Thoughts on the 25th Anniversary of the Release of The Phantom Menace

Every year I am met with more anniversaries that make my head spin. The last good X-Men movie came out a decade ago this month. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones turned twenty years old two years ago. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace makes 25 this weekend and can rent cars without hassle.

It is an imperfect but beloved movie, reassessed by some of its past decriers as the trilogy’s metaphor for American imperialism and the slide from liberalism to fascism becomes ever more cogent, sometimes held in unalloyed regard by those who enjoyed it as children. I am not quite one of those. I have a vivid memory of quitting on Episode III specifically while watching it on DVD on my original X-Box. I remember being embarrassed at the battle droid voices in the midnight screening before that.

The Phantom Menace is one of two Star Wars movies I do not believe I have ever seen in a theater (the other being the 1977 original). But I have seen it several times, and in honor of the 25^th anniversary of its release, I thought I would share some thoughts:

I would have argued in the 2010s Star Wars as a whole and the prequels specifically could have done without the Phantom Menace. Setting aside the racist caricatures and awkward writing and performances in the films, there’s a decade between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, as opposed to the more reasonable three years between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. It felt like an unforced error, starting us so far away from the main action, ending the trilogy with a gap of twenty years still between the trilogies. Maybe you start with Anakin as a Jedi child, and focus the films on his growth that way. Instead, he is part of an ensemble in the first film; Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan MacGregor) ends up the main protagonist of the trilogy (which is also interesting, especially in the second film where we see how much more interested he is in the adventuring part of being a Jedi than the tutelage part, though he maintains some joy in condescension toward Anakin). Spin-off shows filling gaps notwithstanding, it makes sense that the prequel trilogy is not just charting Anakin’s fall, but Obi-Wan’s life and Sheev Palpatine’s rise to power. Anakin is just a part of the story. Leaving the gap of twenty years is a creative choice that leaves a lot of space for interpretation but overall conveys a sense that there are twenty years of depression and stagnation across the galaxy. Still doesn’t make sense that the Death Star is so close to being finished at the end of Revenge of the Sith and only just starting to be used regularly in A New Hope, but such is life.

The Star Wars prequels are simultaneously an episodic melodrama about government corruption and a criticism of the uncritical worship of characters and stories by fans, wrapped in a shiny CGI-laden toy-selling bow for children. The Phantom Menace is a valuable artistic artifact of its time, beginning the political metaphor that carried through the Prequels and, as an example of both Lucas’s idiosyncratic style and digital mass-audience feature, showing how Hollywood began closing the door on individual acts of expression on large scale while committing further to the blockbuster model.

It’s also a jarring film if your last exposure to Star Wars is 1983’s Return of the Jedi. It is aesthetically several steps away from that film – its imagined science fiction universe much sleeker and more ornate. That’s in part because of different technological priorities in the production, but it’s also a tool for delivering a different perspective. The Star Wars prequels are less about war from the side of the warrior enmeshed in it and more from the side of the politician and the bureaucrat, if not the everyday citizen. The Jedi is reimagined, expanded from warrior monk to warrior monk-space cop, with all the subjective interpretation and application of laws and rules there implied.

My read on the prequels has gradually evolved to see it as George Lucas cutting the legs out from under fans’ hero worship of the Jedi (itself a silly phenomenon considering how often in the EU they were shown to be flawed before and after Luke’s new Jedi order) while creating a space opera for children about the tendency of liberal states to slide into fascism due to corporate capture of the state apparatus.

We learn in the Clone Wars cartoon that all the actual regulatory and enforcement bodies are atrophied and that the Senate hardly even pays the aids that work for it on Coruscant, but even with this first prequel film we see a trend that we’re reminded of in both of its sequels – the government is invested in its own largesse and maintaining ceremony but cannot help people at the margins. The government has overextended itself – the massive body of the Senate holds tens of thousands of representatives who cannot, by personal will or by government structure, facilitate a just society.

