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.

---

[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.

---

[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]

---

[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.

Microsoft’s Big Adventure – What Are Console Wars But Corporate Competition Persevering?

This is about framing news and then finding indignation at similar but distinct framing.

I avoid criticizing games journalists as a class of workers or writers because I try to avoid denigrating generalizations, especially about types of work I respect and they get enough stick from tribalist gamers whose identities are wrapped up in affiliation with a commercial brand.[1] In fact, that group, the veterans of the console wars, are among our focal subjects today.

It’s funny (if not completely without reason) that some forms of consumption, including of art and media, are looked at as superior to others. Calling someone a “cinephile” doesn’t quite rate as an insult, but “film bro” does. I know there are TV critics that love the form, but I haven’t ever heard anyone call themselves “a TV fan,” though I am sure they exist. But gamers, well… Gamers specifically have a tattered reputation based in one part on their (our? I’ll return to that question in a second) medium of choice being considered an object for children and in another part on longstanding cultural practices of casual sexism and racism that have ratcheted up in the past few years, after being mainstays over the last several. This reactionary ratcheting is in part a response to these cultural markers being challenged by serious game writers in the Trump years and since, not that the problem or the challenges to it are as young as eight years old. I remember once (here we are returning to that question) on Waypoint several years ago, the crew were responding to a listener question about whether they consider themselves “gamers.” The answer boiled down to that it depends on the audience: when games media people are talking about “gamers” they may be talking about the consumer-identity group with the soiled reputation of misogyny and other bigotry that want the form to be respected but don’t want it to be criticized as a serious artform should be, but they wouldn’t necessarily respond with concern if people within their family that don’t play videogames referred to them as such. The well-earned bad reputation of “gamers” is partially maintained through the constant and perpetual slandering of games journalists.[2]

In general, journalism in the United States has a bad reputation. I don’t think it’s unique to here, but this is where I live. Some of this reputation is because of the corporate capture of the media through increased consolidation. Some of it is because the most well-paid of them are frequently stenographers and propagandists for the powers that be, such as police departments and large multinational conglomerates. Some of it is because the most powerful and least morally upright are good at depicting everyone else as “the media” and themselves as brave truthtellers.[3] Of course, the tendency to critique a group of which you are part by naming that group as if you are outside of it is a common enough tactic, whether done as good faith self-criticism or generalizing putdown.[4] I say all that to mention that I am also not trying to come across as a games journalist speaking truth to the power of more mainstream games journalists. I’ve done very little games journalism, and none recently. This is commentary.

This is all preamble to discuss recent rumors out of Xbox, and how they have been handled. After a merger with Activision-Blizzard that took two years among legal scandals, related labor trouble, and regulatory hurdles, Microsoft’s gaming division swiftly laid off over 1900 people last month. Early indications are that this year will see a contraction of the workforce across games (AKA the disciplining of labor by capital) at a rate even worse than last year, which was an absolute bloodbath.

Microsoft’s gaming division has three subsidiaries – Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax Media, and Activision Blizzard which have over forty subsidiary studios between them and around 20,000 employees. They own some of the biggest names in gaming after more than a half-decade of acquisitions.[5] They compete with Sony while Nintendo does their own thing. After “losing” the last console generation to Sony’s PlayStation 4 with the confusing vision of their Xbox One, it was the hope of Microsoft’s games division and fans of their games that all these acquisitions would turn into some console-selling, culture-driving games. That has yet to be seen. It was, however, briefly rumored that Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, two Xbox exclusive games, are going to come to Sony.[6]

The initial reactions to this I saw out of games media were a combination of “why do stans care so much about this” and “wow, looks like X-Box is falling apart,” sometimes in the same article.[7] This reads as at least a little bit disingenuous, though it is worth noting that the author of that article, Luke Plunkett, pointed out to his cohosts on the Aftermath Hours podcast that shortly after saying it didn’t matter, they said they need to buy PlayStations. On the February 16^th follow-up episode, guest Ash Parrish (The Verge) pointed out that they collectively transitioned from saying Xbox minimizing exclusives wasn’t a big deal to highlighting the success of PlayStation semi-exclusive Helldivers 2 (it’s also on PC, but not Xbox or Switch). To keep it very simple, Sony has a lot of appealing first-party games that do not come to Xbox. If the big first-party games that were exclusive to Xbox are now coming to PlayStation, why didn’t I just buy a PlayStation to begin with? Now, for one thing, I quite like Game Pass – it’s introduced me to games I otherwise might never have bought, like Katana Zero, Weird West, The Ascent, and Hades. For another thing, I skipped a generation; while we were an X-Box household for much of my childhood, I have affinity for the console (my first console was a PSX, then a PS2, and I currently have a PS2 and PS3 in addition to my Xbox, so I’m hardly a gaming monotheist).[8]

More important, perhaps, than the qualitative value of understanding my lens is the recurrent framing that produces these discourses. If you always frame what is happening in games as a competition between corporations, how else are game players, games enthusiasts, “gamers” supposed to see it? Having a corporate-aligned identity is a bad thing, but having a perspective framed within corporate competition is unavoidable if that is how even the least corporate-aligned publications see the thing. And they’re not wrong to see it that way: games is a big industry made up of big businesses. But if you, as a member of the games media, see Xbox putting some games on PlayStation as possibly foreshadowing the death of their console business, how out of line is it for the game-playing public to see it that way? Acting as if the sky is falling is out of hand, but seeing what everyone else sees doesn’t make you imperceptive.

