Review: Glass Onion

A few years ago, Knives Out (2019) unexpectedly solidified the revival of the whodunit and introduced its modern-day master sleuth: Benoit Blanc. The primary appeal of the whodunit has always been smartly constructed plots that unfold slowly and culminate in a final reveal or unmasking that invites readers to reread in search of missed clues. The two early masters of this category of genre fiction were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, both succeeding in making their fictional detectives iconic. Others followed their examples, though the genre arguably shifted onto (into?) the TV with shows such as Perry Mason, Columbo, and Murder She Wrote. No surprise, Hollywood transformed what might have been a one-and-done story into the beginnings of a franchise, following up Knives Out with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (subtitle displayed unnecessarily to ensure audiences make the connection — wouldn’t a better subtitle be A Benoit Blanc Mystery?). Both movies are entertaining enough to justify munching some popcorn in the dark but neither observes the conventions of the genre — novel, TV, or film — any too closely. Spoilers ahead.

I harbor a sneaking suspicion that Benoit Blanc is actually a bumbling fool the way poor, rumpled Columbo only pretended to be. Although I can’t blame Daniel Craig for taking roles that allow him to portray someone other than James Bond, Craig is badly miscast and adopts a silly Southern accent others complain sounds laughably close to Foghorn Leghorn. (Craig was similarly miscast in the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but that’s an entirely different, unwritten review.) So long as Blanc is a nitwit, I suppose the jokey accent provides some weak characterization and enjoyment. Problem is, because the film is only superficially a whodunit, there is no apparent crime to solve after Blanc figures out the staged murder mystery (sorta like an escape room) just after the vacation weekend gets started but before the faux murder even occurs. Kinda ruins the momentum. As a result, the film digresses to a lengthy flashback to establish the real crime that Blanc is there to solve. Maybe good mystery novels have partial reveals in the middle, reframing the entire mystery. I dunno but rather doubt it.

The plot is by no means tightly knit or clever as a whodunit normally demands. Rather, it employs lazy, pedestrian devices that irritate as much as entertain. Such as one of the characters (the real murdered character) having an identical twin who substitutes herself for the dead one; such as trapping attendees on a remote island without servants or transportation but largely ignoring their suggested captivity; such as uncovering an orgy of evidence better suited to misdirection and framing of an innocent; such as mixing faux violence with real violence, though none of the characters appears even modestly afraid at any point; such as bullets being fortuitously stopped by items in a breast pocket; such as sleuthing and detecting — done by the twin, not Blanc! — being presented in a montage of coinkidinks that demonstrate more luck than skill. I could go on. The worst cinematic trick is reprising scenes in flashback but altered to insert clues viewers would have noticed initially. Those aren’t reveals; they’re revisions. Moreover, instead of inviting viewers to rewatch, this gimmick jams supposedly unnoticed clues down their throats. How insulting. If Benoit Blanc is really an overconfident, dandified nincompoop, I suppose it’s better and more convenient (for bad storytelling) to be lucky than good. He doesn’t solve anything; he’s just there to monologue incessantly.

The weekend party is hosted by a character patterned after … oh never mind, you know who. I decline to provide the name of that real-life narcissist. Members of the entourage are mostly sycophants, originally good friends but later ruined in different ways by proximity to a hyper-successful fraud. As a group, they’re known as The Shitheads, which just about sums it up. Critics have observed a shift in entertainment toward depicting super-wealthy pretty people as heels of the highest order. Not sure what makes that entertaining exactly. I enjoy no Schadenfreude witnessing the high and mighty brought low, much as they may deserve it. It’s just another lazy cliché (like its inverse: the dignity of the downtrodden everyman a/k/a the noble savage) trotted out in the absence of better ideas.

Strong Female Lead

For this blog post, let me offer short and long versions of the assertion and argument, of which one of Caitlin Johnstone’s many aphorisms is the short one:

Short version: Modern mainstream feminism is just one big celebration of the idea that women can murder, predate, oppress, and exploit for power and profit just as well as any man.

Long version: Depicting strength in terms of quintessential masculine characteristics is ruining (fictional) storytelling. (Offenders in contemporary cinema and streaming will go unnamed, but examples abound now that the strong-female-lead meme has overwhelmed characters, plots, and stories. Gawd, I tire of it.) One could survey the past few decades to identify ostensibly strong women basically behaving like asshole men just to — what? — show that it can be done? Is this somehow better than misogynist depictions of characters using feminine wiles (euphemism alert) to get what they want? These options coexist today, plus some mixture of the two. However, the main reason the strong female lead fails as storytelling — punching, fighting, and shooting toe-to-toe with men — is that it bears little resemblance to reality.

