscient digital extremity turning abstract code into a legible document. The film is explicit in maintaining this is not the movie in the mind of Flavia, although she would certainly have her own imaginings that might align with what we see onscreen, but rather from the technologies she uses themselves. ↩︎
    6. The Hairy Leg scene also testifies to the subversive role of mass media under circumstances of state-sanctioned violence against the most vulnerable groups of society. For more on the history of this local legend, in which a Recife journalist deployed the recurring figure of the Hairy Leg as a means to bypass state censorship in order to report on the homophobic violence of the military police, read this article. ↩︎
    7. Hinting here at an entirely different conversation on the aesthetics of film versus video, and the limitations of a digital cinema that desperately and poorly imitates its filmic predecessor, Alex Bailey takes the words right out of my mouth with his stellar essay, “The Future of Film Is Texture.” ↩︎

  • Three Years at Sea: A Short Story

    The Voyage of Life: Manhood (1842, Thomas Cole)

    He hates her when he reads her words. He does not think of her anymore as emphatically and obsessively as he once did those three years ago. However, she still comes and goes, passing through the walls of his brain like a ghost; sometimes he even conjures her up himself, he can’t help it. He hates that he cannot help himself, but sooner or later, he has to give in. Sitting at the computer, he scavenges through the rubbish pile of her curated history, descending further and further until he finds something promising, then descending again down another labyrinthine rabbit hole, moving quickly but deliberately for any sign of himself still left inside her. He hates that her words are so carefree and that there are so many of them; they are able to be so carefree because there are so many of them. There is an indescribable hollow fury, then he is filled with disgust at the whole ordeal—the hackneyed vanitas of candlelight and light-emitting diodes that color and smooth the resurfacing savory memories of their expired rendezvous. Nevertheless, he continues his excavation. He hates that he still cares, that he still has to know. He hates that his life has gone on, hers too. A romantic sentiment centuries ago maybe, a cause worthy enough of taking one’s own life once upon a time, but he knows better; he knows too much. And so, he wonders whether she has given the virtual projections of his life the same investigation, that same squinting scrutiny. A couple of vulnerable narcissists, he thinks.

    He feels at once the fish and the fisherman, luring himself and letting himself be lured according to the tug on the opposite end of the line. He sees a post that beckons him, practically calling out to him and him alone—a message in a bottle that has finally reached him—but nonetheless still blurred and indistinct. In that moment, black text over white appears indistinguishable from the inviting gaseous glow of red and blue neon hanging on the other side of wet midnight glass. After gorging himself on the pink, wriggling flesh of her words, the hook still piercing his fish lips, he goes still and still feels hungry. The anger dissolves in an instant and he feels foolish, selfish. He reads and rereads in a pathetic frenzy. Now, he has become more like the worm, inching about uselessly over the same bone that it has already picked clean, hoping for a bite of meat it missed. He dissects her poetics and interrogates his past: did I say that? can this be me? did I say that? I could’ve; I must’ve; I could’ve. He just wants her to write about him. He wants her to write about him and to want for him to read it and for him to want her to want him to read it. He aches for her write his name, to give some pointlessly concrete indication that he is still her cherished object. To be loved as such by her would mean all the more the world to him than the nights they spent together, or at least the memories of them. Then again, maybe not really. It would be a hideous shame if she were so uncharacteristically literal, for that would surely spell the same for him. He could not convene with her again as he does now, dissecting the months-old lyrical bulletins of indulgences now three years passed. No, the fact she never names him allows this routine to continue. He would certainly hate otherwise. It is simply against the rules of the game and that is always what reconnects them, but then again, never brings them together.

    He feels sick now. He hates that he is overcome with the urge to confess whenever he dives headlong into her current, swept away by the undertow. It feels more like drowning actually, the burning excitement in his organs giving way to extrasensory bliss after the first breath of her flows—a deadly trick of his own mind slowly shutting down. With him, or rather with her, it has always been that way, feeling like a guilt-ridden stowaway aboard his own solitary vessel, some imposterous seafaring vagrant anticipating the moment he will be caught redhanded by some shipmate who simply is not there. As if hypnotized by a siren’s song, he feels compelled to leap overboard and fling his body into the sea, baring his soul for the sake of eyes he may very well never meet again, leaving behind a display of his few abandoned possessions for when the time comes for their invisible judgment. He hopes to find her there, on the other side of the confessional channel, and when she does, that she might offer some sign that she found her way. Even in her absence, he still desires her approbation; even in absence of any particular wrongdoing, he still desires her absolution. He could never hate her. Her words are not carefree at all, not in any derisive sense. Her words are unabashed, excruciatingly intimate and violently impassioned, and so he envies her, having hated her as the reminder of who he is not. To become language, expression for such an unyielding muse, is to be regarded in the highest honor, to be born again as an object immortalized amidst a sea of others, a fetish encoded and remixed—exalted!—with all the erosional tides of history and desire. Through all his doubt and failing memory, he knows who “he” is to “her” and who “she” will be for “him.” Thus, he plans his message to the sea and the woman who might be there, waiting on the other side of the waves.

    The light outside has long gone down now, the space only illuminated by the glow of screens and the waxen stump dimly flickering and sputtering in the base of its brass holder. That’s one more day in one more year between them.

