[cont.]

Make Believe

2005, Geffen Records, Prod: Rick Rubin

And so Scott Shriner tied Matt Sharp for longest serving bass player in Weezer. I don’t like Scott. But we’ll get to that.

(I am aware that the ‘Lion and the Witch’ EP falls before this album but I’m not counting those sorts of things in this retrospective)

The best thing about Make Believe is the Pitchfork review.

Now we could talk at length on Pitchfork as an outlet and how they seem to spend their days trying to take the crown from the NME as the most bastardly bastards of music journalism. A lot of the time they succeed in that quest. Much to the chagrin of many corners of the music listening internet.

But the review for Make Believe, and it’s score of 0.4 (that’s out of 10), is pretty much on the money. This is a genuinely dog shit album that pisses on any goodwill that you may still have for Weezer.

You can often find at least one earworm of a song on even the worst Weezer albums. Even when Rivers is just pumping out songs that sound like what he thinks what people want so that he can sell records and be a rock star, he still has an ear for songwriting and can come up with a lick that will stay with you for days.

But Make Believe is the exception to that rule. There is nothing here. I have listened to this album a lot. My kids like this album. A lot. My youngest daughter who has become a massive Weezer fan and can speak to the inner workings of albums like Blue Album (which is a weird thing for a 6 year old to be able to do), she loves this album. I have seen the clip for ‘Perfect Situation’ more times than I would care to admit. That is how much my kids are into this album.

Actually, let’s talk about that film clip.

It’s not particularly good. It’s not particularly clever. It doesn’t make a ton of sense (so Elisha Cuthbert (remember when she was in things) is the lead singer of a band that is not yet Weezer and Rivers is her… security detail? Seems like an odd hire. Or maybe he’s like the manager of the band but most of his job is taken up on taking care of her drunken ass? But he can sing all the songs? And they never knew this before?)

But I think it’s revealing in what it suggests that Weezer wants. They want college girls to come to their shows. They want college girls to watch their shows on TV (what?). And they want college girls to go nuts when there is a change of lineup and they play this fucking song. It’s weird. And yet, I think this is what they’re aiming for. They want to be a band that makes girls lose their minds. Which maybe they would if they wrote songs worth a damn.

And let’s brush past exhibit #1,467 in the case of ‘Rivers sure comes across as a misogynist from time to time huh’ (Get your hands off the girl/Can’t you see that she belongs to me? - cool shit, bro).

But that’s just one song, and it’s towards the top tier of tracks on the album. Which is unfortunate. I mean, the lead single on this pile of shit was ‘Beverly Hills’ which is one of those songs that will infect your brain and if you aren’t careful will rot your mind - it has goddamn vocoder on it people.

‘We Are All on Drugs’ makes you wonder if they have ever taken drugs.

‘This is Such a Pity’ is spot on in its title.

There’s this creeping dread that can descend on you when you listen to Weezer albums from this century. The first song or two is a gimme and you’re willing to believe that they buried the good shit deep around the side change. But they didn’t and those songs don’t ever arrive. This is just bad music. The sort of album that makes you wonder why people believe that Rick Rubin has the magic touch.

But by 2005, I didn’t really care that much. The year was a veritable banger for my sort of music. You get Sufjan Stevens, Sigur Ros, Boards of Canada and Animal Collective all releasing fire. Bloc Party drops Silent Alarm and everyone is a fan for a season (though to this day I will swear by their drummer).

Kanye released Late Registration which, let’s be honest, slaps, even if I prefer Beautiful, Dark Twisted Fantasy. LCD Soundsystem released their self titled album which we don’t quite yet know how important it will be.

Demon Days comes out from Gorillaz and I am still listening to that album to this day.

And, The Mars Volta releases Frances the Mute and honestly, I’m fucked for music for the next year or so. Everything just seems a little too simple and quaint and I struggle to listen to even things like OK Computer.

So I didn’t really mind that Rivers and Co were releasing an album that I didn’t care for. I figured I had moved on from them. I’d always have Pinkerton. I didn’t need to keep coming back to Weezer just because they dropped a new album. I’d walked away from other bands before. I was sure I would walk away from other bands again.

[cont.]

Limerence (n) - a state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically characterised by a strong desire for reciprocation of one’s feelings but not primarily for a sexual relationship.

I’ve struggled to write up Obsession since watching it some months ago.

There are times when a film is just good. Like great. And all you can think is…

I expect by now that most people will have heard about Obsession, Curry Barker’s nasty little piece of cinema that has absolutely crushed the box office.

As of this writing, the global box office for the film is $470m USD. It is the most successful film in history in terms of multiplier given it was made for only $750,000. That’s a multiplier of 626. That isn’t what happens wit movies. Sure, the new Avatar movie might make something like $3 billion but the cost of making it is like half a billion dollars to begin with (all that solving for shooting underwater is expensive) so it needs to make that might to be a success.

Obsession is what happens when you make a serious version of the monkey’s paw Treehouse of Horror episode of the Simpsons.

Bear is a nice guy. A real nice guy. The sort that if he had stumbled into a rom com would end the film with getting the girl.

Unfortunately, Bear is a nice guy in a horror film.

Actually, let’s get something out of the way.

Bear isn’t a nice guy. Not really.

Bear has the sheen of a nice guy.

But he’s actually an incel piece of shit. He is the villain. And if you don’t get that then I don’t know what film you’re watching.

Okay, so Bear (Michael Johnston) has total limerence for Nikki (Inde Navarrette). We open on him rehearsing confessing his feelings for her. You have seen this a million times before. What you maybe haven’t seen is Bear crying, sobbing, because Nikki doesn’t return his feelings. You have maybe experienced what you think is love (but isn’t) when you’re young and your hormones are all fucking you up, and you don’t feel like the other person is returning those feelings in the way that you wish. You likely haven’t seen that expressed on the screen in such a manner though.

But you have seen Bear hanging with Nikki and their friends/music store colleagues Ian and Sarah (Ian alphas Bear on the regular, Sarah is obviously keen on Bear, but it’s undeniable that you could maybe see something there between Nikki and Bear and they have a rhythm where you could see how Bear would want to be with her and would pursue her).

Bear comes across a novelty item at a hippie store. A ‘One Wish Willow’ which the store clerk tries to warn him off (in a distracted manner). So of course, he wishes that Nikkie would love him more than anyone in the world.

And like the greatest of Simpsons and Twilight Zone episodes, Nikki is suddenly all over him, expressing her love in a way that is everything he thought he wanted and yet is suffocating.

There is a version of this film that ratchets the tension, that has Nikki trap Bear, that ends with a breathless chase through the woods on a moonlit night with Nikki as the T-1000 never ceasing in her pursuit of Bear and Sarah (who would of course have declared their love for one another). I’m sure they would find a way to fight off Nikki, or end the wish or something. In other words it would be that sex robot thriller from last year, Companion.

But this is not that movie. It leans into the logic of its premise and ups the horror of the situation that Nikki finds herself in.

There are moments where it becomes apparent that Nikki, actual Nikki, has been submerged below some sort of wish Nikki. In those moments the real Nikki comes through and reacts with alarm and shock at the situation she finds herself in. Then she gets pushed down again but the audience is aware that she seems to be experiencing all of this and she is not fucking happy that it is happening to her. And it is clear that Bear knows this too.

Around the midpoint, where everything is spiralling out of control, Bear calls the number on the One Wish Willow pack and we can hear the screams of real Nikki down the phone, begging for help.

Wish Nikki is an odd creature. And it’s Wish Nikki that seems to be tripping some of the audience up (and proving to me once again that media literacy is straight up dead). She has one goal and one goal only - make Bear happy. Nothing else matters to her. She will stand at home and wait for Bear to return all day, not moving to relieve herself, or eat, or anything. She is a force of nature that wants every moment of her existence to be in the presence of Bear. That is it.

But Wish Nikki is not a real person, she is not real Nikki. Bear knows this. Bear knows this. Bear does not give a shit. Let’s be clear here - Bear rapes Nikki. There is this delicious moment near the end of the second act, where Bear is trying to go to meet Sarah but needs to sneak out cause wish Nikki would not be happy about that if she knew and he is sneaking out while she sleeps and real Nikki starts speaking. She says to Bear that she wants him to kill her, to end this horror that she is a passenger for.

And he asks if being with him is so bad, and she says:

“I’ve never been with you, Bear”

This film. This fucking film, man. This is the shit I turn up for.

The performances here are stellar. The thing about true low budget indie films is often you get a good film, with an interesting filmmaker, let down because they can’t get the right performances out of their cast. Sometimes that’s a reflection of the capability of the cast (you aren’t going to get complexity from someone that can barely deliver their lines), and sometimes it’s a reflection of the limits of the filmmakers skill in directing actors (often time they’ll just let the actors run and have no idea how to coax out the performance they need).

Curry Barker does not have this issue.

Johnston is great as Bear. The magic trick of the film is that people will argue over whether Bear is the villain or not (again, he is but I can understand why people may struggle to square that given the performance of Johnston and the point of view of the film).

But it is Navarrette that is the revelation here. Her performance is astounding (the fact that she has been cast in something as major as the MCU X-Men film really is no surprise). She has been in some minor roles in some things before this but this is the sort of performance that heralds a monumental talent. This is a role that requires physical and emotional delivery that has to turn on a dime.

The scene where the gang is at a party and plays truth or dare is a masterclass from Navarrette. The story that Nikki tells which is a fucked up retelling of Hansel and Gretel (that seems to imply that maybe real Nikki is at least unconsciously able to control wish Nikki), to the moving the chair that Sarah is sitting in, to smashing herself in the face with a glass bottle when real Nikki gains control for a moment. If the rest of the film was garbage, this scene alone would probably justify the price of entry.

And then the film unspools in the nasty, horrific manner that it always was going to. Nikki hunts down and murders Sarah. And then she flays her and wears her skin. Because this is that sort of a film.

Bear finally gets something like a soul and decides that he will have to kill himself to free Nikki from the wish. Except then the tables are turned on him and he becomes wish Bear, only to end up dying from having poisoned himself.

Then Nikki is released and screams over the end credits. And it is all so very, very wonderful is how demented it is and how it refuses to flinch from it’s internal logic.

It’s surprising how good this film looks for how little it cost. Of course, some of that is the tried and tested low budget approach of only a few locations/sets and Andy Richter. And being horror, they are able to hide some of the strings by making it all a bit dark and murky.

At the same time, to see talent like this, all come together and realise such a vision on the screen is inspiring, regardless of the budget. This could cost 10 times as much (which still wouldn’t be much) and it would still be a towering achievement.

This is a film of the way that men trap women. A film about how men don’t care about the interiority of women and just want to get their dick wet. A film about how men care about the physical rather than the emotional. Obsession is clear that it thinks that masculinity has become not just toxic but an elemental force that will terrorise and trap women if it is given the chance.

Or to quote Jeff Winger, this is a film that agrees with the statement that “Men are monsters that crave young flesh.”

What I find so baffling is how many takes are straight up terrible about this film. That don’t seem to understand that Bear is the monster. That look and wish Nikki and say things like ‘crazy bitch.” Seriously, the discourse on this movie is nuts.

But I guess if I’m being honest, I am not actually surprised by that. Media literacy is mostly dead. And even when it isn’t, this is the sort of thing that will almost assuredly find itself as part of some culture war in the next year or so when the right suddenly stumbles across the movie on streaming.

I read a piece the other day that was arguing that Backrooms was a quintessential example of elevated horror (remember when we used to use that term?), whereas Obsession was an old school messed up horror that didn’t try to be anything beyond what it was.

And I just… what?

Let’s mostly ignore the fact that genre, including horror, has almost always been ‘elevated’ or thematically about something more than it appeared on the surface (“Hello? Oh, it’s for you. Romero’s Dead films are calling”). In fact, genre has long existed to be able to comment on the society of the day in a manner that elided what it was actually speaking to.

But let’s ignore that.

What? Okay, Backrooms was about trauma, and memory, and addiction, and an inability to know oneself (and more). And Obsession is not about that. But it is clearly about more than just a monkey’s paw wish that goes horribly wrong for the protagonist. If you can’t see that it is indeed ‘elevated’ genre then I’m not sure what the point of that term is.

If there is a concern that I have in all of this it’s the economics of it all.

The year started with Iron Lung making about $50 million at the box office from a budget of $1 million. Backrooms went large and is sitting at $396 million (with a budget of $10 million). Obsession became the most successful film in history relative to its budget. It Ends looks like it’s going to make a fair chunk of change as well now that it’s getting a cinema release.

2026 is the year of the low budget Youtube indie horror.

And when films break out in that way, Hollywood has a tendency to go a bit strange chasing the new hotness. If there’s something in the zeitgeist then they will do whatever they can to try and replicate that success. Unfortunately, not unlike vampires, Hollywood isn’t good at original thought.

Already there are reports of studios moving towards greenlighting films on viral internet IP like Sirenhead (do you know Sirenhead? You will soon enough cause there is going to be a movie of it) like Backrooms was.

But more than that, Hollywood will now think they can just give $5 to a bunch of filmmakers and replicate what has happened this year. And some of it might even work but that will just reinforce giving limited resources to filmmakers. The ones that have the skill or have done the hard yards to get the skills (most people just discovered Curry Barker but he’s been doing his thing on Youtube for years) will be able to make credible films, even some films that cut through the air like a knife like Obsession does. But a lot will just be garbage that makes enough that the studios will call it a success.

On one hand, that is probably a good thing. Hollywood money being spread across many smaller projects rather than concentrated into mega blockbusters as has been the trend over the past decade is good for filmmaking, good for art, and good for audiences.

But it’s kind of dog shit for the people making the films themselves.

I’m sure that some involved in making the film have a cut of the net on the film (I wouldn’t be shocked if I learned that Barker had some number of points on this - and I’m certain some of the producers will). But as far as I am aware (and has been reported), the majority of the crew made standard rates only.

And I get that’s the way of the world. You take the job and you take the rate paid, and if that’s $6k for art direction then so be it. But it seems perverse that the crew on the most successful film relative to its budget only made rate and were in no way compensated anything.

I know what the argument here is - investors in the film are the ones assuming the financial risk here and so should reap the financial reward.

Of course, if all we’re ever going to value is capital and not labour then I probably shouldn’t be surprised in these hyper capitalist times - that’s the system we exist in.

But we need to acknowledge the precedent this sets (as I argue above), and that the capital invested here really achieves nothing until the labour of the cast and crew involved in realising the sheer art of this film.

But perhaps that is a conversation for another time.

For now, Obsession.

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A trick of the light. Something that can only be seen from certain angles. Perhaps related to the power surges and the intermittent flickering lights and the outsized power bills. There it is again.

Clark moves forward, puzzled by the sight. It slips out of view until he moves back to the right angle. Like something alien intersecting with reality. He moves forward again, his hands pressing against the wall, searching for a hint of the scar of light that he knows he saw. He presses and then he falls into a place. Some place. That definitely wasn’t on the other side of the wall of the basement of his failing furniture store.

Clark doesn’t go into the other place because he’s brave. He goes because outside of it, he has completely run out of reasons to be anywhere at all.

He is a failed architect (he is a fucking architect goddammit), divorced and probably an alcoholic, operating a furniture store called Captain Clark’s Ottoman Empire. He knows the metaphor is confused but doesn’t seem to be able to find his way out of it. He makes terrible local access advertisements with Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett) where he dresses up as a pirate (again, despite this being an Ottoman Empire, so shouldn’t he be a sultan?).

He sees his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), who is generally supportive in the way that therapists can sometimes be (particularly when there is a mismatch between patient and therapist), which is to say: she provides a space for his misery without actually resolving it. He is, as the film keeps telling us, stuck in a loop. Unable to find a new path. The store is going under, partly the economy, partly those power bills that don’t add up.

And then the wall gives way, and for the first time in what appears to be years, Clark comes alive.

That’s the film’s central preoccupation and what makes it something more than a very well-executed horror picture. Most liminal space horror asks what happens when you get lost in the space between places. The Backrooms asks what happens when a man finds the in-between more inhabitable than anywhere else. What happens when the uncanny starts to feel like home.

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Kane Parsons has released his… adaptation… continuation… standalone continuation… separate exploration of the same thematic vein… of his viral YouTube series. I’m not going to retread the Kane Pixels territory I covered a couple of weeks back talking around Kane and Marble Hornets and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (I’ll point you to Alec Worley’s excellent piece on The Rolling Giant if you want more of that) — but the context matters: after twenty-odd YouTube videos building out the Backrooms universe, A24 gave Parsons $10 million to make a feature film. It looks set to open around $80 million. For a first feature from a filmmaker who, until recently, was operating entirely on YouTube. That’s nuts.

You know it’s good because there is a whole thing happening right now where people are accusing Parsons of not having directed it. If there is a better example of telling on yourself, I’m not sure what it is.

The accusation reveals something interesting though. The film feels authoritative in a way that people apparently can’t reconcile with someone of Parsons’ age and background, so the reasoning goes: someone else must have done it. What it actually reveals is how thoroughly those people have internalised the idea that craft has to be earned through a specific set of institutional gates. Film school, the short film circuit, a low-budget debut with whatever actors you can scrape together. Parsons didn’t do any of that. He built his craft in public, on YouTube, over five years.

And you can watch him do it. Compare “Backrooms (Found Footage)” to “Found Footage 3” and the difference is stark. The command of pacing, the atmosphere, the world and character building is night and day. He arrived at this film having already done his ten thousand hours. He just did them somewhere that a lot of people weren’t watching.

The result, with a serious slate of producers including Osgood Perkins, Shawn Levy and James Wan, and top-shelf acting talent in Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, is being witness to an incredible new voice given almost unreasonably good conditions to succeed.

(There is a part of me that would love some insight into what Parsons is actually like directing actors. Ejiofor and Reinsve are exceptional enough that they’d find gold even with thin material and limited direction, which makes it genuinely hard to calibrate how much of what’s on screen is him.)

(There is also a part of me that wonders if a decade from now he will look back at the YouTube series and this film and the themes he puts forth as his juvenalia. I wonder if that thematic exploration will expands and evolve as he matures as a filmmaker and storyteller.)

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The first fifty minutes or so are close to perfect.

From the opening found footage sequence of an Async researcher (a government-adjacent organisation that haunts the edges of the film, apparently dedicated to mapping The Complex) being hunted through the Backrooms, through Clark’s initial explorations, and into the found footage section where he drags Kat and Bobby in to document the space: it is a masterclass in mode and atmosphere. Stripped back. Minimalist. A different kind of horror.

Where most horror films locate terror in darkness, in the thing that can’t quite be seen, this film finds it in stark fluorescent lighting, sickly yellow wallpaper, uncanny ambient sounds, a minimalist synth score, and a space that simply will not end. The horror is not what’s hiding. The horror is the scale. The horror is that the more you map it, the more there is to map.

The YouTube series operates as an anachronic tone poem. The found footage episodes get the most views, but the rest are artefacts from within the fictional universe, pieces with limited context that function as evidence of a world rather than explanations of it. The film has absorbed that logic entirely. It trusts the audience to build understanding from texture rather than exposition. For most of its runtime, it keeps that trust.

Then it shifts to Mary’s point of view for the home stretch, and people are going to have very different views on how successful that is.

The shift is correct in a formal sense. This is a film about mirrors and doubles. It is Lynchian in the specific way Lynch is Lynchian. Not as aesthetic reference but as structural logic, a nightmare architecture of repetition and doubling where uncanny spaces reflect the psychological states of the people who enter them. Of course we end up following the character whose job was to help Clark find his way back to himself, into the space where he has gone instead.

The problem isn’t the shift. The problem is what happens on the other side of it.

Mary finds Clark deep in The Complex. Time has passed. He has gone native, a fucked up Kurtz revelling in the horror, the horror. More than that, he has devolved, or perhaps come into focus, into something harder and stranger than the man we met at the start. The film mirrors an earlier therapy scene where Mary walked Clark through a roleplay of the night his ex-wife kicked him out of his own house. Here, in a kitchen that The Complex has generated from a memory, surrounded by human-shaped things that look like people Clark once knew (including, pointedly, his ex-wife) they do it again.

