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Digital footprint (non-indexical index)

  • Riffs and Regurgitations: February 2024

    Albums and Movies

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    2/1: Poor Things (2023, Yorgos Lanthimos)

    This is the first film I saw for free since I started working at a movie theater. Honestly, I feel next to nothing about this movie. I liked the black-and-white, fish-eye tracking shots in the first third more than anything that came after. I don’t know what I was supposed to get out of this movie and felt its critique of class stratification was weak. My main motivation for watching the movie besides being a fan of Lanthimos’s previous films (having seen everything from Dogtooth to present) was so I could read the piece about it published in e-flux Notes. I liked that essay more than the film itself. The movie beats you over the head with its lame critique of capitalism, I don’t know what I’m supposed to get out it. It does make me question how much I used to like Lanthimos; I still feel like Sacred Deer probably still holds up well though.

    2/6: The Meg (2018, Jon Turteltaub)

    I enjoyed this movie so much I went back to the library the next day to also borrow the sequel. I have been converted hence to the action-star sublimity of Jason Statham, combining the domineering presence of Arnold or Stallone in their prime with the grim and gruff emotional economy of Clint Eastwood. The will-they-won’t-they between Jonas and Suyin is not only convincing against all odds but is just so fun to watch, with Statham being the father who stepped up adding another nice touch. And somehow, Meg 2 tops the first in almost every department, adding Chinese action hero Wu Jing (who I’m familiar with from Wolf Warrior 2 and The Wandering Earth); however, the lack of Suyin was a bit disappointing, as she dies between Meg 1 and 2 to explain Li Bingbing leaving production for undisclosed reasons. Yet, the jetski battle between Statham and a giant shark, concluding with him impaling it with a helicopter blade probably makes up for it. Now, these movies do have that same ugly digital sheen of gray that coats most recent CGI-heavy releases, but for both of these movies it somehow works for me. I was studying the characters’ faces during closeups and seeing the ways in which the digital camera was adding this swirly, painterly quality to their skin. Then, I started to spot it in every scene, but maybe it was just my TV. When The Meg came out, I was in high school and would continually joke about how amazing the stupid shark movie was despite never having seen it, but now, having finally seen it, I was right all along: these movies rock.

    2/8: All Things Must Pass (1970, George Harrison); Amnesiac (2001, Radiohead); Meg 2: The Trench (2023, Ben Wheatley)

    All Things Must Pass did not wow me like I expected it to when I first listened. I definitely heard the Dylan influence, but felt like I would rather just listen to New Morning. However, revisiting sections of the album since then, I enjoy it a lot more and the songs I wasn’t feeling have grown on me. “Isn’t It a Pity” is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard, it reminds me of my grandma.

    I’ve enjoyed the previous three Radiohead albums, I think they’re good, but none of them have gripped me in the way that Amnesiac has. I wouldn’t really call myself a Radiohead fan, I like their music and listen to it sometimes, although many people my age have found themselves fanatically drawn to the band in a way that kind of eludes me. (When did this happen? I was out of the loop on music until a year and a few months ago.) I do think Mark Fisher has a point when he says in one blog post, “there was something too easy, too tasteful, about Radiohead’s move from stadium angst into a sound that often felt like Experimental™.” There is a pretension about their music and the following that they have amassed that itches at the back of my mind, unconsciously bothering me. No matter! An album that begins, “After years of waiting / Nothing came”—I mean, there was no way I wasn’t gonna be into it after that. The lament for the death of the future ironically coupled with the dawn of the new millenium is delivered as vividly as any of the best films from this era on the same subject. An album speaking to lost futures and fighting the impulse to retreat into the past concludes with “Life in a Glasshouse,” a track that ends with a bittersweet jazz trumpet, wherein Yorke sings, “We are hungry for lynching.” This line sung over elements of jazz stuck out to me for its obvious racial connotations. Radiohead links the end of history of White postmodernity to the Black artistic tradition of jazz, implying this genre informed and shaped and adhered to the project of modernity, and thus, its “spiritual successor” as well. What Yorke and company do expertly well is identify that White postmodernity has only just now begun to catch up to the centuries-old reality of Black diaspora, that is, Black people are the first post/modern people. (Aside: The full-length version of this song that includes the trumpet solo is even better and I wonder why that section was removed for the album.) As Mark Fisher asks in his “Metaphysics of Crackle” essay, “Who were the first victims of future shock if not the African slaves?” (50). He goes on: “time being out of joint is the defining feature of the Black Atlantic experience.” As I listened for the first time, Amnesiac struck me as almost hauntological (I’m not sure if it could actually be labeled as such sonically, but it seems to me to certainly touch upon the same anxieties and sentiments lyrically. “I might be wrong, I might be wrong / I could have sworn I saw a light coming on / I used to think, I used to think / There was no future left at all / I used to think.” “Think about the good times and never look back.” “I want you to know / He’s not coming back.”

    2/9: Hackers (1995, Iain Softley)

    Young Angelina Jolie with a boy haircut. That’s the number one reason to watch this movie. Overall, it’s a lot of fun, everyone in it is super hot, and I really enjoyed the visualization of cyberspace as an actual space, where skyscraper-like structures and streets divide and organize the data of these global corporations. Interestingly enough, Softley opted to forgo CGI for these sequences, believing digital processes would not lend themselves as well to a three-dimensional imaging of cyberspace. In this sense, the simulation is just as real or concrete as the life that goes on offscreen (in the film and our own lives). “There is no right and wrong. There’s only fun and boring.” I think that perfectly sums up the Computer Age, and the only attitude that can survive within it, inundated with hyperreal simulations to forget the desert of the real. Everything that came before simply does not matter: it isn’t matter.

    2/12: Dazed and Confused (1993, Richard Linklater)

    2/13: The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920, Paul Wegener and Carl Boese)

    In one scene, Rabbi Löw walks upscreen to the stationary tableau camera to demonstrate his placing the life-giving word into the amulet, rather than the obvious cutting to closeup that most films would have opted for—a stylistic choice I really appreciated, especially in combination with the washed-out lighting, overexposed frame, and aggressive green tint, turning his eyes cat-like and softening his features. That right there is Expressionism at its finest, if you ask me. Also, we need more directors acting as the lead in their own films, doesn’t seem to be as common anymore. Just off the top of my head, Chaplin, Eastwood, Wegener have all delivered captivating performances in remarkable films; we’ll see what Dev Patel does with Monkey Man.

    2/14: I Might Be Wrong (2001, Radiohead)

    2/17: Sully (2016, Clint Eastwood); Unforgiven (1992, Clint Eastwood); Promising Young Woman (2020, Emerald Fennell)

    I have nothing really to say about Unforgiven besides that it’s an amazing film and Clint Eastwood looks so much like my grandpa in it. His performance is so wooden and reserved and could certainly be called “bad” acting by his detractors, but man, he’s so good in this movie. Still not sure how I feel about him as a director—the jury is still out.

    2/18: Coney Island Baby (1975, Lou Reed)

    2/19: Singles Going Steady (1979, Buzzcocks); Spiral Scratch (1977, Buzzcocks); Saltburn (2023, Emerald Fennell)

    Everyone seems up in arms over Saltburn, at least they were for like the two weeks after it hit streaming. I don’t care enough about it. I had a good time watching it when I wasn’t thinking about it, I kinda gave up on trying to make the movie make sense. I was trying to fit it into the capitalism-bad movies that have grown in popularity in the past five years. Then, you learn that doesn’t work because Emerald Fennell is an old money rich lady, which also might explain the unsatisfying ending to Promising Young Woman where the police save the day. Needless to say, the best part of this movie is the ending long take with Barry Keoghan dancing naked through the estate he has just inherited. More of that.

    2/20: Lush (2012, Mitski); Schindler’s List (1993, Steven Spielberg); The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper); Old (2021, M. Night Shyamalan)

    I only just now learned that there is a dedicated fanbase and critical reappraisal around Shyamalan after shitting on him was the cool thing to do for the past decade-and-a-half. After watching Old, and then Knock at the Cabin, I feel like his penchant desire to overexplain his twists removes a good deal of abstraction and ambiguity that was built, in the first two acts of Old in particular. These two COVID movies essentially posit that we should just embrace family values in order to overcome social isolation and come together, which is really fucking stupid. To say that, now, is insane to me. I find it interesting that Old has as its villain a pharmaceutical company who uses the geographic anomaly of this beach that accelerates the aging process to test new miracle drugs. Don’t really know what to make of that.
    Is his problem that he thinks his scripts are so smart that he has to make sure we don’t miss anything or does he not have enough faith in them to let the contradictions continue to marinate in our minds after the credits? I feel like when a movie has a good twist, you wanna talk it out and interpret and reinterpret it over and over, creating readings that cancel each other out or could exist simultaneously, but I don’t feel that way about his films. I think, “oh, that was fun,” and that’s about it. He doesn’t let you feel frustrated, at least, not in the way that I like. But, come on, it is awesome in Old to finally see the camera that’s been recording these characters from afar and Shyamalan is the one behind it.

    2/21: First Blood (1982, Ted Kotcheff); Retired from Sad, New Career in Business (2013, Mitski); Bury Me at Makeout Creek (2014, Mitski); Puberty 2 (2016, Mitski); Be the Cowboy (2018, Mitski); Knock at the Cabin (2023, M. Night Shyamalan); Trainspotting (1997, Danny Boyle)*

    First Blood is a very bad movie. I do not understand what was going through the minds of people who produced it and watched it. Probably nothing.

    The Mitski marathon continues. I feel like I understand the Gen Z female mind so much more after having listened to Mitski, or at least, I have been elucidated on, granted access into the minds of my female peers. As I was not there or even really aware of it at that time, I do not know, but I do wonder if Mitski is in large part responsible for this online female culture or if she was merely one of its biggest exports. Either way, the entire aesthetic package of Bury Me at Makeout Creek was the final piece of the puzzle that explains so many of my interactions with female friends and past romantic interests. By this type of culture, I am referring to the romanticization of your own suffering and/or mental illnesses (more often than not, attributed to the hands of a male lover), the seemingly incessant desire to wallow in your own sadness and status as scorned lover, the Instagram poetry (also probably written to a past lover who will never read it), wanting to stay a girl forever, etc. In a sense, it annoys me, (1) because it is annoying and (2) because I’ve kinda done the same shit, but I respect the vulnerability. There are songs that would make me want to brace myself like I was about to get punched they were that affecting, like I shouldn’t even be listening to this—it’s too personal. My two favorite albums are Lush and Puberty 2, Lush for its songwriting, and Puberty 2, for its more experimental sound. When I first listened to Lush to begin my chronological deep dive in order to prepare for the Mitski concert that I was invited to attend on the 24th, I was floored by it. The next couple albums didn’t hit that hard for me or evoke that same intense reaction, although I generally still enjoyed them. Of course, I like the big songs off those albums, and on the later albums as well, post-Puberty 2, I enjoyed the albums as a cohesive project even less than the 2013 and 2014 albums. The 80s, synth-heavy sounds of Laurel Hell is not great, which started in Be the Cowboy. The latest album is alright, I like it more than the last two, but I could take or leave about half the songs on there. One thing that sorta bugs me is that many of her songs feel like half a song, a good idea that didn’t have enough time to mature into something stronger and more robust, but then again, sometimes it really works, like on “My Love Mine All Mine.” Plus, her album cover game is pretty weak. However, at the concert, I did enjoy that all her older material now had a bit of that same Americana feel that she was exploring on The Land Is Inhospitable, no doubt thanks to the enormous band that accompanied her. That being said, at the concert, I did end up enjoying the songs I was less partial too, but her biggest songs are her biggest songs for a reason. All in all, I need to listen to more female artists.

