What Stories Do They Tell? – Historic Memory and Evading Responsibility

The History We’re Making Right Now

This is going to be a post about history but I am going to avoid filling it with footnotes and hyperlinks because I am, in some ways, talking about broad strokes.

For instance, I sometimes think about “tweeting through the apocalypse.” I first saw this phrase in 2020 during the first peak of COVID-19, when it felt the world was ending. Twitter is older than that and all sorts of terrible things happened preceding it, so I’m sure that wasn’t the first case, but let’s just go with that. Anyway, we’re currently living through a highly-publicized genocide that the countries of the “West” or the “Global North” are funding with your tax dollars and defending through media and international diplomatic channels. I mean, it’s mostly the U.S., but the U.K. and Germany and friends are doing their part as well and if you’re reading this you’re not necessarily a U.S.ian, but you’re probably a Westerner. And I’m mentioning this because the genocide in Palestine is history happening right now and it will be remembered by some amount of people as a grave atrocity for as long as history is recorded. And whatever we do now, whatever we have done and whatever we set out to, will indelibly and indubitably be the record we leave of who we are as individuals and as societies. This is a black mark on our civilization, red in the ledger, whatever analogy you need to make sense of the fact that at least 30,000 people have been killed in Palestine so that the Israeli government can test its murder automation and assert its dominance in the occupied territories.

It may surprise you to know that I wasn’t originally going to write about Gaza (and the numerically lesser though still grand and outrageous crimes in the West Bank). But it came to mind because my general observation is about how during every tremendous calamity in the whole of humanity, people have gone about their lives. Some of them felt bad about it, some of them tried to disrupt their lives to help things, some of them ignored what was going on or were not aware. I don’t know how you could not be aware of what’s happening in Palestine right now at this point, but we all have different news sources and so forth.

When we write in our private journals, perhaps some or many or most of our thoughts will go toward the genocide. But perhaps not. Perhaps it is a small thing hanging in the background as you try to record your other thoughts and feelings. Disgustingly and perhaps unforgivably, our lives go on. Someone posted an embarrassing poem a few weeks ago and lots of people on Twitter/X talked about how bad the poem was. And that’s their right because art is to be critiqued and when you put it on social media you’re leaving yourself open to a very broad audience. Some people no doubt liked and shared it. I initially reposted it when I saw it on Bluesky before I saw everyone tear it apart on Twitter because I have this perpetual anxiety about being caught in the crossfire of someone’s needless flame war and my forwarding of a message being taken as its endorsement. Sometimes that’s what I mean. Sometimes I mean a thing just needs to be seen and the feeling of powerlessness under the realization that you do in fact still have to do laundry while your country is helping perpetuate a genocide is a difficult feeling to wrestle with even if the artistic output of that feeling isn’t well regarded.

In the past six months, I have talked and read and written about movies and games and television. I have gone to my job and done that job to the best of my ability, working late nights from time to time like so many other people. I have attended birthday parties and watched sporting events and television shows. I have also attended protests and written and called my representatives and bought eSims but I guess I wanted to foreground all the things I’m doing that aren’t helpful to the people being killed with the help of my government just so everyone understands I don’t think I’m floating above them just because I realize it’s happening.

We all have to pay our bills, right? The fact that our comfort and security comes on the back of exploitation that is secured through subjugating violence is clearer now than ever, but there’s a lot of work to do to turn the acceptance of that disgust and misgiving into an effective corrective movement. So in the meantime we go to work and do our jobs and occasionally are shaken with thoughts concerning how anything we do contributes to fixing anything going on.

What I sat down to set out to write was about the liquid and gaseous nature of information in this age of electronic technology. I was hearing about deep fakes seven years ago. Photoshop was before that. “AI” as a catch-all term for everything from procedural generation in videogames to chatbots and text/image/video generation is a more recent phenomenon. There is a lot of trash and emptiness being produced in the pursuit of greater profit. There is a hollowing-out of so many beautiful things.

But even that is sort of an aside. It just feeds into the question I have in mind.

“How will we be remembered? How will this be remembered?”

And this isn’t even a matter of value judgment about how we chose to live and act. I mean, literally, “what are the processes by which this time period will be recreated and related by and to scholars and students and lay enthusiasts in the future?” Basically, I think frequently about how important it will be to catalog and study memes to understand this period in American and world history. That feels embarrassing and fart-sniffing but it’s simply true that that’s a big part of our lives now. I can’t think of much slang I know from the medieval period (I recall “grinding corn” as a tern for sex); will urbandictionary last into the 24^th century?

Eventually, all of us will fade into memory. Whoever wins the presidency, whatever terrible use our mayors put their robot dogs and cop cities to, however we continue to mismanage our resource exploitation, whether or not nuclear war unfolds, we are all going to die. And human civilization in some form or another, will continue beyond our last breaths and those of our favorite artists, our least favorite politicians, and the institutions and societies of which we are part. All of this will fade away, but there will be vestiges. Little things to remember us by. I wonder what those things are and how accurate and precise a picture they will paint of this edition of humanity.

So much of the intellectual infrastructure of the gaming industry is being destroyed – layoffs kill institutional memory while the tech sectors assumption and consumption of media means that critical and news reporting faculties are also being destroyed. Those are records of culture – of what people engaged with, what they thought about it, why they cared, much of it gone forever.

Will podcasts lamenting these things coming to pass function like BioShock audio logs?

Will someone be able to read all the ebooks Verso gives away? Or will all the e-readers be dead and inscrutable? Will they be destroyed in a fallow period between the death of our advanced civilization and the next version of humanity to follow?