    There is the rest of a day to attend to.

    paulschraderprotagonist.substack.com

  • A ROMANCE for the Ages

    She looks older than she really is; the thumbnail for Catherine Breillat’s Romance belies the age of its actress. One expects a more mature woman upon starting the film, only to be met with the glaringly naturalistic youth of its star, Caroline Ducey as Marie. At a distance and on first glance, one would not be remiss in assuming her to be a woman approaching her middle years. Perhaps, the mixup of this painterly frame begins with mise en scène. Marie, a sexually frustrated schoolteacher exploring the misogynistic violence at the core of (her) sexuality and the seeming biological impossibility of heterosexual love, looks down on an older man (François Berléand), grasping at the red dress pulled down around her waist. The graying of his temples, the trendy lavishness of the apartment, and his unremarkable, buttoned-up appearance contextualize the still, imparting authority by association onto the disrobed woman. Her brushed-out dark hair falls down her chest and shoulders, obscuring her profile and lending an air of mystique to her femininity. In time, when the film itself arrives at this moment, the viewer has already been confronted with and acquainted to the stark dialectic that comprises Marie’s character: at once, the ability to be the juvenile, naïve young adult continually wading into ever deeper and treacherous sexual waters as well as the most levelheaded, intelligent, and self-aware person onscreen at any given moment, making the sadomasochistic dynamic with that same man, her school’s headmaster, all the more complex and unsettling. It is like meeting someone for the first time, that first impression that quickly melts away and is not ever forgotten but is never felt again, never to color the object of a gaze henceforth. In that respect, it is no different than meeting any other person really.

    Ducey was in fact only 21 or 22 at the time of the film’s shooting, a film in which she takes a husband and bears a child. Did everyone’s parents convey that innocence, look that babyfaced, and act that impulsively when it was there time to bring children into this world? It has been assumed for some time now that it was the internet that, in its all-encompassing digital flattening of the historical and the social, bulldozed age along with everything else. The salaryman at his corporate email job, opening and closing a secret second window to some social media feed is the same as the student in the back of class scrolling on the hidden phone that nests between their legs. Online the two are allowed to rendezvous, an unspoken May-December affair. They meet together in secret and unbeknownst to each other—not even thinking to be known in the first place—to consummate the secret of the secret in itself, as it were. In the anonymizing embrace of the devouring Mother, all is accelerated or regressed back to an enforced and eternal pubessence. As a result of their shared language and expression, the salaryman and the student by default presume a mirror on the other side of lightning-fast connection that delivers their comments and communiqués before the gaze of the other through space and time. It is a portal between two screens that we mistake for a mirror. Maybe only unfortunate as opposed to incorrect. We have become one and the same, or as the misleading appearance of Miss Ducey suggests, loose strands of hair always fallen across her unblemished face even as she elegantly dons chic designer wear, perhaps this is the way things have always been. Children beget children.

  • Destroy the Family, Destroy the World: GREENLAND 2 Review

    In the apocalyptic world of Greenland: Migration, family is all about sacrifice. Family is everything and everything must be sacrificed to ensure its continuation. In Ric Roman Waugh’s sequel to 2020’s Greenland, family man John Garrity leads a band of survivors after the destruction of Greenland Station on an expedition to a scientifically anomalous paradise in a crater somewhere in the south of France, where the possibility of life reflourishing might still exist. As it turns out, this international trek across oceans and land masses ends up being little more than the single-minded effort of one father to secure the future of his family. Throughout the film, the entire cast of side characters that offer to help John, wife Allison, and son Nathan ironically all die in the wake of this family’s mission. Rather, everything in their wake gets destroyed, whether by soldiers, marauders, tsunamis, electromagnetic storms, or earthquakes, but always managing themselves to escape in the nick of time. Even institutions themselves—science, the democratic process, bureaucracy, the military, other families—are sacrificed on the altar of the American nuclear family.

    John (played here with a convincing nuance by Gerard Butler), as established in the previous installment, is a successful structural engineer who is selected by the U.S. federal government to relocate with his family to an emergency shelter before the initial impact of fragments from the deadly comet, Clarke. Throughout the course of that film, the Garritys lose everything that John worked so hard to provide them. And so, with the loss of their suburban home and upper-middle class lifestyle, this John does whatever it takes to keep his family alive while the John of Greenland 2 does whatever it takes to reunite his family with all that they lost five years ago. Put simply, surviving versus thriving. Greenland 2 most obviously speaks to a generation of children who grew up socially isolated as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but also to the fathers of these kids who see that what they were once able to build for themselves and their families is no longer obtainable for their kin. To add, the radiation sickness that John hides from Allison and Nathan adds dramatic weight to this fact: yet another emotional burden that the traditional family man must bear for those he promises to love and defend. It seems that only in the aftermath of a world-ending event like Clarke is it possible to imagine a young person living a life as materially secure and fulfilling as their parents’.

    There is however one notable exception to the rule dictating death behind the trail of the Garrity family. After reaching Calais, the Garritys are taken in by a Frenchman, Denis Laurent, and his family, Camille, a daughter Nathan’s age, and a mute, wheelchair-bound wife. Despite their kindness and generous accommodations, the dying John is determined still to travel to the crater, this new Fertile Crescent, just for a rumor’s chance at a new life for his wife and son. Thus, Denis begs John to take his daughter with them, to accept her into his American nuclear family—ostensibly the only surviving relic of the old world that can withstand the shocks of Armageddon. This plea is the chance Denis takes for the continuation of his family; therefore, he remains unharmed by the wave of catastrophe hot on the trail of the Garritys, as he offers them a sacrifice in the form of his daughter, who is likely to form a romantic pair with John’s teenage son.