    Because of Trainspotting, I have been developing an ongoing and very specific list of movies that could be considered “perfect” although they are not necessarily my personal favorite movies, a sort of everyone should watch these style of list. Here’s what I got so far:
    1. Trainspotting
    2. Heat
    3. Fight Club
    4. The Raid 2
    5. Crank
    6. The Gold Rush
    7. Raiders of the Lost Ark

    2/22: Laurel Hell (2022, Mitski); The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (2023, Mitski)

    Books and TV Shows

    ~2/15: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005–present, Rob McElhenney)—Finished
    This show got so ugly and so much less consistently funny into the later seasons. Shooting it in HD and 16:9 makes the actors, who are already aging, look like shit. It became hard to watch because the resolution was so crisp and everything seemed so bright and blinding. How is making everything sterile and clean good for comedy? I’ve never had an affinity for television in the same way I do for cinema, in fact, I much prefer the latter, and I think I’ve finally figured out why. Watching TV turns entertainment into a chore, especially because of streaming. Sixteen seasons all in one place makes it hard to say no. You get sucked into an unproductive vacuum, which feels even worse when the show has ceased to be entertaining (The Sopranos had a similar effect where I was getting irritated by it and called it quits after the third season). With a series you have to power through or just throw in the towel; however, with a movie, if you don’t like it, you can see exactly when it’s gonna end if you’d like, you can know exactly how much time you’re gonna spend before you even hit play. I like the confinement. More than anything, I just feel relieved that I got through It’s Always Sunny, so I can go back to not watching TV. Although, “The Nightman Cometh,” “Mac Finds His Pride,” seasons one and six, and Charlie Day still stand as highlights regardless.

    Don Quixote (1605, Miguel de Cervantes, trans. J. M. Cohen)—Currently Reading
    I’m about halfway through—just started Part Two, although I’ve had to stop bringing the book on the commute to work because the cover is almost ripped off—and I have so many ideas about the character that I will work out more thoroughly as I finish the second half.

    Note: * indicates a rewatch, relisten, or reread

  • Riffs and Regurgitations: January 2024

    I have been terribly lazy and bad about keeping up with any sort of writing, this past month in particular. I’m taking this idea from Steven Soderbergh’s blog, as in my own personal diaries where I have been documenting the movies and music I have been watching and listening to since the start of last year. I have plenty of thoughts on several of the things I watch and listen to, but oftentimes, these go nowhere and just kinda sit around in my mind. Perhaps, this space will give me some space to expand upon them or just to record some basic reflections on what I’ve seen (even if only to help me better remember what I’ve seen/read/listened to) or to just let bad ideas be bad ideas without any sort of expectation.

    Albums and Movies

    1/2: Boarding Gate (2007, Olivier Assayas)
    Assayas is a weird director for me. In theory, I should love his films and how he handles and thematizes post-classical aesthetics. Yet, I just cannot help but feel that there’s just something missing (for me) whenever I finished Irma Vep, Demonlover, and now, Boarding Gate. I love thinking through his films and find that a more enjoyable experience than watching the films themselves. Perhaps, this lack is carefully crafted, not that it matters, but it is always there. Never quite revealing itself, keeping right below the surface of feeling or sensation. Engaging with criticism about the film, namely Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect (my main motivation for watching this film), helps me intellectualize my own response and make sense of my own inability to grapple with Assayas-as-auteur. His films are unsatisfying because their very form embodies the untethered, mobile, and unstable nature of life in the late 20th/early 21st century, maybe?

    1/4: Frailty (2023, Jane Remover)

    1/5: The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009, Tom Six)
    This movie is so nauseating to look at, its sterile cinematography and poor color grading probably contributing more to my headache while watching it than any of the body horror depicted onscreen. That being said, I think the film’s ugliness as a result of its low budget works in its favor, producing a nauseating and uneasy e/affect. I cannot stand it when people write off any sort of production or project on the basis of its economic limitations. This-movie-looks-terrible-therefore-it-is-terrible sort of logic is uncritical and lazy and excludes you from engaging with the work as a cultural text. Please, just take one second to think how this one aspect that does not please your senses might still serve the greater whole. This problem persists from the more casual “movie nerd” with their pop culture palette and desire for escapism to the most hardcore analog film bro who still clings to the idea of cinematic truth via film as this contained medium with transcendental potential. As Sergio Leone once said, “When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.” Anyway, I haven’t yet decided to visit the subsequent entries in this series, and I’m not in any hurry to do so, although I’m sure I will eventually at some point. But above all else, Human Centipede’s greatest accomplishment is the creation of two of the most annoying female characters of all time.

    1/6: El Mariachi (1992, Robert Rodriquez)
    This movie is great, plain and simple. Charming in its performances, cinematography, editing, music, action setpieces, ADR, love story, etc. The more you learn about its production, the more you enjoy it. I’d love to rewatch it with director’s commentary. I don’t think there’s any person alive who could watch this film and not want to go out and make a movie of their own. This is Rodriquez’s greatest gift.

    1/7: Desperado (1995, Robert Rodriquez)
    So disappointing. What the fuck happened? I was so excited to watch the followup to El Mariachi, but the casting change from Carlos Gallardo to Antonio Banderas is such a miss. The gentle masculinity and boyish charisma of the neo-Western hero has been “upgraded” to a hypersexually aggressive parody of himself. The character feels completely different. I thoroughly enjoyed the Steve Buscemi cold open, who is great but criminally underused in this film. The sex scene between Banderas and Hayek is laughably horrible: electric guitar solo, liberal use of dissolves, dozens of candles, uncomfortable closeups, gratuitous female nudity. To be fair, this whole movie is gratuitous and ridiculous in comparison to the relative restraint of the first, of which I am stylistically much more fond of and impressed by. But now that I have experienced and can expect the tonal whiplash, I have to go ahead and watch Once upon a Time in Mexico, don’t I?

    1/8: New Morning (1970, Bob Dylan)*; Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973, Bob Dylan); Dylan (1973, Bob Dylan); I Love You (2023, Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers); The Bends (1995, Radiohead)*; Jackass Number Two (2006, Jeff Tremaine)*; Jackass 3D (2010, Jeff Tremaine)
    Jackass Number Two easily deserves its newly earned spot as one of my favorite movies. It had been years since I had (re)watched it, but there’s something timeless and universal about the comedy of Jackass, and this entry into the series is easily the best, pound-for-pound, in terms of laughs. A man getting hit in the dick will never not be funny. These guys deserve to be enshrined among the all-time comedy greats right up there next to Charlie Chaplin and the lot. The most elaborate of Number Two’s pranks, like the finale staged kidnapping of a fake terrorist with a beard made out of pubes and ass hair, elicits just as big a laugh from me as a short insert of Bam Margera skateboarding down a ramp into a sheet of plexiglass directly in front of the camera. This movie improved upon the lightning-in-a-bottle of the first that I feel the next two sequels could not hope to top.

    1/9: Jackass Forever (2022, Jeff Tremaine)

    1/10: mid90s (2018, Jonah Hill); Kids (1995, Larry Clark)
    The standout scene of mid90s for me was the scenes between Stevie and Estee during the house party. I was immediately pulled in when I heard Nirvana’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” play softly underneath their conversation in the kitchen, as this older teenage girl flirts with and seduces this 13-year old kid. She knows he’s bullshitting and turns it against him. “I don’t kiss and tell. I’m a gentleman.” “That’s good to know.” She knows she won’t be considered a predator, not even to the child victim who most certainly will spin the tail to impress his cool older friends. The whole scene is heartbreaking and hard to watch. The wailing of the cello off this cut from the Unplugged album as she leads him to the bedroom lends the scene its mundanely sinister and melancholic, haunting air. Cobain belts the first verse for the final time from the other side of the closed door after Estee asks Stevie to undress her, as if desperately trying to warn this misguided little boy that he doesn’t have to go through with anything. “It’s okay, don’t be nervous,” she assures him. “My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me,” Cobain protests over Stevie’s silence. The song fades, Stevie admits he’s not sure about this, but she goes in to kiss him again anyway. Shutting him up under the guise of passion, charity. “He’s gonna worship you for the rest of his fucking life.” It’s a masterfully executed, terrifying scene that I was completely emotionally unprepared for, making my stomach sink into the floor with how acutely it captures the dread of being in what feels like a helpless encounter, one in which you think maybe your only way out is through.
    The 90s adolescence double feature concluded with Kids, which I had been meaning to watch for a long time due to its controversial status in the film world. I thought it was great. I appreciated how detached it was; it did not moralize the abhorrent abuses committed by its two lead characters and their friends. Protagonists Telly and Jasper are disgusting and reprehensible teenagers and I felt no sympathy toward them, but all you can do is look in on their lives over the course of one New York City day, in which they smoke, steal, and rape. Of course, the idea of the fly-on-the-wall, D. A. Pennebaker style of documentary that this film is indebted to is ultimately a fiction. We know there is no such thing as a wholly detached observer or a mere window into another world when it comes to cinema. We know that montage shapes how the audience interprets events and characters onscreen. I learned that bell hooks takes issue with this film and dismisses it as reactionary garbage. She states that a Black man getting beaten close to death in the film is emblematic of its problematic racial politics; however, I think I might disagree. Where hooks thinks the film is unaware of its race problem, I found that to be exactly its point when I watched it. These kids are diabolical, racist, misogynistic, and get away with every crime they commit. The filmmakers don’t punish them because the world doesn’t. It is neither endorsement nor condemnation. It’s the horrifying reality. The kids are not alright. I would like to rewatch it with her arguments in mind and see if I lean more toward her view, paying particular attention to montage, but I definitely want to check out Larry Clark’s other work.

    1/16: Wonka (2023, Paul King); Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971, Mel Stuart)*; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005, Tim Burton)*
    I watched all three of these movies after feeling compelled to watch Wonka to see if a hunch I had about it, based on its end credits, was correct. I’ve already compiled most of my thoughts on that movie in my last post. So, I went back and watched the other two Willy Wonka movies afterward, more as a why-not than anything else. I like the Gene Wilder movie, mostly for his performance and the music. For some reason whenever my brother and I would spend time with my grandpa in his room, we would surf channels in search of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. I don’t know why my grandpa insisted on looking for this movie in particular. Maybe we had stumbled upon it the first time by accident and enjoyed it so much that we wanted to see if we could find it playing again by sheer dumb luck every other time. I remember one time we found Charlie and the Chocolate Factory instead. Rewatching that film, I couldn’t stand it; however, I find myself respecting the film all the more for it. But, my god, was this film grating to sit through. I saw Depp’s Wonka as Burton’s avatar. “Candy has no point. That’s why it’s candy,” sums up the point of this movie for me. In the years right before the industrial shift from film to digital, Wonka/Burton says there’s no point, so he can feel free to insert his retarded ideas into a beloved cult property and combine it with established film history and pop culture imagery as he pleases within his approach to the blockbuster form. Mike Teavee is shrunken down and inserted into a television playing the prehistoric opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s probably something to unpack there about Burton’s blockbuster and what he’s saying about this dominant form and the effects of mass media on his characters/audience with his choice to include 2001, a sort of proto-blockbuster, a necessary precursor for its existence. Burton is his Wonka. If the ’71 Wonka is God, Burton’s is the Devil.

    1/19: Penalty of Leadership (2024, Nicholas Craven and Boldy James)

    Books and Series

    ??/??–~1/6: The Orphanage (2021, Serhiy Zhadan)—Finished

    ~12/22–~1/6: Post-Cinematic Affect (2010, Steven Shaviro)
    Brilliant. Shaviro blends vulgar autuerism and academic rigor in one of the finest pieces of moving image criticism that I have ever read without ever falling into either’s trap of coming across as annoying or pretentious. I cannot praise the imagination of these essays enough.

    1/11–~30: Silas Marner (1861, George Eliot)

    1/21–22: Fleabag (2016–2019, Phoebe Waller-Bridge)
    The mental image of the police banging on the front door in the middle of night because my dad put out a missing persons report to the NYPD because no one’s texts were getting through to my broken phone while I’m just in my room watching Fleabag with headphones on is so fucking funny.