Whether moving all their first party games to other consoles is in line with Microsoft’s vision as established over the last several years with Game Pass is up for debate, but it feels desperate as the Xbox is being outsold about 2.5-to-1 by the new PlayStation and Microsoft has all these developers they need to do something with. One of my overriding concerns is what will happen to those people if Microsoft decides to contract; certainly all the people involved in hardware development have to be looking around wondering what’s going to happen with their jobs.

There were statements made by Microsoft gaming President and CEO Phil Spencer around the launch of the Xbox Series X and Series S that denoted that was their general direction – they want people playing their games in as many places as possible; that could mean bringing Game Pass to console competitors. Patrick Klepek at Remap Radio argues that it’s likely the subscriber numbers have stagnated and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella doesn’t want to be in the business of console exclusivity anymore. The team over at GamesIndustry.biz argue that it’s aligned with their longterm strategy of putting all their X-Box exclusive games on PC long before Game Pass. Frankly, I think that’s going a bit soft on them for the sole reason that Microsoft is a software company that already has market share on most computers – they own the most popular (as in most-used not most well-liked) operating system in Windows and most popular (see above) suite of electronic work tools in Office. They cannot lose out on market share by making their games available on PC (as they have for two decades) because they already make money on PC hand over fist in the bigger parts of their company. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that someone that does not use their PC primarily for gaming will play an Xbox game on PC and later buy an Xbox (though it may be increasingly less likely to need to do that as they position themselves as the lead cloud-streaming games company). It’s not a concession the same way Sony putting their games on PC is, or Microsoft putting major first-party releases on PlayStation and Nintendo would be.

In any case, one thing I think is funny about games media is that, like all media, the need to constantly be telling people the news means that your work sometimes feels like it has a short memory or a short attention span which provokes hot takes and hyperbole.[9] The easy comparison for me is always sports. The Football Ramble (my favorite soccer podcast) has had a decent amount of narratives about Chelsea F.C. over the course of the last several months.[10] But with sports there are seasons, so there comes a point where you do have a complete narrative. With games, the attention and memory is as short, but there aren’t real seasons with firm lines; there are generations (which are averaging about six years before turnover) and there are years.

I wrote the bulk of this two or three weeks ago. I thought about not posting it. Then Jeff Gerstmann (formerly of Giant Bomb) posted this Tweet and it made me feel insane.

“The fanboy stuff was already out of control but I gotta say I’m really not looking forward to this new wave of Xbox Flat Earthers who will take every single move the company makes from here on out as a sign that they’re quitting the console business.”

Like, not for nothing, but Gerstmann used to be coworkers with Patrick Klepek. Patrick Klepek, Rob Zacny, Janet Garcia, and Ricardo Contreras at Remap are not Xbox Flat Earthers. And I don’t think other journalists considering the possible ramifications of Xbox ending exclusivity or stopping making consoles, whether it’s Danny O’Dwyer and the rest of the gang at NoClip, Jordan Middler, Andy Robinson, and Chris Scullion at Video Games Chronicle, or the aforementioned Aftermath Hours folk, or so on. And I guess finding this all so frustrating is a signal about me not being a games journalist any more than I’m a Gamer:

I will concede that capital-G gamers produce myriad problems as an extended internet community. And, moreover, I recognize that my experience online (mainly Twitter) is so different from what big name video games journalists experience as to be a world apart with just the occasional crossover. I concede that the more concentrated around a given subject your Twitter feed or your professional life is, the more likely you are to see its deranged dregs. And some many factors about the digital communities around games contribute to them being perpetually generally hyperbolic, rude, and toxic toward games journalists.[11] So, I am saying, I understand that this framing feels self-contradictory to me because I am not in the same gauntlet as these folks; I mostly only see opinions about games and gaming from games journalists, games critics, or other writers or fans that I follow because I think that they have interesting opinions.

Irrespective of that, as long as the headlines, articles, and podcasts are framing these changes as breaking news which needs immediate response, even if some of that response is about telling hysterical fans to pipe down, you are still contributing to the framing of competition through which the industry is seen. That said, games enthusiasts, fans, the gaming audience, game players, gamers, are not obligated to pick a team. It is no doubt somewhat the fault of the consumer if they (we?) cannot separate the framing of corporate combat from console wars. But even if they don’t have to pick a team, they do have to pick a thing to buy to play videogames on, and it makes sense that if you spend $600 on one machine and are told afterward that, because of change in corporate direction, you will not be able to access what’s available on the other machine, but the other machine will be able to access what you thought you were trading-off for, some level of disappointment is acceptable if not laudable.