    But for all this, the price must be paid. For all the sacrifices made for the future of his family, John must forfeit his life. The father must die. In the final minutes of Migration, John drifts into a peaceful sleep, having sustained a fatal gunshot wound protecting his loved ones but nevertheless delivering them to the summit of the crater’s paradise. Nathan, having earlier demonstrated skepticism toward heavenly salvation and religious ritual, kneels over the body of his father and wishes his soul safe passage in death. The overhead camera soars upward before fading to black, John rewarded with respite for a job well done. Yet, the work is not done. Over the final images of civilization reborn, John becomes a disembodied guiding voice(over) to the viewer speaking directly to them. God the Father and faith itself will continue to shepherd humanity in this next phase of its evolution. John the Father urges mankind that it is not too late to treat the planet and each other more justly, concluding the film on an optimistic note in an otherwise grounded look at the disappearance of the future, in this case, via environmental collapse. Therefore, Waugh settles his film, narratively and tonally, in opposition to other such works, for example, the speculative apocalyptic nightmare of Threads (1984, Mick Jackson). Does the family unit as we understand and abide by it have no place in the future? It seems to be but one element that will lead to our destruction while also being our salvation.

  • Living with Yourself after Death; or, Why WE BURY THE DEAD

    We Bury the Dead (dir. Zak Hilditch) happened to be the first in a long list of January genre releases (Mercy, Primate, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Send Help, Shelter, Greenland 2: Migration) that I was looking forward to this new year. Easily the most memorable, touching scene of this unexpectedly quiet, tender zombie film occurs before American disaster relief volunteer Ava (Daisy Ridley) sets out on the final leg of her journey. The purpose of which—to travel to a seaside Tasmanian resort to locate and retrieve the possibly reanimated corpse of her late husband, his uncertain resurrection the result of an experimental American bio-weapon that halted the brain activity of every living thing within its fallout radius via electromagnetic signals. In her final night before her last day on the road headed south, Ava finds a Winnebago Leisure Seeker to hole up in for the night, carefully removing the brain-dead family of four and laying their bodies outside the camper door. In the middle of the night, she hears the reactivation of one of these corpses, and much to the vocal dismay of everyone in the theater, she goes out to investigate. On opposite sides of the residential vehicle, Ava prepares to dispatch the unwelcome visitor. She rounds the corner and the tension is cut. It is the father, wielding a shovel and digging a grave for the unanimated bodies of his family. He turns to Ava with a hauntingly blank, thousand-yard stare and then moves to continue his work.

    The singular-minded heroine finds herself at this intersection with the dead after having only narrowly escaped the predatorily nostalgic demands of the strungout, isolated armyman Riley. After dressing up as his late wife and agreeing to give him just one dance in exchange for safe passage to the Enso Resort, Ava discovers the decomposing body of Riley’s very pregnant wife. It is here that we are explicitly introduced to the principle of “unfinished business,” as until this point it is proposed that only a random selection of the dead are able to regain their basic motor skills. However, according to Riley, it is only the ones with unfinished business that are permitted once more to walk the earth, waiting for his wife to return to him with their unborn child.

    And so, it is the father that is chosen to perform a sort of last rites and lay his family to rest. But why is that? It seems as if his role as patriarch demands he is the one to return rather than the mother or one of the children, as if his social obligation within the family unit has informed his very biology ostenibly detached from any memory or emotion. The societal burden of your determined (and here, gendered) role stays with you in death. Is it perhaps pure affect, acting according to an unidentifiable pre-subjective social/ontological impulse? This inexplicable resurrection raises several complicating questions: why was the father the one to be resurrected? what did he do or fail to do in life that meant he had unfinished business in death? how aware is he of his actions in his undead state? why did he come back only after they were all removed from the RV? did the RV function as a sort of collective tomb that was then disturbed by Ava seeking refuge for the night? and what about all those that came before? Up to this point, the audience via Ava have only ever seen the reanimated quickly dispatched by the Australian army. The revelation of unfinished business and the resurrection of the father recontextualizes all the resurrections that We Bury the Dead handles with a careful, evasive hand. (It is the entire movie that is handled in this way, whether hiding its budget in several economical cuts to a wide, or a tightened frame restricting from view what is now only heard.)

    In fact, this is the first time that we see someone physically burying anyone. It is only earlier in the film during the first door-to-door body retrieval parties that we see bodies being buried, not by people though, but by machines: bulldozers in the far background dumping mountains of bodies into mass graves. At this point, Ava is still far removed [literally, in the foreground talking to fellow volunteer Clay (Brenton Thwaites)] from the disposal of the dead, and although she is getting closer to meeting it, it is still somewhat of an abstraction to her. Likewise, when the smoke signals are pulled to alert the military forces to the walking dead, the audience is never afforded a look at the killshot, only the ring of a gunshot and the flash of a muzzle from a distance. It is the undead burying the undead that teaches Ava how to make the closure she needs for herself for when the time soon comes to face her husband. We have forgotten how to bury our dead, necessitating the dead come back to life to teach us how again. The father fulfilling his final duty as man of the house—with the help of this stranger from the living, no less obligated to her beloved—kneels silently and bows his head, turned away, on the far side of his completed makeshift family plot. The camera tilts up to frame Ava behind him on the other side of the opened earth, taking the shovel and raising it slowly above her head. She strikes the resigned man over the head and he falls into the ground. It is not merely paterfamilias, but the Protestant work ethic that follows a man into the land of the dead, Hilditch asserting the uncomfortable matter of fact that “a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure.” The political becomes the social becomes the biological becomes the ontological.

    The conclusion of this film further affirms the above point in tandem with the principle of unfinished business. Driving back from the resort in Woodside, Ava (now reunited with Clay, presumed to have been dispatched earlier by the shady soldier) encounters once more the deceased expecting mother. Standing in the middle of the road, her baby bump gone, a bloody stain left in its place on her nightgown. A child can be heard crying not too far from the road. It was the mother’s unfinished business to not only give birth to this healthy, living child, but to find a home to care for it. In this case, it is to be “adopted” by a hetero-platonic pairing of a infertile widow who cheated on her now dead (and also unfaithful) husband and a man whose wife and child have removed themselves from his life, better off without him as it were. We Bury the Dead in its unexpectedly matter-of-fact affirmation of the social-biological-ontological continuum subverts then suggests a reconciliation (as renewal of/via friendship) of the family unit amidst the ruins of a cottage on the side of a deserted roadway, for the sake of this unnamed, ungendered life, for the sake of all things future and past.