Do you ever think about how ancient Egypt was? How much inference over thousands of years has gone into understanding this civilizational predecessor? The accession of Hor-Aha, second Pharoah of the First Dynasty of Egypt, was placed between 3111 and 3045 BC with 68% confidence, and between 3218 and 3035 with 95% confidence. This is nearly copy-pasted from Wikipedia but comes from this November 8, 2013 article from the National Library of Medicine, which is free to read. Check it out, it’s pretty cool, “An absolute chronology for early Egypt using radiocarbon dating and Bayesian statistical modelling.” Imagine, in five thousand years, someone saying, “John Adams is believed to have been the second president of the United States, a position he came to somewhere between 1700 and 1850 AD.” Think about all the space that leaves and how much the context of American history changes if you aren’t sharp on those dates. Think about the vastness of human experience in comparison with the life of a star, or a mountain. We are closer to the time of Jesus (happy Easter to you Christians) than Pontius Pilate was to Ramesses II.

I’m not trying to be a “RETVRN” guy, but we don’t build monuments like they used to. I think paper will certainly last a long time, at least some of it. I held a book a couple weeks ago that was four hundred years old or so.

I think a lot about historians. I think a lot about journalists and other humanist and social scientist scholars as well, but I think *a lot* about historians.

I think about the archaeologists of the future, and how broken or unbroken the chain of records will be from here until then. I think about who is cataloguing and archiving the memes as well as the headlines. So many of these trends and fads will fade, but is dril historically significant? Maybe not for studying presidential politics, but historians of internet culture will matter in the future, no matter how ridiculous we think that might be.

They will have to go through physical journals as well, collected letters and essays. What will we leave behind? Physically, electronically… What will their perception of the journalists and scholars of this period be? What will their conception of other workers be? Will they be able to puzzle out the professional-managerial class? With they be shocked that we still had landlords?

I don’t really believe in an afterlife or God or anything. I sometimes wish I did. Sometimes I wish I could see the stats at the end like a videogame, but frankly I live with far too much reflection for someone that isn’t quite 30 as it is and I’m sure the flashbacks I get hit with shaking off this mortal coil will be sufficient final trauma. What I really want, almost more than anything, is to see what happens next, not in first person at a regular rate, mind you… I just want to see and to know how things go. Do we repair our damage to the planet? Do we make it beyond it? How are we remembered? What stories do they tell about us?

The Making of Distant Futures – Apocalypse, Post-Apocalypse, and Post-Post Apocalypse in Dune, Star Wars, and Mad Max…

…or, Kevin’s In Love With Settings

This is the second of three essays I’m going to write inspired in part by the new Dune film. Maybe it’ll end up being the third because it’s the widest ranging topic. It’s about set up, but not pay off; it’s about implication, which I suppose was also a major thrust of the review essay. Here I want to talk about the interstellar civilizations of Dune and the Star Wars galaxy, as well as the post-nuclear destruction/environmental degradation of Mad Max.

A trailer for a new Star Wars show called The Acolyte has been released. My initial reaction was mixed-to-negative. Most Star Wars live-action of the past decade has been bad, especially the last three years, except for Andor. To me, the trailer looked very much like telling the same story that’s already been told. The interview in The Hollywood Reporter with the showrunner Leslye Headland, who co-created Russian Doll, made me more excited. There were bemused negative reactions to the trailer from culture critics I respect, as well as the smothering fanboy backlash anyone could have predicted and about which I have written before. But either sample among the spectrum of critique – “it’s funny to do the same thing again” and “this is actually different and that’s why it’s bad” rely on engaging with the implications of the trailer’s premise as set against what’s been implied or explained as the sociocultural and sociopolitical structure of the world that already exists. We can hope to see changes in attitude to express social differences in different eras of the Republic, but we can’t reasonably expect different technology.

Star Wars is one of my favorite examples of the phenomenon I want to get into, about what hangs in the background of the setting of advanced societies, in part because I’ve just spent so much time with a galaxy far, far away. The podcast A More Civilized Age, and to some extent the podcast A People’s History of the Old Republic, as well as myriad essays written by other people about the prequels, are some of the things I’m engaging with here in addition to my own experience watching the movies, playing the games, reading the comics. The question is about the relative stagnation of technology across thousands of years not as a matter of lacking creativity from writers, directors, and so forth, but taken as an expression of the post-post apocalypse, the idea that the intergalactic civilization and every global civilization that exists within it, is living in the wake of barely-remembered or completely-forgotten collapses. The wide spread of galactic civilization means that there are different levels of technology in minute ways between spaces, but a lot of similarity as well, yet frequently a lack of advancement in everyday transportation or communication technology, as well as an incredible lack of record keeping.

The obvious real-life reason that the Old Republic approximately 4,000 years before the original films and the sequel trilogy set decades after the original films share broadly similar levels of technology is that you want to be able to maintain a continuity within the setting even when you are distinguishing it by using different planets, characters, factions. But, taking that alongside story notes like (1) that Luke and his Uncle Owen need a protocol droid to talk to their moisture vaporators (and Luke and the Rebellion needing astromech droids to talk to their starships) and (2) people across the galaxy seemingly forgetting thousands-year-old institutions like the Jedi under the Empire and the New Republic, a picture is painted of a society where people don’t understand how the things they rely on function, and societal and institutional memory is broken. These aren’t the most persistently explored analogies in Star Wars relevant to or resonant in our culture, but they are persistent, resonant, and besides that just flesh out an interesting galaxy far, far away. If you go back to Tim Lebbon’s Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void novel, tens of thousands of years even before the Old Republic, humanity and the alien species it spends time with are within a few hundred years of beginning settlement of the galaxy, and lightsabers hadn’t been invented yet, but space travel had been. The story goes to length to explain early Jedi as institutionally morally corrupt from the outset, though their code is different than their spiritual descendants. Regardless of that, even there is implication of the known galaxy being the product of an intergalactic colonization effort as of yet unexplored in canon.[1]