Watching The Phantom Menace, we’re introduced to capitol planet Coruscant by following a random spaceship navigating traffic and coming down into the planet’s atmosphere, and as we come to see Darth Maul and a figure who looks like The Emperor (and turns out to be Senator Palpatine, played in either case by Ian McDiarmid) conversant, we get a sense of the massive scale of the planet. There are thousands of levels of people on Coruscant – trillions of people. Small delegations in the legislature represent single planets or whole systems in different sectors of the galaxy, with voting representative delegations for banking clans, trade federations, and mining guilds.

Speaking of Sheev’s rise to power, one thing that really struck me on this most recent watch was the vast scale of the planet of Coruscant; in the second film, it reminds more of Blade Runner, but in The Phantom Menace it feels like Metropolis. It’s so big; the daytime scenes where you see the Senate building evoke tremendous scale. It’s a massive high-rise among high rises, dwarfing the many ships that fly past it.

Zooming in on the Jedi, their arrogance is on full display as they use mind tricks to maneuver every situation, flouting rules and norms as suits them. The casual cruelty inherent to their organization also apparent in the freedom/abduction of Anakin Skywalker. The boy who would become Vader is a slave; the Jedi free him because he is useful. They cannot free his mother without disrupting the order of things on Tattooine – don’t have the inclination to start a slave rebellion, even in the future once the conflict of the story is resolved. That he would hold onto such concerns is considered a sign of his weakness and hotheadedness. But, back to the film at hand, it’s said that he’s too old to begin the training, because of these attachments to his mother, this past he will not be able to forget as he executes his Jedi duties.

The Jedi Temple, which we see much more of in the following films, has its own strange look to it, but what matters there is the characters. There’s the Yoda-like lady Jedi Yaddle, who has no lines, disappears after this movie, and was not replaced with CGI in the remastering like Yoda was. More pressing is Samuel L. Jackson’s Mace Windu, stoic with anger in his eyes, certain of Anakin’s potential but not interested in training him. I wonder, what happened to people the Jedi found out in the galaxy that they did not adopt into their order; shouldn’t they want to prevent just having loose Force users out and about? Potential Sith, as it were…

Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn as a character is a retcon that throws a wrench into Yoda and Obi-Wan’s previous relationship (Obi-Wan had told Luke that Yoda was the Jedi who instructed him). Midichlorians felt like an unnecessary scientific codification for the mystical ubiquity of the Force. More importantly, though, Jinn’s literal interpretation of Shmi Skywalker’s words about Anakin not having a father and the Jedi’s related “Chosen One” prophecy helped set up half of the political inquiry of the Star Wars prequels. It’s canonical that Anakin was made through the Force by Palpatine, instead of something more interesting and human like Shmi having an ill-fated relationship; I suppose this magical conception is preferable to implications of a slave suffering sexual violence in a children’s movie, but you know what else would have been interesting? If the chemistry between Shmi and Qui-Gon was evidence of an old tryst; if Anakin was Qui-Gon’s long lost lovechild and that’s why he was so intent on freeing and training him, underscoring the cruelty (or learned hopelessness) of leaving Shmi to her fate.[1]

Anakin’s arc over the films is fascinating – the Jedi need him and they use him, but they never trust him despite foisting the responsibility of a millennia-old prophecy and command of clone soldiers upon him. My read is that the prophecy was bullshit: in the third film, George Lucas introduces some ambiguity (notwithstanding whatever J.J. Abrams was trying to do in the climax to The Rise of Skywalker) about the prophecy, some doubt by Yoda about how they interpreted it to begin with. Mace Windu only starts to come around to the kid when they go to arrest Palpatine.

It’s obvious to everyone in the Jedi and the government that Anakin is sleeping with (secretly married to) a powerful(?) Senator, but no one broaches the topic and he thinks it’s forbidden, never has anyone he can entrust with his concerns about her dying. The few times he tries, in veiled language, to go to the Council for help, they fail him. “Train yourself to let go of everything that you fear to lose,” says Yoda, not realizing he’s doomed the Jedi Order and the Republic. Anakin’s main father figure never wanted him and has always treated him snidely as if resentful that Qui-Gon Jinn put the kid in his lap. Obi-Wan trained Anakin because he owed Qui-Gon and wanted to honor his memory, he grew to love the man, to be his friend, but in many ways, like he says at the end of the trilogy, he failed Anakin.