    But, in this world, can things ever be past? The digital brings everyone and everything that ever was back to life, into your life. They must be buried or we will be overrun. The digital, defying death in its insatiable zombification of the world-historical into sequential bits of discrete data, is thus itself encoded with death and vice versa. In We Bury the Dead, the dead walking is vaguely but expressly tied to digital communications technologies. After all, it is electromagnetic signals that essentially fry everyone’s brains, but not only that, more importantly, this information is disseminated via the only instance of digital technology in the entire film—a seatback television screen on the flight to Tasmania. It is in this introductory scene that death, the digital, and the photographic converge explicitly and inform the rest of the film, as the woman next to Ava fingers a locket’s photograph of her own lost relation. She remarks that she hopes it is true what they say, that it was a peaceful and painless blink into sleep.

    Once in Tasmania, the volunteers, turning over their devices to the military before breaking into house after house in their mission to recover the dead (death itself?), are forced to reckon with overwhelming quiet but also intimate human contact—with the living and, more importantly here, the dead—without the mediating hand of the very forces that turn us into the braindead. It is the ever-modernizing world’s treatment of death (see Geoffrey Gorer’s “The Pornography of Death”) that characterizes the end of life as something simultaneously to consume for ecstatic pleasure and censor according to the puritanical mores of a repressed society; to dismiss and obsess over. And so, the camera that lingers on the artifacts of dead strangers, practically yearning to extract from these images some clue into their abruptly ended lives is not incompatible with that same society that would rally an international cooperative effort to quickly terminate and dispose of the (un)dead without hesitation or question. Yet, like the invasive gaze offered and encouraged us by social media and lives lived online, the audience through the eyes of Ava are permitted to enter these private domestic spaces of the deceased, the camera lingering on photographs of people who are just around the corner, waiting in the next room to be buried.

  • A Steam Room of Troubles

    There is no escape, there is simply the
    given, and there is nothing that we can do.
    —Harold Bloom, “Interview,” Diacritics

    Throw your soldiers into positions whence
    there is no escape, and they will prefer
    death to flight. If they will face death, there
    is nothing they may not achieve.
    —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

    I cannot break my months-long fixation with the metaphor of drowning. I notice it, more than ever now, everywhere. It started up once again this time with another fascination: monasticism, or rather the men themselves who were individually and obsessionally committed to it. (What is the place of/for the ascetic in the modern world, if there is any at all?) These two forces coalesced before me in Thomas Merton’s The Wisdom of the Desert, wherein the writer-monk posits that the Desert Fathers—the fourth century ascetics who turned their backs on the realm of the social and walked into the same deserts that propagated the earliest known human civilizations in order to live a life of solitude in the ruins of these empires—opted to “swim for [their lives] in an apparently irrational void.” And for this, Merton lauds them, gently urging his reader to follow in the footsteps (although not quite literally) of these humble Christian forefathers. It would seem that he proposes we willingly accept that going-under feeling (an existential impulse in search of an “‘anarchic’ desert ideal” not entirely divorced from Camus’s train of thought previously referenced) as he celebrates a “leap into the void,” the detachment of oneself from ego, although in surrender to and devotion toward God. Thus, according to The Wisdom of the Desert, this frustratingly slippery answer to the question of drowning cannot be an intellectual one but rather only and wholly a personal, spiritual one. Therefore, he proposes an individualistic solution to a collective social dilemma, which no matter how appealing or personally helpful (and I do find his reflections to have made a beneficial impact in my own thinking), I cannot find satisfactory. So, the fixation remains.

    But for all this talk of the desert, one’s entry into almost all Christian denominations is heralded by christening, baptism, that is, by some submersion of the mortal body in water; this ritual not only undergone for the purposes of initiation but even more so a necessary component of the salvation doctrine. Put plainly by Geoffrey Bromiley in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, “[t]he goal of baptism is eternal life.” To add, the act is itself a symbolic conquering of the primary primal(/mammal) fear. It is the very defiance of drowning that inducts one officially into the embrace of God’s undying love. It is no coincidence that the biblical Greek text employs the verb báptō, denoting several water-related actions, namely, “to dip,” “to immerse,” “to bathe,” and “to drown.” However, it is only baptism if you can manage to get out of the water.

    Suffocating in my own snot for the past two months, my body produces this mucus for its own defense against some unknown foreign contaminant. The sickness comes in waves, off and on again. The only recourse, especially when the inability to breathe renders sleep improbable, seems to be the image, to submerge my chills and body aches in hyper-consumptive normality, one shimmering spectacle immediately followed by another with no time to come up for air.

    To allow just one breath of their flows into your system causes your airway to seal itself as to prevent the entry of anything further into your lungs, your body essentially asphyxiating itself. The spasmed voice box eventually fatigues, releasing its dam and allowing fluid to flow freely into your airways post loss of consciousness. Laryngospasm and aspiration, as described, comprise the most common mechanism of drowning. Aspiration, “when something that’s supposed to be in your stomach . . . gets into your airways,” as Cleveland Clinic puts it; on the other hand, aspiration, as in the object of one’s dreams or desires, a goal or ideal to strive toward. The confusion of consumption with respiration in combination with the connotation of aiming toward a yet-unrealized future spells out the exhausting stalemate of the contemporary dilemma of drowning. Much has already been said of the collective inability to imagine a future that is not worse than that dictated by our current downard spiral trajectory. And so, consumption is the new respiration, having effectively replaced it to where it is no longer possible to imagine life without this ubiquitized, digitized, convenient version of it. (Note how false prophets who extol such solutions as the “dumb phone” or call for the resurgence of pre-streaming technologies all must look backward: this is precisely not imagination, this is nostalgia and self-help guruism.) We have nothing left to aspire to.