Meanwhile, with Dune and Mad Max, the gaps in understanding are less implied and more textual. Dune is set tens of thousands of years in the future; Mad Max at some nebulous point in the next century. Dune is premised on a global human rejection of “thinking machines” (advanced computers and robots) that culminated in the “Butlerian Jihad” when such machines were destroyed, and mental conditioning (and eugenics) advanced to the point where people have psychic powers, can use drugs to mentally fold time for space travel, and some act as “human computers” (AKA “mentats”) in a baroque neo-feudal intergalactic imperial-religious-technocratic triumvirate inspired by mid-20^th century global capitalism. There has been less forgetting and on the part of the characters in the story and more just a gap in our knowledge – Frank Herbert’s Dune is written in parts like a history book and includes in its glossary appendix (one of five appendices) a definition of religious text, the “Orange Catholic Bible” which “contains elements of most ancient religions, including the Maometh Saari, Mahayana Christianity, Zensunni Catholicism, and Buddislamic traditions.” I.e., in the ancient past of Dune, many of our religions of today had already hybridized with each other.[2]

Alternatively, the Mad Max sequels posits a world of barbarism, where civilization is struggling to recreate itself in an ignorant and violent fashion, another sort of struggling emergence of kingdoms and slavery congregating around resources like what remains of oil. The aesthetic of the films (except the original, where the world is amid collapse but not as sand-swept), and the 2015 video game, is the sandy wastes of post-apocalyptic Australia whose environmentalist themes come through in the depleted, barren, starving world. In the original Mad Max, the setting alerts the audience that this is “not far from now;” the second film, The Road Warrior, opens depicting nuclear war as the set up. The videogame is less clear about that, but its setting echoes the film that came out the same year, Mad Max: Fury Road, one where poisoned humans live in caves, bred as warriors to pillage and plunder for charismatic psychopaths and zealots that have concentrated resources (like water, fuel, and bullets) under them; the whole world we see, all technology and clothing, is salvaged and refitted.

I reference the videogame because it is so deeply interested in you as Mad Max interacting with the denizens of the waste that have recreated little societies, often built around raids, slavery, and ornamentation which invokes combinations of ritualistic body art and pain worship. It’s a road-and-vehicle based society from the outset of the first film, which is visually focused on prairies and small towns, and onward into the desert pseudo-civilization of the post-apocalypse. Over the course of the movies, we see humanity move further from the vestiges of civil society, in both physical and metaphysical institutions, as the protagonist becomes a wandering pseudo-mythical character, a traveling fable of vengeance and survival in a world gone mad, holding on to what little remains of his own sanity after the murder of his wife and child.

In a way, I feel like these three settings (or settings with similar premises) could work on a singular space-time continuum, not because I think they *need to*[3] or it would make it better but because I think the procession from one form of this society to another is fascinating. Let’s say a couple of decades sees the mass destruction of computing technology across the world. The subsequent chaos leads to depopulation and war.[4] The resulting society rebuilds itself along different structural lines, eventually finding its way to the stars. The reintroduction of thinking machines into this galaxy-spanning civilization leads to overreliance on them again. Eventually humanity is separated from memory, and depending on humanoid and animal-like robots to interact with the machines they need for their everyday tasks and jobs.

Dune is on the mind because it’s never far from it, but also Denis Villeneuve’s second of three proposed Dune films has come out, to some commercial success and critical acclaim (though WB is now undercutting its Dolby Digital and IMAX screens for a Ghostbuster’s movie). It put me in mind to think about adaptation and interpretation, and I’ll link to that piece once it’s finished. But, in any case, I must sadly admit that I love lore and worldbuilding. Not at the expense of story, but I love when the world is assembled in an interesting way for characters to move through and interact with; the economy with which this is done in books like The Stars My Destination. The adaptation point – even if I hate how attached some early criticisms of Villeneuve’s aesthetic were to lionizing what Lynch actually did and what Jodoworsky dreamed of doing, the things that were kept in and left out and people’s outsized reactions to them all speak to the world Frank Herbert created.

His space fantasy far-future feudal intergalactic society is a strange place. People walk into traps with their eyes open because honor demands it of them, yes, but that’s far from the most spectacular or unique part and the thing about implications is that having them spelled in new explanatory stories is seldom satisfying. What we have in all the implications within a setting are hints and teases. When we see people being bled alive upside down for their blood to be used to ornament the Sardaukar, we learn about the brutality of Sardaukar without having it explained that they’ve been trained on a prison planet. It’s nonetheless very interesting to think about how they came to be so tirelessly devoted to the Padishah Emperors (which I guess is why Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson wrote about it), how their society was so organized.  There are the gigantic, maybe world-sized spaceships that smaller spaceships and shuttles travel inside of and through, and the massive militaries on Giedi Prime and Caladan; the sprawl of humanity across the stars and the recreation of civilization. It’s fun to live in these spaces, and to consider all the space in between from one point to another, even if it’s not always well-executed when it’s explicated.

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[1] The book, and the comic series it was loosely connected to, all came out between 2012 and 2014, and then was rendered non-canonical by Disney.

[2] I’m pretty sure there’s also mention of the first use of atomic weapons being an escalation of a trade war between House Washington and House Osaka, but I can’t find it in my physical copy or the version scanned onto the Internet Archive.

[3] I’ve only just heard of Earth-27 and it’s not quite what I’m going for.

[4] This is kind of the set-up for the Twisted Metal show.