One of the clever, silly things they do in The Phantom Menace is have Natalie Portman play Padme, Queen Amidala’s handmaiden and bodyguard (secretly the queen) while Keira Knightley plays Queen Amidala (secretly her handmaiden and bodyguard Sabé). It strikes me watching the film now that the films would have a different narrative and political trajectory if Padme had really been the handmaiden and went on to become a Senator; i.e., if the films were about two young up-and-comers thrust into great power and responsibility.

Anakin (nine years old when fourteen year-old Padme meets him in The Phantom Menace) later marries Padme in a secret wedding at the end of Attack of the Clones. Five years his senior, she confessed her love to him as they were entering an arena to be killed. My read on this is that he was infatuated and she was sure they were about to die.  The flirtation beforehand was like her letting off steam or having fun.

But, back to Phantom Menace. Funny tweets notwithstanding, it’s clear that their initial feelings are platonic. I mean, the nine-year-old might have a crush on the teenager, but I don’t think it goes both ways. I am curious about the idea of an elected queen; George Lucas seemed to want the titles, pomp, and circumstance that came with having a monarchy while telling his story about intergalactic democracy falling into fascism. What’s fascinating here, to me, is how a planet’s society develops in such a fashion that they determine that elected child monarchs are their best hope for just rule and – in the case of Amidala and Naboo – training for that person to become their representative in the Galactic Senate.

Palpatine, who I don’t believe was ever king, orchestrates a nomination to the Supreme Chancellorship from his position as Naboo’s senator, manipulating the Queen and her doppelganger to call for a vote of no-confidence for his predecessor, Valorum. In a blunt bit of storytelling, Valorum’s hand is stayed on an investigation of the Trade Federation’s blockade and invasion by bureaucrats standing alongside him whispering in his ear (likely about the Senate Parliamentarian or some such nonsense). Much like his later promise to Anakin (to teach him the trick to eternal life and resurrection), he does not repay the favor done to him, living his alleged allies (and in this case, his technical superior) twisting in the wind. He’s nominated, but not yet elected, so the Republic proper continues to offer no help to the people of Naboo. Amidala has lost faith in the Republic and returns home, falling into the future-Emperor’s trap. The Jedi Council orders Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan to return with Amidala, and Obi-Wan is trying to impress on Qui-Gon that he doesn’t think the boy should be trained because he’s dangerous. As aforementioned, this fear of Anakin’s potential for danger creates the danger; a real self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fighting between Amidala’s strike team and the battle droids feels somewhat passionate on one side, but inert on most of the other. One problem I had with the films from my younger days and maintain is true is that the war taking place between droids and clones removes a human element about the cost of war. There are other metaphors at play in the use of slave labor, indoctrination, and the connection between the finance industry and the military-industrial complex, though perhaps not smoothly.

I found Gungan exile funnyman Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best) generally less annoying on this watch than I have in some of the past. I generally found him amusing. I did find it funny that Qui-Gon’s attempt to use a mind trick on Boss Nass led to him sending them through the planet core – weak-minded enough to be open to persuade, but strong enough to still send them to their apparent deaths. Later Jar Jar is given a command for the sole reason that Nass thinks it will be funny if he dies on the front lines.