I also think that, aside from being inundated with overreactors, journalists are inundated with news. Exposure to a lot of it means you have a better gauge on what is important, how to read and examine it critically; that’s kind of the job.

Now, not to be outdone for bad news, between Microsoft rumors three weeks ago and a Microsoft podcast two weeks ago that announced Starfield and Indiana Jones are not among the first four games to go multiplatform and that Microsoft is staying in the console business for the foreseeable future, Sony announced that their initial expectations for PlayStation 5 sales are coming up short and they’re in the latter half of the console’s lifecycle. Which in turn began discourse about how the PS5 doesn’t have any games as well as a more interesting discourse about the unsustainability of these current trends in game development and console manufacturing. Or maybe it was just Marc Normandin having an idea I agree with and folks at various podcasts arguing that we don’t need to move to the next consoles when we’ve barely seen what the current ones can do. Their ridiculous hardware specifications have hardly been tested; the current length of AAA game development means major series are skipping generations for their releases. Why not extend the window and the console lifecycle?

Obsidian’s Grounded and Pentiment are coming to PlayStation and Switch. Hi-Fi Rush (Tango Gameworks/Bethesda Softworks) and Sea of Thieves (Rare) are coming to PlayStation. The new fights are the same as the old fights and console wars are stupid, but corporate competition is the framework of discourse around game news.[12] And this is already old.

---

[1]There is a society-wide problem with people not recognizing that journalists exist to defend their interests to those in power. This is true in politics, in sports, in entertainment. There are a lot of reasons for this (such as journalists who claim to be doing that when they’re very much not), but the overarching reason under whose umbrella all other reasons fall is that it is the way people with money and power want it – they want the average worker-citizen-consumer to think of themselves as a consumer first and a worker last and to identify with corporations over their fellow workers within those corporations or critiquing those corporations. Sports are a great example of this because you can see how angry, for instance, college football supporters get at journalists who rightfully critique their sporting organization of choice (typically a state-funded university) for, for instance, hiring a mediocre defensive coordinator under whose watch a player died at practice. Many of the people that run and own media corporations also fund political campaigns. See this article from 2021 at USA Today: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/09/08/tracking-media-owners-political-donations/5719743001/

[2] It is worth noting that however someone self-identifies within the realm of being a casual, enthusiastic, critical, or enthusiastic and critical consumer of games, there are overlapping and sometimes oppositional media for them to consume, as well as different layers of journalists, influencers, and critics that they consult, and circles that work concentrically or in Venn diagrams on the internet. This is because experiences aren’t monolithic, and perhaps also because that enthusiasm can breed contempt for people with different perspectives, even if given internet communities or forum boards or what have you have internal conflicts. This is part of a wider hypothesis (part of it is around how communities and outlets coalesce around viewpoints sometimes incidentally if not accidentally) I will explore when I finally get down to detailing some podcast recommendations, and I probably need to finish the two McKenzie Wark books I’ve started (Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory) to tease this out some more.

[3] Take for instance the way “content creators” and “influencers” cultivate the goodwill and loyalty of the gaming public while taking money to use reviews as marketing as far as this topic, or, in the realm of politics, the most watched cable news network in the country referring to less-watched channels as “the mainstream” or “lamestream” media.

[4] Some of my favorite examples of this are “white people,” “Western leftists,” and “Film Twitter”

[5] ZeniMax media is the holding company for Bethesda Softworks (a publisher with the development division Bethesda Game Studios), known especially for The Elder Scrolls and the post-2005 iteration of Fallout. ZeniMax also holds Arkane (known for the Dishonored games and Prey and currently developing a Blade game for Marvel) and id Software (known for the Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein series, among others), MachineGames (who has mostly been a support studio on Wolfenstein games by id and Arkane, and Quake games, and is now developing an Indiana Jones game), Roundhouse Studios, Tango Gameworks, and ZeniMax Online. Xbox Game Studios comprises fifteen studios, including inXile (developer of Bard’s Tale and Wasteland 3 among others), Obsidian (developer of Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and others), Rare Limited (GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, among others), 343 Industries (the Halo developer successor to Bungie), and several others. Activision Blizzard owns Activision (which has several subsidiaries including Raven Software and is primarily known as the Call of Duty studio), Blizzard Entertainment (the World of Warcraft studio), King (the Candy Crush Saga studio), Major League Gaming Corp (a professional esports organization), and a film corporation. Microsoft bought up all these companies in the hopes of becoming a bigger player in gaming.

[6] Most speculation about this points to Starfield coming at a later date, the way Ghosts of Tsushima, The Last of Us, and Spider-Man came to PC from PlayStation.

[7] “While the idea of releasing Xbox-exclusive games on PlayStation might seem incendiary to anyone whose brain has been turned to paste by decades of console war, it’s also the only possible outcome here.” Followed a few paragraphs later by “But if, as these reports suggest, big changes are afoot–these games would be just the first wave–then what even is Xbox anymore?”