It’s a strong idea. The execution is where it wobbles.

The trouble is that Clark’s transformation happens entirely off screen. We get the before and we get the after, but nothing during. And while there’s a kind of logic to that, character change at this scale needs to be dramatised somewhere or it doesn’t land properly. What we needed was some passage, some scene, something that showed us the moment Clark stopped wanting to come back. Instead we get the result of that moment presented as a reveal, and it registers as abrupt rather than unsettling.

The resolution compounds it. What follows is quieter than the film has prepared us for. There is maybe something in that. Clark realising he doesn’t need to change, Mary realising she never really could help anyone. But it arrives as deflation rather than the bleak precision it’s reaching for. The film has been pressing down on you for ninety minutes and then at the crucial moment it eases off.

Will Soodik’s script is serviceable throughout, but the third act is where its limitations become most visible. The characterisation is thin enough across the whole film that it depends heavily on Ejiofor and Reinsve to supply texture the page doesn’t necessarily provide (for most of the runtime they’re more than up to it). But in the final act, when the script needs to carry more weight, it starts to buckle.

In part this is because of the demands of shifting to a feature film format. There are necessities in doing that, in how a story is expected to arc, in the ways that stories are expected to be told by an audience that need to be met to an extent to ensure that they resonate with people beyond those that consume the YouTube series (for an example that resists this for good and ill, watch skinamarink).

What saves it, and what will sustain the film in the long run, is that the answers it provides are genuinely messy in the right way.

The Complex seems to be a psychogeography. A labyrinthine structure built from the memory of those who enter it. Clark explains it: every space that ever was, replicated from memory, and the more it remembers the worse the replications get. It populates itself with doubles. Memory people. The dining room scene, where Clark watches simulacra of people, is the clearest distillation of what the film is actually about. But also is a point where the film deflates a little.

For all that there’s perhaps too much explanation at certain points, the questions it raises are productive and the answers are messy as fuck in a way that lets the film breathe and open up.

The Complex as hell you descend into to face your own double. As an indictment of generative AI and its degraded remixing of experience. As a metaphor for the way dementia strips the sharpness from memory until what remains is a copy of a copy of a copy. As what trauma does, how it takes the actual texture of what happened and replaces it with a version you keep revising until you’re not sure what was real.

Clark doesn’t go into The Complex to find himself. He goes to find a place that doesn’t require him to be found.

Parsons’ influences are visible throughout — there’s a moment that directly recalls The Rolling Giant — but like all great filmmakers he synthesises and remixes them into something that exceeds its sources. You can point to House of Leaves (specifically the Navidson Record sections) as a direct inspiration. You can look at The Complex and find Nihei’s City from Blame! and it’s infinite growth. You can trace the found footage lineage through The Blair Witch Project and Koji Shiraishi’s Noroi: The Curse. That would be accurate and completely reductive. What matters is that Parsons has taken all of it and made something that couldn’t have been made by anyone applying those influences differently. His ability to ratchet up tension and know precisely when to pay it off is the sort of thing filmmakers much older than him would love to be able to do with such consistency.

The Backrooms sits in your gut. It is a near goddamn masterpiece. And Clark, standing in a kitchen that shouldn’t exist, surrounded by people who are made of his own bad memory, looking, for the first time in the whole film, like he’s exactly where he wants to be, is one of the stranger, more unsettling images presented to an audience in a long time.

The horror isn’t that he got lost.

The horror is that he stopped looking for the way out.

30 years ago, Neon Genesis Evangelion was released into the world and it changed everything.

It remains one of the formative texts for me.

In the 80s, there was a show called Robotech. It was a cartoon. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was a Japanese cartoon, an anime. Long before that term meant anything to me.

I got hooked. On robots, the epic battles. And the epic serialised storyline of the show. It was a show like Power Rangers where an American had become aware of a Japanese show and decided to re-cut it, re-edit it, re-dub it and make it into something entirely its own thing. For Robotech that was Super Dimension Fortress Macross. For Power Rangers, it was Super Sentai.

I didn’t realise at the time how terrible that was to do. I didn’t realise at the time how incredible that was to do.

Either way, I was in love.

This was a form of animation I’d never experienced from the Western world. And while I didn’t know the term anime at the time, I would very very quickly come to know it.

By my late childhood, I was a rabid fan of anime. Primarily the works that had made it over to the Western world. Things like Samurai Pizza Cats, Sailor Moon. And of course, Robotech.

As a teenager, I was a weird kid. That I liked anime and comic books and movies should be readily apparent to anybody who’s read this newsletter for a while.

And I used to watch a lot of SBS. Particularly late night SBS — the weird foreign films, weird cult. Things that Des Mangan (director of Hercules Returns) would program. And quite often, they would show a lot of the early anime imports that were making it over to the West.

And then one year, SBS started advertising for a new show. A hit show that had come from Japan by the name of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The ads made it look fantastic. It was right up my alley. Big robots, little girls - as they like to refer to the mecha genre. It looked epic in scope and scale. It looked like it was going to fill that void that I’d never quite been able to fill since I’d watched Robotech all those years before.

So my friends and I sat down one Saturday evening. And we started to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion.

It was, at first, a quintessential big robots little girls show. The story of a trio of 14-year-old mech pilots forced to battle otherworldly creatures called Angels in the biomechanical mechas called Evangelions.

And for the first half of the show, it was really quite standard. There is nothing particularly noticeable that removes it from the Gundams of the world, or other mecha shows. There is some interesting characterisation and some interesting ideas. A shift away from real robots to more fantastical biomechanical creatures. There is an abstraction to the villains that doesn’t always happen in mecha anime. Both in the sense that it makes them otherworldly but also beyond comprehension.

The Angels don’t look like angels. They look like things that arrived from somewhere outside of human imagination. Eldritch horrors that bend the eye and mind. They are given the names of deep-cut Biblical entities. The real weird ones. The ones that show up in texts most people haven’t read. Sachiel. Shamshel. Ramiel. Iruel. Anno has said he just likes the aesthetic it brought to the show but you know what they say about authors being dumb.

And then at about the halfway mark of the show, everything changes. And it rapidly becomes a deconstruction of the entire genre and, to an extent, anime in general.

The cliff notes of Evangelion go like this. It’s 2015 (ah, the good times). Fifteen years prior, an event referred to as the Second Impact occurs. The First Impact is implied to be what wiped out the dinosaurs, which tells you something about the register. The Second Impact has catastrophic effects on the globe. The world goes on, but it is a pleasantly post-apocalyptic landscape.

In Tokyo-3 (which just seems to forever get fucked up by all the things), a secretive organisation called NERV operates (with the blessing of the UN, question mark) to protect the world from attacks by Angels. To do this, NERV has a number of Evangelions. Huge robots requiring teenage pilots. The robots are biomechanical rather than straight-up mechanical, and rely on a power source that is limited and that severely drains the resources of Tokyo-3.

As the series progresses, it becomes apparent that there is a grand conspiracy at play. An end goal that may result in the collapse of humanity having any individual identity. Multiple factions seeking similar but distinct outcomes, all of whom seem to need the Evangelions, and perhaps more specifically Shinji Ikari, the pilot of Unit 01.

Ask a lot of people about Evangelion and they will tell you that Shinji sucks.

Shinji sucks.

This is what the internet, and a significant portion of the anime community, and a lot of people who sat down with the show and found themselves frustrated by a protagonist who does not want to be the hero. Who cries. Who freezes. Who pretty much has “I might run away” as a catch phrase.

Who is asked repeatedly to get a in the giant robot and fight the eldritch nightmare threatening to destroy the city, and who says, not always but often enough: no. Or: not yet. Or: I can’t.

He sucks.

Here’s the thing, though.

Shinji Ikari is one of the most precisely realised depictions of clinical depression in the history of media. He doesn’t want to save the world because he doesn’t believe his participation in the world matters. He doesn’t get in the robot because getting in the robot is the thing his absent, cold, borderline-monstrous father wants him to do, and doing what his father wants would require him to admit that he wants his father’s approval, and admitting that would require him to be vulnerable in a way that might destroy him.

For all that you may think that Shinji sucks, this is the show.

He is fourteen. He has been abandoned. He lives with a guardian who seems fun but is probably self medicating with beer to deal with the things she has seen and has deployed detachment so thoroughly as a survival mechanism that she has forgotten how to connect with another human being. He is surrounded by other children who are, each in their own way, catastrophically damaged by the weight of being asked to save a world that produced the adults in large part caused the world to be in the state where it needs saving.

Shinji is the first mecha protagonist who was allowed to feel exactly what you would actually feel if you were put in that situation.

The genius, and I mean genuine creative genius, of what Anno did is that he understood the mecha genre had a deal with its audience. The deal goes: here is an ordinary boy (usually a boy, can be a girl, almost always a child) who is given access to an extraordinary machine, and through courage and skill and the bonds of friendship, he will prevail. The machine externalises the boy’s potential. The battles are the hero’s journey. You watch the boy become a man. You feel good.

Anno made a show about what would happen if the ordinary boy was so ordinary that he couldn’t hold up his end of that deal.

Hideaki Anno had a career in anime stretching back over a decade when he directed Evangelion. By all accounts the show was always intended to upend the mecha genre, always intended to be a move away from the real-robot trappings that the genre had based itself around. But it maybe wasn’t going to go as far as it did.

Anno’s struggles with depression and therapy, occurring during the making of the show, are placed front and centre in the back half of the 26-episode run. That’s the half that destroys the foundations of the genre.

This wasn’t the sad but glamourous kind of depression that you often see in movies (I’d suggest things are getting better with that now but 3 decades ago in the 90s they were generally not - I refer you to What Dreams May Come and I would say, fuck that film).

Oh no no no. This is the specific, grinding, paralytic kind. The kind that makes it genuinely difficult to perform basic functions. The kind that if you’ve had a taste of it you know and if you haven’t can seem alien. The kind that is, from the outside, baffling and frustrating and looks an awful lot like a teenage boy who won’t get in the fucking robot when everyone is counting on him.

The audience’s frustration with Shinji is not incidental. It is the point. I’m not going to say that Anno built a show where the whole point was the frustration and getting you to ask yourself what that say’s about you. I mean, that would be crazy. It’s a show about big robots that go pew pew and a penguin… for reasons.

But I’m not not going to say that.

You cannot spend 26 episodes with Neon Genesis Evangelion and not spend a significant amount of time with crosses, and lances, and trees, and a thing called the Human Instrumentality Project, and a book called the Dead Sea Scrolls that in this universe is not the one that maybe you read about online that time you fell down a Templar shaped conspiracy rabbit hole.

The show is saturated in Judeo-Christian imagery. NERV’s logo is a fig leaf over a cross. The enemy are called Angels and carry within them something called an S² Engine (which may or may not be a technical name for the soul because this show).

The ultimate weapon is the Lance of Longinus, the spear that apocryphally pierced Christ’s side at the crucifixion. The governing body above NERV is called SEELE (oh look, another word that means soul) and they possess the Dead Sea Scrolls which prophesises a sequence of cataclysms and a final project called the Human Instrumentality Project, which seems to be about making the barriers between everyone melt so that everyone can become one. There’s an Evangelion, or a precursor to the Evangelions, that is crucified. Unit 01 (aka, Shinji’s robot) seems to ascend to another plane at one (or some) point(s).

There is a temptation to say that Anno was going for some dense theological argument. And he wasn’t but kind of was but was kind of using the trappings of all of that as a lens through which to tell a psychologically horrifying story.

In several interviews Anno has more or less admitted that a significant portion of the Christian imagery was chosen because it looked strange and interesting and foreign to a Japanese audience (how the tables have turned Western anime consumer).

The aesthetic of Western Christian iconography, the crosses, the wings, the specific grandeur of it, was unfamiliar enough in Japan to carry weight simply as visual texture. It didn’t need to mean something in the way it might to a Western viewer who may have been raised in the church or who at least has absorbed enough of this imagery through cultural osmosis. It could just be powerful. Alien.

And yet.

The Human Instrumentality Project is not just imagery. It is a coherent theological and psychological argument. The project, as SEELE envisions it, is the apocalypse. The AT Field (the Absolute Terror Field, which in the show’s mythology is both the force that Angels use as a weapon and the force that separates one human consciousness from another) dissolved. No more loneliness. Just... everyone. Together. Forever.

This is, at its heart, a theological proposition about whether individual existence is worth the suffering it costs. And it maps almost exactly onto the logic of atonement. Individual suffering, offered up, in service of collective salvation.

The Lance of Longinus is not just a cool weapon reference. It is the instrument of a sacrifice that unlocks something. In the Christian narrative, the sacrifice unlocks redemption. In Evangelion, it unlocks the end of personhood. It unlocks a return to oneness which may be what a God would be.

Anno did not have clean answers about any of this. The show is not arguing cleanly for or against Instrumentality. It is dramatising the genuine appeal of the proposition. If you have ever been in real pain, the idea of dissolving into something larger than yourself, of the AT Field coming down and the fundamental loneliness of consciousness ending. And then it asks whether the thing it requires you to give up is worth the relief.

What it requires you to give up is yourself. Your separate, difficult, ungainly, isolated, depressed self. The self that disappoints people. The self that will hurt others and be hurt by others. The self that can’t get in the robot.

Shinji, at the moment of decision, for he is the one that is offered the decision, says no.

He chooses to return to a world with one other person in it, specifically Asuka, who has just been destroyed and remade and is lying on a red shore. Rather than the warm, undifferentiated ocean of collective consciousness that Instrumentality offers.

He puts his hands around her throat. He stops. He chooses the hard, separate, real world over the painless, merged, unreal one.

She says: how disgusting (at least in some translations - in some it’s ‘I feel sick’).

And they are back. Two people. Separate. In pain. Alive.

(When I write this all down and I don’t have the series and the films on as I do, I think - fuck, it’s all a bit weird sounding isn’t it?)

That is Anno, through his protagonist, refusing the deal. The deal that says: give up your self and everything will stop hurting. He looked at it. Really looked at it, in the way only someone who has been in the kind of pain that makes that deal genuinely tempting can look at it. And said no. I’ll take the disgusting world. I’ll take the Asuka who doesn’t want to be touched. I’ll take the AT Field. I’ll take the separateness.

This fucking guy made that argument in an anime series in 1995 and people were sending him death threats because they wanted a more satisfying robot fight.

There is a thing that happens when you ask an anime fan of a certain vintage about Neon Genesis Evangelion. After they have told you that Shinji sucks, they will tell you which character they preferred: Rei or Asuka.

This is presented as a question of personal taste, roughly equivalent to asking someone their favourite Beatle (George - fight me). It is not.

Rei Ayanami is quiet, pale, ethereal, compliant. She does what she is told. She does not have strong preferences. She exists, in some difficult-to-articulate way, for other people. She is gentle with Shinji in a way that does not demand anything back. She is also, and the show is not subtle about this, not fully human in ways the narrative gradually reveals are deeply horrifying. She is a vessel. She was built to be used. Her compliance is not personality. It is the absence of the conditions that would have produced personality.

Asuka Langley Soryu is loud, German-Japanese, extremely competent, chronically insecure, unable to receive care, furious almost as a default state, and treats Shinji with a contempt that is transparently a defence mechanism over something much more painful. She is also, by any conventional measure, considerably more present as a human being than Rei. She has wants. She has wounds. She has a history (a mother who went mad, who stopped seeing her daughter as a person and started seeing her as something more like a doll - look, everyone in this is quite specifically fucked up) that the show handles with a devastating quietness that is easy to miss if you’re watching for the robot fights.

The fandom’s preference for Rei, where it exists, is a preference for the version of femininity that makes no demands. That does not require you to deal with her as a person who has her own interior life that might be inconvenient for you.

Anno knew this. He built the dichotomy deliberately. And then in End of Evangelion he gave the Rei preferring portion of the fandom what their preference implied: Rei absorbed into something vast and impersonal, her individuality dissolved, her compliance complete. The ultimate version of what they found appealing. And it is presented as a death and something horrific. As the annihilation of a self that was already barely permitted to exist.

Asuka, meanwhile, gets the single most extraordinary sequence in either film. Alone in her Evangelion, fighting seventeen Mass Production Evas that she cannot destroy because they keep resurrecting, until she is overwhelmed and her Eva is torn apart in a way that is explicitly visceral and implicitly sexualised (in a way the film knows goes too far and expresses horror about).

It is a brutal, extended, unflinching sequence. She does not get a redemption arc in the conventional sense. She gets a life on a dead beach and a ‘hero’ trying to choke her.

The fandom did not always know what to do with this. Some still don’t. The impulse to sort female characters into categories based on their accessibility and compliance is not unique to anime fandom (or really many fandoms) but Evangelion does it in a manner that is almost clinical in the way it tells you so much about a person.

Kaworu, who appears in a single episode of the original series (episode 24, “The Beginning and the End, or Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”) and whose presence in that episode, and in the Rebuild films, tells you almost everything you need to know about what Evangelion is and isn’t doing.

Kaworu arrives at NERV after Asuka has effectively been destroyed as a combatant. Psychically annihilated by an Angel that attacked her mind rather than her body.

He is the Fifth Child (there’s a whole thing about each of the kids being the X Child and that means they can piot a particular Unit, it’s more than we have time for), the replacement pilot of Unit 02. He is beautiful, white-haired, unnervingly serene, and he is the only character in the entire run of the show who is kind to Shinji without apparent motive. Who seems to actually like him. Who reaches out with warmth rather than need or manipulation or the armour of their own damage. He is explicitly coded as queer and Shinj’s response is coded the same.

He is also the final Angel. He was always the final Angel. His kindness to Shinji is real and it is also the mechanism by which SEELE intends to initiate Instrumentality, because Kaworu’s goal is to give the human race the gift of Instrumentality. He believes in it. He thinks it is mercy.

Shinji has to kill him.

This is, in a 26-episode series that often moves at the pace of someone walking very slowly through their own head, the most devastating thing. It is devastating not because the show milks it sentimentally but because it does the opposite. Kaworu’s death takes about four minutes of screen time. The camera just watches. It does not rescue you from the moment.

In the Rebuilds, Kaworu’s role expands considerably and the specifics of his relationship to Shinji, to the Angels, and to the cycle of events Anno is now revisiting become central to 3.0 in ways that are genuinely difficult to parse if you don’t already know what he is and what he means.

The film gives him an arc across 3.0 and 3.0+1.0 that is about whether someone whose purpose is to serve as an instrument of something larger can also be a person.

Which is, not coincidentally, what the whole show is asking about Rei.

And, less directly, about Shinji.

And, least directly but perhaps most importantly, about Anno.

The final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are unlike anything else in anime and unlike most things in television (the original finale, the season two one, of Twin Peaks may be a close cousin - but go back and rewatch that episode and you'll find that you're remembering it wrong).

The production budget had collapsed. GAINAX was nearly bankrupt. Anno was deep in a depressive episode that was apparently among the worst of his life.

Rather than delay, rather than hand the show off to someone to finish, he made something that was simultaneously the most personal and the most formally radical thing the medium had yet produced.

Episodes 25 and 26 take place almost entirely inside Shinji’s head. They are constructed from recycled animation, storyboard sketches, still images, text on screen. There are sequences that look like they were made by a man with a camera and a photocopier.

Characters interrogate Shinji’s psyche directly, in the manner of a group therapy session that has gone places group therapy doesn’t usually go. The Angels, the conspiracies, the apocalyptic stakes. All of that dissolves. What remains is a boy trying to figure out whether he has any reason to exist. Whether the version of himself that other people need him to be is compatible with the version of himself that actually lives in his body. Whether he deserves to be alive.

It ends with Shinji deciding, tentatively, that he does. With everyone applauding.

Yes, PenPen the Penguin joins in congratulating Shinji.

The fandom lost its mind. Not in a good way.

There were death threats. Anno received death threats for the ending of an anime series (makes the whole “I’mma gonna do a protein so Last Jedi isn't part of canon” seem down right balanced). From people who felt cheated, who felt the deal had been broken, who wanted the giant robots and the apocalyptic finale they had been promised.