Jake Lloyd is fine as young Anakin. I think anyone who harassed him is a real piece of shit; the young lad gave up acting. Now, I don’t feel it was necessary to have a child protagonist for child hands to dig it. I wanted to be Luke as a child and we never see him younger than his late teens. However, in skewing the film younger, Lucas allowed the audience to grow with the characters. If you see The Phantom Menace at ten years old and then Revenge of the Sith at sixteen, you’re going to have a really engaging experience of learning about how storytelling works even if you’re not a kid that writes fan fiction or film reviews or whatever; just the subliminal process of understanding the story on a different level as a child than as an adolescent will be clarifying about your tastes. Anyway, the pod race sound design is fantastic, and it really stresses Anakin’s immense talent as an engineer and a mechanic that, at nine years old, he can build a racer to compete with professionals that travel the galaxy; such a good racing vehicle that, after he stalls out at the starting line, he’s able to come from behind and win the race from last position.[2]

The Duel of the Fates is a fun fight scene; I feel that the original films are still generally superior for emotional impact to those in the prequels, while the prequel films have much better choreography by and large.[3] But, Obi-Wan yelling “No!” as Qui-Gon is felled is a two-way narrative echo: in the real world, it echoes what we had already seen; in the universe of the films, it foreshadows Luke’s later experience seeing Obi-Wan die. In fact, while I don’t care for George Lucas deciding over the course of these films that learning to be a Force Ghost is a special technique you have to learn (I feel like it cheapens the spirituality by making it just a skill besides rendering a bunch of cool stuff more complicated before Disney rendered it noncanonical), Obi-Wan seeing this happen to Qui-Gon and being enraged by it before later giving up his own life peacefully (“If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine) is meaningful without Qui-Gon teaching him to be a Force Ghost as a ghost, but it gains a wrinkle with that addition.

In the end, one of Padme Amidala’s security head Captain Quarsh Panaka (Hugh Quarshie) says the Trade Federation can “kiss their trade franchise goodbye,” setting up the plot of the next film. The Trade Federation is a founding member of the Confederation of Independent Systems, the “Separatists” or CIS. They don’t seem to have lost their ability to produce robot soldiers, thanks to the connections they make with the people of Geonosis. But they are eager to escape the control of the Republic. We know little of their inner lives, but they were the first pawns on the board for Sheev, the first moves he made and the central antagonists of this film while he manipulates from the darkness.

The thing that makes the prequels hard for some critical viewers is that they’re children’s films with a lot of adult themes. This is harder for adults than children because children don’t typically decide what is or isn’t appropriate for them. They don’t hear “trade federation” and “illegal blockade” and start worrying about the feasibility of intergalactic trade or asking an accountant or comptroller to start fact-checking the film. All the information they need to figure out if they’re having a good time – and, indeed, all a critic needs to know whether or not it’s a good movie – is take the information as given and apply it to the world as received. Any insights you have about the real world are only useful and applicable so far as they speak to the real world stimuli which George Lucas and his collaborators are responding to in the piece. Any real life insights about trade or politics that fly in the face of the universe are tertiary to the experience; to over-apply it is to at best mistake the metaphor and allegory for one-to-one recreation. Otherwise it’s sophistry and pedantry, isn’t it?

Feudalism is hard for kids to wrap their minds around but if you present them a film with a king, a tax collector, and a peasant, they can follow the story without a ledger or an abacus. They might miss that Palpatine is manipulating Amidala, but they migh tnot. They’re certainly capable of seeing the Jedi are treating Anakin unfairly and that he shouldn’t have had to leave his mother behind. Those things are textual.

I like the prequels more than I did the last time I watched them, and I’m really impressed that George Lucas was so willing to try things. Now we get family-targeted blockbusters on an annual schedule that feel like they have all their edges sanded off and undercut all their interesting choices or ideas. For all the subjective flaws of the Star Wars prequels, and the arguments that can be made over which story ideas could have been better executed, there were at least ideas at work and play here. They may just stand the test of time.[4]

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[1] He even uses the Force to influence the die to make sure it lands on the color representing Anakin when their owner, Watto, won’t let him bet for them both.

[2] I jokingly compared it on Twitter/X to Sergio (“Checo”) Pérez falling into 18^th during the Sakhir Grand Prix in 2020 and coming from behind to win the race. It was a great story on Drive to Survive, winning him a spot at Red Bull as he was pushed out of the Racing Point team that would eventually become Aston Martin. I don’t know who’s Lance Stroll in this picture, but I guess Qui-Gon is Christian Horner.