On Review Scores, and objective scales of subjective experience

I generally don’t like review scores because I feel like they contribute to a perpetual culture of consensus building and shunning people with differences of opinion, because they flatten all the things you think about a movie or a game or a book into a number and because people sometimes use them as excuses to start dumb fights instead of interesting arguments, which is subjective but so is the rest of this. I actually don’t mind seeing them from other people but I don’t love doing them myself because I feel like it’s a square peg in a round hole. It’s attributing an objective mathematic rating to the subjective experience of a film. But I guess one of the few things in this realm that annoys me more than worrying about my own ratings of films is when people (especially those I respect) worry about those of others. I mean, a couple weeks ago people were circulating screenshots of people’s Letterboxd ratings spreads. I don’t think there’s any certain substantial insight you can extract from a survey of people’s Letterboxd ratings. If you wanted to hack it, just look at the lowest reviewed films of the people that cluster higher or the highest reviewed films of the people that cluster lower. Better yet, just look up how an individual feels about films you feel particularly strongly about positively or negatively to get a sense of how their taste aligns or conflicts with yours, like you might the body of work of a professional critic. It’s not rocket science. And we shouldn’t be enforcing a consensus on move opinions, much less scores or how scores are clustered. That’s silly. Letterboxd scores are not the most serious scores, no matter how often I agonize over them, because it’s a social media site. But more important than that, to me, is the text of a review. I can abide just about any non-bigoted opinion on art and media if the argument is compelling. I’ve said that before, I think. I like tweets all the time I don’t agree with if I’m interested in seeing where the argument is going. I like reviews where the audience member-critic I’m reading liked it more than me or less than me if the way they are analyzing it is interesting to engage with – if they see the things I saw differently or if they see different things altogether.

I guess the other reason I don’t like doing review scores is that they’re static things and my opinions can be fluid (I’ve changed ratings a bunch, as I get to later and as my Letterboxd activity will show). I tend to think what I say about a film will remain true even if I weigh its components differently over time or develop new insights about it. I mean, I change Letterboxd reviews from time to time, certainly on rewatches; there’s no changing the score on a published piece.

But, alas, a critical essay about a film is technically a different thing than a review to guide consumptive practices, a film ticket buyer’s guide piece. I think that a piece intended to be a see-or-do-not-see recommendation can turn into a nuanced investigation of form and substance, and also that a piece interested in particularly aspects as reflecting sociocultural, political-economic, artistic, or other trends can also highly recommend a film to you or let you know you ought to avoid it. Still, I accept that these are broadly different modes of writing.

So, even though most of my reviews on this blog are somewhere in between these spaces, or closer to the former, maybe putting a number on things would be more helpful.

Maybe I can even create a scale, as I considered doing some years ago, and leave it here for you to reflect on or cite, when I inevitably abandon it or change scales unannounced (something I am reserving the right to do, just like most EULAs reserve the right to change things at any time with whatever notice they deem acceptable):

…

Here’s the scale, with examples from my Letterboxd and links to reviews either on PCVulpes on WordPress or Substack, Paste Magazine, Vague Visages, or Blood Knife:

0.5/5 or 1/10 or 10/100 – apparently I haven’t rated anything this low, but I’m going to sift through my old ratings and see if I can’t fit something down here

1/5 or 2/10 – really bad, don’t watch (Black Adam)

1.5/5 or 3/10 – bad, with the occasional good part (A Good Person, which very nearly moves into so bad it’s good)

2/5 – not good, but maybe not totally irredeemable, occasional good parts (Beekeeper, Aquaman, Knock at the Cabin)

2.5/5 or 5/10 – bad, with some redeeming qualities/or average, since it’s smack in the middle; this could be a poorly executed movie with big aspirations (Mean Girls, Foe, Last Voyage of the Demeter, The Flash, Batman v Superman), a well-executed or relatively-well executed movie that I find fundamentally flawed in different ways (Air, Mad Props), or something with artistic merit that I found disagreeable (Beau Is Afraid)

3/5 or 6/10 – pretty good but not exceptional (Thanksgiving, Problemista, Raging Grace, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves)

3.5/5 or 7/10 – very good with flaws or specific shortcomings or limitations (Rebel Moon, Priscilla, Barbie, Joy Ride, John Wick Chapter 4)

4/5 or 8/10 – very good (Drive-Away Dolls, Poor Things, Ferrari, Kubi, The Northman)

4.5/5 or 9/10 – very, very good (Godzilla Minus One, Asteroid City, Banshees of Inisherin)

5/5 or 10/10 or 100/100 – perfect viewing experience or so engrossing and entertaining that my critiques are bowled over by my fascination and engagement… the type of movie that makes me think “Oh you can do this?” (Deep Sea, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Five Devils, Mad Max: Fury Road, Margin Call)

And I guess all further decimals in a ten-point scale, which equal to one point in a 100-point scale, are me modifying in one direction or another.

And, like, my ratings change. I keep going back and forth on how I feel about American Fiction, which I didn’t like that much coming out of the Philadelphia Film Festival, but found funny toward the end and enjoyed much more at the press screening I went to afterward, and which I gave a 3.5 on Letterboxd but a 7.9 at Paste. The Iron Claw has a 7.6 and a 3.5 I just saw I had The Suicide Squad and Black Widow as 3 stars and switched them to 2.5. I initially felt Ferrari was 3.5 but realized I loved it so much it had to be a 4.

Maybe I’ll stop using decimals on ten-point scales; I’m less likely to stop using them on the 5-point scale. Or maybe I’ll go the other way and get more and more particular on the 10-/100-point scale and less specific on the five-point scale. See all of this makes me feel neurotic BUT I also have felt compelled this year to try to be more critical on Letterboxd and therefore in my writing, so maybe I’ll start incorporating numeric ratings into my reviews on here even knowing it’s inherently flawed and limited and that my opinion changes from time to time.

Oh, one thing I didn’t complain about earlier – I think ratings tend to only use the upper half of the scale, which I think diminishes the utility of the scale. In games, I know this has in part to do with gamer trolls and the toxicity of discourse and at least one high profile example of the tying of dev team bonuses to ratings. In movies, maybe it has more to do with some combination of access journalism and being empathetic for the fact that a lot of work goes into making these things. But a lot of work goes into a lot of things that are shitty, and it’s not incumbent on us to pretend to like things we don’t, or to try to set an agenda inflating the ego of people that make bad art, as subjective as the criteria for badness is. Oi, that’s enough rambling.