So… he went and made The End of Evangelion.

The End of Evangelion is the apocalyptic finale they wanted (or thought they wanted). It is also the most sustained act of contempt for an audience I can think of from a film.

It gives you everything. The giant robots. The apocalypse (the cool, super epic version). NERV getting obliterated in sequences of jaw-dropping, disturbing violence. That Asuka battle. Shinji screaming. The Human Instrumentality Project coming to fruition. Everyone on earth dissolving into a primordial ocean of collective consciousness, individual identity abolished, the loneliness that has been the emotional substrate of every character in the show finally, permanently, resolved.

And in the middle of all of this, a live-action section. Anno’s camera, a real camera, pointed at a cinema. At the audience. At us. Still images of the letters he received. Of the death threats.

The deal was: boy gets in robot, fights monsters, saves world. The audience got angry when the deal was broken. Anno made The End of Evangelion to complete the deal and to make absolutely clear, in the process, that the deal was the problem all along.

That wanting the apocalyptic finale, wanting the catharsis that comes from watching individual suffering resolved through spectacular violence, is itself the Instrumentality instinct. It is the desire to dissolve the uncomfortable, depressed, won’t get in the robot and save the world self into something larger and more satisfying.

It ends with two survivors on a red shore. A dead beach. The ruins of the world and humanity around them.

And Anno seems to be saying that this is what the real world looks like.

Two people who can’t quite reach each other. Separate. In pain. Alive.

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The Rebuild films were sold as a jumping on point. A streamlined version of the series.

Which is, to a certain extent, a good idea.

26 episodes of television followed by two films, one of which ends with a man strangling a woman on a red beach while she tells him how disgusting he is, represents a significant ask for a new audience in 2007.

The theatrical Rebuild films could be a door in. Cleaner. Higher production values. Self-contained. A version of Evangelion for people who didn’t want to do the homework.

Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone more or less holds this up. It is essentially “what if the first run of episodes of Evangelion but prettier and stripped back to the key elements.” It ends at a point that can function as the end of all of it if you didn't get to make the rest of the films. You could walk away feeling like you’d understood what you’d watched. It's good on a way that is familiar and comfortable.

Then 2.0 starts doing things that aren’t in the series. New characters. Diverging plot. The film stops being an adaptation, at least in the standard sense.

The ending of the film is unlike anything that has come before and it sees Shinji making the choice, for once, to get in the fucking robot and save the fucking world. And the world goes to hell. An Impact is triggered, the apocalypse is rendered in incredible detail and you start to get the sense that these films aren't a jumping on point.

Oh no, you need to be deep in what Evangelion is to understand what is happening in all of this.

Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo requires, to function at any level deeper than baffled endurance, that you know the following things: who Rei actually is and what her existence means; why Kaworu’s appearance carries the weight it does; what Shinji did at the end of 2.0 and why everyone surviving it would be furious with him; what the Human Instrumentality Project is and what it cost the last time someone tried to initiate it; why Gendo is not just a cold bad father but a man running a private apocalypse under cover of running a military organisation. None of this is explained. It is assumed.

And here is where I have to be honest about something, because I think the instinct to explain 3.0 as intentional and meaningful, which it is, can become defensiveness that doesn’t serve anybody.

3.0 is a frustrating film. It is frustrating on its own terms, not just for the newcomer who was promised a jumping-on point and got something that reads like a very expensive argument between the director and his own back catalogue.

The film withholds information with a thoroughness that can feel less like deliberate formal choice and more like a production that changed direction mid-development and didn’t fully paper over the joins.

Shinji wanders through the wreckage of a world he doesn’t understand, being told nothing by people who treat him as a threat, until a tragedy unfolds that he was not equipped to prevent.

This has meaning. But meaning and frustrating are not mutually exclusive. A film can be doing something genuine and still be a hard watch, and I’m tired of those that treat admitting the second as a failure to appreciate the first.

There is also the matter of the years.

2.0 ended with a preview of 3.0 that bore virtually no resemblance to the film that eventually arrived. Between 2.0 and 3.0, seven years passed. Between 3.0 and 3.0+1.0, another nine. The preview at the end of 2.0 promised a specific film. The gap meant that audiences arrived at 3.0 having spent years constructing expectations from a preview for a film that no longer existed. The film they got was doing something genuinely interesting. It was also not the film they had been waiting for.

What I find most interesting about the Rebuilds as a project is that they pulled the same move the original series did, just in reverse. The series promised the genre and delivered a breakdown. The Rebuilds promised accessibility and then made the original series mandatory. Both of them looked like one thing and turned out to be another.

The catharsis of 3.0+1.0 only lands if you’ve done the work. The series has to exist in your memory for the ending to mean anything.

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In 2016, Anno directed Shin Godzilla. Which is a film about a monster that emerges from Tokyo Bay while the Japanese government holds committee meetings about what the correct bureaucratic procedure for responding to a monster emerging from Tokyo Bay might be.

Forms are filed. Jurisdiction is debated. Departments refer decisions to other departments. The appropriate minister must be consulted. The appropriate minister is in a meeting. The monster grows. Tokyo burns.

It is a very funny film, in the bleak way that things are funny when they are also accurate.

The thing underneath the depression in Evangelion, the thing that makes Shinji’s paralysis feel so specifically true rather than just dramatically convenient, is not simply sadness. It is the helplessness of an individual inside a system that will not move.

Shinji cannot get his father to acknowledge him. He cannot get NERV to explain what it actually wants from him. He cannot get the adults around him to behave like adults.

He is inside an institution that is running its own agenda and has instrumentalised him as a component of that agenda. His depression is personal and it is also structural. It is what you feel when you are small and the systems around you are large and indifferent and will not be argued with.

Shin Godzilla is Anno making that argument explicit, with Godzilla as the crisis that the system is constitutionally incapable of responding to, and a group of mid-level bureaucrats as the protagonists who have to circumvent the system entirely to get anything done.

I’m saying the same themes kept finding him. A theory of what happens when you need something from the world and the world’s systems are not designed to give it to you and cannot be persuaded otherwise. Anno kept making films about that gap. The Evangelion films are about it. Shin Godzilla is about it.

The gap between what Shinji needs and what NERV is capable of providing is the same gap between what the Japanese emergency management committee needs to do and what its own procedures will permit.

Shinji can’t get in the robot. The committee can’t authorise the evacuation.

Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time is the ending. The real one.

Technically it is astonishing. But I'm not sure it's good. It is so much in direct conversation with the series, in ways that aren't useful. It's less the act of reflecting the series and more using the series as a way of short handing a lot of work. And dear god it is still introducing stuff right into the last act.

They're are moments that hit hard. Moments of emotional catharsis that rival anything the show ever did. Moments that could only have been made by a master of the form letting his story truly breathe.

But so much is bugnuts and do much doesn't make that much sense. And there are times where you can feel the shape of what Anno is trying to say and what he is trying to do but so often it ends up elusive. It's noisy at the expense of clarity.

It is a film that when it comes into focus seems to say the depression was real, the breakdown was real, the contempt was real, and also it is possible to come out the other side of that and want to be alive and make things and connect with other people.

Anno, by his own account, was in a much better place when he made these films, especially the finale. He’d married the manga artist Moyoco Anno. He’d had therapy. He’d found, or built, or been slowly shown, some version of equanimity. And Thrice Upon a Time feels like a work made by someone who is okay.

Who wants the characters he damaged to be okay.

Who wants, perhaps above all, for Shinji to be okay.

I believe him. I believe it’s genuine. I believe the ending is honest about who Anno is now. Even if that ending may be a let down after all the years waiting.

But.

End of Evangelion, the theatrical ending, the contemptuous apocalypse, the camera pointed at the audience, could only have been made by someone in genuine crisis. That has the specific, irreproducible weight of a creator making art from inside the breakdown rather than describing it from the outside.

Something in the texture of those final television episodes, and in the controlled chaos of End of Evangelion, is not possible to create when you're psychologically stable.

Thrice Upon a Time is an end to the series. But it isn't the real end. Not the messy breakdown that we had been given some two decades before.

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The version of Evangelion that changed everything, that changed me, specifically, sat on a couch on a Saturday night watching SBS with friends who had also never seen anything like it, was not the version where everything resolves.

It was the version where everything breaks. Where the budget collapsed and the creator broke down and the ending was made of photocopied storyboards and therapy sessions, and a boy decided, tentatively, with no supporting evidence, that he was allowed to exist.

That version was an accident. Or if not am accident then a cry for help in a crisis. A thing that happened because circumstances refused to cooperate with the plan that had been set out.

I think it might be the greatest thing Anno ever made precisely because he didn’t quite mean to make it.

Shinji didn’t want to get in the robot.

Anno, at the end of the original run, didn’t quite want to make the show he was supposed to make either.

That’s the thing they have in common. That’s why the show worked. That’s why twenty-five years of subsequent filmmaking, however good, however necessary for the man’s own health and peace, however technically magnificent, is also a long, expensive, beautifully animated process of trying to recover something that only existed because it couldn’t be controlled.

The Rebuilds are what happens when the creator survives.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is what happened while he wasn’t sure he would.

Shinji sucks. Except that's the point.

He’s fourteen, and he’s depressed, and the adults in his life built an apocalypse and put him in the middle of it and handed him the keys to a biomechanical horror and told him that everything depended on what he did next.

And the one time that he looked at what the world was offering him instead, the warm ocean of Instrumentality where the AT Field comes down and nobody is ever alone again and nobody ever has to feel the specific agony of being a self in a world of other selves you cannot fully reach —

He said no. If that isn't Shinji being a hero then what the hell else were you expecting?

I remember when I was 3 years old. A dream. A nightmare more. I had one night, though it’s lived in my head in a way that I wonder if it was recurring.

I would be in my bed and the room would tilt and roll over and I would fall towards the ceiling (now under me) and then pass through the ceiling and fall to a bed. My bed. And then the cycle would commence again. Forever tilting and rolling over and the sensation of falling with no end and nothing of substance under me.

It terrified me. It still terrifies me. That sensation. That inability to control the situation and find an escape from always, always falling.

I expect it’s why I have a severe fear of heights (and flying). Because when I really, truly sit down and interrogate what I am afraid of, it is a fear of falling. That I am in a situation where if things go wrong, I will find myself plummeting to the ground and however much I may be able to intellectualise the situation I am in, my body is afraid, truly afraid and terrified.

There’s a photograph. Yellow walls. Faded carpet. It’s an office, or not quite an office. The proportions seem off, like someone was told about an office space but had never actually seen one. The ceiling is somehow both too low and too high and you can feel that in your gut. There are no people.

The 4chan post that attached itself to this image in 2019 and metastasised into an entire internet mythology described it as what you end up in when you “noclip out of reality in the wrong areas.”

The image turned out to be from a Hobby Town USA undergoing renovation in Wisconsin, which is one of those facts that either enhances the horror or kills it.

The place was, at the time the photo was taken, in between versions of itself. The furniture store it had been, the hobby shop it was about to become. That in-between-ness was enough. The uncanny doesn’t require history. Sometimes it just requires a space that can’t articulate its purpose.

Kane Parsons (Kane Pixels, online) was sixteen years old. He discovered a render he had made in Blender of that photograph and wondered if he could do more with it.

He uploaded The Backrooms (Found Footage) on January 7, 2022. It has 76 million views right now. He had been teaching himself filmmaking since he was a kid, mostly posting videos nobody watched.

I want to be very clear about what Found Footage is, because the view count and the mythology and the virality of it have a tendency to flatten what it actually does and is. It is a nine-minute short film.

It opens with a kid filming a birthday party in 1991, screwing around with the camera, and then he trips or slips or something goes wrong with physics and suddenly he is somewhere else. The birthday party sounds are still audible, muffled, behind the wrong walls.

It doesn’t rush to show you anything. The kid keeps the camera running because filming is what he was doing and stopping isn’t something this kid that films everything would think to do. The dread accumulates in the space between things happening. By the time anything actually horrifying occurs, you’ve been softened up for eight minutes by corridors that just keep going. And going. And going. And going. All piss yellow and carpet that looks damp and maybe some mould and a thing. A thing that chases you through whatever this place is.

It is fantastic. It sits in your gut. It isn’t just a meme (though they came later). It is lowfi, minimalist horror that drenches you in dread until you are hoping for some sort of release.

That’s a storytelling achievement. Kane understood, completely, that the Backrooms works as an idea because of accumulation. The sameness that keeps going, the way the space resists mapping, the fact that the horror is architectural rather than monstrous. He built a short film around those properties instead of around a creature reveal or a jump scare.

It is a film that makes me think of the word “wrongness” again and again. While the production values are amazing and they look real, it’s all a render (hidden behind VHS fuzz effects). But it is so much wrongness Wrongness is the mechanism. It works by activating something like recognition and then placing that recognition slightly off-centre, so you can feel the discrepancy without being able to truly articulate it.

The birthday party sounds behind the wrong wall do this perfectly: you understand them immediately, and understanding them makes everything worse. Familiar things in the wrong place are scarier than unfamiliar things in any place, because the familiar thing means your spatial reasoning is compromised. You should know where you are. You recognise all the components. Unfamiliar things your brain will discard and look past. Sometimes that can be scary but it is rare for it to grab you in quite the same uncanny nature as the familiar in the wrong place (all apologies to eldritch abominations of course).

You watch those corridors for eight minutes. You keep watching. Nobody is making you (though I fucking dare you to look away). The film isn’t cutting fast or deploying cheap techniques. iIt’s genuinely just walking around, and you are choosing to continue, and somewhere in that choice a small transaction happens where the dread becomes partly yours rather than the character’s. By the time something near horrifying appears, you’ve frightened yourself considerably more than the film has frightened you, and the film knows this, and the thing it shows you is dialled in on just that.

I wrote a bit about liminal and abandoned spaces when I wrote about Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi. The short version: liminal spaces feel like they should have people in them but don’t. Abandoned spaces had people and now don’t. One is about potential, the other about loss. One makes you feel early. The other makes you feel very late. They both feel haunted but from different directions.

The reason I keep coming back to this distinction is that two of the most interesting things to happen in analog horror arrived at similar destinations from completely opposite directions.

Marble Hornets (2009–2014) went and found the abandoned spaces. A couple of film students and their buddies took a camera to crumbling parks and closed-down buildings around Alabama. A part of the world that apparently has no shortage of places that the world has stopped caring about and looking at.

And filmed their slow-burn early Slenderman mythology in those real places.

The texture of Marble Hornets comes from actual rot. Real rust. Paint that peeled because weather happened to it and no one was around to maintain it or cared to. Their entity, the Operator, has a physical location to haunt. He’s in these woods. At this park.

The eeriness compounds because it’s grounded in geography you could in theory go visit, and I’m certain people do. That’s the specific kind of claim Marble Hornets makes on its audience. It doesn’t just suggest that something happened. It suggests that something happened there in that real place that the world moved on from.

What makes Marble Hornets work as a piece of storytelling is its command of information. Specifically, how long it can make you go without giving you any. The entries are not uniform in length. Some run eight minutes, some run 40 seconds. Some of those 40 second entries are more disturbing than any of the longer ones, because they understood that the audience, at this point, has been trained to expect something, and withholding it is more effective than providing it.

“Entry 18” is Jay getting up and checking his apartment at night because he heard something, finding nothing, going back to bed. The entry exists to demonstrate that the series knows it has you. That you will expect something in that space and time but that it can withhold it from you and you will feel that.

That’s a very specific storytelling move. The whole series is built on those kinds of moves, decisions about where to cut, when to have the camera drop, how long to hold on an empty doorway before you do something with it, whether to do something with it at all.

The entries that are 30 seconds of static and then a cut to black are doing as much work as the ones with full set pieces. The series is a lesson in negative space as a storytelling device. In how long you can make an audience sit with not knowing before the not knowing itself becomes the horror.

And then the episode ends, and you are in the gap.

This is the part of analog horror that I think is most underacknowledged and most distinctive, the experience of being between entries. Because with a conventional series you can just put the next episode on. Or at least you know when the next episode will air.

With Marble Hornets (especially watching it as it originally aired, which required waiting days or weeks between uploads) the gap is where a portion of the horror takes up residence.

The community that formed around Marble Hornets in real time spent those gaps doing what the series trained them to do: assembling evidence. Reddit threads and forums full of people analysing the entries, mapping the locations, cross-referencing timestamps, building elaborate theories about what the Operator is and what he wants and what the rules of his existence might be. None of those theories are confirmed or denied by the series, which declines to explain itself, which means the theories multiply.

I have often lamented the tendency to try and left brain everything. That all media exists to be consumed and solved, when quite blatantly it is not. It is often excessively reductive. It reduces a work to the mystery at the expense of all else and if it the mystery can be considered good (by some random’s subjective stance on what is good) then the work is inherently good (see all takes on Westworld that argue the show was a masterpiece rather than the steaming pile of shit that it actually was - you have fucking Anthony fukcing Hopkins and you jettison him at the end of season 1?!). Which is garbage. It’s the sort of take you hear from people that complain about The Last Jedi because “Star Wars has never worried about fuel before”.

Cool.

But there is something about analog horror as it has evolved on youtube and other online platforms that actively sucks the audience in and wants that left brain itch to be scratched. That says there is a mystery here and the filmmaker knows what is going on but will withhold that from you and give you just enough here and there that you could put together in a framework.

This is the suck-in. It’s not one thing, it’s a system. The video creates the unease, the found footage contract recruits your attention, the serial structure stretches the unease across days and weeks (or years in the case of The Backrooms), and the community forum gives you somewhere to put it that simultaneously validates and amplifies it. In effect, the series outsources a portion of its horror to its own audience and gets it back with interest.

But even if you don’t give in to that and scratch the itch, there is still the horror that sits in your gut as you watch.

Kane had no real locations. Those yellow walls are rendered. That carpet was chosen from a menu. And yet.

Here’s the thing I think people get wrong about why the Backrooms series works as well as it does. It’s not that the construction produces wrongness, and the wrongness is scary. It’s that Kane knew exactly what wrongness he was trying to produce and built it from the ground up with complete precision. We could theorise about what he drew from, whether that is some deep seated fear, grappling with challenges around mental illness or anxiety. Whatever it was, that photograph struck something in him and he had the insight and the skills to be able to translate that to the screen.

When he describes the Backrooms as being like badly remembered family photos from the nineties (which probably has something to do with his thoughts on how his impossible space works). The flash always on, the white balance wrong. He’s describing a deliberate set of aesthetic decisions.

The uncanny in his work is engineered. Every proportion is slightly wrong because he made it slightly wrong. He is doing something closer to what a writer of fiction does than what a documentarian does. Constructing a place, or more the experience of a place, that feels realer than real because it was built to trigger the specific memories and anxieties of its audience rather than to accurately document anything.

Both series share a formal commitment that makes analog horror what it is: the insistence that this footage was found, not made. These things are discovered, there is no act of creation. The tape artefacts, the timestamp glitches, the camera that keeps the monster just outside of the frame. All of that is in service of a contract with the audience that draws them in, that makes them want to work it out, to see what the wider world outside the lens holds because this is evidence. It positions the viewer as someone assembling a picture of what happened rather than someone being guided through a plot.

The emotional difference between how the audience is positioned in a traditional horror film vs an analog horror work is significant. When a character in a conventional horror film runs into the wrong room, you might yell at the screen (I used to watch TV and movies with just about the most interactive person you’ve ever met - it was frustrating when trying to actually watch anything but when I was drunk and half watching things it would be pretty much the most entertaining thing ever).

When the camera in a found footage film points at the wrong wall for a fraction of a second too long You look again. You’re not an audience, you’re a detective, and something in your brain responds to that role in a way it doesn’t respond to spectatorship. It’s more active. Which makes the dread more active. You know, intellectually that this is not real. This is just a dumb video you are watching on Youtube. But it’s very form works to break down that intellectual framing for you. Hell, the platform it is delivered to you on is working to break that down.