[3] (of course, there’s a huge step up in the fencing choreography between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back)

[4] Inevitably the Sequels will be reappraised and I’m not much looking forward to it. 7 is a remake of A New Hope, The Last Jedi is the most interesting and divisive so it may just be an unstoppable discourse-generating force for the next decade and a half, and The Rise of Skywalker is terrible but someone enjoyed it so someone will reclaim it as they get older. Because that’s how these things work. Critics and enthusiasts develop tastes within the context of a given childhood and adolescence and then even as their tastes change and grow some of that sticks to them and reoccurs.

Drive to Survive Part 2 (Seasons 4-6)

After I completed Drive to Survive season 3, I went a lot slower through the latter three seasons, watching them in bunches with big gaps between them. Over time, in part due to getting more informed about the sport by outside sources, what the show leaves out becomes more apparent. And in exploring those gaps, perhaps the value it does add similarly becomes clearer.

Season three ended with broad allusions to social justice through an interview with former perpetual champion Lewis Hamilton. Season six ends shortly after Hamilton recommits to Mercedes. In the time between Hamilton recording that episode where he signed a two-year contract extension (turned out in real life to be a one year guaranteed with one optional year) the episode coming out, Lewis Hamilton announced a contract with Fred Vasseur at Ferrari, to begin in 2025. I expect season seven of Drive to Survive to discuss that; there’s been a lot of drama off the grid in real life this season, and I’m curious how much of it will make it onto the show.

What it has missed, as a corporate-approved product intended to garner attention for F1 from Netflix audience members, is the minor controversies that have intersected with Hamilton’s career, and his activism. There is, for instance, his wearing of jewelry that the FIA has tried to crack down on for opaque and vague reasons that just feel like racism from afar. There are plenty of moments of racist abuse from his early F1 days that of course the show barely glances at, but it also never mentions things that happened during the show, even comments made about that racism in support of Hamilton by Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff. Since 2020, Hamilton has been involved with various social justice efforts, including speaking out against police human rights abuses in Bahrain and anti-LGBTQ laws in Hungary and Saudi Arabia, speaking out about the BLM movement in 2020, supporting UN campaigns, tons of work in fundraising. Obviously, being committed to charitable causes isn’t the same thing as trying to pull apart the oppressive systems which makes them necessary, but it is valuable and it is odd that it goes unmentioned except that the show is not interested in the inner lives or off-the-grid activities of the racers except as contributes to a narrative of mystique and spectacle around the sport.

The other thing that stuck out to me a lot over time, as I started to try to become more knowledgeable about Formula One from non-Drive to Survive sources, was the show’s lack of interest in technical explanations. Coming through the series, you will take away that tires need to be changed and pit stops need to be quick. You don’t really learn about what it means to balance break and tire use, just that some cars, drivers, and teams, are better at it than others. This isn’t necessarily a flaw, but it is a limitation. The show continues to be focused on the personalities of the drivers, the managers, and their conflicts from contract negotiations as the focus of the drama. What is missing is any sort of relationship between the viewer and most of the engineers and pit crews. I guess that would be a different show.

So much of it is about withholding information to have dramatic reveals later. If your only understanding of F1 came from Drive to Survive, you would have no idea that James Vowles was the lead engineer at Mercedes before becoming Team Principle at Williams, until the show reveals that information to you through using old recordings in conjunction with new interviews. I’m personally fascinated that Adrian Newey, the engineer/designer/technical director that wrote the book How to Design a Car and had successful stints at Williams and McLaren, has been at Red Bull since 2006 and it never comes up in the show. It’s come up quite a bit in the racing media lately because he’s supposed to be leaving Red Bull’s F1 team after next year, to design Red Bull’s first racing hypercar (or to join Ferrari or McLaren, as rumors have recently persisted).