I’ve got two Dune essays coming, maybe a surprise review, who knows what else. Tune in soon!

Dune Part Two – Giddy About Implications

Dune Part Two – When a tragic space epic makes you giddy with excitement about what’s said and what’s hinted

No one who cares to think about it will ever run out of things to say about Dune Part Two. It is a sticky topic because it is in a tradition of adaptations spinning out of a science fiction novel made in the middle-1960s by a man concerned with the problem of authority, of strongmen and charismatic leadership; an environmentalist who was distrustful of government, who drew on the real world occurrence of Amero-European exploitation of the Middle East as inspiration for a neo-feudal far-future story of an aristocrat who seizes power after surviving a purge and assassination attempt by taking hold of a desert warrior people through a prophecy seeded over centuries by his mother’s order of space eugenicists. Frank Herbert’s Dune is a seminal text for modern space opera and space fantasy. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two adapts the second part of that book, including its clean and quickly-executed finale. It is a film about destiny, devastation, inevitability, and tragedy. It is set in the 110^th century of a different scale of time, in a world where people have trained their minds to replace computers and their bodies to reject poisons. It is a fantasy war epic set among the stars which resonates and reverberates in our present moment as conflict escalates in the Middle East as the result of a violent and domineering settler-colonial project in Israel roils into the genocide of the Palestinian people, a comparison which feels inevitable when seeing bloodied children leaving their bombed homes on the screen.

Dune Part Two stars Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides, later Muad’Dib Usul, heir to a murdered duke, adopter of indigenous traditions, and claimant to a prophecy. Across and alongside him is Zendaya as Chani Kynes, his lover and teacher, who does not believe in the prophecy, but grows to trust in, and be hurt by, Paul. Javier Bardem is Stilgar, leader of many Fremen, a deadly warrior and strategist, and Paul’s loyal steward. Rebecca Fergusson is the Lady Jessica, the grieving lover of Paul’s father, a pregnant member of the Bene Gesserit. In the first film she is an able thinker and warrior beset by tragedy in the knowing that she has laid a trap for herself, brought ruin to her chosen family because she put her love and loyalty to it above her loyalty to the conniving order she came out of. Here she finds new psychic and political power among the Fremen, the desert nomads fighting against the oppressive Harkonnens, the Atreides’s primary Great House Rival. The Harkonnens are the Baron Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgard), a brutal, gluttonous man with two nephews as prospective heirs – “The Beast” Rabban (Dave Bautista), a vicious, angry, paranoid monster of a man – a great warrior turned into a coward for fear of what he might lose, and na-Baron Feyd Rautha (Austin Butler), a sociopath who brims with lust for blood and for flesh.

The film starts as Paul and Jessica accompany Stilgar, Chani, and other Fremen on their way to their home, the Sietch Tabr. They fight Harkonnen soldiers, equipped in dark space suits, floating through the air in a way that almost feels like old-fashioned wirework, exemplifying the science fiction aesthetic here that feels so unlike the versions of jetpacks, wings, and other forms of flight that have become ubiquitous and redundant throughout mainstream mass market speculative fiction film. There is a smoothness and a crunchiness to them, and to the Imperium. There is a distance and a strangeness everywhere and always, but we are drawn into the characters by the weight of their troubles and their charisma. The Atreides who become Fremen are victorious here; gradually Paul learns to fight like them and be like them. He seizes a prophecy given to him through psychic powers his mom taught him and through the powerful hallucinogen that comes from the planet Arrakis/Dune, the “spice” mélange that makes space travel possible and gives the planet its importance and is everywhere in the Fremen’s food. Paul becomes a great warrior and reunites with his old battle master, the Atreides warrior-poet commander Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), bringing together the atomic weapon power of the Atreides and the desert power of the Fremen to bring the Imperium which had conspired against his father and his House to heel.

This is a movie of images – great dunes in Jordan and Abu Dhabi for Arrakis, battlefields in Budapest, sets and CGI constructions of ornate oppression in the intricacies of the Harkonnen home world Giedi Prime (which also features striking black-and-white sequences of ceremonial arena battle, wet fireworks, and a huge military procession) and the massive scale of mining and transportation technology, and of course Shai-Hulud, The Great Maker, the iconic sandworms of Dune. Here those great monsters show their tremendous utility to the Fremen – the process known as “making peace with Shai-Hulud;” tricking the beasts which grow up to 400 meters (1300 feet) long into giving you a ride on its way across the sand which it refines into spice through its natural processes and travels.

The scale of this desert world, of the natural austerity, of the ingenuity of the people that live in it, married with the idea of high-tech and low-tech that is not inscrutable but feels irreplicable, these are all components of the aesthetic magic of the film. No less than five months pass in the film as the small Atreides remnant and their plentiful Fremen allies build up their violent resistance to the exploitative occupiers. In this time, we see Paul have visions of possible futures, and we see things come to pass which are similar but different than his visions in the first film – we see the limits to his prescience, the limits of prophecy even as he gives himself over to it, finding the points of choice and chance among what seems inevitable.

This is a movie rife with implications through its worldbuilding; as a matter of adaptation, there is so much you learn in the book that is only nodded or hinted at here. And there are changes made, too; Liet-Kynes is never mentioned by either name in this film even though we know from the first that she has begun the ecological program of reclaiming the desert as green. The Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) is a character rather than just a narrator; Chani’s resistance to the prophecy (alongside her friend, Shishkhali, played by Souheila Yacoub) is a new wrinkle.[1] There’s no spice orgy. We get a talking fetus instead of a nigh-omniscient toddler. I take no issue with any of that; one thing I did miss from the book was Paul becoming responsible for the widow of the man he slew in the first film, but again, choices amid storytelling constraints.