    When the sickness washes out with the tide (and like any tide, only temporarily), I have to reckon with the consequences of this gross submersion: not the endless coughing to remove the excess phlegm from my nasal and escophagal passages, but the new habit I have picked up over and over again, the one that nobody can seem to kick for good.

    “Modern life is a sea of images”: this is how Camille Paglia establishes her historical tracing of Western art in her 2012 book, Glittering Images, with the very first line. Paglia believes us, especially children, to be dangerously flooded with overstimulating digitized distractions, proposing “self-education in art” as the salve to ease our detiorating socio-politico-cultural landscape and turn back our declining attention spans, seductively worded with plenty of aqueous metaphors. Again, I do not even necessarily disagree, but find this answer ultimately unable to grapple with the phenomenology of drowning on the basis of its do-it-yourself, individualist stance, an iconoclastic one that is informed by Paglia’s personal brand of libertarian feminism. Is there nothing outside ourselves that can save us from this boundless, mesmerizing sea?

    It was not until I took my first visit to a bathhouse that I gained some insight, or at least anecdotal experience, regarding the implications of a contemporaneity figured in a constant state of drowning. Sitting in the warm caress of an 118-degree steam walk-in, I first noticed changes in my breathing within a few minutes. My ability to inhale oxygen felt dampened, my breathing shallow. Attention moves solely to breathing, as you force deep breaths in and out in spite of the oppressively humid atmosphere. You find it is not impossible, only requiring more effort and focus as you readjust to the new climate. As the hot water pours into the bucket on the floor and fills the tile chamber with water vapor, you retreat further into yourself, losing sight of the other bathers sitting only several feet in front of you. To not lose your cool, to resist the panicky feeling of drowning, it is almost as if you are actively required to continually and wholly center your own bodily experience. Then, in a moment, you begin to think about every single bead of water on your body, the sweat being pulled out of every pore, until you feel every little thing with exacting acuity. Behind a cloudy visual field, your body and the environment begin to merge in your mind. Is this particular drop of liquid rolling down my back from the room or from me, condensation or perspiration? The air begins to clear, the fog slowly dissipating but never disappearing; the hissing, boiling water from the faucet into an overflowing bucket runs slower but never gets cold. The collective comes back into frame in the breathing room, where one can once again see and hear the reassuring dissonance of others’ labored breathing. The site of arduous labor and pointed focus returns momentarily to a site of communal recovery and socialization. When all is said and done, for lack of a better word, it feels like microdosing drowning.

    “Hence baptism has no purely external efficacy and in itself is unimportant,” writes Bromiley. Much like the lack of a unified scientific consensus on the positive health benefits of heat immersion, the purpose of the steam bath is more appealing as an internal exercise, a test of will not wholly unlike the retreat of the ascetics into the desert. (It is no coinicidence that it is cultures outside of or adjacent to the Occident that tout the physiological/psychological benefits.) Nonetheless, not a discredit to its potential as therapeutic practice, forcing oneself to reckon with the sensation of drowning in a controlled environment. Yet, to further reiterate, drowning seems particularly unaccomodating to solutions of intellectual- or spiritualization, at least in terms of a large scale, collective response against its imposition on every human tendency toward life (if that is something even worth looking for).

    All that being said, as my avocational trip into the mist reminded me, there is no building a tolerance to drowning. At the end of the day, drowning is simply drowning. It is a metaphor that has haunted the greatest dramatic minds and works of the Western world. In Shakespeare’s magnum opus, the eponymous prince of Denmark for all his courtly brilliance, like the very playwright behind his words, could not remedy the drowning problem. In the most famous verse ever written in the English language, Hamlet asks, “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer // The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, // Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, // And by opposing end them.” It always comes back to the same binary choice: kill yourself or suffer. Shakespeare explicitly ties the deathly option with water, worded as if double entendre, invoking warfare against “a sea of troubles” and the physical action of swimming, that is, “tak[ing] arms against” the determined direction of a most powerful current. “To take arms against a sea of troubles” is to “swim for one’s life in an apparently irrational void” is to tread water until exhausted strength drags under an unwilling body. And so, there really is no choice in the matter at all: it is always and simply, suffer and then die. Therefore, it would seem that the question of drowning is no question at all, but an indispensable fact of human existence: that is, that the human condition is the condition of drowning. Yet, we insist on creating for ourselves infinite petites morts—little drownings, figurative ones, ontologically pharmakonic—to avoid facing la grande noyade.

    In his science fiction novel, The Futurological Congress, Stanisław Lem differentiates between the two drownings. Throughout these passages taken from the memoirs of the fictional Ijon Tichy, Lem’s absurd man experiences hallucinatory breakdown after hallucinatory breakdown of an eccentric future world that itself already resembles a psychoactive drug-induced hallucination. As Tichy succumbs to the dissolution of his reality, he is transported into other illusory ones, sometimes even residing within them for extended periods of time, like the alternative lifetimes lived by those under the influence of a salvia trip. The world of this novel and the starting point reality of Tichy is one already heavily medi(c)ated by a laundry list of hallucinogenic drugs with any single expectant emotion existing in dosage form. Before his Dantesque descent into the bowels beneath his reality (literally as he takes refuge from a terrorist attack in the sewers), Tichy mistakenly drinks the tap water at the hotel hosting the conference. As a result, he accidentally acquaints himself firsthand with the psychotropic effects of benignimizers, a class of mind-altering substances that do exactly what it sounds like:

    Every analytical reflex was as if submerged in thick syrup, wrapped and smothered in a porridge of self-satisfaction, all dripping with the honey of idiotic optimism; my soul seemed to sink into the sweetest of oozes, like drowning in rosebuds and chocolate icing.