    ~1/27: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-present, Rob McElhenney)—Started

    ~1/30: Don Quixote (1605, Miguel de Cervantes, trans. J. M. Cohen)—Started

    Note: * indicates a rewatch, relisten, or reread

  • The Neverending Ending of a World of Magic: WONKA Review

    My new job at a quaint Brooklyn movie theater has got me thinking. Now in the fifth week since its U.S. release, Wonka is still going strong, oftentimes filling our larger theaters close to capacity on the weekend, with families curious to see the third film adaptation of the Roald Dahl chocolatier, popularized more than 50 years ago by Gene Wilder’s iconic performance in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971, Mel Stuart). Cleaning the theaters before the next screening means I repeatedly (and only) catch the tail end of the credits, accompanied every time by an undeniably catchy original song for the film, “A World of Your Own,” performed by Wonka star Timothée Chalamet. It begins:

    Close your eyes and count to ten
    Make a wish, now open them
    Here’s a store that’s like no other
    If it was, I wouldn’t bother

    Chocolate bushes, chocolate trees
    Chocolate flowers and chocolate bees
    Chocolate memories that a boy once saved
    Before they melted away

    A world of your own
    A place to escape to
    A world of your own
    Where you can be free
    Wherever you go
    Wherever life takes you
    This is your home
    A world of your own

    The song is dripping with nostalgia, dreaming of a time when things were better and inviting the viewer to do the same. It proffers Wonka’s chocolate store as one way in which to experience that feeling once more, the feeling of being a child—even after your dreams have long since “melted away.” Here, the verse succeeding the chorus:

    Here is the child that you left behind
    Here is the kid with the curious smile
    Here is the wonder we used to feel
    Back when the magic was real

    The repetition of “here” in the beginning of each line positions the viewer in both space and time, seated before the conjured image of the film they are watching. What you left behind is right here; here is the kid you used to be. To be back in the theater in that very moment is to return to the “wonder” and “curiosity” of childhood. Wonka claims it can revive the magic lost to the years gone by. Certainly no small feat. Nostalgia is the antidote of (the) age, Wonka affirms. And then, reprising the refrain:

    A world of your own
    A place to go when you’re
    Feeling alone
    Feeling unsure
    Embrace the unknown
    Enjoy the adventure

    Wonka founds itself on the assumption that there once existed a world capable of magic: a world of sorcerers and believers alike. Practitioners and adherents turned to disillusioned skeptics and heretics after the mirages, myths, and mirror tricks of the last few centuries were unmasked in the philosophical power vacuum following the atrocities of the Second World War. “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” philosopher Theodor Adorno famously declared. The world as it remains is no longer conducive to magic, only simulacra. It likely never was. Wonka tells its audience to “[e]njoy the adventure” by retreating into fantasy, by believing that everything is going to be fine in spite of all indications to the contrary, hoping against all hope. Speaking directly to the viewer, this retreat into fantasy essentially relies on an adherence to individualism: “A world of your own / A place to go when you’re / Feeling alone” (emphasis added). As if widespread loneliness and isolation is best treated on a case-by-case basis, that is, with more isolation. While the film ostensibly offers the triumph of a diverse collective over the monopolistic Chocolate Cartel, the individualistic shortcomings of liberalism, that presuppose the individual rational subject as the basis for its politics, are reinforced. The film’s faux progressive slant is as vapid as its oft-repeated phrase: “The greedy beat the needy.” After a bridge, the song ends with another variation of its chorus, Chalamet now backed by the ensemble cast:

    A world of our own (A world of our own)
    A place to escape to (A place to escape to)
    The world of our own (A world of our own)
    Where we can be free (Where we can be free)
    Wherever you go (Wherever you go)
    Wherever life takes you (Wherever life takes you)
    This is our home (Ooh)
    A world of our own

    After being subjected to these lyrics over and over, I am eventually reminded of Dr. Ferguson’s lectures on the New Hollywood blockbuster, in which he notes that this form of media like any other reflexively allegorizes its own operations. His primary example is in regards to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)—the year that formally codified the blockbuster in conjunction with Star Wars (1977, George Lucas). Specifically, Ferguson draws attention to the film’s tagline: “We are not alone.” He goes on to contextualize: in a world still reeling from the post-Nixon military-industrial complex and the consumerist alienation of (primarily White) midcentury suburban life, directors like Spielberg and Lucas reinvented the cinema, imbuing into it a new sense of community. Not only this, but also introducing a “new aesthetic value”: “material contiguity” in the form of hyper-Newtonian aesthetics (“Self-Exculpating Environmentalism”). We are not alone, indeed. This new brand of aesthetics—made possible by a shifted emphasis from image to sound (Dolby, then later, surround sound, foreground bass as a physical force), post-Classical Hollywood aesthetics (shaky cam, fast-paced editing, loosened and fragmented notion of continuity), increased z-axis movement, and the increased value on gravity and physics in order to provide an immersive thrill ride—envelopes the viewer in a purely sublime “thisness,” an enclosed bubble of sensation “grounded” in the here and now (“Self-Exculpating Environmentalism”). Therefore, this thisness (or haecceity), rejecting “causal dependencies between spatially separated beings,” represses and expresses distrust toward the forces of abstraction, themselves predicated on certain degrees of pure imagination, ironically enough (“Introduction”). There is no better future; that is, to say, it does not get better than this. The blockbuster, from Close Encounters to Wonka, tends to exculpate its own contributions to what Steven Shaviro calls the “neoliberal network society,” itself also a project decades in the making that prioritizes and privileges “immediate connection in an age of self-perceived disaggregation” (“New Hollywood Blockbuster”).

    In “A World of Your Own” (playing once as its own musical number and then again in the end credits), a parallel is drawn between Wonka the movie and Wonka the chocolate store in the diegesis. Either way, we are “buying in” to that which is “Wonka.” Director Paul King imagines his musical fantasy as a reprieve from the poisonous banality of contemporary life. However, the film falls short of this mark by a long stretch. As indicated by character interactions between Wonka and his sidekick Noodle as well as the lyrics across the entire soundtrack, this movie is expressly intended to make you feel like a little kid again, relying on the physical embrace of blockbuster aesthetics more than anything else to enrapture the audience’s imagination. However, this film could not function as a standalone effort, purposefully reminding the viewer of the “magic” of the original 1971 film, in addition to all its own spectacular bells and whistles. Thus, King immediately underscores the opening of the film with the instrumental composition of “Pure Imagination” from the original film, as if the cinemagoer eager for their dose of nostalgia was not already drooling. Yet, this longing for the past goes even further. Embodying the nostalgia mode (Frederic Jameson’s conception of present-day media’s insistence on the formal reproduction of older forms over the establishment of newer ones), the opening audio track of Wonka directly parallels that of Willy Wonka. In the 1971 film, the opening credits “Main Title” is subtitled “Golden Ticket/Pure Imagination,” with the codetta of the first running into the beginning of the second. In Wonka, the closing notes of “Pure Imagination” transform in a similarly contiguous manner, into the opening whistles of “A Hatful of Dreams.” A polyvalent song that supposes paradise is merely a matter of perception is replaced by an ode to rugged individualism, requiring anyone who dares dream of a better life to pull themselves up by their “one good bootlace.” Wonka admits that the Protestant logic of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps proves even more difficult today, yet for all its professed imagination and magic, offers no substantial or consistent critique, let alone, any alternative. The film is acutely aware of its sappy wistfulness, going as far as to embrace it and wish to be celebrated for it; after all, the director does brand his film “A Paul King Confection.” So, what is the film’s proposed solution to the thousand natural shocks that neoliberal flesh is heir to? To feed oneself on the “chocolate memories” that only the blockbuster can revive and sell back to you, wherein the postmodern condition is repackaged and remarketed as utopia. But, it will never be enough; the appetite only grows. Such films that fall victim to this nostalgic impulse today can be categorized into what Bill Nichols identifies as postmodern films of reaction (as opposed to those of resistance). These films “sanction the status quo” by failing to imagine or present any indication of an alternative to the present order (Nichols 207). In Wonka, the invisible machinations of capital are downplayed as merely the individual greed of the three heads of the Chocolate Cartel, assuring that the socioeconomic order being critiqued is able to be directly confronted and swiftly defeated, simultaneously ensuring its reification offscreen.

    However, what is to be made of the chorus of voices behind the last refrain in “A World of Your Own, wherein the lyrics change to “[a] world of our own” (emphasis added)? It would seem, after all, that the film wishes to conclude with some sort of future founded upon collective cooperation; however, its vision of a new world is as inclusive as it is atomizing, unintentionally reflecting the algorithmic logic of life entangled in the network society. Not to mention, the complete lack of credibility that these characters, in any sense, genuinely care for each other, especially since Wonka’s lead is so obviously disinterested. Furthermore, the possessive determiner your becomes our, involving the audience in the ensemble rather than their simply being addressed, conjoining the diegetic and the extradiegetic realms at film’s end. And while the cinemagoing experience can certainly be regarded as a communal act, the phenomenology of the Spielberg-Lucas blockbuster cannot adequately address the socioeconomic framework that it simultaneously meditates upon and props up. Moreover, it was designed (1) as a way for these pop auteurs to pay homage to the B-movie serials that they and the rest of the TV Generation grew up on, and thus, “return” to an idealized world of easily demarcated lines between good and evil, and (2) to cradle the viewer in a comforting caress of hyperbolized gravitational physics, offering what Dr. Ferguson refers to as a reassuring “there, there,” alluding both to hyper-Newtonianism’s consoling phenomenology as well as its preoccupation with physical proximity, wherein gravity is a more secure, distanced form of mediation (“New Hollywood Blockbuster”). In turn, the blockbuster approach to cinema paralleled the rise of Thatcherite/Reaganist economics; on the one hand, imaging neoliberal “desires and possibilities” while, on the other, decrying its “instabilities and anxieties” (“New Hollywood Blockbuster”). And so, the cinema itself becomes a sandbox and a mirror, “[a] world of our own” and “[t]he world of our own,” as the final chorus dually invokes, embodying the central conceit of the Information Age: we are more connected than ever, yet we are more alone than ever.

    Employing chocolate as a figure, Wonka then reflexively allegorizes the aforementioned underpinnings of the blockbuster—its nostalgic impetus and gravitational tropes. After landing in the city after seven years at sea, the first instance of Wonka’s magical edibles is the Hoverchoc—a chocolate that causes those who ingest it to defy gravity and lift off the ground, mirroring the effects of the Fizzy Lifting Drink in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Then, the “World of Your Own” musical number in the middle of the film connects past memories to chocolate, reducing the elusive/illusive and abstract nature of their construction into simplistic and sugarcoated confectioneries. Coming full circle, Wonka and his crew of formerly indentured servants vanquish the evil corporate tyrants by tricking them into consuming the Hoverchocs in the resolution of the film. This move—either naively or disingenuously—asserts that the blockbuster and its gravitational fetishism as a means of critique is effective in challenging and eventually dismantling existing power structures and returning previously monopolized resources back to the public. To consume (and agree with) the vaguely anticapitalist notion of Wonka is to take part in its nominally performative act of “protest.” Yet, no formation of media that represses abstraction in favor of reducing “nearly all cinematic experience to hyperbolic material physics” can itself truly envision a better world beyond the structural limitations of our own—within or without the cinema (“New Hollywood Blockbuster”).