[8] It also gives access to EA Play and has some limited crossover with Ubisoft’s Uplay. It’s a great service, and I’ve tended to buy indie games that come off of it, like all of the ones mentioned in this sentence, though I do also worry about its long term affects undercutting real sales.

[9] Kat Bailey on another of my favorite games podcasts, “Axe of the Blood God,” said that this console generation was four years old; the PS5 and Xbox Series X and S came out in November of 2020; it is barely over 3 years old.

[10] Inconsistent results, losing streaks, a brief winning streak… we lost to Liverpool in the Carabao Cup Final today.

[11] (the medium being explored exclusively electronically, frequently online, the median and mode ages skewing younger, the cyclical or symbiotic relationship between the worst of tech culture and the habits of game culture, other material and social factors beyond my immediate grasp)

[12] Some of the podcasts I listened to and am responding to or otherwise have affected my thinking obviously include Remap Radio, Aftermath Hours, GamesIndustry.biz, Video Games Podcast (VGC), NoClip Crew Cast. I’m behind on Nextlander, but I tend to like their thinking as well (which is not the same as ubiquitously agreeing with it, which I think should be obvious to point).

Fargo Season 5 – On the Confused Politics of Billionaire Matriarchs

There have been five seasons of Noah Hawley’s Fargo show based on the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo.[1] I have seen four of them (not season three, because I didn’t know it existed until four was already out). At some point I’ll rectify that, but today we’re going to talk about my positive but mixed reception to season 5, the most closely related to the first film in plot and theme since at least the first season.

Fargo season 5 follows Juno Temple’s Dorothy “Dot” Lyon on a breakneck adventure that takes the premise of the original film and tilts it, illustrating the American rightwing militia movement’s connection with “constitutional sheriffs” as backdrop to a story about domestic abuse. After a brawl breaks out at a PTA meeting, Dorothy is briefly arrested by Scandia, Minnesota police officer Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) before being bailed out by her beloved kindly husband Wayne (David Rysdahl), owner and manager of a car dealership. Dot has a strained relationship with her mistrustful billionaire debt baroness mother-in-law Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who nonetheless loves her tomboy granddaughter Scotty (Sienna King). Not long after seeing them pose for a Christmas card that looks like it’s for a Republican politician’s campaign (rifles in hand all), we see a sort of recreation of the kidnapping scene from the film.

Dot is knitting and watching TV when men arrive, peering threateningly through her windows. Unlike the film, she hides before they enter, then scars and maims the men, and her husband isn’t in on it. Rather, these kidnappers were sent by her ex-husband, Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), an abusive psychopath rancher who runs the Stark County, North Dakota sheriff’s office like an organized crime syndicate, purchasing surplus military hardware from the federal government to hand off to his militia leader father-in-law (Michael Copeman as Odin Little). Tillman is supported in this role most closely by his son and deputy Gator (Joe Keery) and ranch foreman Bowman (Conrad Coates).[2]

In any case, the kidnappers get stopped on the highway in North Dakota just like in the film and an officer is killed just like in the film, but there are two major differences – for one thing, the officer has a partner this time (Lamorne Morris as Whitley “Witt” Farr); for another, they’re alerted to the situation by Dot jumping out of the car and running away. She’s a wily one, later described by the Welsh kidnapper Ole Munch (pronounced “Oola Munk,” played by Sam Spruell) as “a tiger.” After Dot kills the other and wounds Munch, who had shot Witt (whose bleeding she helps staunch), she returns home claiming she wasn’t taken, she just needed to blow off steam. A big presence in the story throughout the season are the psychological ramifications of Dot’s past suffering – she’s optimistic and sometimes delusional, wanting to simultaneously safeguard her home while claim nothing happened. She just wants to forget, to make the past disappear; unfortunately, it cannot, though she finds her freedom in the end.

Ole goes to settle his debt with Roy and Gator, who try to double-cross him and incite a vendetta that carries through the season. Munch, it turns out, is a centuries-old Welsh sin-eater. For reasons still unclear to me, every season of Fargo except the first one has a supernatural or extraterrestrial element. This one works within the story better than season 4’s (there it felt a bit deus ex machina, in season 2 it was mostly an aside; here it felt like an added wrinkle to an effective murderer). Meanwhile, Roy and Gator continue their pursuit of Dot, culminating in violence at Halloween, Wayne getting shocked by some windows Dot had booby-trapped, and Lorraine having Dot committed to a mental ward, which she quickly escapes. At the same time, Indira’s life is weighed down by debt from her feckless, useless husband Lars (Lukas Gage) and is drawn into chasing Dot alongside Witt, while FBI Special Agents Joaquin (Nick Gomez) and Meyer (Jessica Pohly) investigate Tillman.