    It is here that the reader encounters the only instance of the word “drowning” in the entire novel, in a novel that bombards the reader with an overstimulating overabudance of absurd scenarios, characters, and visual images, in addition to its motif of water, especially submersion. It is worth highlighting that the only form of the verb “to drown” is conjugated in the present continuous tense here and, more importantly, presented as a simile. After Tichy’s persistent trips into alternate realities and consciousnesses, he awakens, as if from a dream, from these altered states when he rolls over into the waste water beneath the Costa Rica Hilton.

    In the non-place of the Hilton, after enduring the effects of the drug-laced water, he remembers he was not seen anyone drink any water. This is a future where just about everything except water is consumed. If someone is thirsty during the Futurological Congress, “they would have a coke, or a schweppes,” always something prepackaged and for sale. Perhaps in this avoidance of the nectar of life, the inhabitants of this funhouse mirror world have drowned out their fear of drowning, and as a result, their connection to its life-giving properties. It is precisely this interaction with that insurmountable animal impulse within all humanity that snaps Tichy back to “reality” one last time, finding himself once more fallen into the “stinking, blessed waters closing over [his] head . . . choking on the foul swill, but happy, happy!” Here, Lem expresses the necessity for contact with the threat of “real” drowning as opposed to the “false” drowning of addiction and self-medication but also, even more so, psychiatry and overmedicalization. Realizing that he has finally made it to the second day of the convention, Tichy laughs uncontrollably, startling one of his colleagues who drops the manuscript he is fussing over. The document falls into the dark water, “float[ing] away—off into the unknown future.” Here, Lem concludes his work on an uncertain yet contently fatalistic note, and working within a genre that conjures the present in its vision of imagined futurity, does not pretend to hold the answers.

    I do not feel so bad if even the greatest English dramatist in his finest poetic hour or the most widely read science fiction writer channeling Aldous Huxley could not write us beyond this fatalistic condition. I can accept that and it. I do not believe any one can pull us out, for life is sin. You pay for the mistakes of the past with your advancing age. Your bones creak from the abuses of adolescence. Your relationships all mirror those that came before you. That which was done unfortunately unto you, you will unfortunately do unto others. Everything that has been done has already been paid for, someone has already picked up the tab. We are fallen, and the water is rising. If history has proven anything it is that the world will keep ending for generations to come. Memento mori ad infinitum. There is no reversing it, despite the feeble protestations of those suggesting lofty, impossible radical (re)turns, to some manner of means by which we used to or ought to be conducting ourselves. I cannot go back. I have no memory. We can never afford to go back, to pay back. Everything that has ever happened is right here with/in/out us. Full steam ahead.

  • Drowning? Enter the Net

    I’m already drowning again. I still have no clue what to do about it. It’s such a beyond trite observation at this point, but it is too much for any one person to have access to the entire wealth of the world’s knowledge without so much as a second thought toward the matter. The Library of Alexandria beaming its binary-coded information into your skull, absorbed unblinkingly. Only this time the library can seemingly never burn, and perhaps, we are all the worse for it. The accumulation of knowledge for the sake of itself. There can be no love of wisdom if we can never experience the risk of losing it all for good. Now, one source may just get washed away in a boundless sea of others until it all becomes too much to tread. The Library of Alexandria, and a house of ill repute; it is as if the greatest monument to human thought also had the best bathrooms for cruising, with the most popular peep shows in town. That’s what the internet is. Ready-to-hand access to any and all information, the ability to have just about any person you could ever desire, naked and performing, for you. Choose Your Own Adventure and Build-a-Harem. Equal parts Demetrius of Phalerum and Hugh Hefner. The tree of knowledge and the forbidden fruit.

    Decades ago, one was forced to visit physical places to access either, forced to interact with other people to temporarily acquire that which they sought. You had to research, you had to peruse, you had to risk—trial and error. I’m not being nostalgic—and frankly, I wasn’t alive or old enough to enjoy the heyday of library archives or adult video arcades, restroom glory holes, or what have you—but, this purgatory we find ourselves in now just cannot be sustained, at least not by the human. It’s simply not tenable. I so desperately want to find a way, or rather a more interesting answer to the question, “what should we do?,” then simply walking away from it all, electing against every impulse to take no part in it. Aside from the fact this option is an impossible one, it is simply not helpful and, worst of all, hopelessly boring. Everyone already knows it. However, what is possibly the alternative? All things in moderation? There is no moderation. Our economy (although having undergone horrifying Gigerian transformations in the last century, let alone the last decade or two) has never run on such a principle, so we cannot either, especially not now. The powers that be need us more than ever to exist without temperance or taste. So, it seems it is a question of how do we navigate endless surplus and advertisement.

    What’s the only other option? Kill yourself? Get a lobotomy? Give up on everything until you are homeless and starving? While noble in a Bartlebian sense, it’s only a proposition appealing to the living, romanticizing the mere thought experiment or justifying the bitter end of some sad sap who was willing to do what it takes but thankfully was not us. All for some sort of intellectual edge? No! What can I do right now? Everything seared into my head by the digital bibliotheca/bordello is designed to make me feel inferior. I don’t think any modern innovation captures both of these binary oppositions into one form more than the dating app. The left/right swipe feature mimics the simulation of page-turning from print media, then coupled with the neverending stream of seductive images and promising prospects. It always comes back to the buying and selling of potential, alternative, better futures. A product, solely designed to extract as much money/time from you as possible before you kill yourself; for those who don’t spend, less success is owed them and likely all the more reason to end it.