Red Bull is still winning on the grid (except for one race this season where Max Verstappen didn’t finish and one where he made a mistake hitting a cone and finished second) but have been embroiled in controversy because team principal Christian Horner is being investigated for misconduct. Or, Red Bull investigated themselves and decided nothing was wrong, which you may imagine has not calmed controversy, while there seem to be some wrestling over control between Christian Horner and head of Red Bull driver development program Helmut Marko, who is close with Max and his father, and another important piece is possibly missing soon.

I realized something about the “what a film isn’t about and how it isn’t about it” criticism – it’s because sometimes a piece of art leaves you fucking starving for substance.

But the show still shines at highlighting how clever, funny, and driven their drivers are. One storyline focuses on media darling Daniel Ricciardo’s work as Red Bull’s third driver (i.e., he’s mainly doing marketing, something you wouldn’t know reserve drivers do until this season, because they’ve never paid them much attention aside from when Esteban Ocon was moving to Renault from Mercedes) until Nyck de Vries’s underwhelming results led to Ricciardo getting to take over Red Bull’s feeder team. One of the funniest scenes in the whole run of the show is, after Ricciardo does his test and ends up taking over for de Vries, former-AlphaTauri/Red Bull, current-Williams driver Alex Albon jokes about exactly how the DtS team will shoot and edit the comeback, and it’s very accurate and quite nearly precise. I laughed, I probably even ran it back.

I remain amused by the camaraderie among the drivers and team principals. Even the ones that really don’t like each other are frequently forced to sit next to each other and generally put on a good show of not hating each other. There’s a lot of verbal chess, and a lot of shit-eating grins and smiles that vary between being the fake smile of a sad man or a salesman. One of the more interesting storylines in the last season was Alpine (Renault’s new name) teammates Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly (coming over from AlphaTauri) not getting along well under Otmar Szafnauer’s stewardship, and starting to get along after Szafnauer was fired and the new team principal made them sit down and talk after a crash. We don’t know why the two, who had known each other since childhood, had beef except that they were always competitive and things cooled down some afterward.

The show is interesting in that it often catches on record things that seem like they ought to be private, but then there is such editorial direction that we are missing out on tons of context. I am by no means an expert on Formula One, but just listening to the podcasts I do (Shift+F1, The Race F1 podcast, which is partnered with The Athletic, Late Braking F1, and Autosport) and reading stories compiled in Motorsports Beat and The Race, on occasion, I’ve gotten a lot of context I wouldn’t otherwise have. I learned from The Athletic that F1 has an all-women feeder league called F1 Academy.¹ Their races are free on YouTube (as well as being on F1TV). Toto Wolff’s wife Susie (who we meet initially in the series as a Team Principal in Formula E) is now the managing director of F1 Academy; this comes up in her description caption, but not otherwise.[1]

I mention all this because the show is very well crafted to give you the idea that you are seeing behind the curtain and, in some ways, you are. I’m surprised how often we get to see into pre-race strategy meetings, but we just get a broad understanding of what is going on. The pre-press event meetings between drivers and their PR handlers feel a little more bare, but even there the drivers have some barriers up. The sport has lots of layers of opacity and the show is still manicured to some extent to keep the audience within certain boundaries and present a certain version of the spectacle. In this way, it is reflective of a broad trend among documentaries as they exist in this moment; it’s not that it never happened before, but we are getting a lot of journalism-adjacent stuff that evades inquiry and elides problems. Speaking just to Netflix-produced docuseries, Last Chance U felt a lot more incisive.

Now, all my hating frontloaded, the show does still work at getting me invested in the emotional highs and lows of the drivers. The stuttering of Mercedes the past several seasons as Red Bull first took the driver’s (2020) and the Constructor’s (2021-2023) championships from them has been fascinating to watch. I felt bad about Valtteri Bottas losing his job in season 4 (2021), though George Russell has proven a very capable teammate for Lewis Hamilton. Yuki Tsunoda’s relationship with Pierre Gasly at AlphaTauri (formerly Toro Rosso, now Visa Cash App RB) was nice to see – it’s funny to contrast when the teammates get along and when they don’t. Now-former teammates Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris got on great at McLaren and seem to have remained close, with Carlos congratulating Lando’s first podium even as they finished second and third with different teams, and again this last race weekend with Carlos embracing Lando after he got his first win at the 2024 Miami Grand Prix.[2] Yuki seemed sad Pierre was leaving and, similarly, does not seem especially close with Daniel Ricciardo. After much hotheadedness, Yuki is having the best season of his young career this year.