This culminates in a ranch showdown with murder and maiming. The tension in the story revolves around a few topics – one is policing and its purposes. When Lorraine is first interviewed by Officer Olmstead and her superior officer about Dot’s kidnapping, she returns a confrontational question: “What purpose do you serve?” going on to state that the cops’ job is to keep a “certain element” in line and support the status quo. The Tillmans use the sheriff’s office to enforce a traditionalist patriarchal ideology based on violent and regressive interpretations of the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. Farr tries to be everyone’s conscience, pursuing Dot to protect her, motivating Olmstead to do the same, and – like Olmstead – treating with the FBI agents in the interest of protecting Dot rather than focusing solely on a pursuit of Tillman.

Another axis is that of women’s rights and roles in patriarchal society – that hasn’t been completely absent in past seasons of Fargo, but everything flows through and around gender roles here. This season might have more to do with the movie aesthetically and thematically than any of the other season’s, with only the first season near as close. But part of its intrigue stems from altering the movie’s premise not just in the provenance and root of the kidnapping but the capacity of the wife as well as making the untrusting billionaire parent the mother-in-law. Jennifer Jason Leigh gave an able performance, but there were occasions where the writing felt confused about what it was trying to say about Lorraine. In painting a portrait of complexity, it struggles to make a clear point. Part of Lorraine’s arc with Olmstead and Dot includes getting Olmstead to come work for her as security chief after Olmstead stands up to her while advocating for Dot. This leads to some sweet and reconciliatory moments, but they stay within the tone of the character – she is clearly a woman who has fought and struggled a lot to get her position, and dealt with a lot of sexism while nonetheless being a ruthless businesswoman.[3]

This arc also includes an argument with Roy that sees Lorraine snipe at his politics for not believing in the social safety net among his general libertarian feelings as a Constitutional Sheriff of not needing to contribute to society beyond his own domain. It strikes as unlikely that a woman enriched by taking advantage of other people’s financial vulnerability and who looks at police as tools to discipline rabble cares much for the social safety net, especially because (before seeing the battered pictures of Dot) she says that everyone in our society wants to claim to be a victim. She is a modern-traditional center-right capitalist; as broader social ideas go, she calls her tomboyish granddaughter a “crossdresser” but doesn’t insist on her changing when they shoot the photo early on, and also says she’s “fond” of her. If she’s racist, it’s never explicit. Her husband is a silly drunk and she dresses down two misogynists whose bank she is trying to buy. She later destroys the life of one of them after he pulls out of the deal because he’s assaulted by Tillman. At the same time, she tries in the first episode to convince Dot to take a less hands-on approach to social betterment (i.e., philanthropic board roles rather than in-person planning to save libraries and protect vulnerable/controversial books), implying that she has an older liberal conception of the role of the wealthy in relation to society at large. Lorraine Lyon also has close relationships with important politicians in the region and is able to pull state and federal strings toward the big showdown at the end (it’s heavily implied she donated to Trump, though he is not named; referred to as “the Cheetoh” or some such).

Juno Temple is very compelling as Dot/Nadine, a wily action hero and survivor of grooming and abuse. Her combination of ingenuity, optimism, and delusion is captivating work. She is fun to follow and, despite her capabilities, we never lose dramatic tension; there’s ample concern for her wellbeing the whole way. The show avoids being too neat in its conclusion, and her final confrontation with Munch is very funny. Sometime after Ole helped Dot escape at the ranch, she returns home from errands with Scotty to find Ole with Wayne (who is as affable and admirable a car dealer I’ve ever seen on screen, saved from being completely unbelievable by his occasional cluelessness and his brain injury).[4] He feels they have unfinished business; she talks him out of it and conscripts the confused 500-year-old killer into helping make biscuits for dinner.[5]

But there’s one other thing that really bothered me – Witt Farr’s death, not as a matter of its execution, just that the only black main character dies, a martyr to the concept of a kind and caring police officer. Perhaps this specific tragedy is supposed to underline the current of injustice around which the show is built. He is unwaveringly honorable throughout the show, but not in a completely unbelievable fashion.[6] My point is that he’s not a paper-thin or two-dimensional character, exactly. He’s a bit of a boy scout but not eerily optimistic or anything. His death, then, feels a bit like it falls into an old trope (culturally ubiquitous in understanding if not in practice) of black characters being damned from the jump, serving as moral upholstery for white protagonists. That’s not the most generous reading, and I still think the show is worth watching. I stayed up until 3 or 4 am a few weeks ago watching the last three or four episodes in a row after taking ample time getting to that point. I guess it just makes me think about current and ongoing trends in television. The rise of prestige TV after the rise of miniseries has created a high standard of quality among some genres, and for this high value of set design and writing we wait several years for a substandard amount of episodes.[7]