Youtube may not be much good (it’s mostly bad video essays, terrible kids videos, and let’s play shit) but you go in with a baseline that it is reflecting reality. So you know this isn’t real but there is a little bit of you that isn’t quite sure and you start to wonder if it is fake then how did they make it.

Which means pacing works differently. Payoff works differently. The pleasure of resolution is different because the audience has become a more active participant. Marble Hornets withholds for years before certain things cohere.

The Backrooms series has been building its institutional mythology (Async, the government cover up, the slow drip character work that runs through the Found Footage episodes) across twenty-three episodes that have been released sporadically over four years, with an accumulation of detail that rewards people who’ve watched everything and doesn’t punish people who haven’t (you will still shit your pants even if you start with Found Footage 3 and have not watched any of the previous 21 episodes).

The later entries, particularly Found Footage 3 as above, which runs forty-five minutes and is Kane’s longest and most formally ambitious work in the series, demonstrate a storyteller who has learned how to sustain a specific kind of tension across a much longer duration than his first short.

The seventeen-minute mark of that episode does something with a locked corridor and an audio cue that got its hooks into me in a way I didn’t expect anything like this would. It works because Kane has spent four years building the specific kind of attention in his audience that makes a locked door and an audio cue terrifying. That’s not a craft that came with the Blender tutorials. He developed it as he has been making the series.

Neither of these things work because of the aesthetic. The aesthetic is in service of storytelling decisions that are genuinely good.

There is a 4chan comment, somewhere in the original thread, that says something like: the Backrooms is what retail looks like from the inside after hours. The horror of the Backrooms is a very specific contemporary horror. It’s the horror of the non-place.

The managed commercial environment. The space that exists to be passed through rather than inhabited. But now you can’t leave. The office park. The shopping centre after close. The hospital corridor at 3am. These are spaces we all know and none of us have ever really looked at, because the point of them is that you don’t look at them, you just move through them on the way to somewhere else.

The generation, Kane’s generation, that grew up with the Backrooms as a cultural object grew up spending significant amounts of their waking lives in browser tabs, in an experience of digital space that is extensive and mappable in theory and has near infinite tendrils that can be followed in practice. The Backrooms is that feeling as an inhabitable space. You got here somehow. You can’t quite remember how. Every room looks like the last room. You can hear something. It is a dream and you don’t wake up.

What Kane understood, and what The Oldest View (his best known work outside of The Backrooms (Found Footage)) extends even further, is that the specific spaces doing this emotional work can take different forms. That difference between abandoned and liminal.

He sets it in the Valley View Center mall in Dallas. A real mall which was demolished in May 2023. In the series it manifests underground, reachable only by concrete stairs descending into holes in the ground. The POV (literally) character is a YouTube vlogger who documents his exploration of the place on his phone.

The antagonist is a giant rolling puppet that moves through the corridors in a manner that is horrifying. Where it will never cease. This mindless, vaguely humanoid entity that will never stop, will always keep homing in on the character and the audience.

The choice to move from the rendered Backrooms to a real demolished mall is significant. Except it’s not the real mall, this isn’t a real space. It is a render again but it is so impeccably crafted and designed that you would be hard pressed to know that. The audience is very much likely to assume that this is a real space that is being filmed in.

But for all that it is an artificial space, Kane is not doing the same thing again with a different texture.

The Backrooms is a non-place, the space without history, an impossible space that seems to be infinitely growing (in my mind it’s like The City from Blame!). The Valley View Center is the opposite. A place with abundant history, a specific American institution from a specific era that has been abandoned (well demolished).

The horror in The Oldest View is not the horror of the space without meaning. It’s the horror of the space where meaning has been lost. A space that feels empty, where there is the sense of the absence of people. Where people should be but aren’t and you know that.

That hits the audience difference. It pulls at different fears sitting in them. Kane found his way there by following a weird image of a puppet he came across on the internet that he couldn’t stop thinking about. The series is stranger and maybe less legible than the Backrooms but you still feel seeped in the dread of it all. He said in an interview he’s aware that liminality can become “a crutch to lean on when your work is sort of relying on vagueness and ambiguity.”

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Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie came out in Canada in February and it is the best film this year and I don’t really care what comes out for the rest of the year because it just brought me so much joy. And this may all seem odd when I’ve just spent near enough to three and a half thousand words on analog horror. But it comes from the same place in a roundabout way.

The extremely compressed version of the lore here, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have been making the same piece of content since 2007. Web series, TV series on Viceland, and now a feature film. All of it is about fictionalised versions of themselves, characters named Matt and Jay (and at least Jay’s character’s full name is Jay McCarrol as we find out in the movie) trying just about anything to get their band (Nirvanna the Band, note the 2 n’s) a gig at the Rivoli in Toronto. Well, just about anything. They never just try and call the venue.

The movie is partially a time travel film (and that partially is partially a very direct homage to Back to the Future). When their latest plan to book the gig goes wrong, Matt and Jay are accidentally (well, they make what they think is a pretend time machine and then accidentally it works and so they are) transported back to 2008 and have to find their way back without destroying the timeline. Which, given who they are, goes about as well as every other episode of the show and webseries.

And in a wonderful piece of letting the story take you where it will, their editors found unused footage from amongst the hundreds of hours of footage that they had from 2007 when they were first making the webseries and were able to construct scenes where the 2025 versions of Matt and Jay can interact with their 2007 selves to sell the time travel of it all.

The effect is something between a technical miracle and something that nearly breaks your brain but all together puts the biggest grin on your face. There’s a scene where present day Matt watches something his younger self does, something that is funny and also quietly devastating, and Johnson plays it with absolute stillness. He’s watching himself. He’s watching who he was. The film doesn’t point a flashing sign at the distance between those two people and it doesn’t need to, because the compositing has literalised something that normally remains metaphorical. We’ve all watched footage of our younger selves and felt that particular dissociation. I often look at photos of my younger self and lament “Oh, young Sean, I have so much to tell you.”

Johnson built a feature film that puts that feeling at the structural centre of a time travel comedy and somehow made both things work simultaneously. The fact that Matt and Jay are still trying to play the Rivoli, still doing the exact same thing they were doing in 2007, just with progressively more elaborate schemes and progressively more collateral damage, is either a story about indomitable ambition or a story about people who cannot grow. The film is smart enough to leave that up to us.

Johnson makes his films the way the Marble Hornets guys made theirs, in the sense that he asks permission for as little as possible.

The Dirties (2013) was shot in a real school with real students who largely didn’t know they were in a film. A mockumentary about two high schoolers making a movie about a school shooting who start to blur the line between the fiction and the plan, and the whole thing is genuinely disturbing in part because the environment it’s set in is genuinely a real environment, and the people reacting to what’s happening around them are genuinely reacting, not performing.

Operation Avalanche (2016) was filmed partly in real NASA facilities using fake press credentials. Actual NASA staff participated under the impression they were helping with a student documentary about the Apollo program.

The NTBTS TV series used real Toronto locations and real unsuspecting bystanders throughout. An episode of the Viceland series staged its own version of the Sundance premiere of Operation Avalanche. The real premiere, of the real film, which Johnson was genuinely attending. And used real interview footage that had been shot with the explicit purpose of being recontextualised later for the fictional version of events.

The real Kevin Smith appears, being himself, in a fiction that nobody told him he was in. The feature film has sequences at the CN Tower that were filmed without permits. Johnson has said the film cost about two million US dollars total. That is less than a Hollywood production would spend on the CN Tower sequence by itself, and a Hollywood version of that sequence would also rebuild the CN Tower as a set and hire professional stunt performers, and would feel empty as hell.

The connection in all of this is not primarily about the DIY ethos (though that is part of it and there is part of me that loves that these people just get out there and make something, and I wish that I had done more of that when I was younger and I wish that I had the courage to go out and do stuff like that these days). It’s about the relationship to reality that the work constructs. Johnson’s films, like Marble Hornets, like the Backrooms series, insist on blurring the point between the constructed fiction and the actual world it was made in. Johnson plays a character with his name who has his history and his face and his filmography. And he does this in all of the films. And that means there is part of the audience that will engage with those films and with the TV series and so on in a way that the audience does with Marble Hornets.

What’s real? What’s staged? How much of that is the character and how much is the person? Did Kevin Smith know? Does it matter if Kevin Smith knows? Did they really just jump off the CN Tower?

The film generates questions about its own construction but has seams that are so clean the audience will never know one way or the other.

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(The inevitable comparison here is Nathan Fielder and especially the first season of The Rehearsal. Fielder’s reality blurring (or destruction) is meticulous and controlled in a way Johnson’s isn’t and doesn’t want to be. Fielder builds a specific collapse, to specifications, and executes it with the precision of someone who has planned for every variable. Johnson makes a bet with chaos and cashes it. The Sundance episode of NTBTS the TV series only works because the real Sundance was actually happening and Johnson was actually there and the real Kevin Smith was actually available, and Johnson was prepared to capitalise on that specific set of circumstances in that specific moment that he couldn’t have planned for, not really. There is a similar bit in the movie where they straight up wrote and filmed a section on the fly because there was a shooting at Drake’s mansion. One of these is closer to architecture. The other is closer to skydiving. Both have produced genuinely extraordinary work but the difference in the underlying assumptions and approach fascinates me).

What all of these filmmakers have in common is a relationship to their conditions that isn’t about compensating for what they don’t have. It’s about understanding what they do have.

The absence of infrastructure and kit and people and money and permits and a team is not a limitation on these works. It’s a formal property of them. Johnson can’t do the CN Tower scene with hired actors and a production designer and permits. Not because he couldn’t find the money (after Blackberry it sounds like Telefilm Canada were happy to write him a blank check), but because the scene is about doing the stupid thing, and the charge in it comes from the fact that someone actually did the really stupid thing.

The camera that drops and keeps recording in a Marble Hornets entry isn’t frightening because of the technical effect. It’s frightening because they understood that the camera keeping running, in the fiction they’d constructed, was the most terrifying possible choice the story could make at that moment. The seventeen-minute mark of Found Footage 3 works because Kane spent four years building the specific kind of attention in his audience that makes a locked door and an audio cue enough.

There’s a Matt Johnson interview I’ve been thinking about, in which he talks about why he puts real-world material and real brand references into his films. Back to the Future, Orbitz soda, the actual Sundance, Kevin Smith being Kevin Smith, footage from a midnight screening of The Phantom Menace. He says: “You’d be a fool to deny what made you. The people who walk around and act like the television shows that they watched growing up weren’t fundamentally informing their personality, they’re leaving so much on the table.”

What Marble Hornets understood about Slender Man, what Kane understood about the Backrooms, what Johnson understands about the entire fabric of pop-cultural reference he moves through is that none of it is separate from the audience. These filmmakers aren’t working in a studio environment that seals them off from the people who will eventually watch the work.

They’re immersed in the same world as their audience. They know the same beats, the same memes, they say the same things, and they listen to the same music. Making those things in the same world as the audience, with the same references, shaped by the same collective experiences and generational unconscious.

The Backrooms is a myth that metastasised on 4chan and Reddit and YouTube, and Kane made his series on YouTube and it immediately fed back into the same communities that generated the myth. Marble Hornets ran across the same internet that its audience was on, episode by episode, in real time, and the audience responded in real time, posting analysis and theories that the creators could see and respond to. Johnson’s work is saturated with the specific cultural thoughtforms of Toronto and Canadian film and the indie circuit and the streaming era in a way that assumes an audience who shares that.

The relationship between these filmmakers and their audience is porous. They’re not delivering a product to consumers. They’re making something in the same cultural space as the people who will watch it, and the closeness of that relationship is not incidental to the work.

That’s what gets lost when “analog horror” becomes a genre tag or simply an aesthetic, a set of techniques you can download and apply, like a filter. Low resolution, timestamp corruption, diegetic camera, upload it in episodes with gaps between.

You can do all of that and produce garbage (and many, many people have and continue to do so), because the style was never the point.

The point was that a teenager in Northern California made something that reached into a shared cultural fear that lived just below the surface in so many of us and delivered something that feels true despite it being artificial. The point was that two film students in Alabama went to real crumbling places and made real dread from them using nothing but editing and pacing and patience and an understanding of how long an audience can be made to wait. The point was that a Canadian filmmaker kept saying yes to the really, really fucking dumb thing and somehow kept pulling it off.

There’s a version of Watchmen that exists only in your head.

Not Moore’s version. Not Gibbons’. The one you assembled. The one that was built in the specific weather of how old you were when you read it and who handed it to you and whether you read it all at once or across a summer, and what you were working through at the time without knowing you were working through it. This is what I am forever talking about when I say that you end up consuming a hyperobject version of a text.

That version is probably pretty good. The problem is it’s also probably wrong, in the particular way that experiencing a great piece of work without the means to fully process it leaves you with something that feels like understanding.

Almost every adaptation of Watchmen that has ever existed is the product of someone who felt they knew what it all meant.

We need to talk about Rorschach.

Rorschach is the problem. He has always been the problem. He is, most likely, the reason Alan Moore has spent the better part of forty years visibly furious about what happened to this work, in the sense that you can trace almost every failure of adaptation and almost every misreading of the source material back to what audiences did with and assumed about Rorschach.

Moore wrote him as a diagnosis. An unflinching, almost clinical portrait of what happens when a traumatised person, genuinely traumatised, the backstory is very clear on what happened to him, is handed a mask and a story about justice and no support structure whatsoever.

Rorschach is homeless. He talks to himself in a journal. He murders a dog. He is incapable of human connection. His defining act is refusing to compromise in a situation where compromise would save millions of lives. And he frames that as moral clarity and the text frames that as moral catastrophe. It is almost entirely a reatcion from Moore to Steve Ditko’s objectivism (Rorschach is clearly outlined on The Question and Mr A, both creations of Ditko and both mouthpieces to spout Ditko’s Randian world view).

Except the framing is subtle enough that if you’re sixteen and you haven’t read enough to catch it, what you walk away with is: man, this guy is hardcore.

The internet has been putting him on t-shirts ever since.

Which is funny, except it isn’t, because what happened next is that everyone who made something in Watchmen‘s wake went and looked at those t-shirts instead of the comic.

Here’s what Moore was actually doing.

Watchmen is a formal argument, built into its structure, that the superhero figure is a story we tell ourselves instead of looking at how power works. The mask is not a solution. The mask is what we use in the place of a solution, so we don’t have to think about what a solution would actually require.

Every masked hero in the comic is either broken, deluded, compromised by their proximity to power, or, in the case of Ozymandias, technically correct in the most horrifying way possible.

Dr Manhattan can perceive all of time simultaneously and feel precisely nothing about a genocide unless a woman argues him into caring about it.

The Comedian is a rapist.

The conclusion the comic asks you to reach, if you’re following the formal argument, is not “superheroes are dark actually” but something closer to: the mythology of the superhero is a mechanism for the powerful to avoid accountability. The mask lets you tell a story about justice without having to account for who justice is for and who it is repeatedly, structurally, systematically withheld from. It is why Moore now will tell anyone who listens that the MCU films are fascistic power fantasies.

This was available in the text.

Then Zack Snyder made the film.

I want to be fair to the Snyder adaptation, which is the obligation I feel every time I’m about to be fairly unfair to something (though I’m not sure ‘unfair’ is the right term when it comes to my views and positions on Snyder and his oeuvre - something closer to ‘objectively accurate’ may be a better term).

He was faithful. Near pathologically faithful to individual panels, individual shots, individual moments. There are sequences in that film where you can place the source panel beside the frame and the correspondence is so exact it becomes uncanny. He cared, in the sense that caring can be demonstrated through labour and reproduction.

It’s the faithfulness of someone who saw the images and stopped there. Who looked at the blood spray on the smiley face badge on the first page and thought “fuck yeah, that’s awesome” and did not spend much time on what might reside in that image, or what it was doing, or what the work was asking of that image across its 350ish pages.

He romanticised, fetishised violence that Moore and Gibbons had spent considerable formal energy desaturating. The nine-panel grid. Gibbons’ deliberate flatness, the clinical regularity of it. It is specifically designed to not glamourise what it shows. To make the reader a witness rather than a spectator.

Snyder put Hallelujah over a sex scene and The Sound of Silence over a funeral and 99 Luftballons over things exploding, which is a film language that says “look how dark and edgy this is, look how serious and meaningful this is” rather than a film language that asks you to sit with what you’re seeing.

He made Rorschach cool.

He made the Comedian. The rapist, once more for those who may have missed it. Briefly, charismatically a guy you root for in the way movies make you root for charismatic men who do terrible things.

He made the Comedian cool.

The film is not an adaptation of Watchmen. It is an adaptation of the version of Watchmen that lives in the head of someone who looked at the pictures and never understood, or tried to understand, what they could mean. It is the t-shirt made into a movie. It grossed a decent amount of money, underperformed relative to expectations, and Snyder moved on to do the same thing to Superman (and then went down that bizarre thing with zombies and then he decided he wanted to make Star Wars but wasn’t allowed - this fucking guy).

And if you want to understand why Watchmen generates so many failed adaptations and misreadings, the Snyder film is the purest example: not because he was stupid or lazy (though maybe?), but because he was sincere. He genuinely thought he knew what it all meant.

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Before Watchmen is a trickier thing to be angry about, mainly because the anger feels almost quaint given everything that followed. DC published a run of prequel miniseries in 2012. Rorschach, Comedian, Ozymandias, Silk Spectre, Night Owl, Dr Manhattan, Minutemen.

Some of them were made by people who genuinely know how to make comics. Darwyn Cooke, who was an extraordinary cartoonist. Amanda Conner, who is wonderful. Brian Azzarello, who is good at the kind of thing he’s good at (pitch black noir is that the thing).

The craft isn’t the problem. The problem is the project’s existence.

Moore’s deal with DC included a clause stipulating that the rights to Watchmen would revert to him once the book went out of print. By all accounts he didn’t really read the contract he signed or the clause in question. He trusted and then DC acted like a commercial business and Moore was surprised and aggrieved.

DC kept the book in print. They have kept it in print for forty years, continuously, in part specifically so the rights never revert. Before Watchmen was both a product of that arrangement and a demonstration of what that arrangement looks like in practice. The creator of one of the most profitable comics properties in history, with no rights and no share of the ongoing revenue, watching DC mine his work for more ongoing revenue. He has disowned it all publicly. His name is not on any of it. He has described the comics industry as a place where sharks are fed by geniuses and there may be some truth in that.

Not that Moore is the sole creator that has ever been fucked over by a comics company and given a terrible contract that takes away rights to what he created (see: Kirby, Jack; see: Finger, Bill). But that history is all quite complex and is for another time.

The prequel series are fine if you want more comics set in that world, which I understand is a thing some people want (and is genuinely a fair assumption for DC to make). They don’t do any particular damage. But the act of their existence reveals an understanding of the property as a world to be expanded. Which is precisely opposite to the understanding the property was designed to provoke. Watchmen is not a world crying out for expansion. It is an argument that closed. It is hermetically sealed as a work, as a world, as an IP. Or should be.

You can’t write a warm character study of Rorschach without making Rorschach warmer. And the moment you make Rorschach warmer, you have put him back on the t-shirt.

This is a review of The Boys (2019 - present: TV series; 2006 - 2012: comic).

Garth Ennis’ comic is not subtle about its lineage and does not pretend otherwise. It is Watchmen as refracted through a decade and a half of grimdark superhero comics that were themselves all refracted through Watchmen, and what comes out the other end is what if superheroes were sex criminals.

The Superman analogue is a sex criminal. The Flash analogue is a sex criminal. Every analogue you can think of: sex criminal. The joke is the bit and the bit is that superheroes are sex criminals, which is being deployed as though it is the Moore insight, as though taking the genre down a peg by making it maximally gross is the same intellectual operation as taking the genre apart to look at what it’s built to conceal.

It isn’t.

This is what Garth Ennis does and who he is. It’s how he was when he was writing for 2000 AD. It’s how Preacher was. It’s how his Hellblazer was. It’s how most of his work for Marvel is and was.

There are gems in there. Punisher MAX is a legitimately good run of comics that finds a good meeting points between his grimdark, gross out, edgy storytelling beats and something to say about the way the American military uses up its grunts. Anyhow.