One of the sadder stories in season five focused on Mick Schumacher, son of the legendary Michael Schumacher, and Max Verstappen’s childhood friend (at least, they went on holiday together when Michael and Jost Verstappen were racing). It’s nice that he has Sebastian Vettel to help him adjust to F1, and unfortunate that it never really came together for him. He’s currently Mercedes’s reserve driver; we’ll see what happens in the future.

The season 6 premiere showing Lawrence Stroll’s reveal party for the new Aston Martin felt a lot like Succession, and that felt intentional. My favorite episode might have been Forza Ferrari, just because I find Ferrari attractive and because you learn a lot about how connected current Ferrari team principal (and, in the course of the series, former Alfa Romeo team principal) Fred Vasseur is to so many of the current drivers on the F1 grid. The contract talk episodes around Lando Norris (episode 3) and Lewis Hamilton (episode 6) are also interesting, especially because they do a lot to reveal how deeply the drivers are to their team principals, primary professionally but on a longer trajectory than you might assume.[3] The finale in Las Vegas felt in some ways to be a letdown. Much like the season 3 finale which saw Max Verstappen win his first Drivers’ Championship, it helps illuminate something you will get if you watch the races or read about them beyond the series: F1 officiating (i.e., the rulings of the stewards and the FIA) can feel very fickle and unforgiving. Guenther Steiner leaving Haas F1 felt inevitable, but still unceremonious.

I continue to find Drive to Survive entertaining and understand why it can’t operate on the level I might like it to. Nonetheless, once it gets someone into the sport and they broaden their sights beyond what it shows, its arbitrary barriers can feel somewhat devious if not entirely malevolent. One of the odder choices I have neglected to mention is how frequently closed captions will show a name of a person you have not been formally introduced to as a viewer, leaving you to piece together their relationship to the story as it unfolds, or do some internet searching and find out, for instance, the name of a journalist speaking in Italian telling Daniel “I told you not to trust Zak” as Daniel is being ushered out of McLaren. Drive to Survive is a marketing exercise, after all, that opens the door to knowledge and entertainment, one I’m uncannily eager to revisit. These are charming fellows and an exciting sport. Maybe I’ll watch the Schumacher documentary next.²

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[1] She’s also a former kart racer, sports car racer, Formula Renault, and touring race car driver who had a short stay in Formula One as a development driver for Williams. It’s fair enough that her whole background didn’t come up, it just feels like her running a major development initiative for F1 *might*.

[2] Though it seemed to me from how the narrative was constructed in the show that part of Lando Norris’s problems with Daniel Ricciardo stemmed from bitterness over Sainz leaving, but there’s no real proof of that and I mentioned before that the show intentionally leaves fuzzy timelines.

[3] I’ve already mentioned Mercedes boss Toto Wolff. McLaren boss Zak Brown is one of my favorite personalities on the show, persistently happy to needle Christian Horner.

1. So this originally said “The Atlantic” because I was typing too quickly. I haven’t learned anything about sports from The Atlantic ever. ↩︎
2. This footnote was added in WordPress so it’s different than the ones added in Word, but anyway, my favorite drivers are Carlos Sainz (I found him so endearing and have been so pleased with all his success), Lewis Hamilton (the statistical GOAT is a Black man who cares about the world beyond racing), Lando Norris (in part because Carlos likes him, which is also part of why I like LeClerc, but I also just find him charming), and Daniel Ricciardo (because he was so fun in the first season of the show and managed to maintain that energy despite his travails; I hope he picks it up on the grid), but I don’t dislike any of them. I find Tsunoda charming, I like Bottas, I’m pulling for the underdogs KMags and Hulkenberg and thought it was funny Magnussen semeed to push for Hulkenberg to come on considering their past quarrels. I think Alonso’s love of being the bad guy is funny. I want Albon to get another shot in a top car, or for Williams to really get it together. And this list can change at any time. ↩︎

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.