    Nonetheless, the film sees itself aligned with the title character and against the corruption of the Chocolate Cartel; however, a reading that situates the film itself in the role of the three chocolate tycoons is much more in line with our reality. Slugworth, Prodnose, and Fickelgruber control the institutions of power—namely, the police and the church, and therefore, the masses—through chocolate (often being described with language typically reserved for and producing effects commonly associated with recreational drug use), not at all unlike the tranquilizing effects of the blockbuster on the aesthetic (and therefore, the audience). “The greedy beat the needy, every time.” That may very well be the case, however, the film is not speaking for the needy, as it claims, but rather for that other, privileged term of the binary opposition. What exemplifies greed more than a halfhearted, uninspiringly safe, nostalgic cash cow, designed to “uplift” the spirits of those in need? The neoliberal blockbuster instructs us to take comfort in the constant flux of cameras and characters falling and flying through space, mirroring the precarity of life in network society, a world where nothing feels grounded, from institutions of finance to institutions of culture (“Declarations”). It is all-encompassing, all-consuming, and presently seems inescapable. Even the stage play for all its abstraction and imagination and comparatively “primitive” suspension of disbelief is subsumed by the same order. “It’s Time to Believe in Magic Again,” announce the billboards for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child seen all over Broadway and Times Square. The film nominally speaks out against socioeconomic disparities (well, as much as one can in a movie “made for children”), cashing in on the wave of progressive politics that have continued to surge into the mainstream since Occupy, but even then does a rather poor job, offering only an inconsistent and contradictory critique of the capitalism boogeyman.

    But, any assessment of a Willy Wonka movie is not complete without a look at the man himself. Regarding the 1971 film, it was elevated to cult status largely on the strength of Gene Wilder’s performance. And although the first film is in no way a sacred text in my movie-watching life, Chalamet, on the other hand, for all his promise fails to live up to either of his predecessors. His performance is above all boring and uncaptivating, failing to capture the mysterious and sadistic charm of the Wilder version or the cranked-up-to-11, grating ridiculousness of the Johnny Depp version in Tim Burton’s reimagining of the source material [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)]. If the Willy Wonka of the first film was an obvious stand-in for God, then God is most certainly dead in this film. Wonka winds up just another bland star vehicle that will coast its way to a respectable box office return something shy of a billion dollars solely on the good graces of its hot, young actor and famous licensed property. It is genuinely baffling how such a dull and uninspiring movie received positive reviews from the likes of anyone fancying themselves a professional “critic.”

    Wonka expects you to sit back and enjoy the film for what it is, or at least, what it tries to be: a lighthearted romp, all in good fun; and anyone you mention your distaste to will likely tell you to do the same thing. Yet, the film is particularly lacking in imagination of any sort. You cannot expect to jump-start magic in a world no longer agreeable to it. There is reason, and good reason at that, why even the most humble of moviegoers bemoan the constant remakes, reboots, and sequels. This transparently dubious attempt at producing a guaranteed moneymaker—amidst the hundreds of other produced every year—just so happened to be the one that arrested my attention. Wonka is only one tiny piece of a globalized industrial and aesthetic trend that has spiraled beyond its considerably humble beginnings in the 1970s. More than fifty years ago, Charlie could pass the tests of Old Testament Wonka, uplifting his family out of poverty through his persistent faith, goodhearted nature, and an unwavering attachment to his loved ones. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory demonstrates that, while almost certainly unlikely, one can be lifted out of these conditions if one plays by the rules. However, the possible rewards for adhering to these rules were already diminishing in the same decade, so how about now, more than a half-century later? “You lose,” whether you return the Everlasting Gobstopper to the candyman or not. “You get nothing!” All that being said, it is no wonder Wonka fails to conjure any magic of its own.

    Works Cited

    Adorno, Theodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber, MIT Press, 1983, pp. 17–34. Archive, https://archive.org/details/prisms0000ador/mode/2up.

    Ferguson, Scott. “Introduction: Critique after Modern Monetary Theory.” Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care, U of Nebraska P, 2018, pp. 12–36. PDF file.

    Ferguson, Scott. “The New Hollywood Blockbuster: Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Canvas, University of South Florida, 23 Feb. 2022, usflearn.instructure.com. Video recording.

    Ferguson, Scott. “Self-Exculpating Environmentalism in the Digital Blockbuster.” Moving Image Aesthetics: Introduction to Film and New Media Studies, 11 Sep. 2019, University of South Florida, Tampa. Lecture.

    Nichols, Bill. “Three Fundamental Styles: Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism.” Engaging Cinema, W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, pp. 175–208. Archive, https://archive.org/details/engagingcinemain0000nich/mode/2up.

  • God’s Postmodern Man

    I have no memory. I have no history. I am God’s postmodern man.

    Anthony the Great, Father of All Monks
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    I will have no memories left by the time I become an old man. Yet another storehouse of memories has been destroyed by time and carelessness. (Is it really careless on my part if the mechanism is designed to break, designed to be superfluously delicate?) I will have no photos to share with my children and grandchildren, in a world where I choose to start a family. Children keep your stories alive, but I have no stories and likely will have no children. There will be no record—no footprint. This is the second or third time something like this has happened. It’s especially annoying considering, only months ago, I individually went through six-thousand photos and managed it to a respectable thirty-five hundred. I have mourned the loss of a hard drive or old device as I did the loss of some friends. To be fair, it did not take much time to get over either instance. I come to accept that it was simply time to move on, it is of no matter whether it was my choices that caused the outcome or not.

    Is it surface imperfection or rotten at the core?

    Two years ago, on the day of moving back home for my last summer vacation, my phone falls from a mundane height at just-the-right angle, dislodging shreds of glass from the screen. (Even now, without a camera roll as reference, it is difficult to construct a coherent timeline from my position in the present.) At the time, I was on a video call with the first woman I had ever fallen in love with. Ironically, the relationship did not last very much longer after that. As the years passed, more of the screen chips away, spiderweb fractures spread across the back glass, and the camera gets a hole in it that quickly fills with sand, now only able to capture impressionistic swathes of light and subject through its broken lens. The second day of this new year, a properly tremendous drop adds a new array of colored lines under the initial impact almost two years ago. It is completely unusable by the middle of this week. A keyboard with a mind of its own gives way to a screen with zero haptic response. My first fear is that I had just lost the first time I was in love. Yes, I still have my own memories, encoded and stored; however, the problem now lies in the retrieval, lacking the specific visual stimuli designed to conjure memories. A photograph is an instance, allowing one to recall a time now passed. Without the instance of the photograph from which to ground my re-collection, all these moments—whether shared or having only been perceived by me—will be lost. The issue is not technology; the issue is memory, and mine has been failing for four years. A brain fog that will never pass.

    I knew it was hopeless, but I set an appointment the next day to have the screen fixed with money I really could not afford to spend, knowing it was likely an issue that had gone beyond mere display. All they could offer was to essentially replace the phone for more than double the price of a screen repair. While not the most terrible deal, all my photos would be trapped on the locked phone with no conceivable way to access them. There is no backup. All anyone can muster in the aftermath of these situations is well-meaning advice to back up your data before the next time this will undoubtedly happen again. It never matters. Even if you do your best, something still goes wrong. If I were to tally all the happenings since my having moved to New York, on paper, the deltas would surely outweigh the pluses. However, no one lives life on paper anymore.

    But then, sometimes, things are not as bad as you thought. Wading in the midst of the rubble, you think to check elsewhere and, sure enough, there exists a partial catalog. The last year-and-a-half in images might still be missing, but it is something. It has saved what you feared was gone forever. For you, it’s enough. So, do you consider yourself spared?

    I suppose it is rather fitting that the act of deleting was the last time I will ever see each and every one of those pictures, having gone through the last eight years of lives in order to trim the digital fat. It is certainly devastating to think about: all the planned video ideas that can never be started, let alone finished, the loss of an ongoing record that provided some sense of linear time, all those instances you want to always have on demand. Yet, what else can I do but accept my fate, even try to enjoy it? For a second, I worried about publishing this—it’s too personal, too much about me—but I will wake up in the morning a completely different person. After all, I am unburdened by the depths of memory. I cannot be upset. I have already forgotten.

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  • “Is your war finally over?” Toward an Impetus of Care for the Blockbuster: GODZILLA MINUS ONE Review

    Godzilla Minus One is a film that delivers exactly what is promised by the kaiju genre in spite of a “shoestring” budget within the industrial economy of the blockbuster. According to the film’s director, the film cost even less than the $15 million amount that had been reported as its official budget. Nonetheless, the film delivers compelling action set pieces, a charming love story, and a cast of stock side characters that are memorable and likable. But better yet, the film makes a promise that is unforeseen—in my limited memory—within the blockbuster form, and it keeps it. In the third act, as the retired Japanese Navy men prepare their plan to defeat the monster, engineer Kenji declares that this final mission will have zero human casualties. And the film executes exactly that—not even a single redshirt-esque, “unimportant” death; however, as the viewer, I did not feel like this was a cop-out or a concession made on the grounds of less-than-ideal funds or irritating plot armor, despite some glaring examples of deus ex machina and bait-and-switch deaths. Rather, writer-director Yamazaki Takashi, by returning to the immediate postwar period of Japan, envisions a future founded upon collective care, one that not only masterfully reckons with a decades-old national guilt but introduces a level of care not present in the contemporary (American) blockbuster.

    As film scholar Scott Ferguson puts it, the blockbuster “allegorizes its own operations,” and the thirty-third installation in the Toho Godzilla franchise, despite its low budget and care-ful approach, is no expection (145). Such examples illustrated in the blockbuster typically see characters employing the assistance of targeting computers or holographic displays or any such futuristic/fantastic technology to register and align abstract phenomenological data, which according to Ferguson, represses the the “boundless co-presence” and “mysterious mediations” of abstraction (147). The blockbuster envelops its viewer in an ecstatic audiovisual spectacle both comforting and suffocating. An “insufficient [form] of care” for the neoliberal age (147). By returning to midcentury Japan, merging the blockbuster with the historical epic, there is no such diegetic technology present (although this does not entirely diminish its hyper-Newtonian aesthetic, rather sidelining it for a surprising amount of the runtime). In the place of the aforementioned hi-tech gadgets are printed charts and maps, handdrawn diagrams, and most importantly, the film photograph.

    If the film recenters interpersonal networks of human connection in the midst of Godzilla’s leveling of Tokyo (as well as the flattened landscape of contemporary cinema), Yamazaki registers this attempted realignment most demonstrably through the figure of the photograph. It is through the photograph that the film’s mission is allegorized. In the film, one can practically see the human element behind the film in part to its low budget. The viewer sees the man behind the film through its endearingly economical effects. And as a mangaka offers a more intimate, even amateurish approach to comic artmaking than major American comic book publishers, more often than not collapsing the role of illustrator and writer into one singular artist, Yamazaki is both writer and director and VFX supervisor. This (relatively) scrappy, DIY approach is almost entirely unheard of in blockbuster filmmaking—certainly in the last decade—which has made increasingly Fordist and atomized the production process: uninvolved (boards of) directors relegating creative labor to outside VFX houses and/or highly specialized teams with whom they are unfamiliar whether due to time constraints, the juggling of other multimillion dollar commitments, or the breakneck pace demanded by a cross-media, instantly streamable multiverse—the nature of the business. “That’s just how things are done here.” No. Both of these highly-grossing franchises have recently released their thirty-third entry, so what’s the excuse? Godzilla Minus One offers a rendition on the most pervasive cinematic form that treats its subject matter, craft, and audience with a more involved hand, one guided by care.

    So, Godzilla allegorizes its mission through the recurrence of photography throughout the film. In many ways, it can be said that photography motivates the main characters and drives the plot. (Of course, the act of photographing actors to make a motion picture also performs both these functions in an extradiegetic sense; so, by reflexively acknowledging the photographic basis at the heart of cinema, Yamazaki likewise recognizes interpersonal care as the center of any culture.) To take a photograph, to hold onto a photograph is a sign of care, as the film routinely demonstrates. Yet, according to theorist Roland Barthes, the figuration of the photographic image supposes a paradoxical and simultaneous preservation of life and production of death: “This will be and this has been” (96, 92). The earliest and longest lasting instance of photography in the film—the photos of the dead Odo Island mechanics given to Koichi, after his failure to attack Godzilla, by their sole survivor Tachibana—comes to thoroughly encompass both of these poles of photography. The guilt-ridden kamikaze pilot carries these photos, refusing to let go of the shame he carries after depriving the Japanese empire of one more honorable suicide and his subsequent failure to fire on an invincible sea monster.