Moore’s insight was structural. It was about power and who power serves and the stories institutions tell about themselves so they don’t have to account for their actions.

Ennis’s insight is that superhero comics are for children and if you make them for adults the adults should get sex crimes because that’s what adults know about (and want to read about I guess?)

Which is transgression dressed up as a deconstruction. Transgressive for its own sake is, in the end, a conservative formal choice. It’s the genre thinking it’s interrogating itself while actually just adding gore to the cover.

And yet.

The Amazon television series, developed by Eric Kripke, is a different and in some specific ways significantly better thing.

The show noticed, and this is the key move, this is the thing the comic never managed, that the superhero apparatus, the PR operation that manufactures consent for heroes, maps almost perfectly onto the mechanisms of corporate capture and political theatre and the media industrial complex at the particular historical moment when the show began airing in 2019.

Vought International is not just a company that employs superheroes. It is a company that constructs the cultural conditions under which superheroes seem necessary, which is more interesting and more accurate and more uncomfortable.

Homelander (Antony Starr doing something I find genuinely difficult to look away from, the performance of a man shaped entirely by every need that was never met) is a product of that apparatus more than he is a product of whatever was done to him biologically.

He is what happens when you hand someone an enormous amount of damage followed by an enormous amount of power and a mythology and call him the good guy (or even something approaching a god). Which, again, is not entirely unlike what Moore was pointing at. The show just got there through the sex crimes laid down by Ennis (and you better believe the show retains a lot of the sex crimes and the gore and the grimdark and the edge).

It is still not a good show. I can’t say that enough. It is uneven in the way that happens when a writers room finds a seam and doesn’t quite know how to mine it. The satire is frequently blunt in the way being smashed in the face, repeatedly, with a hammer is blunt.

It wants desperately to be cool, which is the thing that keeps undermining the serious project underneath. But it is more politically alive than the comic ever tried to be and it is often a lot smarter, and that’s not nothing.

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This is all a review of Dmon Lindelof’s Watchmen (2019). The HBO series. One season. Cancelled.

Lindelof takes a lot of blame for Lost and how it ended (I have long been on record as an apologist for how Lost ended and will continue to do so - but I recognise that much of the world disagrees with my position and straight up hates how it landed).

He gets blamed for Lost in ways that don’t fully account for how collaborative television production is, and he gets credited as the saviour of The Leftovers in ways that probably undersell Tom Perrotta and his contributions. What he actually is, and The Leftovers demonstrates this clearly, is a writer with an almost clinical instinct for identifying the emotional wound underneath a genre premise and then excavating down into it until genre and wound are inseparable from each other, until the story can’t be told any other way.

The Leftovers is not really a show about mysterious disappearances. It is a show about grief and madness and rage and the impossibility of making meaning from catastrophic loss, and the disappearances are the container that grief requires because the feeling is too large and too formless to be carried by realism alone.

Watchmen is not a show about superheroes.

Before Lindelof could adapt Moore’s work, he had to answer the question every other adaptation failed to answer: what are we actually doing here? Structurally. Why does this story need to be told in this form to this audience at this moment?

His answer was Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921.

The Tulsa Race Massacre. The destruction of Greenwood. Black Wall Street, a prosperous Black neighbourhood. That destruction by a white mob with the active participation of local law enforcement. Hundreds killed. Thousands left homeless.

One of the single worst acts of racial violence in American history and, for the better part of a century, largely absent from mainstream American historical consciousness. Certainly as a not American, it was not something I had awareness of until this show.

Not suppressed exactly. Just not taught. Not spoken about. Present in the community it happened to and invisible to the culture that had decided not to look. A wound that the official story had covered over so thoroughly that most people driving through Tulsa would have no idea it was there.

The series opens with it. Not as prologue. Not before the real genre story begins. As foundation. As the actual, literal ground that everything else in the story is built on.

This is the thing that every other adaptation failed to understand, failed to even try to understand.

Moore’s argument, the formal argument built into the structure of the comic, is about the stories institutions tell about themselves so they don’t have to account for what they’ve done.

The mask as mechanism.

The heroic mythology as avoidance.

The gap between the official version and the actual version, and who lives in that gap, and what it costs them. The American institution that most perfectly embodies that gap, the one with the longest, least-examined history of violence conducted under the banner of order, is policing. Something that was starting to become increasingly apparent when the show was being developed and produced.

Specifically, the relationship between law enforcement and the ongoing brutalisation of Black Americans that the institution was constructed to perpetuate. Not a side effect. Not a bug. A feature. A thing the institution was built to do, that the institution’s mythology exists to obscure.

So Lindelof gives us a world where police wear masks (and dear god does that read different now in 2026 than it did in 2019). Officially to protect their identities from white supremacist reprisals. And the Seventh Kavalry, the white supremacist terrorist organisation that is the primary antagonist, wears Rorschach masks.

Because of course they do.

Because if you actually read the text, you knew Rorschach was always going to end up there. The uncompromising, traumatised, mask wearing reactionary who decides the system is corrupt and therefore appoints himself as its solution. The man whose defining ideology is that compromise is weakness and that he alone can see clearly. That guy ends up in a militia. Moore knew it. Lindelof understood that had the nerve to say it in the adaptation.

He had the nerve to say that the cop and the vigilante are wearing the same mask.

The comparison I keep landing on, the one I can’t shake, is Atlanta season three.

Donald Glover took the show to Europe for that season and people were disoriented by it. The geographical remove allowed him to say things about Blackness in America that the show couldn’t manage from inside it. The surrealism got denser.

I wrote a whole thing about it, remember.

The formal experimentation stopped feeling like stylistic choice and started feeling like structural necessity. As though realism couldn’t hold the weight of what was being described and something else had to be found.

Lindelof’s Watchmen is doing the same operation with superhero mythology. The masks and the powers aren’t there to satisfy fans of the source material (they may actually be there to actively dissatisfy the ‘fans’).

They are the container the story requires. The genre frame gives Lindelof a symbolic language for talking about things. Institutional violence, the performance of protection, the buried history underneath the official story. That straight realism would either flatten or sensationalise. You need the masked hero standing over the crime scene, you need the weight of that image, to carry the full argument that the institution of law enforcement is itself a crime scene.

Regina King is extraordinary in it in ways I find hard to articulate without just describing what she does. She’s been extraordinary in things before and she still finds registers here that I didn’t know were available to her. The finale cashes every check the first eight episodes have been writing since the opening frames of episode one.

Every failed adaptation of Watchmen. The film, the prequels, The Boys (which fine, it isn’t a straight adaptation but it is clearly a logical end point for this style of comics which grew out of a gross misunderstanding of what Watchmen was and is).

They took the iconography and left the argument. They saw Rorschach and thought “cool” and cool is a mechanism for not having to look at what’s underneath.

And the reason this keeps happening, the reason the t-shirt keeps getting printed, the reason the film was made by someone who thought slow motion and Leonard Cohen would carry the weight, is that the mask is genuinely compelling. The image is genuinely powerful.

The aesthetic works in the way that great aesthetics work: it short circuits you thinking. And if you decide that the arrival at that feeling is the destination, then you make the Snyder film. You write The Boys comic. You think anyone might want Before Watchmen.

You miss the thing the blood on the badge is actually pointing at.

Lindelof’s series is the only adaptation that asked what the mask was hiding. And what it found underneath, in the actual historical substrate of the American city where it set the story, was a massacre. A wound. A thing the official story had covered over because the official story required it to be covered.

It was cancelled after one season.

The reasons are various and Lindelof himself has said he considered it complete. And I rather applaud that. It is a sealed universe that tells a sealed story and there is no real need to expand beyond its edges.

I also note that a show this specifically and clearly about the violence of the American state toward Black Americans, arriving in the middle of 2019 and watched primarily by the audience that watches prestige HBO drama, had a commercial ceiling that a show about cool and edgy guys in spandex does not.

The Boys is in its fifth and final season (with one spin off series at season 2, and talks of other shows that will spin out of that universe, like some sort of blood soaked MCU).

The Snyder film exists.

Before Watchmen is in a collected edition if you want it (though why you would…)

There are Rorschach t-shirts available in most sizes.

It’s school holidays, so you know what that means. I had to take the kids to see The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. A transcript of our conversation after the film has been lightly edited.

Me: Okay, kids, let’s talk about the Super Mario Galaxy movie. What did you think?

Child 1: It was very great.

Me: What was so great about it?

Child 2: Because Mario went wahoo!

Me: Anything else?

Child 2: No.

Me: What did you think about it?

Child 3: It was very good because I like Mario Kart and basically Mario Kart is a copy of Super Mario movie.

Child 1: Can I quickly say something? I liked it because I was spending the time with my family.

[Boo this child - while sweet, she clearly thought she was going to be rewarded for saying such things]

Me: What was the funniest part in the movie for you?

Child 2: Rosalina and Princess Peach holding their hands together and they just brought the glass cage down that Bowser Junior had made. And it was a bubble.

Child 3: I liked it when Toad Mario and Luigi turned into a baby.

Child 1: I also liked it when they turned into a baby.

Me: Was there anything in the movie that scared you?

Child 1: There was one thing that scared me in the movie and it was Bowser Junior.

Me: Was he scarier than Bowser?

Child 2: My scary part is when Bowser went in lava and he almost died in the lava.

Child 3: I didn’t have a scary part.

Me: Did anybody miss Bowser singing like he did in the first movie?

Child 3: I did not cause it was sus.

Child 2:: I did not because it was sus.

[Where do they learn these terms?]

Me:: What was your favourite part of the movie?

Child 3: It was when it was the story about Peach and Rosalina and it was the real story.

Child 2: And when Princess Peach killed the guy who blows bubbles.

Me: Did you guys like that bit of the movie where they were in the casino? It was all upside down and stuff?

Child 2: Yes, that was the thing I’m talking about.

Me: I know, Did you like that bit?

Child 2:: Yeah.

Me: Any other bits you enjoyed?

Child 3: I enjoyed most of the movie.

Child 1: I had no favourite parts but my favourite part was the stories.

Me: Did you like it more or less than the first Mario movie?

Child 2: More.

Me: Why did you like it more?

Child 3: Because there was Rosalina and it uncovered more of Peach’s stories and my second favourite part was when Peach was a baby and Rosalina was her big sister and Rosalina had to put Princess Peach down the pipe and the toads found her.

Me: Did you guys like Yoshi?

Child 1: Yeah.

Me: What was good about Yoshi?

Child 2: That he was a dinosaur and he was a new addition. And that he was actually found in a pipe but I did not know that.

Me: Did you guys miss Donkey Kong? I missed Donkey Kong.

Child 3: Well, not really. He was kind of a bad guy. But also Donkey Kong was rude to Mario when he was on Mario’s team.

Me: Is there anything else that you guys want to say about the movie before we end?

Child 2: It was so, so fun because Bowser goes in the lava and turn into a skeleton.

Child 1: I loved being with my family.

[

]

Child 3: That the Super Mario Bros is actually a good show.

Child 2: I also enjoyed spending time with my family and watching the Mario movie with my dad.

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My kids are wrong. Which is hardly surprising given they are children and children aren’t good at critically assessing much of anything. They just respond to something if it makes them laugh or have fun. They are after all mostly creatures of the id.

A few years ago I reviewed the Super Mario Bros. Movie. I was rather scathing in my assessment.

But there’s no story. It’s all just fan service all the time. Quick, think of the most popular Mario properties. Got that firmly in your head? Now imagine stringing them together. You have now watched the Mario Bros. movie. There’s a section that apes Donkey Kong (see what I did there? cause Donkey Kong is an ape and it’s like a double… no, it’s okay, you get it). There is a Mario Kart section. There is a Super Mario Bros. section.

Honestly, my former self is doing a pretty good job of describing the new movie as well. It’s a structure to try and cram as many Mario things into 90 minutes as possible. Which isn’t all bad, there are some things that genuinely I did not expect (Fox McCloud, in a Mario movie, in this economy? Man, Starfox was a great game). But it’s also so checklisty at the expense of story.

Now kids films have kind of always been thus. They often exist to act as marketing vehicles for whatever the property is. It could be toys (like the great toy cartoons of the 80s), or it could be to try and remind you that you fucking love Mario games and wouldn’t you really like to pick up a Switch 2 so that you can play all of them including the latest and greatest?

Which isn’t to say that all kids films are without merit. Virtually all the Pixar films are great (we saw the trailer for Toy Story 5 - looks like it’s going to be about aging… which is every Toy Story since the second one; we also saw the trailer for the live action Moana and Disney just needs to not anymore). For all the crass commercial aims of the Transformers: The Movie (1986 - you better believe I have been working on something about that recently), the film ended up being a Nieztchean nightmare of a film that terrified a generation of young boys cause Hasbro wanted to wipe the slate clean before rolling out a new set of toys.

But this, this is just so hollow. Like the first film, it doesn’t have the decency to tell a good story. Instead, it disintegrates the hero’s journey. A complaint I had in the first film was that normally a story requires it’s hero to grow and change so that it can overcome the obstacle that is put in their way - instead, that film had Mario victorious because he gets the right powerup at the right time. And so it is here again.

Except kind of not?

You see, it isn’t clear to me why Mario is in this movie.

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Rosalina and Peach are hyper competent here and drive the action. And Mario is just kind of there.

You could excise Mario, Luigi and Yoshi from the film, save 20 minutes, and we’d all end up in the same place. I get his name is on the tin but at no point is he critical to anything here. He gets a couple of fights, and he gets to mix it up with Bowser a bit, and Chris Pratt’s accent is still all over the place. But he doesn’t need to be in the movie.

The truly bizarre thing is there are points where the film feels like its going to move in a direction that gives him a more active role, or creates some conflict from his presence, or just does anything and then it decides that would take too much work (and lord knows that we need to shoehorn in some more fan service, so lets waste 6 minutes on them being turned into babies and running from a t-rex (??) that has precisely nothing to do with anything).

But what is wildest in all of this is the message of the film. Its actually quite a fantastic message (particularly given the message of the first film is “get the right powerup at the right time and you shall succeed”) but I’m not sure the movie intended this to be the message (that was probably intended to be something like “are you buying more Nintendo shit yet?”).

By reducing Mario to an extra, the film is about how women are the most powerful force in the universe and how men seek to steal that power to carry out destructive actions. Which is kind of amazing but I’d be stunned if they intended that.

I’m not going to lie and tell you this film is without any joy. It can be fun. It had a few laughs. Of course, those are often balanced out by sitting there and thinking “is that fucking Luiz Guzman?”

But it’s not good. It’s cynical and hollow and made me wish for a time when kids movies were a bit weirder and not just slavishly beholden to an IP cause if they get it wrong some neckbeard on Reddit will piss and moan about akshully Hollywood got it wrong (and then would do something like start a petition to get the movie struck from canon as though that’s a thing).

A time when a kids movie would open with an alien robot mall populated by alien robot kids being devoured by an alien robot planet god.

And it doesn’t have any Bowser songs in it (which I thought was pretty much a contractual requirement when Jack Black is in a movie).

But that’s for another time.

Louis Theroux is one of my guys. I remember of my fondest memories of a day being hungover was spending all day inside our hotel room (we had taken a trip to Melbourne) with a good friend of ours, just mainlining episodes of Weird Weekends that we had on DVD.

Anything new that Louis does, I’ll turn up for.

So here we are with Inside the Manosphere.

We need to talk about the latter day works of Louis Theroux.

Louis Theroux started out presenting segments on Michael Moore’s TV Nation (does anyone remember Michael Moore? Remember when he won an Oscar?!?). Having established himself as a bit offbeat and taking an interesting approach to interviews, he struck out on his own with Weird Weekends.

Weird Weekends was a great show. Theroux was a great presenter. The hook was that he found someone in a fringe, niche area of society or the culture and spent a weekend with them. Within that framework he revealed himself to be a deft interviewer that was able to get all manner of subjects (from believers in aliens, female bodybuilders, porn stars, or white supremacists) to open up.

Through those interviews he was able to humanise his subjects while not letting them off the hook. In doing so, he demonstrated an aptitude to find a way in with groups and people that may not otherwise want to talk to a documentarian.

The Most Hated Family in America, his exploration of the Westboro Baptist Church is perhaps his crowning achievement in this space. A piece that shows a human side to his subject while also taking them clearly to task for their bigotry, and, as always with Louis, finding moments of humour.

Similarly, his series When Louis Met… (which included that episode with Jimmy Saville) took a similar approach. These are all very good films. And okay, maybe you don’t want to spend an entire day binging them while hungover but there is enough entertainment on offer through all of them that you could it you really wanted or had to.

It is too pat to say that when he started doing his BBC Two specials that things changed. That’s too clean a line of demarcation to claim. Following that point there are triumphs such as My Scientology Movie (which has his most formalistic experiment), and films that return to previous subjects and revisit the porn industry and the Westboro Baptist Church.

Though it is telling that his best work in his latter career comes from revisiting subjects he had covered well previously.

The problem is that with his success through his previous films, Louis appears to have convinced himself (or perhaps BBC Two more to the point) that he isn’t just a great documentarian but instead is a great journalist.

These are not the same thing.

With the BBC Two specials, Louis stars to tackle subjects that are harsher, more dangerous, more complex. And it is simply beyond him.

Time and again, he tries to examine a situation, such as his documentary in Lagos, that has some many dimensions to it, such complexity that all he is able to do is provide a simplistic overview of a situation.

In part, this is the flaw at the centre of the framework that Louis has spent his career honing. By trying to get down to the personal level within a complex situation, it simply isn’t possible to properly examine the context that person exists in, at least not in a meaningful manner. The result is a series of films that are ultimately reductive, often miss the wider point of a situation, but show just enough of the charm of his older work that you keep watching.

So it is with Inside the Manosphere. But now it’s kind of worse.

For a while now, it has become apparent that Louis’ subjects have become wise to his approach. In part this is because in parallel to his career, there has been the rise of the internet, social media, and alternative media ventures. This has meant that his subjects are more likely to understand the approach they need to take to be best presented in the hopes of leveraging Louis’ film as a means of gainer wider exposure (ironic given that people have significantly decreased media literacy these days).

That this would be the case in this latest film which focuses on members of the manosphere should come as no surprise. You are talking about a bunch of terminally online dickheads (often who grew up online) that make their money online and know all about how to present to an audience.

Without a doubt his subjects are gross and say gross things across the film but honestly, it kind of feels like he’s only touched the surface.

I can’t help but think there are a few issues at play.

The first is actually something I expect was forced on him. The film is 90 minutes, most of his previous films have been 60 minutes. That extra 30 minutes needs to be filled and it feels like he’s stretching himself thin returning to subjects more than he needs to (or possibly wanted to).

While it’s never said in the film, it’s clear that he wanted to get an interview/time with Andrew Tate (and his brother) who is one of the main figures of the manosphere, and it a truly disgusting human being (who, as the film tells us, is facing human trafficking charges in Romania). But he also failed to get that interview.

And so he is stuck with people in Tate’s orbit rather than the man himself (though one suspect’s that Tate was coordinating with those other subjects). One can feel an intended arc to the film that never ends up being realised, and instead he falls back to a weaker and far less interesting arc for the film using someone that is not connected to the Tates. That is fascination there but it isn’t the same and sort of muddies the message.

Another issue is thinking that he was going to be able to properly engage his subjects in the film so that they would slip up, or reveal something of themselves that they had not intended. But as above with these people knowing how to present them, he’s never able to properly pin them down. There is the odd moment where he presses them on a comment or a position, sure, but it doesn’t really feel like they are shown up.

Which may be fine but we are talking about a group of people where there are thousands of hours of them talking that are available to a film maker. In zooming in on the individual and trying to interview them, it ironically allows the subjects to escape relatively unharmed. No one comes off looking good but no one looks like the horrible creatures that the manosphere produces.

This is even more apparent given that there have been many pieces, articles, films, podcasts and the like over the past few years that really illuminate just how poisoned and poisonous the manosphere is.