My general rule with remakes is that for it to be worth doing, a film has to be improvable. There is little sense in just making a movie to make it. Adaptations are slightly different because you have a different creative team with different interpretations of source material (obviously that’s also the case for remakes, but it’s a slight distinction of process). How many versions of A Star Is Born or The Great Gatsby do we need? I can’t call it, but I do think it’s funny that every generation or so, a new audience is introduced to Frank Herbert’s Dune, with all its fascinating in-universe and real-world implications, its line or symbiotic relationship between exoticizing Islam and the Arab world and critiquing that exoticization. It is impossible to make art without problems, and this story will always have some layer of being “problematic”; that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be told, that just means that when it is told we should think deeply about its meaning, however and by whomever it is made. I suppose I struggle to condemn it because, as a refraction of an artifact, it has value for what it shows about the time it came from as well as what it represents in the current moment. And it’s cool and fun in the ways that make incisive critiques about the premise the second or third thing that comes to mind instead of the first. Dune is a story concerned first-and-foremost with confronting heroic narratives and deconstructing them, and it does this through a heroic narrative with an ending you are told is nigh-inevitable and of at best questionable morality by the very framing process of the story. That translates to this film as destiny and doubt. The story confronts white savior narratives by circling and underlining that the protagonist feels an inevitable pull toward wreaking terror and havoc, and in Dune Part Two this translates in part to his mother just fully appropriating cultural aesthetics to claim a place of religious and political power that she herself is half-pulled into.

It feels astounding and miraculous even as cinephiles, film critics, and science fiction fans debate on the internet whether and what constitutes strangeness in the book; what is unfilmable or unadaptable or what have you. Simultaneously to considering what is impenetrable, people debate inclusivity, representation, and appropriation. Someone said it was an Arab world with no Arabs; this was perhaps a more compelling critique in the first film, which had far less Arabic names in the cast, but it stands to reason nonetheless that you can watch it and have a visceral reaction of concern or even embarrassment as we can all watch the film and know the Fremen aren’t in the wrong, even if Paul is. My enjoying Dune and not wanting flat critiques of its use of imagery with clear cultural connotations does not mean those connotations are not worthy of assessment or critique. It feels unfortunate ( though inevitable for at least the last two decades) that a studio would insist on the characters talking of “holy war” and “crusade” instead of “jihad,” but it’s hard for me to tell if the movie be a better piece of art or the world a better place if that was the language Paul used. It’s less forgivable that they designed a language that sounds a bit like Arabic instead of just using Arabic, but I’m more acknowledging a complaint than making one. I’m getting aside from myself, but I essentially don’t think it’s as easy as “this was done one clear whitewashed way and should have been done a different, more inclusive way.” For one, it isn’t a straight cultural whitewash, and for another I don’t know if the themes work as well if you make it less allegorical and interpretive and more literal. That’s a nonexistent counterfactual.

My biggest complaint really is that I wish there was more dialogue to help establish the development of and emotional engagement within the Paul-Chani romance, and perhaps to further flesh out the court intrigue beyond inevitabilities. I find what is here useful and I do like living in its implications and subtleties. I don’t think what Villeneuve did was wrong or a failure of adaptation, and I believe in film as an audiovisual medium where pictures take precedence. I even think the film very smartly leans into the meaning of silences, but I think Dune Part Two could have been even more cerebrally and emotionally engaging (especially as far as selling the romance between Paul and Chani) with more dialogue. At the same time, that could have made it feel crowded. Within the constraints of what is left here, we are very close to perfection, yet not quite there. A conundrum of art. It also feels very much like the second act of a trilogy, but that doesn’t strike me as a problem, just a fact of life.

I end up crossing 2000 words while this was intended to be the short version of the piece. It’s far longer than the essay that I cut away from to start writing this. Is it clear what I think? Can you tell what I feel? Dune Part Two rocks, especially if you watch it in IMAX two hours after finishing its predecessor at home. It’s a great time. It’s visually compelling, by which I mean gorgeous – it would clearly be an unforgiving life to live on Arrakis, and yet I feel called to it. It isn’t especially wordy but all its dialogue is meaningful. It isn’t a slow movie (it endlessly impresses me how Villeneuve and company can push past 160 minutes and make it fly by) but it’s given me so much to contemplate. Dune Part Two feels like a space age fairy tale, a space fantasy with few easy good guys but still dotted and underlined with clear moral warnings about the temptations and trappings of power. If anything, the baseline political-moralistic critique should interrogate the seeming wrongness of what the Fremen will go on to do in league with the Atreides. As in, why is their vengeance on the Imperium wrong? But this gets precluded by and large because the story of Dune (in film and in book) is so clear about this being Paul’s will and destiny rather than the Fremen’s (and the film goes further to explore the Fremen as a people of split consciousness around being undermined and manipulated) that this critique might die out of the gate. Dune Part Two is a drama, an epic of sight and sound, a film I want to return to again and again – a universe of terror and tragedy that I nonetheless feel enticed to and want to envelope me. Long live the fighters, indeed.

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[1] It was important to me, especially after watching this a second time before reviewing it, to avoid just parroting what was on the internet in the interest of giving my own impression. But it can’t be helped that, while I’ve avoided reading major reviews so far, I did have internet interlocutors. https://x.com/muaddibstyle/status/1766646007385784593?s=20

Problemista – As in, Problem Solver

Problemista is an A24 movie. Occasionally, people will act as if it’s absurd to notice that the production company has a vision because people can be limited in how they interpret that vision (they have produced or distributed nearly as many comedies as horror), but there are still some signs in what they look for – the slightly off-kilter but overall approachable, the heady but not impenetrable, the artistic but not necessarily abstract. Problemista is a very funny comedy in this vein. The film, written, directed by, and starring Julio Torres (writer on SNL, creator of Los Espookys) and narrated by Isabella Rossellini is a story of dreams – a story of desire, perseverance, and of course the hurdles of dealing with the arcane institutions which make up the U.S. state and economic apparatus. Problemista means “troublemaker” and what our protagonist (Julio Torres as Alejandro aka “Ale”) navigates through the film are problems he must solve through cool-headed optimism, trouble he finds himself in because he wants more for his life than the world will easily give him.