    In Camera Lucida, Barthes reflects on the death of his mother and her postmortem existence by photographic means, commenting on her absence/presence. He sees a photo from her youth and remarks, “she is going to die” (96). In her photograph, he sees his own impending death. Through this exercise, Barthes has “no hope of ‘finding’ her” (63). Koichi has no hope of finding these men either. He has nightmares of his own death. The bundle of photographs given to Koichi once aboard the rescue vessel depict scenes from the fallen men’s lives, with most appearing to be posed family portraits. These photographs are documented proof of the lives these men once lived, a collective testament to the fact that they once cared and were cared for. It is not until he begins to care for himself—by being forgiven by Tachibana, by admitting his feelings for Noriko after her death, by finally wanting to live, by forcing himself to bear the weight of these photographed lives, by allowing himself to care and be cared for—that there exists the possibility of such a future for all. Kenji declares that no one will die on G-Day, maintaining that their future cannot—it will not—be built upon anymore neglect and death.

    The second major instance of photography takes as its subject Noriko, whom Koichi accepts into his dilapidated Tokyo home along with the child in her care, Akiko, following his return from war. After taking employment as a Pacific minesweeper, Koichi creates a bond with the crew and they are invited for dinner at the “family” home of Koichi, Noriko, and Akiko. A photograph is taken of Noriko at the dinner table, visibly uncomfortable at the insistence her likeness be recorded. To capture her life force with an image signals her death later in the film during the Godzilla attack on Ginza. “She is going to die.” After her death, her picture reemerges and finds itself in the cockpit of Koichi’s fighter. After this point, the status of the photograph is uncertain. Afterward, Koichi is informed that Noriko is in fact alive, having regained consciousness in a hospital; however, I find myself preoccupied still with the status of the photograph. When Koichi flew the plane into Godzilla’s mouth, did he eject with it? Did it burn in the explosion? For all intents and purposes, the photograph is destroyed. It is never seen again in the remaining final scenes. For the sake of the viewer, the photo is gone, as Noriko gets to live again (minus one eye and a mysterious indexed mark on her neck; a burn from Godzilla’s atomic breath? a scar? radiation poisoning?). He ejects from the plane and destroys the somber, deathly image of her visage, choosing to live in honor of his memory of her and for the life of his young, “adopted” child. It is only then that she can return to the picture, as it were. It is only then that their future can begin.

    However, the final instance I would like to discuss is not even a photograph at all. It is a child’s drawing. Akiko draws a family portrait: her, Noriko, Koichi. Significantly more abstract than the photographic image, the drawing is also more iconic than indexical, according to C. S. Peirce’s semiotic formulation. But the truth claim of the photographic arts is not only founded upon indexicality. According to film historian Tom Gunning, it is in combination with iconicity that such a claim can be proposed (42). The iconic is necessary and cannot be overlooked. With Akiko’s drawing, there exists no indexical connection between the subjects and the light that allows her to see them, unlike the photochemical reaction of film photography. The “compelling sense of directness” implored by photography in its reproduction of the world is made increasingly abstract through the iconic nature of drawing media (Sadowski 332). And so, it is here I also believe to be some nugget of care extractable toward some collective future that remains unexplored. Although bearing little resemblance to any of the three, the picture nonetheless imagines a future where they are finally together as a family. It is not realistically figured—the three subjects are next to indistinguishable from each other, their expressions are blank and openended, there is no indication of setting or mise-en-scène—and returns an air of abstraction to the family unit, to the representational arts, and the blockbuster. In the final moments of the film, Akiko gets her wish.

    But at the end of the day, Godzilla Minus One is a blockbuster, and like Godzilla at the end of this film, it is still the dominant form that is not going away anytime soon, no matter how many times it is sunk. Although, in recent years, the blockbuster has become increasingly stale not just to a critical audience but for the mainstream to which it widely appeals: the visual effects so lackluster as to reverse the once seemingly dialectical progression of digital imaging capabilities (as in the recent outputs of the MCU since the start of its “Multiverse Saga”), or on the other hand, so sublime and immersive, that is to say, too believable and realistic (as is the case in Avatar: The Way of Water), as to arise no sense of transcendental wonder within the viewer at all. As film critic Leonard Goi remarks, “[The Way of Water’s] visual charms can often trigger the opposite [of their intended] effect, yanking you out of Pandora rather than drawing you in.” Spielbergian form without the requisite and resultant Spielberg Face. The average consumer, so conditioned by the digital information society, understandably demands more from their media, having come to depend on a never-not-unavailable stream of personally marketed content flows algorithmically curated to their interests. Or, as Steven Shaviro puts it, the consumer has become adapted to flexibility, no longer content with “Fordist standardization and uniformity” that lacks input for customization and personal preference (14). However, flexibility goes beyond the consumer, even ordering the consumed.

    Shaviro’s conception of flexibility, drawing from Deleuze and David Harvey, can be employed to trace the entangled relationship between the blockbuster and neoliberalism, not so coincidentally birthed as formalized regimes around the same time. First and foremost, flexibility is the prerequisite for the Information Age: “an ability to take on any shape as needed, a capacity to adapt quickly and smoothly to the demands of any form, or any procedure, whatsoever” (14). Shaviro delineates two reasons why flexibility is cultivated in the contemporary moment: the first being as a means to reduce costs through what he calls “just-in-time production.” The second reason is of particular interest to the discussion at hand:

    flexibility is the attribute that “new economy” corporations
    look for in their employees: workers must be “adaptible [sic] and
    flexible, able to switch from one situation to a very different one,
    and adjust to it; and versatile, capable of changing activity or
    tools, depending on the nature of the relationship entered into
    with others or with objects” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007, 112).

    And so, we can think of the blockbuster as under the employ of the neoliberal. The blockbuster—as economic model, as aesthetic form, as pop culture entertainment—comprises, in part, the culture industry of capital, performing the indispensable function of pacifying the masses via consumption. The culture industry, as a machination of capital instills new desires in its subjects; desires only achievable through products only it can provide (for a price, of course). “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need,” as Tyler Durden put its in Fight Club. All art has become advertisement. Only now, it’s not selling products necessarily but rather experiences, “escape.” We are purchasing affect. Consumption as affective labor. And while there is a whole industry of toys and collectibles and comic book tie-ins and box sets that has spawned out of the Lucas-Spielberg model, that is in no way the main product of the neoliberal culture industry. We buy in to the fantastical, spectacular worlds of the blockbuster and its larger-than-life characters. And so, outside the envelope of the theater seat with built-in haptic effects, the curved widescreen, and Dolby surround sound, we look for heroes to catch and save us from our free fall. But all our heroes died decades ago.

    However, the blockbuster machine, despite its exclusion of “abstraction’s endless co-presence,” which “furnish[es] nervous sensoria with disastrously insufficient forms of collective care,” is nonetheless an impressive marvel, owed to its technological advancements to the (post)cinematic arts, thanks to all the capital pumped into it (Ferguson 147). The omnipresence of the blockbuster mimics the spread of neoliberal network society into all corners of the Earth—physical, virtual, affective, psychological, etc.—to become the undisputed global order. So, like any good employee, the blockbuster must be flexible, its aesthetic preoccupations merging with the documentary, the art film, the historical drama, television, video games. I am not moralizing about the state of cinema, and declaring its death as has been done hundreds of times over. I am not condemning the blockbuster. As Godzilla Minus One highlights, there is still plenty to admire. In fact, I don’t believe the first step toward a new kind of approach to cinema can be constructed within the cinema. Things will happen as they will. Instead, it is the work of the critic, a really good critic, the professional contrarian, to exalt the seemingly mediocre and the overlooked, to point out what you and I cannot yet see, what we feel is unworthy of being seen. What started as a half-baked review idea transmogrified into an ode to Steven Shaviro and his style of criticism, especially his Post-Cinematic Affect. But, in the meantime, if this is all we’re gonna get, shouldn’t we at least have an iteration that is not only more enjoyable but also more audacious?

    Merry Christmas. War is over, if you want it.

    Works Cited

    Too lazy to do this right now…

    Ferguson, Scott. Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care.

    Gunning, Tom. “What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs.”

    Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.

    Sadowski, Piotr. “Between Index and Icon: Towards the Semiotics of the Cast Shadow.”

    https://rbc-cataloging-manual.beinecke.library.yale.edu/comic-books-and-graphic-novels

    https://www.traileraddict.com/star-wars-4/targeting-computer

    Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. https://www.xenopraxis.net/readings/shaviro_postcinematicaffect.pdf

    https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/the-current-debate-the-cornball-sincerity-of-avatar-the-way-of-water

    https://w1.chainsawman-online.com/manga/chainsaw-man-chapter-148/

    https://twitter.com/Trey_Explainer/status/1578421650961203200

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fejxdg5XEAIep28?format=jpg&name=large

