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?

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!

Cultural Critique and Knowledge Production, or Thinking Critically in Public

We are all writing criticism because we want to contribute to the collection of thoughts about art, to help make art better, whatever we consider “better” to be. This is some of why I find that important and interesting.¹

One thing about criticism is that it isn’t always directions on how to improve something; sometimes it’s just observation about how something must exist in the world in its current form. The purpose of all cultural critique isn’t to create frictionless art or art without problems; it’s to have a more thoughtful experience of art. You can see the limitations of something and not consider those limitations to be flaws. Or you can see those limitations and accept that nothing is perfect. You can see an artist respond to criticism in subsequent pieces (paintings, books, films, games, what have you), either trying to prove doubters wrong, answer challenges posed, or something else entirely.

I’m mentioning this in part because I’m thinking about an article I wrote a few years ago about whether Batman stories have to be copaganda; some people think landing on “yes” is as shortsighted as saying that Starship Troopers is bad satire of fascism because some of the fascists look cool. I, perhaps obviously, disagree. I think Starship Troopers is successful satire because of its aesthetic choices, many of which are obvious. And I think the question of superhero stories being pro-police propaganda is part and parcel of the nature of superhero stories under our current social construction. That does not mean they cannot have value as art, media, craft objects, or whatever phrase we want to use. And it is subject to what you think propaganda is and how deeply you need to feel its effects to consider it real.

One of the stories I wrote about when I wrote that piece (prompted by the release of The Batman, one of my favorite Batman movies) was Batman: White Knight, a book written and drawn by Sean Murphy whose ending undercuts its critique of Batman by having Bruce Wayne secretly having started a fund to make up for the property damage undertaken in Batman’s work. Sometimes art struggles to incorporate critiques, sometimes it isn’t structurally possible, sometimes it turns into lampshading, often but not always in the case of preemptively telling an audience that a story’s creators know the story is dumb.

Sometimes you just need to accept a premise and not be reminded of it. Sometimes a premise works for you, and you accept it and work through the piece from that lens. Sometimes you cannot accept a premise and a story never has a chance. Sometimes you accept a premise, but something happens within the story which disrupts your ability to continue existing within it.

Taste is subjective, as are the grand majority of our experiences moving through reality. I’m trying to read Fredric Jameson’s critiques of postmodernity to cut through some of the relativism I find myself just absolutely drenched in; it evades the dialectic at times. In fact, I find myself at times wondering why people can’t just chill out a little bit about their opinions on art because I wonder if it is so necessary to presume that everyone that feels differently than you about a given piece of art is a numbskull or your political enemy. But then, if no one ever took these things “too” seriously, they would never improve, we would never grow. I am, generally, open to arguments I don’t agree with if I find them compelling to read. That is the work of it, right?; staking out a claim with sufficient evidence or flair as to make others believe that either what you say has some great truth and wide applicability OR AT LEAST that you truly believe it and therefore are showing people another way to look at the world which, if they do not adopt, they at least now know exists and can try to apply or consider from time to time…

I was reading Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp. In the early going, she writes:

“Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion – and there is taste in acts, taste in morality.

Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It’s rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)”

This last point ties into what I was just saying about subjectivity. You may find in your life that there are people you interact with who think, speak, and write in ways you find brilliantly about one subject and on another are just so flat, so rote, so boring that it completely disrupts any idea you might have had about genius being universalizing. Of course, an individual’s artistic tastes in one medium not translating to the same level of rigor in another is not necessarily the same thing as being so myopic in their interests that they think they have something interesting to say when they don’t – a sort of persistent self-aggrandizing blandness born from a flattening of art that comes from a pursuit of truth and kindness that leads to seeking comfort, perhaps. That’s maybe not the most generous reading; but sometimes you’re not seeking comfort in the art, you’re seeking comfort in your tastes, confidence in your perspective.

The rest of what Sontag was saying is more to my general point here. Something that changed in me as I got older, and pursued a second History degree, was that I felt myself thinking much more critically about what I was writing. I felt humbled being exposed to new information about the world that let me know that I should be careful about my blanket statements, that I had much more to learn. I think, before that, I had a tendency to be more cutting. I am trying to build that back up. Sometimes art is shit, no matter how hard people worked on it. And if we’re not honest when we find art shitty, it can’t get better. We must have the confidence to say when we really think things are good and really think things are bad, even if good and bad are matters of taste, and even if I find rating them numerically to be frustratingly counter to my perspective.

The subtitle of this blog, PC Vulpes, is “Critical thinking in public.” That’s taken from a discourse that has transpired over the last seven years about critical thinking and the value of the humanities. This discourse has spurred as the general deprivation of the United States specifically and the Western World/Global North more broadly has become apparent to the professional and intellectual layers of the working classes because of a rising tide of rightwing populism or fascism and fascism-adjacent policies with the added level of a lack of etiquette (for those with the decency for the lack of etiquette to not be the most important part, it is at least a prompt for considering the rest of it). Education is generally being devalued outside of STEM (also inside of STEM and some would argue really just outside of business schools) and part of the argument on behalf of humanities has been to discuss their schools and departments as being places where you can learn “soft skills.” [1] Soft skills are not without value (I not too long ago worked at a nonprofit where my job involved helping kids develop them), but you don’t study English or History to learn how to write an email. You study them because you think they are interesting and that the pursuit of knowledge about them holds inherent value.[2] But critical thinking *is* a value I believe in. What it means to me is to think through critique, to question the sources you are reading and being pointed to, to analyze the tone and word choice of what you are reading or hearing, to question the world around you and not accept it at face value because every person, place, thing, and action is imbued with great meaning even if it is not always intentional.[3]

Another time, I will talk about how things have politics, and the differences between intended and interpreted meaning and context. I will undoubtedly harken back to different arguments I have read over the years about critique and critical thinking in games, movies, books, and other things. But I felt a need, in any case, to explain what I’m trying to do here.[4]

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[1] One of the prompts for my recent consideration of critical thinking and knowledge production was Tyler Austin Harper’s piece “The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of their Own Destruction” from The Atlantic, but I am also considering Merve Emre’s piece from The New Yorker “Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?,” Erin Bartram’s “The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind” from her blog, Harper asking on Twitter what people mean when they say “critical thinking,” online discourses and in-person discussions around these topics, and probably some other stuff not immediately coming to mind.

[2] For my part, I think that your undergraduate degree should primarily be based on what you find interesting, not going into that field necessarily, because doing professional-level work in humanities and social sciences tends to require some sort of terminal degree anyway.

[3] Dictionary.com says “disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence”

[4] Here is the three-part series I wrote on criticism last August and September at Substack

1. I do think it’s worth mentioning that, for me anyway, it’s frequently difficult for any of this to feel important when there’s a genocide going on. ↩︎