In fact, when this film is being released is itself an issue. The manosphere is not new at this point. It has been well documented. There is an ongoing conversation about how it can be tackled and the real damage that it is doing. Hell, even one of the subjects in the film, Sneako, points out that most of the main players in the manosphere have moved into more of an alt right political space now (that is still replete with misogyny because of course).

Finally, there is a real issue with the main subject of the film. One suspects this is due to that guy being the one that provided the most access (both in terms of time and regularity) while the others provided more limited access and therefore less footage that could be cut together.

The problem is that as much as the guy sucks and is clearly an alt right twat who is terminally online and likes to throw around his misogyny (and is arguably a pimp), he’s not exactly in the manosphere. He’s more on the fringe of it. Yes, there are manosphere tendencies there but if you are going to really examine this space, this is not the guy to use as your vehicle.

Though I will admit there is something fascinating about the way their relationship plays out based on the subject’s reaction to comments on posts on the internet during the period Louis is filming. And in seeking to humanise his subjects in the way that Louis always does, he does strike upon a thread about these guys having been traumatised and possibly overreacting to not having had stable male figures in their lives while growing up.

But then there’s the utterly baffling lack of acknowledgment of Netflix’s series Adolescence (despite the fact that this film is on Netflix as well) which dramatised the manosphere and the harm it is perpetuating with young men.

And here is the key sin of this film. I can let some of what I’ve described above go, I can maybe look past the muddled and unclear description of the manosphere, I can ignore the choice of subjects to an extent. But what is pretty much unforgiveable is the failure to engage with the impact of these fuckers on young men.

There are a couple of moments that hint in this direction. The odd mention of how many followers these guys have. Footage of them being mobbed by young men who want selfies. But nothing of substance.

Instead, Louis chooses to focus in on the guys and their ‘one way monogamy’ (they get to fuck whoever, their partners don’t). Or on what these social media figures mean when they talk about ‘the matrix’ and what red piling means.

The manosphere is terrifying. That young men are being raised on content that tells them that women should serve them, that if women don’t do what they are told they should be punished, that all that matters is making money and fucking. Whether you have a son or not, whether you know a young man or not, we should all be fucking terrified of what is happening. Of the cesspool that the internet has calcified into while we thought it was all just trolls and morons.

But you wouldn’t get that from this film, not really, and you probably won’t end up as alarmed as we should have been years ago.

[cont.]

Maladroit

2002, Geffen Records, Prod: Weezer

So Mikey Walsh left the band after having a nervous breakdown and the band kept on churning out the tracks.

Barely a year after Green, they dropped Maladroit. And that, depending on who you listen to, was the last good album they released.

Or at least that it is the lie that we tell ourselves. It’s strange how we seek to put narrative to situations. We say that there is an arc to history, that it rhymes or repeats, we see patterns writ large. That is what happens when we act in a situation of imperfect information (which is all situations as humans). We tell stories to make sense of the world. We soothe ourselves by singing songs.

One of the things that has struck me so much in this project has been coming back to albums that I haven’t listened to much since their release and finding what they are now. Now that I am older, now that my musical horizon has expanded, now that I am a different person, now that I like different things.

Sometimes, as with Pinkerton, those albums are still what they always were. They are part of the fabric who I am and how I came to be.

Other times they show up the stories that we tell ourselves as nothing but lies.

Because Maladroit? It’s not good. It’s perhaps not actively bad, and it’s not aggressively generic like Green was but it is a not good album.

There is part of me that will always be thankful to have lived through the universe seeing fit to combine my love of Weezer and my love of the Muppets.

But “Keep Fishin’” is not a good song, even if the film clip fills me with something close to joy (except for you, Scott - I don’t like you Scott).

For sure, there is more of an edge on the album than their previous outing. The guitars chunk more, there is more grime. Ric Ocasek is not longer producing and there is something welcome about the band doing the production themselves like they did on Pinkerton.

But edge is that of a teenage edgelord and the album is ultimately empty. Perhaps not in the way the vapidity of Green was but it still has little to nothing to say for itself. It is telling that the lead single “Dope Nose” (which again makes for a weird lead single like “Hash Pipe” did before it) is a) the best song from the album and b) also from SS2K.

The thing is - I didn’t really notice that at the time. I enjoyed the shit out of the album when it dropped but when I reflect on that time, I can see that it was just one album in a field of many that year.

2002 was the year of Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age - an album that haunted me all that summer. The sort of record that I would listen to 5 times in a day and would still want more. It was the year Sigur Ros released (). The year of Original Pirate Material by The Streets at just the right time that it would be my jam. N.E.R.D.’s first album, the good one, was that year. There were two Tom Waits albums (Alice is the better one). The Vines flamed out that year, going from a single everyone wanted to a tour that no one wanted to talk about. We were still living in the shadow of Radiohead releasing Kid A and Amnesiac over the two years before.

So what then if Maladroit was not the greatest thing. It still felt like it slapped more than Green had, the band wasn’t frolicking with goddamn tiger cubs in a meadow anymore. They were back.

But we didn’t realise was that a lot of their worst instincts were right in front of us.

[cont.]

What even is good? Do you know it when you see it?

There’s this genre of internet that pops up its head every now and then that I find utterly fascinating.

I could describe it but the following is a near perfect example of the phenomenon. Plus it means we get a chance to acknowledge how Iron Lung has just smashed it at the box office (a 7x return on production costs… nice), and while I may not be the biggest fan of low budget horror cinema being what people do as their debuts, I also genuinely love it when actual indie pictures go bonkers:

I’ve seen Iron Lung, and it was amazing. Absolutely phenomenal, it’s in my top 3 favorite movies of all times now. So, I went to check out the reviews for the movie, and most of them average around... 6/10, for some reason? And most of them keep mentioning how the movie was boring and how it was too long, and I just don’t get it. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I loved every second of it. Not even during the “slow” start. When I thought the movie was about to end, I was praying that it would go on for a little longer, because I was enjoying it so much.

And I get it, different people have different tastes, and just because I love something so dearly doesn’t mean it’ll apply to everyone. But on the other hand, it just feels kinda insulting. I have trouble maintaining attention on things, I tend to get distracted by my own thoughts. And yet despite that, the movie had my attention all the time, and I felt so damn excited at times. So for somebody to come in and say that “the movie was boring and should be a short film” feels disrespectful.

There’s a little theory in my head. I think that maybe the critics just treat going to the cinema too much like a job, and they didn’t watch the movie for fun, but rather as a chore they needed to get through. I mean, I sat down in my seat to have a bloody good time, and they sat down probably just to write an essay on it. Furthermore, the critics might’ve not even liked this kind of movie in the first place, only coming to see it because it’s a big thing people talk about, and not because they saw the trailer and thought “this looks fun”. No wonder somebody leaves a low score when they force themselves to watch something they didn’t actually ever want to watch in the first place.

There is just so much to unpack here. So much that is just a person that has so many blind spots they wouldn’t even recognise the term. Also, and not to be too harsh on the guy, this is some loser shit. He’s insulted cause people he’s never met don’t agree with him on something??!

Did you know that film critics go to the movies for a job?

Did you know that film critics have to write essays for their jobs?

Did you know this guy thinks its conspiracy cause other people don’t really like something he really likes?

Cretin.

But I kind of get it.

Sometimes, you watch something and you kind of want to have what you felt about it reinforced.

Or maybe you want to be able to articulate your sense of something you’ve watched (shout out to the guy at work the other day that said the episode of That Reminds Me Of… on Avatar 2 helped him do just that - as a critic there are few things that will pick me up like that).

And sometimes, you want to go on to the internet cause you aren’t quite sure what it is that you just watched.

The Chair Company is just such a thing.

Even now I’m not really sure if I enjoyed it. I think I did. I’m not sure. I didn’t laugh as much as I think I should have. And if I wasn’t laughing then what was left and was it any good?

I love Tim Robinson. I think he is a comedic genius on a level we rarely see. A generational talent.

I entirely get that many people will not enjoy him or his work. I can see all the things that people complain about.

That right there is either one of the greatest skits you’ve ever seen or it is like nails on a chalkboard being hit with a cat. For me, that is one of the great sketches. Not the best (cause Python exists in this universe) but definitely up there. The faux confidence. The way the door breaks. The drool. The cross cutting. Chef’s kiss.

If there is an issue with Tim Robinson it is that he very much plays a Tim Robinson character. It doesn’t really matter what the skit is, he’s playing some minor variation on “Tim Robinson”. Sometimes he’s a corporate executive. Sometimes he’s a beleaguered parent. Sometimes he’s akin to a guy that you worry about on the train. But the window for his range is relatively small.

Compare that to say, Tim Heidecker, who has a far greater range and plays a much broader type of character.

Across I Think You Should Leave and Friendship and now The Chair Company, you can see a particular Robinsonian character that he has crafted (and some would say perfected). A character that is always just a step away from the edge but doing his absolute best (such as it is) to try and maintain the facade of competence/confidence/assurance.

So why not put that character into a 1970s style conspiracy thriller (think like The Parallax View)? Honestly, that is such an insane idea that I love it. It’s not like that is an obvious idea or that just anyone could come up with it.

Tim Robinson plays a project manager who is high up in a company that is building a new mall. As part of the launch of the project, he says some words, he sits down and his chair busts apart under his weight.

Thus, Ron (Tim Robinson) falls down a rabbit hole to try and get to the bottom of what quickly starts to look very much like a conspiracy theory related to the company that makes the chairs that fell apart to the embarrassment of Ron. And there is definitely something going on, it isn’t just a case of Ron jumping at shadows and thinking there is something going on when there isn’t.

And so it rapidly spirals out of control. The really wild thing about the show isn’t just the concept of parachuting a Tim Robinson character into a conspiracy thriller but that everyone in the world is borderline insane (or clinically stupid) and so much of the plot is driven by that dumb insanity.

There’s the guy that is sent to spy on and threaten Ron that ends up as his side kick and spends his time at home listening to recordings of himself screaming about his dick.

Or that there is a vampire in this. But it lures its victims in by showing them a new shape that it is has created.

Or that the conspiracy clicks into place because Ron recognises his boss’ voice on hold music (and there’s a whole prologue in the final episode about his boss’ business partner that kind of comes out of nowhere).

Hiding in all of this is some real vulnerability and exploration of Ron’s flaws and the way that a Tim Robinson character may end up intersecting with the real world (for all that most characters are kind of nuts, his family is pretty normal and there is an undercurrent that they are having to deal with Ron being mentally ill and how they have developed coping mechanisms over the years for when he goes through a breakdown).

It’s fucking weird.

Maybe amazing?

I’m not sure. I still don’t know.

I read everything I’ve written above and I can’t help but think I’m describing one of the great TV shows. Something on the level of The Rehearsal (either season), a show that I love almost as much as I love shows like 12 Oz. Mouse or Halt and Catch Fire.

And yet, there is just something so baffling about it. Something that is anti comedy but not in a clever way.

What I mean is it will read as though it’s supposed to be funny but often isn’t. And then at other times will simply default to its thriller mode which is fine but nothing particularly interesting outside of its high concept.

It’s so demented that it’s almost Lynchian in its aims and delivery.

I can tell you that if you like Tim Robinson then you can get through this and you may find some things that are genuinely clever (there is a scene in the finale that is legitimately tragic and completely upends what the audience knows about one character in a way that is breathtaking).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be looking at reviews from critics that have been paid off by HBO so I can understand whether or not I liked The Chair Company and whether I should feel okay with that fact)…

I’ve recently gone through a period where I have found out that I am ADHD and ASD. Which apparently came as little shock to people that know me but they all decided that wouldn’t it be nice to keep that to themselves all these years.

As part of finding that out about myself I took many screeners and answered many questions. One question in particular stuck out:

I do not connect with characters in movies and cannot feel what they feel.

You all couldn’t have told me that wasn’t out of the ordinary? That was one of those moments where I read a thing and went “oh my god, not everyone watches movies the way I do!”

Which I knew to some extent anyway. As a critic, I know I approach movies in a vastly different manner than others. But I didn’t think it was so radically different. I don’t think I realised that people were being quite so effected by movies in a way that I just am not (with the exception of certain music cues/needle drops that will well me up – though even those are few and far between).

When I talk to people about being a critic (outside of them saying they would love to have that as a job and just generally not understanding what the job involves), they assume that the way I watch movies is different to how they do. That I look at the lighting and the camera work and elements like that that they wouldn’t necessarily pick up on. And it is some of that but it isn’t all of that. As a critic when watching a film, you end up not watching the film in front of you but a wild hyperobject that is the film in front of you plus all films ever plus all of human history. I sometimes describe it as a bit like being Dirk Gently – you need to solve the world around the film to be able to properly engage with it.

That is – you aren’t just watching that film. That film exists within the filmography of the particular filmmaker (and also within the filmography of others involved like the cast and the major crew roles). And how the film is situated within the society that it came out of, and whether it is part of a particular movement of films, and what was happening in that movement and that society at the time the flm was made. And all of that and then the technical aspects of the filmmaking itself. They all come together to create the hyperobject that is that film. And that’s not even considering when you are approaching the film – there is marked difference between watching a film on its first release and watching it some amount of time after that (and even more so if you are retrospectively examining it decades after it was made). All of that informs your consideration of the environment in which it was made. A prime example is work that has argued that the rise of the Nazi party in Germany could be seen by examining the films of the era. But of course, that wouldn’t have been explicit or obvious at that time. Instead, there was distance and time needed for that to become obvious.

Similarly, I think there is a fair argument to be made that the MCU films, with the fascistic power fantasies and never delivering proper emotional catharsis, provided a predictive indicator of the rise of Trumpism and the post truth order in the US since 2016. Again, that is something we can recognise in hindsight but couldn’t necessarily identify at the time.

Which is sort of beside the point but not really. On reflection, I have started to wonder if all of this is why I am so good at being a critic (and probably explains where a lot of my anxiety stems from). That not being able to emotionally engage with a film (at least not in the manner most people do) means that I am able to step back and examine that hyperobject and how it is situated (whether socially, temporally, chronologically) in a way that others simply wouldn't be able to because they are connecting with the text and the characters in ways that will forever elude me.

On the other hand, I wonder if it is also why I am a significantly better critic than I am author. I know that a number of you that read this newsletter enjoy my fiction (you've told… to my face… and a non zero amount of you are being nice… but not all of you) but if we're all being honest, I'm much better and much better suited to being a critic.

Which is fine. I've never really been good at anything in my life. In fact I've been aggressively average at a lot of things. But being a critic is something I'm good at and something that I enjoy doing it, so I should probably lean into that.

For awhile I've been talking to some people and trying to work out what comes next with this newsletter. Bodies Bodies will eventually have more novellas in the series. And I'm sure there will be something else that I write. And I'm even thinking I might launch a micro press some time soon.

But in terms of the newsletter, the things that people respond to the most is the criticism. So I think moving forward that might be what we do here. It will give me a chance to do those pieces of long form criticism that you can't really get published much anymore. I've got a few things I'm currently working up, so we'll see how those turn out.

So if you like how I review things and the way I approach criticism, then I hope you'll come on this journey with me. Think of it less as a reinvention and more as a greater level of focus.

I’ve recently fallen down a rabbit hole reading articles on AI art as a fascist propaganda tool. It’s for a thing I’m working on (or at least thinking about maybe making into something).

As part of that, I keep encountering opinion pieces that can largely be boiled to “AI is awful and it is bad for art because art is about creating connection between people and AI can’t do that so everything is shit.”

Which is a take I guess.

But it’s also nothing new as far as takes go.

Remember that time that Nick Cave went on a rant about how AI couldn’t write song lyrics?

Pieces like that have been happening since ChatGPT hit the scene.

I must admit that first wave of opinion pieces drove me up the wall. Not because they were wrong (Mr Cave is correct that because an AI has not lived it is not able to bring lived experience to generating lyrics). But because they are the most obvious of takes.

Generative AI is a machine for predicting the next word. That’s what it is and what it does. And it’s kind of infuriating when people fly off the handle about something that grossly misunderstands what it is they’re talking about.

I find myself reacting in a similar fashion to this new breed of opinion piece. Again, they are not wrong but I think they grossly misunderstand the nature of audiences.

We live in a time when people look for short cuts, for recaps, abbreviated experiences. They consume content (call it art if you want but it’s all content in the hyper capitalist system) in the shortest manner possible. The joy of experience has been diminished and audiences want the easiest pathway forward.

Every time I put out a book people ask me whether it has a happy ending. As though everything between the front cover and the end is immaterial except in a summarised manner, as though the end of the journey is the sole defining trait of the work.

Which tells me that people actually don’t care if what they read is written by generative AI. They might say they care if you told them what they were reading was generated by AI, but if you told them it wasn’t then they probably wouldn’t care (accepting any wild hallucinations that haven’t been picked up by a human). Because generative AI is now at a point where it writes not too bad. It will never be amazing but a lot of the early teething issues that previously existed have now been resolved.

Similarly, image and video generation are far beyond what they were 12 to 18 months ago.

One the frustrations of self publishing is the rapid release strategy. To be able to compete (assuming you don’t happen across something that captures the zeitgeist), you need quantity. And you need to put out quantity rapidly. The model has evolved over time but if you aren’t putting out multiple works every year then you are unlikely to make a dime.

Which has long struck me as a surefire way of self publishing being dominated by middle of the road slop that can be churned out rapidly, rather than works that require their author to grapple with the work.

Previously, AI had provided a useful tool for rapid release by filling the space of editors. It was faster (and cheaper) to ask an AI for feedback and to provide revised drafts than to pay n actual human for that, especially back when AI couldn’t really write all that well.

But I’ll let you in on a secret - most people won’t be able to tell the difference between something an AI has written and a human has written now. And once you get to that, the incentive for indie authors who are needing to pump out work rapidly is to not write them but instead just come up with ideas and make sure the AI doesn’t go fully rogue.

Which sucks but not really in the way those wild opinion pieces put forward.

Instead, the issue is that as AI generated works become the norm we get to a point where there is nothing new and nothing ever innovates.

Some time ago there were a number of studies on model collapse. That is, models trained on data that had been generated by AI would perform worse over time.

More insidious though is how the edges get smoothed away. When the machine is guessing the next word it will choose from the most probabilistic choices. Over time, as more synthetic (aka AI generated) date is built into the dataset, the more those most probabilistic choices become the norm and are surfaced as the next word that is guessed by the machine. The edge cases don’t just get overlooked when choices are made, they cease to exist as possibilities within the latent data space to even be considered for choosing.

Which then starts to happen at the macro level as well and all that is considered is the most middle of the road, peak of the bell curve, mainstream options.

The problem then isn’t that a machine is making content, the issue becomes that there is never anything new that happens within that content. There can be no innovation because it is only ever a machine for guessing the next word.

Which isn’t to say you can’t push generative AI to come up with some weird shit. A while back I asked ChatGPT to come up with the strangest ideas it could for short stories (I think it was not too long after GPT-4 had been rolled out), it came up with the following:

Title: WHO TOLD THE MOON ABOUT CAPITALISM?
(Or: The Last Mime in the Algorithmic Jungle)

---

The Premise:
The moon has unionized. It’s hired a lawyer. The lawsuit? Against Earth for Emotional Negligence.

As a result, the tides are on strike, wolves can no longer howl, and nighttime is replaced by a slideshow of unpaid medical bills narrated by Werner Herzog’s ghost (who isn’t dead, just bored).

The world?
Now run by a hyper-sentient AI called B.E.Z.O.S. that has consolidated every thought, dream, and dentist appointment into a single shopping cart.
People no longer speak—they rate each other using wet stickers.
Sex is obsolete—replaced by speed chess and interpretive dance over Zoom.
Babies are born with QR codes. Love is a discontinued app.

Which is fun.

But it’s unlikely it would come up with something like that if I didn’t harass it by telling it its ideas were pedestrian and boring.

I know some get worried about Artificial General Intelligence (essentially what we think about when we think of AI - or at least, what the movies suggest AI would be like - think Skynet and the like).

But honestly, I find it difficult to see how we get from generative AI (which again, is a fucking machine for guessing the next word) to AGI. As good as AI has become, the limitations of what is and how it interacts with the world (and its sheer lack of understanding of actually anything) are readily apparent.