  • New Headphones

    I am only writing to stave off the impending depressive episode that I can feel building up in my body. This is gonna be all off the top. I feel too overwhelmed by choice in this city. I’m too obsessive for this. Just yesterday, hanging out with my new NYU friend for the first time, she takes me to a market and I can’t decide what cookies to buy. Most of the options were too expensive and I knew whatever I chose it wasn’t gonna be very good and I didn’t need to be buying them in the first place, so I made myself pick up a cheap, day-old black-and-white cookie after much pacing and deliberation and complaining. My next essay that I’ve been researching and outlining is gonna take so much time and energy and I don’t think it’s gonna turn out that good. It’s not a novel idea it turns out, so I’m not sure how best to go through with it. The laptop I have is a real piece of shit and it’s a hassle to get it to do the simple things I want it to do. I miss my computer back home. How pathetic is it that my happiness is tied to a machine? I guess it’s not that pathetic to be like everyone else. The only Übermensch is that man you will never see or hear from, living away from everyone according to his own beliefs, on his own terms. If the Nietzschean ideal can be surmised as the warrior-poet, I see not many better contenders than Ted Kaczynski. I feel like every man at his core is a libertarian: deep down, we all want to be homesteaders. An entire class of people that cannot stomach being told what to do. And I see videos of these guys going out into the wilderness with next to no survival skills and an iPhone, where they’ll learn how to live off the land and build a house and gather food, like a real man. Yet, they have to post. It’s a compulsion. I genuinely believe it’s just our evolution. The Call of the Wild is overwritten by the Cry for Attention. I try to reject—more like, moderate—all this technology that wastes time and kills attention spans, while, on the other hand, I exalt it in the abstract as maybe still possessing some liberatory potential. The Accelerationist Manifesto professes this doctrine as well: that is, technology can be repurposed under a new economic organization: it can liberate us! the Keynesian future isn’t dead, it just got delayed! However, not even a machine is born with a completely blank slate. There’s too much us in them. As a species, we have always been searching out care. It’s our nature to seek it. I suppose seeking always ends in destroying. I won’t shit on these guys for wanting to get some likes by uploading their lives. I’m not a primitivist, and from what little I know, I honestly think it seems like an ineffectual political philosophy, but aesthetically it just makes sense to me. There is a beauty there, an appreciation that emanates from my bones— something I can neither question nor adequately describe. I wouldn’t want to. Jameson is wrong. There is no waning of affect. On the contrary, there is an overproduction (and thus, a manufactured overconsumption of this surplus affect). Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot of Shaviro lately. I was introduced to him in college and I agree that no one’s doing it like him when it comes to writing on film—although I find myself legitimately and equally excited by the stuff he’s written on any other subject. I have finished a handful of books and essays in just the past week or so, which feels great (with many of these PDFs just picked up on random urge and finished in just a few sittings or less), but then it all gets too overwhelming again. I can’t read everything and I certainly won’t understand a good chunk of what I do read, I can’t possibly comment on all of it. This next big essay idea keeps finding new sources for itself, and like the last one, will take months to fix together. I need to focus on other things to stay sane, but then it’s just there weighing on my mind, so how can I do anything else? So, I don’t do anything. It feels like a black hole honestly. Maybe that’s just writing in general. The obsessive-compulsive cannot be broken, it seems. It’s so frustrating to be someone so easily discouraged and afraid of criticism and rejection, but then after putting forth the minimum amount of effort to convince myself “well I tried, didn’t I?,” knowing full well that I’m not gonna get anywhere, I can’t learn to just give up. I can’t throw a punch, but I can take one. I like to call myself a “not-angry person,” but it was only yesterday I actually realized how angry I still am. My anger is not outward, but I don’t feel it’s inward either. Freud believed melancholia to be a manifestation of anger toward oneself. I genuinely don’t know if I’m angry at myself. I certainly don’t express it outwardly. There are no vocal outbursts, no smashed keyboards, no hatchets through doors, no slamming fists. I don’t think anyone will ever see or hear that again. But, there is that venom. If not inward, then interior. Whenever I see something so mundane that it really should not even be given a second thought or garner any more than a nanosecond’s reaction, I try to mediate between myself and the anger, but that doesn’t make the feeling go away. That’s because it’s not a feeling: it only becomes an emotion when you try to rationalize the affect. I eventually forget, and then I’m angry again at the next thing. You can pull a man out of anger, but you cannot pull the anger out of a man. It’s the only emotion we’re taught is acceptable, says bell hooks. It feels like I have to undo all the damage of purposefully making myself as invisible as possible over the last decade. I don’t get to be mad that no one wants to pay attention to me. I don’t want it, but I do. I won’t pretend to be above the want for validation. I’m not better than that. I’m not above scrolling on my phone for far too long or wishing for the perfect partner to help alleviate my problems. My Bluetooth headphones broke for good right before I moved here, then the iPhone adapter for these awful old CD player earphones broke, and then yesterday, the speakers on my phone stopped making sound altogether, which isn’t even the first time that’s happened. I walked to Target to go buy Swiffer pads and headphones. I didn’t care what kind they were. I was going in there and getting whatever: no looking for a better deal online, no standing there reading the back of every box; I just bought the standard Apple EarPods with a new adapter and left. Cleaning the floor and listening to music. I knew that would pick me up. I always kinda thought the music-as-therapy/music-makes-you-feel-less-alone crowd were annoying, but I did feel it working. I still kinda feel like shit again. Now, I’m trapped with these headphones. I can’t hear anything without them. After two days of training for my new job, I decided to stop showing up. I hated it there. I hated those people. The second day wasn’t just giving it a second chance, but an exercise in figuring out what it was that was rubbing me the wrong way about this place. I can only describe its “culture” as bro-ish. It felt like going in to work at a frat house. It was even funnier when I learned that this shitty Scandinavian company for all its emphasis on “chill vibes” was sued not too long ago for misogynistic hiring practices. It all made sense. I didn’t want to feel like the weird kid who got caught sneaking into a Sigma Chi party and was now being publicly humiliated in front of everyone for thinking he could have ever gotten away with pretending to be one of them. The majority of that training felt more like hazing than any sort of learning. I am a quitter. I’m proud of it. I don’t care. I don’t care enough to describe it in anymore detail, but it made me smile to think of their reaction when I wasn’t there the next day. Of course, they don’t actually care. It’s whatever, I got paid for the online courses and the two days I showed up. I want to find something better. The backbone of my pseudo-justification for moving here was to get closer to a thriving artistic and filmic culture. No, it’s because three years ago I was the angriest and unhappiest l’d ever been and wanted to leave everything behind. I really thought that was possible. I said that I was going to move to New York City. I had to! Even after clawing myself out of that hole, I still felt compelled to go through with this promise. I forget that me now is not the same as me then, or maybe I forget the opposite. I really don’t know. On the one hand, I made it here, which is insane; yet, I’ve already put up my hand to throw in the towel. I’ve barely tried to find a job that won’t make me want to kill myself. Wasn’t that the whole point, to find something that relates to my passions? Whatever, I got paid to learn how to make coffee and juice for a few days. I’ll see your $150 and raise you a pair of new earbuds. It was only a matter of time before I had no other recourse but to admit that I too get lonely and in need of comfort.

  • Unemployed (In)activities

    ***Post got un-uploaded, originally published yesterday***

    I spent an entire day going through all my folder of bookmarks on Firefox and found this old Mark Fisher post I had saved however long ago. It is one of the most relatable things I’ve re-read in a while, and some remarks from another bookmarked essay by Alan Kirby resonated with Fisher’s (and my) sentiments on (un)employment after university.

    For me, it was absolutely a question of being projected into a space between classes. When I did work in factories, I was either pitied or pilloried. Every job seemed impossible: manual work because of my feckless diliatoriness, graduate jobs because, well, I wasn’t the sort of person who could do them. Me, a teacher, a journalist or a lawyer – surely not.

    Mark Fisher, “No I’ve never had a job” (2010)

    This technologised cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless.

    Alan Kirby, “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond” (2006)

    I STILL HAVE NO JOB. I like being unemployed, but it’s starting to feel like a chore. For example, I make sure not to go do too much fun stuff on any given day, because I’ll feel guilty since I should be looking for a way to pay rent before my savings run out. No, it’s not guilt, I would just rather not run out of money, but I cannot seem to care all that much. I’m dragging my feet and not taking it all too seriously. I’m not that pressed. I have time. I should be making the most of acquainting myself with the city. That has been fun—walking around, no headphones, no nothing. My days of unemployment are coming to an end, I feel/fear. I’ll probably have a job by the end of the month. My dad likes to describe it as finding “gainful employment,” but what exactly am I gaining? It’s a negative gain: I have the privilege of selling myself in order to fend off starvation and homelessness. (Another bookmarked page offered a comparison between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on suffering. Schopenhauer, influenced by the translations of Buddhist texts made newly available to the West, asserts that life is indeed suffering; therefore, to experience pleasure is only ever temporary relief from the ongoing, natural human state of pain. Nietzsche agrees that the uniquely human consciousness of time contributed to the life-as-suffering dilemma, but to pessimistically resign from the world was to admit defeat. I agree with Nietzsche actually.) In my eyes, nothing is more gainful than unemployment; however, to be unemployed fully on one’s own terms is probably next to impossible and most are unwilling to try. An idea for a future disappearing act?

    I AM INCAPABLE. I feel I am too incompetent for any job. It doesn’t matter what: graduate job, graduate student, or any entry-level “unskilled” position. I am an “insect” like Fisher. I am no writer, I am no barista or data entryist. (Kirby’s “silent autism” that characterizes his “psuedo-modern” age is so scarily relevant, especially at the prevalence of that word un/ironically today and the seeming omnipresence of neurodivergence. Those hypochondriacs and self-diagnoses, ironic or otherwise, were correct all along: we are all autistic.) Yet, I felt I had to leave the validation bubble behind; everyone goes on and on about how you shouldn’t go to grad school in the humanities: it’s not worth it, they say, as they are currently in or have already gone through the academy. Maybe I gave into the pressure to get a real job. I don’t know, maybe not. I did put a lot of thought into it first. I didn’t feel I was ready to teach others anything. I was scared. I can barely explain the things of which I am most knowledgeable. In other words, moving to the largest city in the country with no job or long-term plan for the future is the most elaborate and expensive way for me to build my confidence. I don’t know how long I’ll give it a shot out here on my own. You always hear late night talk show tales of big-name actors moving to LA or NYC and giving themselves an arbitrary deadline—”if I’m still getting nowhere by 30, . . .—before they were going to pack up their dreams and go home. For them, it’s never not a success story.

    I CANNOT FOOL MYSELF. The human penchant for delusion is extraordinary, but I do believe I am being honest when I say I am an academic at heart and I need to be around people who actually know a thing or two about the thing or two that I know (and care) about. If I keep going down this hole, I’m gonna will myself into feeling bad about myself and whatever it is I am trying to accomplish, or let alone simply do out here. But as it stands, I’m definitely not as big a depressive as Fisher. I feel good. My initial goal was to be closer to more opportunities, but I’m still typing into a vacuum and getting nowhere. At least, I’m enjoying it. Networking sounds abysmal, but it can serve as a half-baked justification for maybe finally going to a movie theater or visiting more galleries and museums on the slim off-chance I meet someone who likes the things I like. I am the most active passive person.

    I KNOW I AM CAPABLE. Where are the days of just walking into a manager’s office, making solid eye contact, extending a firm handshake, and landing a cushy, useless executive position at some company that was destroying the planet before anyone really cared about that? On the one hand, I know I can literally do any job if given the opportunity, but sometimes I cannot help feeling like a helpless child. That’s why I don’t like the person I become around large numbers of family members: they’re accomplished and I am only reminded of my complete lack of real-world skills. The salesman might as well be good as dead. (Sorry, Dad!) But now, my relationship with my parents seems stronger than ever. Distance is good here, necessary I would say. I’m being funny and charming again “around” them. I can’t even remember the last time I made my dad laugh that much during our most recent phone call almost two weeks ago. Who knew all I had to do was leave home without so much as a word of warning?

    I AM WRITING AGAIN. That feels really good. I’m getting new ideas. But, I need an actual computer to enact a good deal of them. I joke that I’m gonna befriend an NYU student, so I can use their school ID to get access to the computer lab with Adobe Creative Cloud. It’s more than likely doable; I looked it up. The six or seven year-old laptop I brought with me as a temporary understudy (and quick cash backup plan if I ended up needing money that badly) allows me to write when I get free café or library Wi-Fi, but it can’t edit video and has a wonky USB port, and I have a lot of things I am itching to get finished. I feel like my headspace changes so quickly that I have to churn out whatever I’m working on while I still have whatever feelings that motivated the idea in the first place, otherwise I get bored and move on and relegate yet another probably-never-to-be-completed work-in-progress to the purgatory pile.

    I NEED FRIENDS. I think all this half-doubt goes away as soon as I make some new friends. That’s another thing I think myself incapable of, but it works out every time. Having a roommate is fine, I guess, but I feel like her role at this point is just to say “what are you doing?” every time I start making random sounds to myself. We don’t have a whole lot in common in terms of interests or character. I’ll make some friends eventually—it is a priority for me—but I am a social camel. Honestly, I’m not really that worried about anything. It’s been more than a whole month; it’s only been like a month. Ya know?

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  • Cristin Tierney Gallery Visit + ‘Three Transitions’ Essay Addendum

    Political art is dead. And while it is incredibly hacky to declare an entire insitution that no longer holds the cultural gravity that you wish it did as dead—poetry, cinema, music, cultural criticism—nonetheless, my visit this afternoon to the Cristin Tierney Gallery served to strengthen this sort of claim, even if it is a lazy one. Political art today is dog shit. So, let me rephrase: good political art is dead. I am not against political art, but I am becoming even more of an anti-moralist. Donald Trump and his consequences have been a disaster for the art world. (Adam Kotsko’s essay in the Atlantic on the adoption of evangelicism by the mainstream Left summarizes and critiques this problem excellently.) Gone are the days of Eisenstein and the “Dialectic Approach to Film Form”; say hello to the milquetoast headline-driven slop of rampant radical liberalism! At this point, I would take another film as thematically reprehensible and vile as The Birth of a Nation if it meant we got something that managed to be both formally groundbreaking and overwhelmingly popular.

    My visit was initially prompted by my research for the Three Transitions essay (that I just finally pushed into the good-enough-to-post stage yesterday), where I learned that this space would begin screening this video by the time that I would be in the city. The chance to see a Peter Campus in person was too good to pass up. The Cristin Tierney Gallery is a sleek space, its up- and downstairs walls entirely white with lots of open space due to the limited works on display. I knew Campus awaited me upstairs, but I walked through the lower level first: mostly paintings, some sculptures, a photograph or two, and a single-channel video—all a part of the ongoing Masculinity in Contemporary Art exhibition. None of it really did anything for me, but I do wish I would have stayed to watch the entire runtime of the video, as its cover image was the most striking and interesting on the gallery website.