Contemporary conversations about this shift over the past two decades have led to audiences and critics lamenting the lost age of 22-episode runs, and many of us squinting to figure out what determines what gets branded a drama and what gets branded a comedy and how that mixing of genre and the air of importance contribute to elevating [in prestige] works that aren’t necessarily “better” (more artistically interesting, narratively satisfying, or “important”).[8] Part of it is a process of trying to turn television into movies and vice versa, but I don’t have a hard stance on whether that’s a perversion of form or whatever.[9] What I find is that, in conjunction with a social media emphasis on enforcing consensus that is also tied to an addiction with objectively quantifying the subjective experience of engaging with art via numeric rating scales, people sometimes feel they’re being had and that we’ve lost something important, in part because the shows that take themselves very seriously don’t always pull it off.[10]

Fargo season 5 succeeds at being a captivating crime dramedy-thriller. It made me laugh, and occasionally gasp, and it got me to binge-watch, something I avoid doing with all sorts of highly-rated shows. I just wish it had also avoided making me scoff or roll my eyes in a finale that was, overall, well executed.

---

[1] I haven’t seen all their movies so I’m far from a definitive ranking. I did enjoy No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, and Hail Caesar! quite a bit. Anyway, I recently reviewed Ethan Coen’s new movie Drive-Away Dolls for Paste

[2] Gator is not infrequently racist when he crosses paths with North Dakota state trooper Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris) and Tillman’s deeply connected to rightwing militias, but there’s one person of color he apparently trusts. I don’t know how contradictory this is, but it is aesthetically significant – the relationship feels like an almost unwitting nod to Clarence Williams III in Hoodlum, if more respectful in personal conversation between Roy and Bowman. It could be the case that it was colorblind casting and all the imagined significance is created by this contrast but never explored.

[3] Jan Bos appears as her husband Wink Lyon in a few episodes to check on their injured son and provide a bit of comedy, but he’s otherwise a non-factor.

[4] It should be noted that when I say “believable” I don’t just mean “Oh, this could happen in real life.” I mean the character fits into the world that is constructed in a way that does not disrupt my ability to embrace the story and enjoy the narrative.

[5] After he gives a stirring and unsettling (and arguably inscrutable to the characters in the scene, who have not been watching this whole thing play out like the audience) monologue about how he came to North America in one wave of European settlement and was displaced by another, and can subsist without eating since eating the sin-tainted food that granted him immortality, he breaks into joyous tears at the experience of eating something baked with love.

[6] well, so far as you can believe any police officer going out of his way to do good

[7] I think the prestige model works for some shows – I think it’s fine that Fargo comes out every two years or so and only runs 10 at a time. I think it is substantially less well-suited to Disney+ Marvel and Star Wars shows. I am impressed that The Bear has just kept up year-over-year instead of making us wait a long time.

[8] Genre is a fluid think in the simplest of times, and I think of The Bear as a drama and Succession as a dark comedy, but runtime seems to determine awards categorization as much as anything else.

[9] Except with the Marvel stuff. That should all clearly be like 13-22 episode shows, as evidenced by the fact WB-DC did it successfully under Greg Berlanti’s stewardship, but because it came out of a movie universe they’re all structured like movies with cutting room detritus left in.

[10] See Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, and various seasons of anthology shows.

Formula 1: Drive to Survive (The First Three Seasons)

According to my mom, some of the first words I said as a child were car marques like Mitsubishi and Toyota. When I was little, I played games like Gran Turismo, Midnight Club, and Need for Speed. I watched movies with my family like Driven, Gone in Sixty Seconds, and Fast and the Furious. I wanted to race cars, I wanted to work on cars. These things did not come to pass, but deeply instilled passions die hard, and in a world of endless content, it takes only moderate means to find ways to tickle those parts of the brain. After watching Ferrari (and movies from Criterion’s 70s Car Movies collection like the original Gone in 60 Seconds and Steve McQueen’s Le Mans) I’ve had a hankering. And I’ve found myself drawn into Formula 1: Drive to Survive and I have been absolutely devouring it.[1]

In little over a week, I’ve watched three full seasons of the show. You’ve probably already heard all about the Netflix documentary series that shines a spotlight on the top level of international open-wheel racing. I became vaguely aware of the show because hosts of two of my favorite videogames podcasts (Rob Zacny from Remap Radio, as well as Three Movies Ahead and A More Civilized Age, and Danny O’Dwyer from NoClip) as well as a videogames journalist you may know from a much-used internet meme (Drew Scanlon) host the podcast Shift F1 and from when I used to listen to Bill Burr’s podcast religiously. But, like I said, I’m just absorbed and obsessed now.

Coming off the first season, two of my favorite drivers were the Spanish Carlos Sainz Jr. (son of rally world champion Carlos Sainz) and Australian Daniel Ricciardo. Daniel left Red Bull racing across from now-repeat champion Max Verstappen to join Renault, and Sainz got moved out from Renault and moved to McLaren after the first season; by the end of the third season, we know Ricciardo has already accepted terms to move to McLaren, where Sainz has taken an opportunity at Ferrari. One of the problems with the show is that its interest in showing each season from multiple angles, while providing a depth of feel for each driver, makes chronology confusing, especially in this case. Renault team principal Cyril Abiteboul was surprised and disappointed that Ricciardo had made his move before the season even started, and McLaren principal Zak Brown felt similarly about Sainz, but it isn’t exactly clear which of those two moved first (it follows that Ricciardo followed Sainz as opposed to Sainz being kicked out by Sainz a second time, considering no big muss was made of it within his personal storyline, but that isn’t presented explicitly). It’s fun trying to navigate external knowledge, trying to avoid spoilers from real life events, and then listening to the Shift F1’s preview for the 2024 season of F1 and learn how much has changed in the time between, how much I still get to learn.