    If it didn’t feel like drowning, it’d be significantly easier to let go, to sink and be forgotten; however, modern man has in him still that innate fear of drowning and the primal refusal of the horrible death it brings. A man’s gotta make a splash, as it were. It is in response to a life lived in a constant fluid state of alienated hyperarousal (fight-or-flight): a maelstrom of paranoia, self-loathing, distrust, obsession, brain fog, powerlessness. I want to do something that doesn’t just feel like staying afloat for a few more breaths before the inevitable. I want to be rescued. I don’t care if I’m the one who has to do it, I just need to know how. I don’t want to do just anything. I only want to do something great. And so, it is bombardment after bombardment of ideas that will go nowhere but notepads. The sinking weight of works unfinished. You know, I, like I am sure many others, make fun of those people who can only fall asleep or eat a meal accompanied by podcasts or let’s-plays or television or music—for fear of forming a single thought—but they’re right. They are right to feel that way. I do not claim to be above them nor do I enjoy ridiculing them. In many respects, I envy them; for I cannot just let go and embrace the new homeostasis.

    At this point, I’m helplessly and juveniley trepidatious when it comes to reading books or essays or watching movies, because like great works should, they inspire some mechanism within me to create something of my own, incorporating that first impulse of an idea—a phrase, a scene, a shot, a truth—into something that does not exist. Yet, they never go anywhere and float helplessly in the water with me, bobbing in the waves of the tide and my own thrashing. Surrounded by this debris, drowning without ever knowing exactly when or what caused the wreck that sent you to your inevitable watery grave. Trying to cling to anything to stay afloat as your biological fail safe kicks in, only serving to push it all farther away or causing it to crack and sink. Put less figuratively, more ideas equal more things not getting done. How can this feeling of inability be channeled into the completion of some project?

    In Albert Camus’s The Fall, the judge-penitent witnesses and does not intervene in the suicide of a woman leaping from a bridge. Yet, it was not necessarily the fall that killed her, but the water below that drowned her. In addition, it was the permission of one man to do nothing that condemned them both to the fall. Similarly, Hito Steyerl in her essay, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” speaks to the contemporary philosophical dilemma of “groundlessness.” She remarks on the lack of stable ground or horizons on which to plant and align ourselves and our visions, likening this disoriented state to one of constant free fall. In each of their works, Camus and Steyerl assure us that falling, succumbing to its effects, can be liberating, that is, that liberation can be found within the act itself, as well as corruption and apocalypse. At the end of the novel, Camus’s absurd man shuts down, in the final lines, the hypothetical chance to go back and save the woman who jumps. He ridicules the hypothetical offer, smugly but not unjustly refusing to entertain the possibility of an alternative to events already happened: “Brr…! the water is so cold! But let’s reassure ourselves. It’s too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!” If the fall can carry with it a freedom, even a freedom to which one is condemned, then can drowning? Wherein lies the intellectual turn here?

    We have collapsed and been flattened into the horizon, it is no longer visible or measurable because we have fallen off the ship and into the water. In her essay, Steyerl proffers the example of J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840) as one artistic expression of the aesthetic/political move from linear perspective toward “one or several other visual paradigms.” The lack of an easily identifiable horizon line disorients the viewer, attention shifts to the drowning slaves, displacing the viewer’s desperate eye, frantic for a visual life raft. There is no vanishing point for your gaze to follow to some determined endpoint, no, only the wreckage of the present historical moment. No longer looking from a linear vantage point, one that implies linear temporality, as we no longer look out at potential futures teleologically promised to us. In his essay, “The Metaphysics of Crackle,” Mark Fisher argues that the repercussions of postmodernity on a broader (white European) culture reflects a similar and previous “temporal disjunction that has been constitutive of the Afrodiasporic experience since Africans were first abducted by slavers and projected from their own lifeworld into the abstract space-time of Capital.” More concisely, black people were the first postmodern people, several centuries before the rest of us were accelerated to this point. We are all drowning now, jagged little images of men surrounded by flesh-hungry sharks with nothing to swim toward and no visible horizon with which to orient ourselves. Herein lies the paradigm of drowning, less visual and more phenomenological.

    So, what is drowning, or more importantly, what does it feel like? Drowning induces panic, fatigue, hopelessness in its victims, with many reporting what most would describe as their life flashing before their eyes, especially regrets, dreams never lived. Then, there is calm as you embrace your fate in the waning moments of consciousness. Total surrender. And so, drowning compels the drowned in their panic to look backward: (1) spatially, to constantly turn about face, hoping against hope for any sign of rescue or refuge, (2) temporally, as your mind retreats into life review for your final moments, and (3) intrusively, for survivors, in the form of post-traumatic flashbacks. Survivors of drowning also report heightened states of euphoria immediately after first inhaling water: “I felt at peace,” “I was looking through a kaleidoscope of pretty colours,” “the most pleasant experience I’ve ever had.” Now, how do we achieve the euphoria of surrendering to death while alive?

    I am afraid there is no exciting, subversive answer to that question, at least not from any of the avenues that have come to inform my thinking. Embrace the absurd, pushing the boulder up the hill eternally? Become an object, living forever as an image? The more I think the more these notions seem like theoretical flights of fancy, no matter how rhetorically or aesthetically alluring to my romantic, critical sensibilities. But really, what on Earth would either of those maxims actually look like in practice? They are certainly seductive ideas, or rather images of ideas, but at this point, I have not the slightest clue how to realistically incorporate them into my life. (Am I not, by trying to live these images in material reality, forgoing the trap of representation (as outlined by Steyerl) in favor of the bountiful possibilities of direct participation in the image?) Alas, I am not an object, as it were, even if I wish so desperately I was (without even really comprehending what that means, rather vaguely, intellectually clinging to whatever that signifies for some sort of disaffected air of superiority). Rather, objects do not concern themselves with drowning. As an object, I would be free to float, or even sink or have already been sunk; it would not matter. An object drowned will simply sink and there it will remain. The object does not struggle in the current, it merely records its flows and violences onto its form, acting as an indexical record. Man is not indifferent to his body swallowed into the horizon, panicking and glimpsing his own struggling hands—hands only trained to consume—in the bobbing expanse of incomprehensible fluid infinity that immediately envelopes him. We cannot hold onto anything.