Ale is a young man raised in El Salvador by his mother Dolores (Catalina Saavedra Pérez), a sculptor and metalwork artist who tried to give him everything, leading him to pursue the ambitious dream of making offbeat and social commentariat children’s toys in New York City. Ale works at a cryogenics company attending the capsule of the artist Bobby (RZA) and ends up working as a personal assistant for Bobby’s eccentric, erratic, explosive life partner, art critic Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton). They grow together over time as Ale pursues permanent residency and a talent incubator program at Hasbo, navigating the maze of the American immigration system, met by passive-aggressive and apathetic artsy roommates, the online gig economy of Craigslist (where Abbott Elementary’s Larry Owens shines as a human embodiment), Elizabeth’s ambitions, mood swings, and old grudges (bringing in Greta Lee as Dalia, an artist whose career she upset with a bad review), and more.

When Problemista first started, I though it felt like mixing Barbie’s tendency of satirizing companies while advertising for them, especially Hasbro[1] with Poor Things and Beau Is Afraid’s respective interest in absurd satire of reality. There’s the Poor Things experience of learning about a world that’s new to you and the Beau Is Afraid experience of constant befuddlement, though Ale is a much better improviser than Beau. Over the course of the film, it establishes itself as more separate in tone, but thematic overlap remains. While completely tonally disparate, it also reminds of Imperial Dreams in focusing on the tremendous barriers people face moving through the world from a structurally marginalized position (in that movie, being a former convict trying to reintegrate into society; in this movie, being an immigrant). Like those movies, especially Beau Is Afraid – which is somehow, or in some ways, the most grounded of the three in comparison – there is flirtation between physical placement in the literal and metaphorical world, most especially the depiction of Ale as a knight facing Elizabeth as a dragon in a low-tech community theater-style costume in a cave.

I thought Problemista had interesting things to say but remained constricted by the socially ubiquitous fear of moral didacticism. It wants to be about the difficulties of immigration but is also focused on the virtues of patience and a can-do attitude, i.e., perpetuating American dream mythmaking by having Ale get a relatively low level job at Hasbro as a triumph against all his hurdles and after holding onto his dream by sidestepping the opportunity to be a paralegal (and of course he becomes later very successful so he can cryogenically freeze himself). Tilda Swinton’s performance was great, her character a terror, her lessons to Ale a mixed bag for him to pick through. The dream sequence imagery was impressive in its moderate technique; Ale bounding around as he walked like a puppet on strings contributed to the fable-like nature of the story and literalized the pep in his step. Some of the most fun imagery expresses the impossible trap, a vertical-lateral maze, of his pursuit of stability to make money to get legal permission to stay in the country.

Problemista is good but not great. It has some utility, some fire, some artistic novelty and colorful imagery expressing the difficulties of making one’s way in the world. If Problemista had foregone product placement, perhaps it could make more cutting criticisms (one of my favorite scenes features an exploration of the illogical nature of late fees and the unethical and illogical nature of companies putting holds on deposits and then taking late fees, but the credits sort of tongue-in-cheekily note that the policy of the bank in question changed somewhat between the filming and release of the picture). If it had come out in 2022 it would have stood out more, but as it is, the shadow of Barbie (which I like, with some reservations) and of Beau Is Afraid (which I did not enjoy, but sort of respect) hang over the film. Yet there is nothing to be done about that. As an individual experience, I like it more than either of those films – I didn’t roll my eyes even once during Problemista. It feels more adult than the former, and far more interesting and less navel-gazey than the latter. I do find it more incisive, but it is missing something in the sense of philosophical vitality or ideological dynamism in the way that its ending comes together. So, if you liked either of those movies, watch this one. If you didn’t watch either of those movies, this is still worth watching. Don’t expect it to change your life, but it may enrich it. [2]

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[1] As opposed to Mattel

[2] I think I’m giving this a 3 on Letterboxd. I’m trying to be harsher on there, as if it matters. I’m toying with the idea of doing ratings on here, but then I have to work up a scale and explain it.

Mad Props – On the Valorization of Commodified Nostalgia

Directed by Juan Paublo Reinoso and starring Oklahoma-based banker-collector Tom Biolcini as lead interviewer, Mad Props examines the hobby of movie prop collecting, the crafts of movie prop creation, and the medium of film to answer the question “are props art?” The answer seems obvious to me and is unanimous among the interviewees, but the film is nonetheless an interesting and reverent work. That reverence is an artistic weaknesses as the film lacks any measure of critique or special introspection and has a slight and occasional air of defensiveness – as if the intent to persuade turns to desperation. Nonetheless, Mad Props is a film which celebrates film by shining a light on the people that make movies beyond the actors and directors, and I’m inclined to celebrate that.

I’m less inclined to celebrate the nostalgia with which our society is currently resplendent and am feeling out the tension of mass culture as a door into all culture. People alive in the 1980s who can’t let go of Ghostbusters aren’t necessarily laudable for that (especially as it leads to terrible sequel after terrible sequel), but I tend to approve of teaching youngsters in Gen Z and Gen Alpha about the pop culture classics of yesteryear. Regardless, it’s interesting to see how film buffs acquire these collections, even if the investigation lacks some rigor.