What makes the show intriguing is the combination of the personalities of drivers and team principles (combination general manager and head coach, depending on your sports reference points) as well as the wheeling and dealing that determines driver lineups and sponsorship deals. There’s a lot to do with internal politics, though external politics are largely absent. The closest thing we have to that is dealing with COVID in the third season (set during 2020) and national pride – little outright and explicit nationalism – but we’ll get back to that.

What makes the sport interesting is that it’s high speed, high stakes, big money racing in beautiful locales – from Austrian forests to the Mediterranean principality of Monaco. And also that it’s composed of teams of two drivers, most of whom do not like one another. Many of them have driven together for years, back to their days in carts; on occasion, guys are friends outside of the sport but less on the grid (like Monégasque Charles LeClerc and French Pierre Gasly, who I think are no longer friends). Many of the guys can be respectful to one another between races, while competitive to borderline point of violence on the track. But the biggest rivalries are within the teams – it’s like if every football team had two quarterbacks that they were trying to score points against, or if the two most talented players on the same soccer or basketball team sometimes had to guard each other. Again, your sporting points of reference may vary.

I could go on about the drivers who have and haven’t endeared themselves to me. It is easier to feel sympathy for the guys like Esteban Ocan who didn’t come from money than guys born with money like Lance Stroll. In the first three seasons, the only nonwhite drivers are multi-repeat champion Lewis Hamilton (one of the best in the history of the sport), British-Thai Alex Albon, and Sergio Pérez (the sole Mexican driver). I’m generally fascinated by the absolute level of aptitude. Almost all the drivers are *at least* bilingual. Their job is to sit in and drive a car, but the physical strain of that requires physical training like any other athlete – a surprising amount, in fact. But there are other dynamics at play within the structure and the sport and the structure of the show that I think are worth mentioning.

As the sport goes, being the sort of person I am, I can’t help but wonder about, you know, the utility in the face of the constant suffering that our world is built on. All of life is worthy of critique, and besides that I feel guilty for ever experiencing joy, so Formula One must be contextualized within the world it exists in. It’s a gas burning sport in a world with an environment being ravaged by manmade climate change. It’s a machine wrecking sport in a world where some people don’t have homes. That’s hardly the fault of the drivers; it’s just the sort of observation I always find myself making. It’s hard for me, always, to avoid thinking about the current global order as a sinking ship with insufficient lifeboats.

We crave spectacle, and these events are indeed spectacular. Competition is always interesting, but especially exaggerated with these rocket-like cars moving at death defying speeds. Many people have died in automobile racing, including in Formula 1 and its immediate lower tier Formula 2. The FIA have canceled the race in Sochi the last three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the race in Azerbaijan continues despite the ethnic cleansing campaign that recently took place there. [2]

I think there is something to a transnationalism in sports like F1 and soccer, if we separate it from the international competition between teams bearing national flags during World Cups and the like. And much like the World Cup, it is an interesting showcase for transnational identity – most of the racers speak multiple languages, many of them have multinational identities. Daniel Ricciardo’s father was born in Italy, his mother’s parents were born in Italy; Esteban Ocon is French . It’s also a showcase for globalization and the easy movement of capital. Everything we enjoy doing or watching costs money, and that money goes wherever money can be made. Italian racing team Scuderia Ferrari has a logo for the Dutch oil company Shell and had American tobacco company Philip Morris as a title sponsor with the subliminal name “Mission Winnows.” They have a racing driver from the city-state principality of Monaco and the country of Spain. F1 is headquartered in England, and therefore so are many of the teams, like Red Bull, owned by the Austrian energy drinks company that also owns soccer teams in at least three countries (German Bundesliga’s RB Leipzig, Austrian Bundesliga’s RB Salzburg, and Major League Soccer’s New York Red Buls). Red Bull’s team principle is English. Mercedes Benz-AMG Petronas’s team principle is Austrian. McLaren’s now-former team principle was American. The Haas team, owned by industrial automation magnate Gene Haas who also owns a NASCAR team, was run by a German.

At the end of season three, British auto manufacturer McLaren has teamed up with American oil company Gulf as a sponsor on their car. Racing Point team owner Lawrence Stroll (father of driver Lance Stroll), became an investor in Aston Martin and they became a title sponsor of that team – while it’s clear this is distinct from their former partnership with Red Bull, it isn’t clear how because it’s all spoken about as “Aston Martin returning to racing” and the like, even right before switching to talking about Red Bull and showing highlights where they have the Aston Martin insignia on their uniforms. It’s clear there’s a distinction, but we’re not privy to the details.