Drafting in the CMS

I’m drafting in the CMS in the hope that not having a backup built-in via handwriting or on my PC will encourage concision. That’s not always my strong suit. The purpose of this place on the internet is for me to talk about movies, games, TV, books (fiction and non, including graphic novels and comics) at length at my discretion. This blog exists for me to discuss my ongoing cultivation of a critical attitude and identity, to discuss knowledge production and the commodification of the soul. Sometimes I will heavily edit pieces to be more in line with what a paying publication might like. Sometimes I will just allow a smattering of random thoughts to adhere or congeal into something hopefully legible. I am writing this in January 2024, as the month transitions from its middle to its late part. I am also amid transitions in my life, some of which just have to do with getting to know myself better. Fear of vulnerability has compromised my writing before, and I will struggle through that.

I’m both aware that no good writing comes without releasing something of yourself for judgment, and that the internet is no less a punitive and surveilling place than it was when I was younger. Arguably it’s even more that than it was before. This fills me with anxieties both perfectly logical and seemingly irrational. I’m not going to dig that out for you right now, but we will no doubt return to it. To courage and cowardice and expectations of one’s self and one’s community and one’s society. About the constant process of selling ourselves, about the further grinding of humanity into marketable, consumable bites.

This space, P.C. Vulpes, will undergo changes as I try to get my footing and figure out what I’m doing here besides jumping ship from Substack because of the whole Nazi thing (a bunch of writers asked “hey what’s up with all these Nazis you’re making money from and promoting?” and substack brass said “don’t worry, it’s cool, we don’t like Nazis but we’re not gonna make them go anywhere”) and because I feel like WordPress as a content management system doesn’t have the same expectations of using its users that Substack as a platform does (for instance, they aren’t trying to pivot to being a social media platform while refusing to do moderation), though I may be proven wrong about that yet. There are still many publications I respect there, and I’m not sure yet whether I’ll get rid of my Substack yet, but I’m leaning toward moving out and away.

I suppose one thing you should know about me, more than anything else, is that I think art and entertainment are important and the central purpose of this blog is for me to sketch out my thoughts on why that is and how it works. I don’t always want to care about these things, because our preconceptions about their triviality (or as I’ve so internalized it) makes me feel guilt as if I’m consumed by distraction while the world burns and collapses. But I’ve seen some journalists from Gaza that call themselves “storytellers” and I do think stories are important even if the concept of the importance of stories has been used to prop up bad art. For whatever it’s worth, I recognize that a genocide is ongoing in Gaza (alongside crimes against humanity in Sudan, unrest in Congo, and a war in Ukraine) among other serious issues that are worth your full attention. Anytime you spend here is a gift to me. I hope I make it worth your while. Sometimes I doubt the importance of art because the constraints and contrivances of what is valued widely (for instance, the box office, the metacritic score, a vaguely defined sense of “representation”) are not necessarily in line with what I find edifying, but besides that these data points can provide context, things don’t always stop mattering to you just because you realize other things have more dire or urgent consequences. I guess I say all that to say that from time to time I may just be talking about politics, but it will likely largely be in the context of writing about how art-media-entertainment-products reflect a sociopolitical environment.

Can you see it? Can you see me struggling with concision as my mind goes in a bunch of different directions? Maybe this will mostly be a place for rambling. But, in any case, it fills me with joy to write. I have a full-time job that pays me to live and I do work that I enjoy and value, and I am here writing because nothing else makes me feel the way writing does. It’s funny, with as much of it is done by typing on computers these days, that we call it writing. Be that as it may, here I am sharing it with you.

Welcome to what I am, for now, calling P.C. Vulpes.