    The work that most annoyed me was a series of sculptures (?) by Jennifer Dalton, Mistakes Were Made, in which she just writes out slogans that are vaguely apologetic and clearly orbit around #MeToo. It was only after the fact when I read the exhibition information packet that I learned they were all apologies from famous men. So, sure, you could read these works as reflexively acknowledging the phony, placatory tone of these celebrities through the felt boards and chalkboards and cinema light boxes, but lazy moralizing and pandering became smug condescension when I read their titles (absent from the wall). Really, Matt Damon saying he should take a backseat on women’s issues and Joe Rogan admitting he’s said racist stuff is comparable to Kevin Spacey raping young boys? I know, patriarchy and White supremacy encompass all of these instances and they all contribute to their cultural proliferation, but what does this series hope to accomplish? “Please, clap.”

    Kevin Spacey says “Honestly” So It’s Probably OK (2020, Jennifer Dalton)

    Thinking more and more about it, I could see this piece critiquing that White liberal, virtue signaling, empty slogans in wacky fonts accompanied by flat illustrations, purely aesthetic style of politics (identified by Brad Troemel in his The Left Can’t Meme Report, also coinciding with the phenomenon he identifies as “literalism,” similar to Kotsko’s diagnosis that “we are all evangelicals now”); however, the rest of the gallery does not lead me to offer that charitable a reading. God forbid a work of art run the risk of “misinterpretation,” better tell everyone exactly what I think about a given issue, so I can’t be criticized for having the wrong opinion! The choice of media strikes me as not befitting of the subject matter either, as this bland appropriation of kitsch/camp aesthetics is practically inseperable from overly earnest liberal White women who don’t understand irony and love to drop words like “anti-racist” or “trauma” into every conversation. This style of post-Trump contemporary art practically broadcasts everything about it before you even get the chance to look it over a second time. Needless to say, I did not need to spend much time in this part of the gallery. What screams gentrification more than mediocre art in the middle of the Bowery? Maybe I’m just an asshole.

    I walked out, went to the next door over and was buzzed in to go up to the main attraction. This space was even more open: only a flatscreen television playing Three Transitions on loop was on the wall as you walked into the large room. Opposite the large screen, a slick looking cathode ray-tube TV with a white chassis sat atop a white pedestal around chest height. And that was it. I did appreciate the choice to have the video playing in two forms, but I did prefer the smaller, low-definition screen for sure. Interestingly, the two videos were not synced—about half a full runtime’s length difference between them, if I had to guess—so, you could hear the rip of the paper barrier over your shoulder as you watched Campus paint his face in front of you. Not a complaint, just an observation.

    I probably watched the whole thing a total of four times or so. The man who first greeted me at the top of the stairs came around the corner and approached me again. Based on the staff listing online, I assume he is William Petroni, Managing Director of Cristin Tierney. He asked me what I thought of the video. I told him I’m a fan of Campus’s work and was already well acquainted with this one in particular. I told him I felt the video strikes me as posthuman. “What do you mean by that?” I did my best to explain my reading on the spot as concisely as possible. I mentioned the deconstructionist tendency seen in video art of that period and the importance of the classical art object to Campus’s critique of self-portraiture by way of video. He said that was interesting, spoke to the confused sense of interiority and exteriority while highlighting the intensely psychological underpinnings, and then I left. On my way down the stairs, walking up is a pretty woman, and she makes eye contact with me. She could possibly be the model in these photographs, but I can’t tell.

    I think I’d like to visit more museums and galleries and see which ones I like the best. I was performing that experiment with coffee shops, but I think I’ve found my usual spot already—free wi-fi and plenty of outlets, not too crowded either, good Colombian empanadas. I don’t know how these places normally work, but I liked that this gallery was free, plus it was completely empty; a complaint I had about my visit to the Museum of Modern Art last Monday was how crowded it was (and $15 definitely isn’t free), but to be expected. The free postcards with a screengrab from the third transition was a great addition as well and will definitiely be going on my wall at some point. Although I had already read the press release online over a month ago probably, I took a physical copy, and I do like that the artspeak is pretty toned down from some of the more pretentious and egregious examples that are all too common.

    So, I did enjoy my time there as a whole. Seeing such a monumental work in person in a similar capacity to how it would’ve been viewed fifty years ago was certainly a worthwhile experience. I’m glad I brought my back pocket notebook because I took some notes on details I hadn’t noticed that I want to add to my essay. It’s still the fiftieth anniversary, so I wanna see if I can get this thing published by someone for that reason alone, or at least get some eyes on it. I’m saying it here so I have to do it, but Peter Campus has his email on his website, so I wanna send it there and see if I get a response. Maybe he’s like Chomsky and replies to all the emails he recieves. I still keep saying I’m gonna email that old gnome before he croaks, but I don’t have anything I really want to ask. Tomorrow, I’ll go to the library for the third time to make my edits to the essay. Nothing crazy, but the details I noted today seem so obvious in hindsight and will work themselves well into the established mold, plus I think they’ll really help make it a stronger commentary.

  • In the Face of Fire: Peter Campus’s Three Transitions, the Self-Portrait Tradition, and the States of the Arts [Revise-it #2]

    This essay is the second piece I wanted to elaborate on, as I think the readings I teased out have not been previously discussed, to my knowledge, by any of the previous scholarship surrounding this videotape by Peter Campus. This was originally “Response Paper 5” for my History of Video Art class in my final semester, a low stakes weekly assignment, meant only to be 250 words, to ensure we were engaging with class materials. However, in my preparatory rewatches of Three Transitions for the assignment, I was propelled to keep riffing and digging further and see where it took me—much past 250 words. When I thought I had said everything I had to say, there was another idea that jumped out ahead of me, necessitating that I push forward. Once more, this text ended up being more ambitious than I had originally imagined: that is, I found myself having much more to say all over again—new angles, new complications—a year and 3,000 words later. So, here is a little something to mark the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most important contributions to the history of video art.

    In relation to fine art, Peter Campus’s Three Transitions did not immediately remind me of the standard self-portrait. Campus’s addition struck me as something else, operating by an entirely new set of principles, diverging from the usual artist posing in medium close-up. In my mind, if we were to compare this video to any self-portraits, what seems a more suitable comparison are those paintings that foreground the process of the artmaking within the self-portrait itself, pushing or playing with the genre’s conventions rather than focusing on a realistic re-presentation of artist likeness. Diego Velázquez or Adélaïde Labille-Guiard with their self-portraits in a group, for example: Las Meninas (1656) and Self-Portrait with Two Pupils (1785), respectively. In addition, Pieter Claesz with the combination of self-portrait and allegorical still life in Vanitas with Violin and Glass Ball (1628), or Johannes Gumpp’s two self-portraits (ca. 1646) and Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait (1960) that see the artists each represent themselves three times in one painting. In all these examples, the artist is seen at work, creating, within that very work that is now displayed for the viewer. And while the latter three reveal the material supports of their self-portraits upon the canvas itself, Campus, despite working with a different medium with its own set of formal apparatuses, also opts to highlight these same fixtures of two-dimensional art in his work, namely, paper and paint. But to create his own version of a triple self-portrait, Campus superimposes two video feeds, adjusting the alpha channels of the layers to double his likeness for each of the three transitions. (So, is that two-self portraits total; one for each layer? Three; for each vignette? Or six; for the total number of Peter Campuses onscreen over the video’s duration?) Despite the multiplications of himself, Campus’s gesture is not one wholly in line with self-portraiture. Unlike those artists, Campus is picturing his body in order to “destroy” it. Two layers of visual information are glaringly (and repeatedly) fused to form an anti-self-portrait triptych. In Three Transitions, Campus plays on the art tradition of the self-portrait, challenging its celebration of artist identity and individual subjecthood by employing video abstraction, alongside two-dimensional art media, as tools of deconstruction.

    In what I see as aligned with typical early video art fashion, Campus is concerned primarily with deconstruction without necessarily planning any sort of reconstruction. In the first scene, after appearing to cut and then step through his own superimposed back, Campus shoddily tapes the ripped paper barrier back together. In the second, he applies paint atop his face, and due to differences in his movement and position before the camera in each layer of footage, reveals a second face that appears to have been waiting underneath the “real” thing. And the third sees Campus burn a piece of paper that holds his own moving image through the same principle of chromatic substitution explored in the second. Across all three of his transitions, Campus is taking fine art media and repurposing them to dis-figure his own image and question assumptions upheld by the self-portrait tradition, a tradition previously only made possible by similar supports. In the scholarship surrounding this video too much attention is paid to Campus himself and the changes undergone by his body-image and what that means he means about subjectivity in the age of instantaneous feedback, etc., etc. I am more interested in the objects at hand. Too much focus on the self and not the portrait, the support, the media that organizes the form.1 The “self-ish” approach seems antithetical to the project of a video centered on breaking down boundaries. Rather, what is the video saying about self-portraiture? about artistic tradition? about itself and its medium within said tradition?

    For instance, one could note several similarities between Campus and Gumpp’s acts of tripled self-portraying (and by extension to Rockwell’s appropriation of the latter as well); however, Gumpp’s goal is one of “defiance . . . by means of art,” an act of preservation from a mysterious, overlooked artist acutely aware of his “impending absence” after the work’s completion (Blasone 3). As scholar Pino Blasone astutely notes, art critic Jean-Luc Nancy and artist Norman Rockwell in their own responses to Gumpp’s portrait omit the symbolic additions of the cat and dog on either side of the artist. As I see it, scholarship surrounding Three Transitions fails to accommodate the significance of Campus’s symbolically reflexive mise-en-scène as well.

    The relationship between painting and moving images goes further back than Campus and his critique of the subject and the limitations of self-portraying. Long before video, film took from painting its core language, but film was about real time—images in motion. When consumer-grade video equipment was made available to the public, artists who adopted the new medium (in the mid-60s and into the early 70s) made themselves the objects of their art, many often performing alone in their studios. These video pioneers added the elements of time, motion, and sound to the act of self-portraying as artistic expression. They took advantage of the instantaneous feedback allowed by the advent of video—to see oneself in real time, to interact with one’s own image, and thus, act according to it. Not to mention, analog video also contributed to the destabilization of art as tangible object. At the time, video was stored on a physical tape, but the images were not viewable through this mechanism alone, as on a reel of film. You could not handpaint on magnetic videotape or physically cut it like film. Unlike film, unlike painting, video processes were all electronic. And so, by employing two-dimensional art media, Campus reflexively acknowledges the historical basis of this new form of moving image media in order to produce something aesthetically radical.

    By foregrounding paint media, Campus returns to the linguistic basis of filmic cinema in order to forge a new mode of looking, one more adapted and adaptable to the world of screens and simulations.2 After all, video (Latin for “I see”) is an action, while film is a technology. In her “Aesthetics of Narcissism” essay, Rosalind Krauss identified this looking as one directed back on the artists’ self when she prescribed onto video a psychological model of medium: narcissism. She argues that the mainstay motif of nascent video art, that is, the monitor, creates a closed loop of space-time with the camera, and it is within this loop of space-time that the artist operates, manipulating their own image by engaging with their own image (Krauss 50). Put simply, an “investment of energy in selfhood” characterized the video art medium more so than any common material basis (Jurgess). Whenever I engage with Krauss’s assessment, I always find myself agreeing and disagreeing (no doubt a testament to its rhetorical brilliance and academic longevity). For example, while Campus does observe his own image offscreen to direct the movement of his body, by the finale of the video, he begins the move to remove him-self from the image, absorbed into the frame. He allows the viewer a peek into the pregnant nothingness beyond the human. All one needs to participate in the camera-man cyborg is hands—the only parts of his body left. And so, Three Transitions, although largely spotlighting the artist’s corporeality, searches for a new mode of looking that attempts to peer beyond the subject. In the liberal Western world, social institutions—including, and especially, those involving art and artmaking—are centered around the concept of the individual, the subject. Perhaps, we can never escape this narcissism or self-possession, I don’t even think Campus completely does (or can), but he suggests the possibility and necessity for other “models of posthuman distributed subjectivity” not centered around the human (Jurgess). After all, Campus titles this work Three Transitions, not Three Self-Portraits, foregrounding the progression and destruction of his body-as-art-object through time, emphasizing transformation, evolution, moving beyond. But toward what?