The documentary begins by introducing us to Tom Biolcini, a banker who’s loved movies his whole life, crafting his own props and homemade horror flicks as a child. While his dream of working in Hollywood as a prop artist fell to the wayside, his love for the artistry of the tableaux never died. As an adult, he has a huge prop collection paid for by his evidently successful career as a financier and shares his collection hobby with his son Rocco. After showing us the Biolcini family home and collection (and soliciting fun anecdotes from Tom’s mom, wife, and daughter), Tom and Juan take us around the U.S. and to England and France to see individual collections, museums, a tattoo parlor that is also a prop museum, the Outsiders House in Tulsa, and a prop design facility in California. In all these spaces, we hear stories of what first inspired the collectors and how they think of props and movies, usually wrapped in nostalgia for childhood fixated around the blockbuster boom era centered on the 1980s.

On the one hand, I often find myself thinking these collectors have too much money. Like many experiences I have with entertainment or otherwise witnessing luxury and largesse amid signs of societal collapse, I can’t help but think that it feels like viewing the last people dancing on the Titanic. There are great sums of money at play – hundreds, thousands, even tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent at auction on what one curator says were formerly considered mere byproducts of the filmmaking process. There are certainly more altruistic uses this money could be put to than permanent revival of childhood.

At the same time, there are perhaps more sinister uses – in a society of consumption and disposal, collecting art you find meaningful rather than consigning it to a landfill is not the greatest sin. Part of Mad Props’s early reflections focus on a loose community across the U.S. and Europe that collect art to be displayed. They start museums, they share their collections and cross-reference each other’s authenticity, and – while they fit the definition of “nerd” that encompasses most audiences now that 1980s nerd culture dominates American pop culture through a media whirlpool – most of them have significant others and social lives. A museum curating duo in France always looks for Dark Crystal merchandise at auction because the wife of one is a huge fan of the film. Biolcini shares his hobby of prop collecting with his son and of movie watching with his whole family. Several of the collectors (including House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan J. Condal) make jokes about their wives’ begrudging acceptance of their collections.

As such, there exists a tension throughout the film for the socially critical as we see a bunch of people spending money to acquire the on-screen tools of filmmaking – costumes, prosthetics, animatronics, set dressing – in a manner that depends deeply on nostalgia for middle brow mass culture art. It is a worship of uncritical populism that I feel a need to push back against even as a big fan of moves like Star Wars and Back to the Future Part II, if only because I feel the closing monologue over-fixates on minimizing high art – abstract paintings and the like. To be clear, the reason I think that minimization is misplaced is because I think an appeal to ticket sales and brand recognition undermines the investment of value into the art on its own merits. E.g., the animatronic skinned rattlesnake from Prey is still impressive even though the film wasn’t given a theatrical release for selfish corporate reasons. Conversely, seeing the B camera from The Ten Commandments was as meaningful to me as any of the costumes because it is a culturally important movie and a sort of historical epic seldom made anymore with a longevity that precedes the era of blockbuster mass marketing of toys and lunchboxes that this prop fixation arises out of.

The tools which produce pop art have value imbued in them by the artist at least as much as the audience, and it is in transitioning from discussing the fixations of nostalgic collectors to the memories of the craftsmen and actors that the film is at its most moving. This really comes across in prop master Alec Gillis and famed actors Robert Englund and Lance Henrickson sharing stories from their movies. Gillis’s collection is especially noteworthy – he and Henrickson tell stories about working on Aliens with James Cameron, but he also has animatronics from The Santa Clause 2, Prey, Mortal Kombat, and other films, and puts a tremendous value on the creation of connection with people in the audience through the craftwork of developing the pieces.

One thing I wish the film got more into was the extent to which the market around prop collection facilitates a secondary or tertiary speculative market. Everyone interviewed in the film – including very notably Stephen Lane of the Prop Store in London which facilitates so many auction transactions to private collectors and museums – seem in it for the love of the art. Granted, Lane is one of the pioneers of the market, so – while he talks about the cultural and historical importance of the artifacts – he clearly has entrepreneurial spirit and profit motive in turning moviemaking trash into treasures. Nonetheless, the extent to which these commodities are sold purely to accrue value is obscured. It’s hard to imagine there’s none of that going on (it’s a longtime large component of collecting traditional art and low art), but I suppose it’s not impossible.

I was impressed by the level of access Juan and Tom were able to achieve – there are prominent actors and skilled craftworkers I haven’t mentioned – as well as the breadth of movie clips cleared that strike me as an expensive undertaking all their own. For whatever my misgivings of the arrested development of American culture in recursive tailspin, it’s not as if I’m immune to it. I like movies, including many of the ones discussed and whose props are collected here. I like when people like movies and when they collect the things that resonated with them and share them with the world. The difference between a collector and a hoarder is in display – at least one of these collectors builds art to display the props atop and within, the exponential exemplification of reverence. And for what little we learn about the collectors and their lives, Reinoso and Biolcini depict them in such a fashion that, separate as we are in geography and money (I won’t be bidding six digits for an Indiana Jones prop at any point in the future), they feel like my spiritual cousins if not siblings.

In that way, Mad Props is an effective showcase. I feel like I should hate these people and their enthusiasm, but I cannot because I share some of it. Even if all the collectors were antisocial neurotic sociopaths, we would still have Englund, Henrickson, Gillis, and his team. But the collectors are nice on screen however they are off it, they mostly even let Biolcini touch stuff (and it’s not like you can hold it against them when they don’t), and he is a confident presenter even if he could have asked more incisive questions. There is some reuse of auction clips, probably too much time with the Biolcini family, and one interview toward the end which really flirted with being pandering or exploitative in valorizing the hobby as an equalizing playing field. There is a version of Mad Props that is more polished or more incisive, and that version would be better, but the version that exists here is mostly charming in its enthusiasm and may prompt further research. This movie fulfills the remit and maintains the vibe of the era of film which it celebrates; when more slips through, it’s a pleasure. And regardless of its critical shortcomings, it at least doesn’t feel as market tested and flavorless as the successors to the era its fixations were born out of.