    Perhaps, the pleasurable kaleidoscope is not some transcendental state where we’ll glimpse our future again, but nothing more than the endless scroll of algorithimic feeding, the relentless swiping of a finger up that sinks you deeper and deeper down into yourself, temporarily forgetting the murky darkness that is always just outside of you. Rather, the object pulls you deeper and deeper into itself, into the image. In this near-death experience, this state of pre-death, one achieves ultimate bliss and capitulation, your brain slowly shutting down. “It was more of a numb feeling than anything. Kind of distant, like I was watching everything unfold from a different perspective, like it wasn’t really me that was experiencing everything. I think my mind was too dulled by panic and fear and exhaustion to really notice any pain at all.” In the struggle to remain afloat, one does not possess the faculties or demeanor to concern oneself with the drowning of others, although we certainly know they are there, just as ultimately helpless. The object has taken its revenge on the subject, revealing us to be, as Thierry de Duve (channeling and translated by Rosalind Krauss) puts it, “thing[s] of absolute narcissism.” Beings fastened unto objects, force fed and chasing escapist, self-destructive, hedonistic desires for some sensation of comfort. Every person screaming out into an inky void of noise, trying to quickly accumulate influence to keep their head above the deep, only and understandably fixated on their own position, unable to lend attention to the thoughts of others helplessly drowning just out of sight and reach. The NSA describes this narcissistic condition rather aptly: “We’re drowning (not waving) in a sea of data.”

    As if looking up at the sun from below the ripples of the ocean surface, I find myself struggling to breach the upper limit of not only my intelligence and will but my imagination. It should be at this point where a more levelheaded and proper theorist would build to the subversive but optimistically contrarian turn. However, I suspect the author never truly believes in their submission to faith in the unrealized radical potential futures of their dissected subject matter; more than anything, it feels like the standard generic convention of critical theory. When will we learn that everything theorized (by McLuhan, by Steyerl, by Haraway, by Hardt and Negri, by Deleuze and Guattari, and on and on) has come to pass in some way or the other but without the political liberation. The future arrived and it is terrifyingly bleak. Thus, I simply cannot extract myself or do not believe in any redemptive opportunity within the phenomenology of drowning. Exponentially rising sea levels, the overwhelming, ever-increasing sea of data, the endless stream of content—our future has been taken underwater. We will have to wait—and not long now—until the drowning become the drowned before we can be reunited with the sunken treasure of our once-future. The only thing left to do: to stop swimming and just get on with it.

  • Arctation’s Anxiety: A Short Story

    Maybe psychoanalysis is what I need. I have horrible dreams, dreams that don’t feel like dreams. Not all that long ago I woke up from a particularly alarming one, one that seemed as if it’d never end. In my dream, I was no longer a man, or so I really believed. I decided I had had enough and went to a doctor to get my penis removed, only to mourn its absence shortly afterward, hiding the fact of the procedure from my weightless dream friends. It was as if those I had met in my university days were amalgamated with my big city friends, doubling the potential humiliation should my regretful secret be revealed.

    I was trying to figure out how to get my dear old penis back, speaking with a man over the phone, learning that they’d likely take someone else’s freshly chopped, still warm piece and Frankenstein it back onto my body. You see, by this time, my own dick would’ve been too cold and too far gone. It may have been the same nebulous caller who made the point that now I could no longer photograph my dick, not to mention that the infection around the surgical staples would become red and inflamed, and thus, unsightly. It was a horrific sight to look down and imagine, the handset still pressed to my ear. I was not pleased with the seeming certainty that I could have a penis back but it would not be my old one, and I was even less so pleased with the very real possibility that I could be trapped with someone else’s smaller, alien part.

    There was a growing, burning discomfort between my legs: the sensation of having to pee, hours after one should’ve already relieved oneself. But I wasn’t pissing, I was holding it. This was because, and made all the more distressing by, the ongoing birthday party for one of my amalgamated dream friends, a hyper-feminine presenting young woman with coquettish, childlike inclinations. The celebration was building toward a movie night in the living room, the living room that had a simultaneous feeling of the first in a long line of bedrooms from my childhood. One, with the denim walls, that no longer exists. I have to pee so bad, but now, I’m actively avoiding it. How would I pee out of a dickless urethra? I couldn’t bear the sight of that.

    The pleasantness of the evening only made me all the more acutely aware of the burden, the burden of constant tears that I could not determine whether were welling up inside me or pouring down my face. The disc for movie night could not be found anywhere and to keep myself distracted and agreeable to the maintenance of my charade, I searched the nearest bookshelf for the missing movie. I saved the day when I found it tucked away on a hidden stack behind the titles aligned neatly on display: a slim pink case with adorable baby blue bubble letters and cartoon characters, like those cute chimeric avatars that should really only be of interest to preteens. Everyone is slowly convening in the amalgamated dream living room. I swing around the dining table bench, angling it toward the TV, hoping that two particular women across the room sit on either side of me; I couldn’t really say who. I worry it’ll be two male partygoers nearby that take their places instead.

    Before I can find out, I’m awake, immediately grabbing my crotch to make sure I haven’t lost anything for real. I have to pee really fucking badly.