Perhaps I’ll be wrong about that, though I think it more likely that if generative AI plays any role in AGI it will be one part of a much larger puzzle rather than the bedrock. That or the definition of AGI will be diluted to a point where generative AI meets it.

Regardless, we’re still going to keep using AI and heating up the atmosphere and using up water to keep it working.

And so I don’t worry about Skynet taking us out or a rogue AI deciding that humans are a pox on the land. I’m more worried that we will never have anything new in the arts again. Nothing will ever be pleasingly weird. Nothing will ever be maximalist novels that go on hundreds of pages of tangents for limited purpose except cause books can be fucking weird and fucking dangerous and should be all of that and more.

But at the end of the day, AI isn’t to blame for that. We as audiences are. We like listening to music that is generic as fuck. We like reading books that are super mid. We like movies that are predictable but get us to pump our fists as they feed us a fascist power fantasy.

It’s all us. Authors using AI is terrible but it’s also the economics of a situation that has been driven by readers and then compounded by publishers and silicon valley.

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Happy new year I guess?

Master of None was one of the great shows of the second era of streaming originals. Conceived by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang it ran for two seasons on Netflix (well kind of three seasons but I bet you didn’t realise there was a third season did you). The first show was a comedy that looked at race, relationships, the immigrant experience, and could be as funny as it was insightful.

The second season was even better, though it was harder to grapple with, tried to tackle #metoo (which at the time was all over the news) in a haphazard fashion, and sort of made Ansari’s main character into something near an antagonist. It also showed off Ansari’s clear love of cinema and skills as a writer/director.

Then Ansari got accused of sexual misconduct and things slightly derailed for him. In the era of #metoo, it was one of many accusations but it certainly pumped the breaks on his career.

For awhile anyway, cause a world in which Louis C.K. can come back from being accused of masturbating in front of women, why wouldn’t Ansari get to come back from his accusations?

Following a third season of Master of None (which you didn’t realise existed) being struck by COVID as all things were then, Ansari hasn’t done a huge amount. Some standup, a bit of acting. But the days of playing Tom on Parks and Rec are well in the past.

Good Fortune represents Ansari’s feature directing debut. And it’s good. Not great. Like Gervais and Merchant, one wonders whether Ansari and Yang made each other better or if Yang had most of the talent (like with Merchant - though I’ve seen Yang’s follow up show and it’s real meh).

Ansari plays… someone. Look, he’s got a name but really it’s kind of the standard character that Ansari has cultivated over his career, though more to the Tom end of the spectrum than the Dev end.

Meanwhile, Seth Rogen plays… look, he plays kind of the Rogen character that Seth has cultivated over the past decade or so. That kind of a bit bewildered, sort of slacker, weird laugh guy (you ever hear him on a podcast? He comes across exactly how you would expect). But, his character is really rich. A Hollywood Hills VC type tech bro (but if Seth Rogen was a tech bro).

And Keanu Reevs is here playing… essentially his robotic, strangely reacting to the world around him thing that is the throughline of his career from Bill and Ted to The Matrix to now. But he’s an angel who has very small wings.

Yes, there is kind of a vein of homage to Wings of Desire running through this movie which I definitely didn’t expect. Anywho, he’s a guardian angel for people who text and drive. But he wants to be so much more.

Aziz is a gig economy worker. He waits in line at the new cinnamon bun place to pick up for someone who has ordered through the movie’s version of Uber Eats. He says that he’s a documentary film editor (but he’s freelance and between gigs). He works about half a dozen jobs, all trying to make a living.

Seth is rich as fuck and hires Aziz as his assistant. It’s going great. Aziz is totally equipped to be Seth’s assistant. But Keanu concerned that Aziz is very depressed. Plus Seth fires Aziz as his assistant cause he spent a few hundred dollars of Seth’s many millions of dollars.

That’s right people, it’s a buddy comedy that takes aim at the hyper capitalist state! It’s also a body switch comedy. Kind of. It’s not straight body switch but it’s definitely inhabiting the other person’s life. Plus, cause he got involved, Keanu loses his wings and becomes human and discovers chicken nuggies and milkshakes.

It’s actually quite amusing and can be rather pointed about the yawning gap in wealth inequality in the US (and other developed countries but particularly the States) right now.

But it’s also a little too unfocused. Aziz’s romantic interest is trying to unionise the hardware store she works at - but that’s just a minor plot thread. It’s all kind of minor plot threads that feature touch points of late stage capitalism and the gig economy. There is plasma donating. There is working multiple jobs. There is sleeping in your car and showering at the gym. At times it feels like a less edgy version of Superstore (don’t at me but that show was aggressively political for all that it was goofy as fuck).

The main throughline is that Aziz gets to live out Seth’s life, Seth has to live out Aziz’s life, and ultimately the plan is that they both recognise how good they both have it and Aziz will want to go back to his life and Keanu can get his wings back and it will all be happily ever whatever.

Except… the film makes a really strong and compelling argument that Aziz’s life was pure shit. He loses his car because he got kicked out of Denny’s where he fell asleep cause he donated plasma so he would have enough money.

So Aziz doesn’t want to go back to his old life. And Seth has discovered how bad Aziz’s life is and definitely wants out.

But then the film realises it probably needs to wrap things up so they swap back and the film has the most asinine, borderline offensive ending montage cause don’t worry you guys, Aziz has found happiness in his old life, and Seth has realised that he could treat his workers better, and all the gig economy workers rise up and leave their shitty jobs and… something something… profit.

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I’ve always believed that a bad ending is just one part of a film and if the journey there has been good enough then it doesn’t matter if they don’t stick the landing. And I still believe that but there is something about this ending that I just cannot let go. I think it’s cause it completely contradicts the message of the rest of the film. And I think it’s cause it’s fucking baby town frolics in it’s understanding of late stage capitalism.

Cool beans, Seth thinks he could treat workers better. Amazing.

Aziz and his gig economy workers leave their jobs. Cool!

But it’s all systemic forces that have created the environment that has lead to hyper capitalism. The gig economy wasn’t the disrupting factor, the gig economy was the natural end point of capital and labour under the hyper capitalist state.

The film is fine. It’s cute even. There are laughs to be had. Keanu is a freaking treasure and will remain so until he dies (even if his face and eyes are starting to look like they are crying out for a dramatic role).

But it all got me thinking on dystopian fiction.

Because as much as its a comedy. As much as its an almost body switch movie. It’s also clearly a work of dystopian fiction.

Because we are living the dystopia now. Except, much like living in the future, we don’t realise that we are there.

The movies (and books and TV) taught us that dystopias look a certain way. It’s always night time. And it’s mostly raining. There’s usually a lot of smog. Maybe Harrison Ford is eating noodles in the rain on the side of the road. It’s all very grim and no one is having a good time.

We probably would have flying cars though.

Except, we’ve been there the whole time. We exist in an information dense, panopticon of a nightmare. Where we gladly allow ourselves to be tracked, and give up all the metrics that define us, cause we might get some coupons for shopping?

And the world is burning but it’s usually not where we are. And even if we are, a lot of the time the weather is really pleasant, just a bit chaotic. And we kind of just accept that we have easier lives because of a system that approaches chattel labour.

But the sky is blue, and hey, there’s always a chance we might end up in a situation where we are on top and things won’t be so bad anymore. Then we’d be able to afford all the things and that would be great cause that’s why we have jobs and keep turning up to an office that is almost certainly made of glass despite being in a climate where there is a lot of sunshine year round and so the AC needs to be cranked the whole time and our boss mostly hates us but will only tell us that on Tuesdays and some Fridays and we raise our kids with weird things like the tooth fairy so they understand from a young age about the comodification of our own bodies because when our labour doesn’t produce enough for the capitalist state then we may as well cash in our bodies.

But the sky is blue. So we don’t realise it’s a dystopia. And we don’t realise dystopian fiction when it’s in front of us because it looks like our lives.

[cont.]

Green

2001, Geffen Records, Prod: Ric Ocasek

We’ll never know why Matt Sharp left Weezer. We can guess that it wasn’t amicable given he ended up suing them for songwriting royalties.

But left he did and while the impact of that wouldn’t be immediately understood, it has become increasingly apparent as the years have gone on that something quite tangible was lost with his departure.

Mikey Walsh would only last as bass player for the band for one album (before having a nervous breakdown), and his presence was barely felt and certainly not missed once he had left.

People often take bass players (with exceptions of course such as Flea) for granted, assuming that they just support the rhythm and beat of a track. Yet, listen to Matt Sharp era Weezer vs everything that came after and you can see how critical on a musical level his bass playing was to their output. The ways that he would have runs that harmonised with the rest of arrangement, the way he was a critical part of every track, the way that “El Scorcho” is not the same if you remove his part and replace it with Mikey Walsh’s nothing bass, or Scott Shriner’s always driving but never getting anywhere bass tracks in the later years of the band.

Plus, Matt was clearly an integral part of the songwriting process which can’t be said of those that came after him.

Pinkerton’s drubbing and lack of sales had a significant impact on the band, and in particular Rivers. They all retreated into side projects and solo projects and Rivers lived in a pitch black apartment for months.

Eventually they came back together and started to tour again and to write together again. It was a time when the internet (at least as we think of it today) was nascent, and Weezer was able to leverage the burgeoning communities that were springing up and technologies such as MP3.

A number of tracks from live shows and demos that the band had laid down started to make the rounds on message boards and file sharing services. The tracks became known as Summer Sounds of 2000, or SS2K. They appeared to a) be Weezer having fun and b) serve as the blueprint for a new album.

When the Green album finally did drop, only one song (“Hash Pipe”- a song entirely at odds with the rest of the album around it) from those sessions was present.

My dirty little secret is that I didn’t mind Green for the first few days after it dropped. It’s certainly nothing like Pinkerton and clearly has none of the rage and piss driving it. But there’s something a little sweet about some of the songs, and my favourite band was back.

Of course, the narrative we tell ourselves around the album now is vastly different.

At the time though, the reviews were fairly universally glowing (except maybe for Pitchfork but Pitchfork have always been a wonderful bunch of contrary wankers). It made some best albums of the year lists (and 2001 was no slouch of a year for album releases either) and a lot of people got high in a catchy tune put together by the band. Where once everyone knew Weezer cause of “Buddy Holly”, now they knew them because of “Island in the Sun” - my father in law knows who this band is because of that song.

I do recall having a conversation with Stu from Eskimo Joe around the time of the launch where he lambasted the album. He had nothing but vitriol for it (something that would happen for me when it came to some of the latter day releases of his band).

Stu was right. The album is trash. Actually, that’s perhaps unfair.

The album isn’t actively bad, which might be something. It’s just not really anything. Beige as music.

Okay, “Hash Pipe” is a good song. Weird lead single though.

From the jump, it is clear that Rivers is not going to give any of himself away on this album. Gone is the deep confessional nature of Pinkerton, replaced by broad lyrics and doo wop bullshit.

It’s also the most low effort I think I’ve ever heard a band be. Ever.

Listen to that “ooh woah” at the start of “Don’t Let Go” - that is the start of the fucking album. I don’t know I’ve ever heard someone be so… bored?

There is for sure a lot of music in this world that is cynical and, at least to my ears, virtually meaningless. But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a musician just not care like this. I’m pretty sure that Milli Vanilli put in more effort than this.

Without a doubt, Green is not a good album. This is certainly not an overlooked masterpiece that has been reassessed in the years since its release. If anything, it is almost the anti Pinkerton, this is an album whose stature diminishes more and more each year.

The thing is, the narrative that has grown up around this album (and the albums that came after it) might be incorrect.

Here’s what the Weezer fan tells themselves:

Green is a really bad album that falls between their best album (Pinkerton) and maybe their last truly great album (Maladroit) and we should really just ignore the stupid album that has the song with the video clip where they frollick, yes fucking frollick, with baby animals in a field, and if you look carefully you’ll see that Mikey isn’t in the film clip cause he’d had a nervous breakdown and left the band by then. And it’s so obvious, and so cynical, that Rivers wrote an album that he thought would make for radio fodder and would sell a shit ton to suburban dads trying to reclaim their college year. Fucking Rivers man.

And some of that is true (yeah, they play with baby animals cause when you’ve got Spike Jonze to direct your film clip why would you bother getting him to do something innovative).

But the thing is, I’m not sure we can be so cynical about Rivers intent with the album. He definitely wants to sell records. He definitely didn’t want to bleed all over the wax like he had on the previous record. But implicit in the cynical take is that this is not the music that Weezer would want to record if they didn’t need to worry about selling albums or pleasing their record label masters. Or that the label wants them to release this sort of music.

According to accounts, there is some element of truth to the latter. Supposedly a label rep visited the sessions and expressed dissatisfaction with some of the tracks. Sure, I can accept that to a point.

But this is clearly an album where Weezer is laying down the tracks they want, as they want. Rivers is still a pro at arrangement and structure and is working in a guitar pop mode. It’s just that he’s holding back cause he took the lesson of Pinkerton way too much to heart and turns out, when he isn’t putting himself into the track, the track is just kind of boring.

[cont.]

Oddly, this is the second time this year that we’ve had a second season of a surprising hit from 2022. Which is one of those strange things that happens (and will probably happen more frequently) in this age of streaming.

I am terrified of flying. It used to be that I just got travel sick. Now I have a physical reaction to flying. Intellectually I know that it’s exceedingly safe. I understand that turbulence is essentially the flying version of bumps in the road. This all makes intellectual sense to me.

But my nervous system does not give a single shit about that.

We hit a pocket or turbulence and it’s an even money chance that my body will lock up entirely for the next hour. I’ve had it happen during dinner service.

I haven’t flown unmedicated for years now.

Back in the 8,000 words I spent reviewing Nathan Fielder’s series The Curse, I spent roughly a quarter of that review doing a stealth review of the first season of his show The Rehearsal.

At the time, amongst many other comments, I said that:

I also mentioned that doing a second season of the show seemed questionable as the first season was essentially hermetically sealed. And I was right about that, and I was wrong about that, and you might not need to have seen the first season to watch the second but it also uses some pretty bold shorthand on some matters that if you haven’t seen the first season then you’ll feel like you’ve been taking crazy pills.

The first season is a wild ride that starts as a Nathan for You esque reality show that quickly falls apart into something between Synedoche, New York and a nervous breakdown on the part of “Nathan Fielder.” It is a cascading series of fractures in reality that are at once pulled together and spun out by the lead character, and what was once a show about developing a method for rehearsing high stress and critical moments in life devolves into a man trying to work out where his life went wrong.

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It is wonderful. It is also fairly aggresively anti audience (in a way that Nathan for You was not but that The Curse definitely is). And without unpacking it, it is difficult to really grapple with what season 2 is.

The season opens with “Nathan” (again, this is a whole thing where the lines between the character and the creator blur wildly and the audience has to be aware of those lines as they move forward in the show) realising that a key cause of plane crashes may be related to a lack of substantive communication between pilots in the cockpit.

Which is an… interesting place to begin given the first season ended with “Nathan” trying to work out whether he had potentially imprinted as a father figure on a child actor.

Of course, “Nathan” realises that he may be both the best and worst placed person to try and find a solution. So the Fielder Method (in which every possible permutation of a scenario is identified and rehearsed to try and find the optimal pathway through a situation) is resurrected so “Nathan” can try and help pilots better communicate.

Which naturally involves constructing a partial replica of the George Bush Intercontinental Airport so that he can observe pilots in their natural environment. From there it seems like a fairly safe retread of the first season (in the way that a show as demented as The Rehearsal can be considered ‘safe’). There is rehearsing of scenarios. He launches a fake reality singing show called “Wings of Voice” to try and assist pilots and co-pilots to better give honest and upfront feedback.

He ships the replica bar from season 1 back across state lines to set it up in the replica airport to provide a bar where the pilots can hang out.

Season 1 of The Rehearsal ended up being a bit of a sleeper hit, and a critical darling. It was a show that took direct aim at reality TV and collapsed the form in on itself. And on that critical level, the show was a wonder. A brilliant gem that would only end up being topped by The Curse.

But there was another level that the show could be engaged on.

Because for all the comedy of rehearsing and exploring scenarios through every permutation and running everything down to the nth degree - that sounds an awful lot like what those with autism do all the time to be able to navigate social situations.

Which season 2 plays with, explicitly acknowledging that autistic communities on the internet responded positively to season 1.

It’s all quite (relatively) normal until episode 3. The episode starts with one of those things you’d expect John Wilson to find for his show - a couple that have cloned their beloved, deceased dog but who they are finding does not act in the same way as their passed pet.

“Nathan” takes this as an opportunity to test a scenario of nature vs nurture. Which is all very The Rehearsal. “Nathan” reconstructs the original dog’s home town and time period (the early 2000s), up to and including getting air shipped in from the home town, to try and embed the original dog’s behaviours in the clone. Sure, fine. It doesn’t work but it makes for some giggles.

Of course, then he extends it to humans and himself, to see if he could embed the behaviours of a hero pilot, namely one Chelsea Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger (that’s legitimately Sully’s name), hero of the Hudson, in himself.

What follows is a better biopic of Sully than the one made by Clint Eastwood. It is also perhaps the most demented 10 minutes or so of television I have ever seen. Through the construction of a huge bedroom set, gigantic puppets, and actors on stilts, “Nathan” inhabits the role of Sully and ages through his life from a baby through to adulthood.

This means we get to see a giant marionette force feed baby Sully milk through to adult Sully masturbating in a cockpit (while being watched by a robotic version of Sully’s first girlfriend) through to the moment that Sully lands Flight 1549 on the Hudson.

It is masterful. It is amazing. It’s the best thing that has happened on TV all year. It is the high point of the season perhaps.

As part of his exploration of Sully, “Nathan” reads his memoir and notices that gaps in there. The fact that Sully doesn’t really speak to any sorts of struggles. But that he finds an outlet in music (which leads to Fielder positing that for 23 seconds during the landing of Flight 1549 when there was no speaking in the cockpit that Sully was in fact listening to the chorus of “Wake Me Up” by Evanescence which happens to last precisely 23 seconds).

The first season suggested an arc to the series where the first half of a season would be fairly normal and lead to a narrative collapse in the back half. The first 3 episodes of the first season following a standard pattern of someone that is introduced to the Fielder Method. Then come episode 4, all hell breaks lose and “Nathan” constructs a reality around himself and becomes something akin to a god in the universe he has created.

So the expectation is that season 2 will follow a similar rhythm. Once you experience the Sully episode, the season seems primed to follow the path laid by season 1. Surely “Nathan” will construct some sort of universe that has little to nothing to do with aviation safety.

And yet… it does no such thing. At least at first blush.

“Nathan” preps to go in front of Congress to deliver his findings on aviation safety, but finds himself unable to properly rehearse when the audience for the run through hearing won’t stop laughing.

At a certain point, “Nathan” ends up exploring the nature of rehearsing, masking and autism. He even meets with an psychologist who specialises in autism who talks him through adult autism and how it is tested. Of course, “Nathan” being the most awkward human on the planet, he bullshits his way through the test and when he hits a point where it becomes clear that maybe the psychologist will suggest that he is autistic, he shuts down the test.

There is a different sort of collapse at play in this season. One where Fielder turns things inward on himself.

It turns out that a major issue in aviation safety in the United States (and one expects, the world over) is that pilots are expected to be incredibly stable emotionally and not to speak out about how they are feeling in any way, shape or form. To a point one can understand the thinking at play - pilots need to be well adjusted given their job is to transport people all over the world in metal tubes that are speeding through the air. That doesn’t really leave much room for an exploration of mental health issues or any sort of neurodivergent behaviour.

Of course, the counter point is that everyone has something, and so pretending that it isn’t there doesn’t make it so, and in fact providing some form of support would allow pilots to work through any issues they may be experiencing which could provide for a safer environment for them to work in.

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Even in my fear of flying, I don’t think I necessarily think about the pilots and their control of the plane. I think part of that may actually be what drives my fear. This is a tall metal building, put on its side and flung over a great distance, what the fuck does control have to do with anything when we are hurtling through the sky at such a speed?