Something else I found frustrating about the end of season three was that Lewis Hamilton’s political speech felt like it wasn’t given sufficient coverage. Now, the first season was focused almost entirely on the lower-tier and mid-tier teams, except for Red Bull, who finished third; Ferrari and Mercedes drivers and principals didn’t interview. That changed in the second and third season, especially as Ferrari fell into the pack because of a bad car design. When COVID was the focus in the first episode as things shut down and then reopened with social distancing, it was mentioned in an early press conference that Hamilton had been outspoken about COVID before the season started, and he says on stage with a mic in his hand that he doesn’t know why any of them are there. But anyway, the episodes that did focus on Mercedes didn’t talk much about Lewis Hamilton’s political speech until the last episode of the season. The biggest flaw in execution here is that they show just enough (Hamilton leading his competitors in kneeling at the starting line before races, Hamilton wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts under his racing suit, and leaving the suit unzipped and hanging so his “ARREST THE COPS WHO SHOT BREONNA TAYLOR” shirt was visible when he makes the podium) that it is very apparent that this was not a one-time thing for him. His last words on the season, and I think the last words of the season at all, were him saying he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to use his platform and influence to do something positive and meaningful (after also showing highlights from his childhood where he and his father talk about avoiding racists and not being outspoken when they were trying to come up).

It felt like Netflix and F1 weren’t trying to minimize it exactly, but that it was certainly worth more than five minutes at the end of the season. It is a compression due to the focus of the series – what they are allowed to do is to focus on what is happening among the teams in a way that stirs up drama to entice and delight the audience, but there is a lot that gets avoided. Reserve drivers are a part of every team, but we don’t always know who they are, even if they’ve featured in a season of the show before.[3] There are also junior driving schemes racers get put on, but it is unclear to me how similar this is to an American football team’s practice squad or a Premier League team’s academy out of which other teams can sign players. There’s occasional lack of clarity regarding chronology because each episode tends to focus on one or two teams or racers. I still don’t know just about anything about how cars are designed – I know there are good cars and bad cars and that Racing Point seemed to steal the 2019 Mercedes design for their 2020 design, but the show doesn’t get into that too much. [4]

Formula 1: Drive to Survive, is an effective marketing vehicle for Formula One racing. I do not know if it is unparalleled in quality among Netflix sports docuseries (Last Chance U was definitely more critical of its sources) but it has me in a chokehold. It has got me playing Need for Speed and Forza again and seeing when the open-wheel, stock car, and sportscar races are happening all over.[5] It has me intrigued and fascinated, thinking about how cars and teams are constructed. I look forward to continuing watching it, and I remain curious in what new ways the show will shift its revelatory gaze.

---

[1] In fact, my film watching dropped off considerably between January and February mostly, I think, because of work… but I also watched three seasons of this show, so I am hoping I can make up some lost ground before the end of this month. And anyway I feel like anything I consume I need to write about, but also this show and sport just inspired me to think about so much.

[2] I read somewhere that sports have become a contemporary substitute for war, as national pride is worn during international competition as an outlet instead of killing one another on battlefields. I’m simplifying the hypothesis in a way that underlines its stupidity. For one thing, war hasn’t gone anywhere. For another, little in the way of resources or territory are managed or directed by who wins the FIFA World Cup or who takes gold at an Olympics competition. There is a more interesting argument to be assessed in the context of “sportswashing,” but only slightly; Anglo and American journalists are keen to point to the hosting of international competitions in Russia or China as exemplifying a tendency of “authoritarians” to downplay internal despotism by putting on a global extravaganza. These journalists are less likely to critique the same thing happening at large in their own countries; we have sports facilitated by universities that pull in billions collectively while not paying their players, while several public university systems are being neutered of intellectual value, HBCUs go underfunded for over a century, and public education at large is suffering for funding. Simultaneous to the Super Bowl, the Israeli government stepped up their bombing in Rafah in the south of Gaza, after ordering Palestinian civilians to evacuate in that direction from further north in the strip, continuing their genocidal campaign while the U.S. government sends them money, weapons, and international sanction. But I go on. I will revisit some of this in other pieces.

[3] I’ve mostly found them when going on Wikipedia looking for details on a season I’ve already seen

[4] they paid Mercedes for information on brake duct design, which was protested by multiple teams, then they were fined but allowed to keep using them, but the body overall looked a lot like the previous Mercedes… Yes, I know, I need to read Adrian Newey’s How to Build a Car

[5] Dayton is ongoing as I type this and I remember my opinion of NASCAR changing for the positive after I watched a Top Gear episode and I think I’m going to have to watch the new Netflix NASCAR docuseries after I finish up Drive to Survive because, without the turns and chicanes, it’s a little bit harder to understand strategy… plus the

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]

---

[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. ↩︎