    According to Steven Shaviro, “An artist is somebody who wants to turn the whole world into images; but he usually ends up making more objects instead.” However, Campus with the ending to his most famous video—a video that has overshadowed the rest of his oeuvre, essentially rendering him into an image, in a manner of speaking—typifies this desire to turn the world into images. Video only conjures images, not objects. For Shaviro, an image is nothing like a solid object. By placing his image over paper, by painting his face, and only by videotaping these acts, Campus registers the unique ability of video to flatten the world into images, especially the art world and its traditions of self-representation à la object construction. Why go to a museum to view the works of the Old Masters when the entire canon of Western painting exists free of charge as images online? He burns the old media until its just a camera recording darkness. “Images are premised upon a visibility so extreme that it relegates the world to a state of almost transparency” (Shaviro). Campus accelerates this process toward its logical conclusion, removing art media and artist from the picture—no, from the screen.

    In an increasingly visual culture increasingly concerned with surfaces and interfaces, Campus becomes these very things himself. For example, in the final transition, Campus is the only visible thing, placed in the foreground as well to highlight his role as surface, as image (as he also holds his own image in his hands). Of specific importance here as well, the background gets noticeably darker from the first to the second to the third transition, paradoxically adding and subtracting a sense of depth within the frame. Both self-portraiture and Three Transitions convert three-dimensional models to two-dimensional image to create the illusion of depth; now, the camera does most of that work for you, allowing the artist to focus on different, newer questions alongside the age-old quandaries. And so, it is all a flattening into surface: the transfer from 3D to 2D, from life to analog (and once more now to digital). Video is concerned with nothing but surface, that is, with what we can see.

    The void is absent, the void is revealed, the void is darkened, and it is here, at its darkest, its most impending and impregnable state, that Campus stages the crux of his critique.

    In the first two sections of Three Transitions, things return to how they were, albeit changed: the paper barrier is more or less intact, Campus still has a face (or two?). But in the last episode, the protruding brow of Campus shrinks back out of frame as the paper—as stand-in for classical painting media—withers away. The first two vignettes could be read as a dual-sided repetition of destruction-creation but the last is a destructive gesture toward subject and two-dimensional fine art tradition, especially the self-portrait. Yet destruction seems too harsh a label for this misleadingly simple video short. It is more a change of matter into new forms, as its title implies. The video triptych follows Campus’s phase transitions through the three states of matter. In other words, the first section is solid (paper), the second is liquid (paint), and the third, gas (fire). It should be noted that fire is a chemical reaction: through video, art and the human body are ultimately undergoing a sort of molecular transformation. The reappearance of paper in the finale is not a return to the groundedness of the initial solid phase, as it is not solids or liquids that combust but the gaseous vapors produced once heated.3 After reaching its flashpoint, this chroma-keyed sheet of paper, once ignited, cannot be repaired like the first, destroying the possibility of any ultimate reconstruction.

    However, there is a fourth, more elusive state of matter, and I do not believe Three Transitions leaves it out. Without definite shape or volume, plasma as a medium is quasi-neutral, infinitely conductive, and dominated by electrical and magnetic fields. Videotape could be described in much the same way, interacting with both these fields, encoding audiovisual information by magnetically recording electronic signals. Like its first appearance, the paper in this final section once more acts as a barrier, separating the “real” Campus from the black void before him, the camera from the void, viewer from void. As it burns, an indefinite space of possibility is revealed; it makes itself known, finally apparent to the viewer so trained to focus on the artist and art objects. That buck stops here for Campus, with video. No longer is the author the final word on the creation of meaning. For the final four seconds before the credits, the disembodied hands of the artist appear as if those of the camera—the camera now functioning like POV. Campus-as-camera. This final action captures the ready-to-hand synthesis of man and video. Film may have developed the language, but video handed out the paper and pen (or rather, paper and paint) to everyone.

    Then, Campus cuts the video short. The paper is never fully allowed to burn. He will eventually have to let it go; an action that we will never see. The edit does not allow the viewer to witness the artist dropping the old media/tradition nor does it allow any legitimate destruction to the artist’s body. As I work through the problem of this video over and over, the self-portrait reasserts itself more than originally considered. Yet, there is a cut. That is the brilliance of Three Transitions: it is both humorously deadpan and disorienting, it is self-portrait and not all at once. Shaviro affirms this paradox more broadly: “images have a weightlessness that is both mysterious and soothing.” Campus’s career aside, as a standalone text, the video and the state of the artist end ambiguously (i.e., what becomes of the artist and his hands, previously tasked to rip, tape, and paint?). Nothing. The paper is always still there, even if it is burning, but the face is always erased by the end, however, the perpetual loop of the gallery will always be sure to bring it back; the gallery monitor and canvas work in tandem after all, preserving the order of things. Like postmodernism to medium specificity, video interrupts, but it does not undo. Yet no video since has captured the potentially deconstructive, emancipatory power of video as succinctly as Peter Campus’s Three Transitions. Video is the next state; the void, its reflection. Video was the next state, but it is not the final state.4 Nonetheless, video still has the power to move art and subjecthood effortlessly between each phase of matter until there is nothing left but two sets of pinched fingers clenching ashen paper in a void, perhaps where something new can spring forth.

    Notes

    1. It would seem that the current direction of Campus’s career (i.e., opting to work in the vain of what he refers to as “videographs”—static long shots of natural landscapes recorded with a digital video camera—which followed his period as a nature photographer from the late 70s to mid-90s) and the choice to now stylize his name and works without capitalization spells a move that aims to de-privilege the subject. ↩︎
    2. According to André Bazin in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” the essence of photography is centered on its realism, taking over the realistic function of painting maintained up until the late nineteenth century. As a result, cinema took over as the primary arbiter of realism, producing the richest imitation of reality: “André Malraux has described the cinema as the furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism, the beginnings of which were first manifest at the Renaissance” (Bazin 10). Campus makes uncanny the realism once proclaimed to be embodied in the photographic arts. To paint one’s face to reveal the same face via chroma key technique figures the fledgling video medium as markedly and consciously departing from realism, or, at the very least, concerning itself much less with such notions while reflexively operating within this filial thread of the (moving) image. (And so, it can be said that video has the baggage of two other art forms to carry.) However, and/or for example, the locked, static framing in Three Transitions recalls the “simplicity” of silent cinema tableaux, in turn derived from the landscapes and genre painting of nineteenth-century French Realism. Even the videographs mentioned in the previous note also invoke this historicity. So, maybe Campus is not all that far off? ↩︎
    3. Additionally, paper serves a different function between the first and third transition, appearing in the latter to behave almost like a monitor or even a mirror. Ironically, the next and now current stage of video in its digital iteration has been regarded by scholars like Lev Manovich as more akin to painting than traditional cinema or videotape (3). Not to say that Campus predicted digital video, but he certainly foresaw and/or ushered in the conditions that allowed the (post-)medium to literally supplant itself over physical media, overtaking those cultural spaces once dominated by print and paint before the Information Age. ↩︎
    4. But what will supersede video and the digital? This article suggests the quantum, which oddly enough returns in some sense to the analog model. The difference between digital status and quantum state is also perhaps relevant—something to think about and develop later. I don’t know anything about science, but it all sounds very exciting. Even further reading: https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/the-end-of-digital-revolution-is-coming-heres-whats-next.html. ↩︎

    Works Cited

    Postface

    What is left in a world in which we have burned our images?

    Perhaps, in fact, we have reached the void that Campus foresaw, having walked face first, full of excitement for all its promises only to find there was no global village, there was no more counterculture, and there was nothing beyond our selves. We only got more images. The digital revolution changed everything and nothing. We are unhappy not because we have become images or because images have been exposed as always having been the “real” thing, but because we mistake the images as anything other than what they are. An image is an image is an image.

    La vague (1869/1870, Gustave Courbet)
    The Unchanging Sea (1910, D. W. Griffith)
    a wave (2009, peter campus)

  • White Flight of the Bus Boy

    What have you been putting off doing? Why?

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    I thought I was gonna have to watch my grandma die on Thursday. It was only for a second. I wasn’t even sad: I was petrified. She’s collapsed on the grass—a dizzy spell from fasting and working outside—and I’m standing there thinking of what life would be like without her. I wouldn’t be in this tiny seat right now, pushing northbound: 12 of the 36 hours now behind me. Thankfully, her neighbor was talking to her outside, able to catch her and lay her down. I do feel terrible about leaving her after something like that. Leaving and the days leading up were supposed to feel good, but it felt shitty after that. For a day, I felt like Stan in that episode of South Park where everything he sees and hears is literal shit. I bought the tickets that night anyway. I still wanted to go, but it felt different than I imagined. It’s not even that I romanticized it, but a plan three years in the making is gonna have unforeseen side effects. I’m not the same angry lil’ guy anymore, trying to run away from his problems. If I thought I was making a mistake, I would’ve called it off. The idea was to just leave, me and my three bags, and explain myself afterward. I couldn’t do that to her. It felt really fucking bad to drop a bomb like this on my grandma on my last afternoon living with her. I don’t know why I’m so secretive. Maybe the answer lies less than two miles down the road in the house I grew up in.

    I was gonna document how my feelings toward my leaving changed over the day-and-a-half of bus rides, but I don’t feel any reservations or butterflies. I feel so calm, so level. Packing only the essentials and moving my life to a new city feels no different than a commute to work. For four hours I had to sit in a bus station, waiting for my first transfer, and I literally did nothing. I helped an old lady use her credit card to buy Cheetos from the vending machine—which reminded me how my grandma thinks I’m a computer genius for setting up her new router and modem—and I updated my diary for an hour, but that was it. I just sat there and felt the rest of time.

    Every time I see an old skinny White man with a white beard and an outfit I would wear, I swear I’m looking in a time travel mirror. I would love to make it to old age just to look like Noam Chomsky. I’m now on the second leg of my trip. Mr. Chomsky is sitting next to me. We’re wearing comparable khaki jackets and jeans. He has a gray skullcap with a small “S” on it. He doesn’t talk much, but he’s got a voice that’s higher than you’d expect; less gravelly too: it’s gentle, and I notice that he’s a conscientious person. Although he looks like the 94-year-old linguist, he rocks an Attack on Titan backpack and lifts himself up when he has to fart. Stopped at Brunswick, Chomsky randomly says that he’s never seen a Chinese bus driver before and then goes on to say how our driver seems much nicer than some of the nastier White drivers he’s had in the past. I love how matter-of-fact old people are about race, it’s refreshingly honest and hilarious. Anyone should be given the job if they’re good at it, he says. “Discrimination is illegal, ya know.” This guy fucking rocks. He shakes my hand and moves to the now empty pair of seats one row ahead in order to stretch out and sleep. If he is anything like me, he likely won’t be able to.

    The fearmongering over taking any kind of bus is completely unwarranted. In my years of taking school buses, different city bus lines, and now Greyhound, I have never had a bad experience. Yeah, sometimes a person might smell a little bad or refuse to wear headphones, but who cares? I think this is my favorite way to travel. I would love high-speed rail as much as everyone else, but a bus just hits home. As it stands, I like it even better than Amtrak: it’s cheaper and takes the same amount of time to get where I need to go. I feel absolutely no anxiety about moving across the country to go live with someone I only “met” not even two weeks ago. I only have several thousand dollars, maybe half of all my winter clothes, and no job. What a day a diff’rence makes.