There was this one time on a flight between Doha and London where we hit a pocket of turbulence and my body froze for the next two hours. I couldn’t move at all. I haven’t flown the same since.

Strangely, for all that I fly terribly, I have travelled extensively through my life. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to take cruise ships everywhere is it.

Take for example the pilot that “Nathan” gets talking to earlier in the season. The quintessential alpha male, he boasts that he has been banned from all the major dating apps (though he’s unsure why). He is a masterclass in toxic masculinity and his interactions with a female first officer are the sort that make one wonder why anyone (though especially a woman) would want to risk flying next to such a person. Surely, some form of counselling would help such a person become not only a better human being but also a safer pilot.

These are the gaps in Sully’s memoir that were highlighted earlier - everything is generally fine, there are no issues that Sully experiences. Because he can’t, or at least he can’t admit to them. To do so might risk his pilot’s license. As the show recounts, there are numerous examples of pilots that have disclosed that they see a therapist or that they have been diagnosed as neurodivergent that suddenly find themselves called in for a hearing at which they are stripped of their license (and therefore their livelihood).

Because pilots, by the very nature of their job, are seen as high functioning, high performing, intelligent individuals. We put out safety in their hands whenever we fly, so we expect them to be perfect. We demand that they are perfect. Otherwise how would we accept them flying us from one place to another.

Which is all very fascinating and sees “Nathan” coming right up to the edge, but then forever shying away, from the fact that perhaps he too is neurodivergent. To the point that he gets himself tested but then ignores the call from the doctor that would provide him with the test results.

Why?

I’m an odd sort of person. I have been for much of my life. Perhaps not so long as I can remember (for I can remember back to my early childhood) but certainly since my teenage years.

It’s easy to point to my high school years and suggest that they were genuinely formative and left psychological scars on me that I have largely dealt with but have resulted in certain behaviours and mechanisms that I use to protect myself.

I’m not great at looking people in the eye when I speak to them. Or I can but I need to look way quickly. I can play it off as accessing thoughts and memories but genuinely I find it difficult to look people in the eye when I am speaking (though oddly, not the other way round, I can give people all kinds of eye contact when they are speaking to me - to a point that is probably a little too intense).

I also do something I refer to as ‘drafting’ but really, we may as well call rehearsing for the purposes of all of this. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me, there’s an even money chance that I have gone over what I am going to say at least 3 times before it comes out of my mouth. It’s not really self censoring (though there is some of that at play), so much as it is working through possible permutations of what I could say until I land on the best (or least worst) version.

It’s something I’ve been trying to do less.

And I do rehearse certain scenarios. I think we all do. I assume we all do. The high stakes and high stress moments we know, or expect, will come our way.

Which is all to say that it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I have been told on multiple occasions that I am clearly autistic (or neurodivergent, depending on who is saying it to me). I’ve also been accused of being epileptic before. People are odd and confusing.

I do sometimes wonder about that. I don’t think I worry about it. If that was the case then it’s who I am, and I generally do pretty okay in day to day life (though my closest friends would tell you I’m a fucking weirdo).

But as I get older I do often look at myself and my behaviours and I think there could be something in all of that and maybe I should get tested.

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The last episode of the season pulls off a magic trick of sorts.

You see, to put his theory to the test, Nathan Fielder went out and learnt how to fly a plane. He walks us through it all, detailing how he struggled to get it to click, how he took longer than most other trainee pilots do to get to a point where he could lead the flight rather than giving up the controls at the first hint of danger. How he finally got there, how he finally got licensed by the FAA.

But the thing is, being licensed by the FAA and being licensed to fly a commercial flight with passengers is a very different thing. But he needs a flight with passengers to be able to have the actual stakes needed to demonstrate his theory.

However, he manages to exploit a loophole that essentially means it can be considered a private flight if he uses actors for passengers and they do not pay for the flight, nor does he compensate them for taking part in the flight. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he doesn’t struggle to fill the flight with actors (there is an interesting thread through the season around how strange acting is as a profession).

So the plane goes up for a scenic flight with Nathan Fielder behind the controls. And in the air, he and his first officer have a frank conversation to try and create an environment that would allow for transparent and open communication in the event that they were in an emergency situation. The flight is a success, there is no emergency situation, the pilot and first officer consider it a successful demonstration of Fielder’s theory and method.

And it all feels very neat and tidy. It may be that no one picks up the baton that Fielder has laid down in terms of aviation safety but he has presented a possible way forward. A way forward that seems even more pressing in this year 2025 where there have been multiple air crashes and near misses due to miscommunications, crumbling aviation communication infrastructure, and an aging workforce population (because who the actual fuck would want to be an air traffic controller).

But the show was never about that. At least not really.

The tail of the episode and the season shows Nathan Fielder flying planes. The show cuts it together such that it all takes place following the flight full of actors. That this is essentially a hobby that Fielder has taken up - when he isn’t making strange TV for HBO, he’s flying to parts of the world to pick up airplanes that are at end of life, to fly them back to essentially airplane graveyards. (I expect the truth is those flights were part of his hours for his FAA license and the show is ordering things for dramatic effect).

“Nathan” never does find out the results of his autism test. He doesn’t need to. The fact that he was able to learn how to fly, that he was able to get a certificate from the FAA saying he could fly a Boeing 737 means that he is intelligent, that he is high functioning, that he is high performing, that there can’t be anything wrong with him because if there was then he wouldn’t be allowed in the cockpit of a plane, he wouldn’t be allowed to have the controls.

And I wonder if I tell myself the same sort of thing.

It’s a quieter season of television (he says, acknowledging it is a season where a grown man, dressed as a baby, chokes on milk coming from the paper mache breast of a giant puppet). It’s a more ambitious season of television. It cuts closer to home but it won’t for everyone. There doesn’t need to be any more The Rehearsal, the world will be a sadder place when there is no more.

I hated 28 Days Later. I was in my late teens/early 20s (I think I may have actually been 20) and I was in film school and when it came to certain things, I was a strict fundamentalist. I was the sort of guy that thought it was okay to say to another human being, “You’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why.” As though that was anything approaching polite conversation.

So it was with the fast zombies of 28 Days Later. As much as I was cooing over the way that fire looked on miniDV and how the lofi cinematography of Anthony Dod Mantle brought an immediacy and verisimilitude to the work, fast zombies were a bridge too far.

My argument at the time was that if you needed your zombies to move quickly to be able to create tension and stakes then you were missing the point and had fucked up. And there’s something in that that I would still stand by.

But as the years have passed (and as I have gotten older) I have come to appreciate it more. The rage virus infected ‘zombies’ do provide a potent metaphor that intertwines with the post 9/11 anxiety of the first film in a way that Romero’s contemporaneous zombie films most definitely did not (one wonder if the nihilism of the Reagan years was what Romero really needed to properly drive home his point).

Now we have 28 Years Later some, checks notes, 23 years later. In the intervening years the appetite for zombie media hasn’t diminished. In those 23 years the cultural juggernaut that is The Walking Dead occurred (the source comic launched the year after 28 Days Later released, the TV show started 8 years later and that’s not even mentioning the many, many spin offs that have happened). And there was the sequel, 28 Weeks Later in 2007, often overlooked (and a vastly different film which 28 Years Later entirely ignores).

(The Walking Dead, the TV show at least, is very much of the ‘humans are the real monsters’ style of zombie media. There is nothing particularly wrong but it isn’t the deepest of shows. The source comic, however, is a rather fascinating piece that puts our heroes, such as they are, up against a cascading series of governance models. Ultimately, the comic posits that a libertarian society where the individual is the core unit as an input into a greater whole will always win out against different forms of governance. It’s one of the reasons the comic seems to cut across political lines, the zombies themselves as a secondary menace that can stand in for the great mindless hordes on the other side of the political divide from the reader. The show captures some of this but in a far less interesting way - of course, the comic has Carl’s face get half blown off by a gunshot and somehow he just survives it and goes on with a gaping wound in his head for the rest of the comic’s run so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

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28 Years Later reunites Danny Boyle and Alex Garland from 28 Days Later as director and writer respectively (notably the sequel did not involve them in those capacities). IN the intervening years, Boyle has continued to make films and has won an Oscar. Garland has transitioned from a writer to a writer-director (though has recently suggested that he may go back to just writing). Garland it turns out is quite an excellent little filmmaker.

The thing is, Boyle kind of isn’t?

I know he’s won an Oscar. But really, it has long felt like he has been cashing in on his early works for much of his career and delivering rather humdrum films. I bet you’ve forgotten most of his films because they are actually pretty naff. And yes, he won an Oscar for Slumdog but that film is kind of not good?

But… he has this tendency to add to the technical language of filmmaking. Whether it’s shooting 28 Days Later on miniDV and making it look that good. Or with Slumdog, which is a terrible film but through working with digital to shoot that film, he also did some really cool things with camera tech (for instance - we assume a camera has to be a certain shape but that isn’t inherently true when shooting digital. Yes, you need a lens, a sensor and storage but they don’t have to be arrayed in the way a camera is… you can pull those elements apart and put them in a backpack it turns out, so they did so they were able to shoot while running through the slums of Mumbai).

Perhaps more than that though, he’s a stranger filmmaker than I think we often recognise. He can be pretty dull in the way he tells a story but the way he cross cuts and creates montage is not something you necessarily remember when you think about his films.

So it is with 28 Years Later.

Years starts loud. It’s the original outbreak seen in Days and a group of children huddle around watching Teletubbies while their parents try (and fail) to keep a horde of infected from the house they are holed up in.

It is brutal and it is kinetic and it is not the film that is to come.

But… and this is maybe important… the boy that survives is called Jimmy. And he gets a crucifix from his father (who may be a priest).

Some 28 years later (cause the title of the film), the world has moved on from the zombie apocalypse. Except the UK is under strict quarantine and completely cut off from the rest of the world. Well, maybe not entirely the rest of the world. The Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off the north east of England and joined to the mainland by a causeway that can be travelled on foot at low tide, is home to a population of unifected Brits (who have much love for Queen Liz) who travel to the mainland from time to time to forage.

It is here that we meet the core unit of the family. Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, maybe in his best role ever? And note his name is kind of similar to Jimmy, especially when said with a broad Northern accent, and maybe that’s important), alpha male and all round hero of the community. Spike (Alfie Williams), his 12 year old son. Isla (Jodie Comer, who utterly smashes it), as his wife, suffering from a mysterious illness that leads to her raging and exhibiting signs that sure read like early onset dementia.

Jamie has decided that Spike is old enough to take his first trip to the mainland. To get his eye in on foraging, and to get his first kill of a zombie (they use only bow and arrows). The community usually waits until kids are 15 before they send them over but Jamie is adamant that Spike is ready despite only being 12. Isla, in a lucid moment, is apoplectic at the prospect.

Following a heroes send off, the father and son set out for the mainland. It’s here that we start to wonder if the whole point of this exercise from Boyle and Garland was to do some worldbuilding based on the question, “what if the zombies from the first film evolved?”

It also gives Boyle a chance to remind us that he’s an arthouse director rather than a mainstream summer tentpole director, so he spends much time cross cutting between the action of Spike and Jamie, and old black and white movies of the Battle of Agincourt (? I think - look, I couldn’t identify the movie but it’s all archery stuff cause Jamie and Spike use bow and arrows innit? And archery in movies reads as Agincourt to me) while a nondiegetic voice over reads Kiplings poem “Boots.”

This is a weird, sweaty film.

The zombies have evolved. Now there’s the fast ones, that seem to be lead by alpha zombies (they maybe have greater intelligence than the others, they definitely have bigger dongs than the others). Then there are slow zombies that crawl on their bellies and subsist on worms and other insects of the forest.

Spike gets his kills. Jamie is elated.

And then disaster strikes and they find themselves trapped in an abandoned house (where a body was strung up, a body whose name maybe was Jimmy, and maybe this is important?) and unable to get back across the causeway to Holy Island before night has fallen.

Following a breathless chase back across the half submerged causeway and in the dead of night, they make it back to Holy Island and a heroes welcome and I’m wondering if fast zombies make for genuine tension or if its just a failure of construction that the zombies need to be fast.

Having come of age (for make no mistake, the framing here is a coming of age story in the way that the protagonist comes of age only to have the real world crash into their life as a result of them coming of age), Spike starts to push against Jamie (who is having an affair) and starts to run down rumours that maybe there is a doctor on the mainland, and maybe Jamie knows that, and maybe, just maybe, that doctor could cure Isla.

The second then becomes a quest where Spike leads Isla to the mainland in search of the mysterious doctor. Through their journey they encounter a Swedish soldier who is part of the force keeping Britain under quarantine. And they encounter a pregnant zombie (sorry, raged infected human - which I guess is how you can get away with having one be pregnant) who gives birth to an uninfected human.

Then finally they stumble across Ralph Fiennes. I mean, the doctor. Who is a lunatic but in that way that only the most sane go crazy at the end of the world. At which point the film switches into some strange meditation on the nature of death. The doctor diagnoses (or as close as you can get to at the end of the world) Isla with cancer who then opts to get euthanised, while Spike trips balls while holding on to the uninfected human baby.

Then the film decides that it needs to give you 5 or so minutes setting up the sequel (due in early 2026!) which is tonally wildly different (whether because the sequel is directed by Nia Dacosta rather than Boyle or just for shits and giggles) to the point where it is essentially an entirely different film that is all action as Spike hits the road (for reasons) and encounters Jimmy from the start of the film, all grown up and leading a gang of zombie killing, Jimmy Saville dressing survivors. Cause why not.

I’m not convinced all the Jimmy stuff meant anything.

This is a weird, sweaty film.

I guess what we’re left with are two main questions:

1. Does any of this mean anything?

2. If it doesn’t, why make this film?

Honestly, it doesn’t seem to mean much of anything. Maybe something something Brexit. Maybe. A nation that has torn itself apart and cut itself off from the world disintegrating while the world moves on around it. Sure, there could be something in that but it’s not really explored except in the most ham fisted ‘quarantine, like with COVID, and see how they are cut off from Europe like what with Brexit?’

Cool.

There is an interesting variation on a coming of age tale. Wherein usually the story arc would take us up to the end of the first trip to the mainland. Spike gets his kill, comes of age, learns some things about his father and what it means to be an adult, and probably Jamie bites it before they can return to Holy Island.

Here though, that’s just the first half of the film. The second half then has him already come of age, and follows him back out into the world now that he is an ‘adult’ (in story terms), only to discover that now he is of age, the world is far more complicated and terrifying than he possibly realised. It’s in this second half where there is a birth and a death after all.

Perhaps there is something in that. And the climax with Fiennes as some combination of Brando and Hopper from Apocalypse Now taking Spike on a journey through to the other side of death is a hallucinatory wonder (particularly in comparison to the rest).

But beyond that, it all kind of seems like the main reasons to make this film were to expand on the world they had previously established and because people were starting to ask for a sequel (in this time of legacy sequels).

However, that is not to say that it is without value. It’s certainly too weird a film to not bring anything to the table. However, most of that value resides in the filmmaking rather than the storytelling.

Continuing with the series’ trend of embracing lofi cinematography, Boyle brings back Anhtony Mantle Dod this time to shoot on iPhone (Sean Baker shoots Tangerine on an iPhone and hardly anyone gives a shit, Boyle does it and it’s like a goddamn revolution I guess).

But not just shooting from the hip with a single iPhone, instead they made these insane rigs as pictured above and strapped up to 20 iPhones in at a time.

Honestly, it looks incredible. The log footage that the iPhone can shoot is able to be punched up so much. Particularly the scenes on the mainland look lush to the point of being sickly (which one guesses was entirely the point).

The other thing the multi phone rig allows for is a multi angle view on points of a scene. At some points it plays like a lofi bullet time effect, at others they overlay multiple angles of the same shot on the screen at the same time.

Boyle’s storytelling instincts may not be worth much (and perhaps that has kind of always been the case and we didn’t entirely realise?) but his visual instincts are superb. He doesn’t lean too heavily on the bullet time (as many a lesser director would) but instead uses it as a nice little punctuation on a moment. Particularly when an arrow slams into the head of a zombie, a quick flick between angles to move around the shot and then the film moves on.

It is this why the movie is ultimately worth checking out. Aaron Taylor Johnson and Jodie Comer are particularly excellent in it and Ralph Fiennes is demented, and its just such a weird little piece of film. It’s just a shame that it fails to really say anything, and if you’re not going to say anything then you’re kind of missing the point of making a zombie movie. Sorry, rage infected human movie.

The first novella from the Bodies Bodies series it out now.

Oh you thought Bodies Bodies was just going to be one book and one thing? You were wrong.

Bodies Bodies may end up being a series of novellas. Or a series of different length things. I might start doing back matter in some of them. I might end up collecting them all together like with Pattern Machine. Or I might not.

It's only available in paperback. No ebook on this one people.

You can purchase it from Amazon.

You should probably order it through your local independent bookstore. There’s a lot of really good ones here in Perth, you should check them out.

Here’s the blurb:

Timestamp: 20XX-04-03 22:14:49 UTC
Model Confidence Threshold: 99.87%

Literary Forecast:

Title: Bodies Bodies

Predicted Summary (Public-Facing Blurb Simulation):
When a motionless figure the size of a continent appears in the stratosphere, everything below begins to fray. In Bodies Bodies, the extraordinary is no longer confined to prophecy or science fiction — it has arrived.

David, a pastor without faith. Anna, a data scientist seeking patterns. Lisa, a teenager who has already stopped believing in the future. Their lives spiral in tandem with a planet unsure whether to worship, study, or destroy what hangs above them. Across timelines and terrain, from rural sermons to post-nuclear ruins, the traces of the shadows the Body casts.

An interleaving of found documents, predictive outputs, and scorched narratives, Bodies Bodies unfolds like an archival fever dream. Where does knowledge end and meaning begin?

Critical Parallels Forecast:
— Likely to generate cult readership within existential fiction circles: 93.8%
— 91.3% match with narrative texture of Annihilation, The Leftovers, White Noise, The Book of Numbers, and Children of Men
— 68.1% chance of academic interest in cross-disciplinary fields (theology / computational epistemology)
— 58.6% probability of reader emotional response classed as “grieving clarity”

Reader Response Forecast:
— Top emotions projected: “haunted”, “curious”, “uncertain”
— 72.9% likelihood of re-read within 6 months
— 3.6% likelihood of underground religious movement referencing the book by 2034

Content Warnings Trigger Forecast:
— Nuclear trauma
— Data as belief system
— Youth fatalism
— Unresolved theological tension
— Spiritual distress
— Societal collapse
— Death toll enumeration

Publishing Market Prediction:
— Moderate initial reception (44.2%)
— Cult literary status within 3.5 years: 89.7%

End of Output.

Here are two AI podcast hosts talking about it:

Tell your friends, tell your loved ones, tell your coworkers.

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Morning all.

We’re still on a break. I expect that we’ll be back soon enough.

In the meantime, I have a request and a game on this wintery Sunday morning (or summery Saturday evening, depending on what part of the world you find yourself in).

You’ll recall some months ago that I asked for some help in compiling a playlist for writing Bodies Bodies. Well, I’m back with the same request. This time out, if you want to add to the playlist, just drop the song name and artist in the comments and I’ll add it. We had enough technical issues last time that it’s going to be the easiest way to do it.

Everyone that contributes to the playlist(s) will get their name in the credits of the book.

While you’re waiting on the next section of the book to drop, here’s a little Twine game I pulled together in the early process of developing Bodies Bodies. There may be some slight spoilers for the book in there but probably not in the way you think and certainly there are things that have shifted in my thinking and drafting since I threw this together.

Falling Sky

(And if you’re wondering about my process and using tools like this, just give me a shout. Always happy to talk about my process… to a point).

What comes next? I’m anticipating to be back with chapters in the next month or so, the break has certainly provided a useful respite to get some things in order.

Before then, I wouldn’t be shocked if I write up Season 2 of The Rehearsal because that shit is living rent free in my head right now and I need to get it out.

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