In sports (combat sports especially), men and women are simply not equally equipped for reasons physiological, not ideological. Running, jumping, throwing, swinging, and punching in any sport where speed and power are principal attributes favors male physiology. Exceptions under extraordinary conditions (i.e., ultradistance running) only demonstrate the rule. Sure, a well-trained and -conditioned female in her prime can beat and/or defeat an untrained and poorly conditioned male. If one of those MMA females came after me, I’d be toast because I’m entirely untrained and I’m well beyond the age of a cage fighter. But that’s not what’s usually depicted onscreen. Instead, it’s one badass going up against another badass, trading blows until a victor emerges. If the female is understood as the righteous one, she is typically shown victorious despite the egregious mismatch.

Nonadherence to reality can be entertaining, I suppose, which might explain why the past two decades have delivered so many overpowered superheroes and strong female leads, both of which are quickly becoming jokes and producing backlash. Do others share my concern that, as fiction bleeds into reality, credulous women might be influenced by what they see onscreen to engage recklessly in fights with men (or for that matter, other women)? Undoubtedly, a gallant or chivalrous man would take a few shots before fighting back, but if not felled quickly, my expectation is that the fight is far more likely to go very badly for the female. Moreover, what sort of message does it communicate to have females engaging in violence and inflicting their will on others, whether in the service of justice or otherwise? That’s the patriarchy in a nutshell. Rebranding matriarchal social norms in terms of negative male characteristics, even for entertainment purposes, serves no one particularly well. I wonder if hindsight will prompt the questions “what on Earth were we thinking?” Considering how human culture is stuck in permanent adolescence, I rather doubt it.

Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Watched Everything Everywhere All at Once (DVD version) at home on my TV, which is where I see most films these days. Very few inspire me to trek to the theater anymore to overpay for seats and popcorn. Was pleased to enjoy this film quite a bit — at least before turning an analytical eye toward it. Let me provide a fun, glossy assessment before getting bogged down in troublesome detail.

The film introduces and trades heavily on characters from a supposed multiverse (a multitude of parallel universes branching indiscreetly from arbitrary decision points into an infinity of possibilities) “verse-jumping” into our universe to fix and repair damage done in one or more of the others. As plot devices go, this one is now quite commonplace and always (perhaps inevitably, given our preoccupation with ourselves) positions our universe (the only one we know until someone from outside intrudes) at the center of the others and as the linchpin in some grand plan to save the space-time continuum. It’s a worn trope yet allows storytellers immense freedom to conjure anything imaginable. Everything depicts disorienting alternative universes quite well, most of them (for no particular reason beyond having fun, I surmise) absurd variations of the familiar. Indeed, unlike most films where I sit in stone silence no matter what is presented, this one generated laugh-out-loud moments and gestures across the couch to the effect “did you see that?” In short, what that means is the film produced reflexive responses (it goosed me), which is quite unusual considering how most films, despite lots of overwrought action and drama, fail to register more than a checkbox “yup, got it.”

Actors portraying the three or four main characters do well in their respective jobs, playing several versions of themselves from different universes with diverse experiences. Most of the film is chase-and-evade, devolving at times into a familiar martial-arts punchfest that has frankly lost all possibility of making an impact in the era of overpowered, invulnerable superheros and magical unpredictability. Why filmmakers believe audiences want to see more of this drivel is beyond me, but I guess the animal curiosity to find out which make-believe character will prevail in a battle royale never gets old with mouth-breathers. I’m quite over it. The central conflict, however, wasn’t about the strongest punch. Rather, it was about persisting in the face of revealed meaninglessness a/k/a nihilism.

So here’s where hindsight analysis kinda ruined things for me. Although I recognize storytelling as elemental to modern cognition and consciousness, I don’t regard most narrative forms as art. Cinema, because of its financial interests and collaborative nature, rarely rises to the level of art. There are simply too many diverse elements that must be assembled under a unified aesthetic vision for that to occur often. Cinema is thus more entertainment than art, just like sports and games are entertainment, not art. Impressive skill may be demonstrated, which often produces enjoyable results, but I don’t conflate skill or mere craft with artistry. (I also tire of everything that provides moral and epistemological orientation being conflated with religion). So when films introduce super-serious subjects that really trouble me (e.g., overpopulation, institutional corruption, the climate emergency) but treat them lightly, I’m bothered. Everything does that with philosophy.

Coming to grips with nihilism and the absurdity of existence is the central feature of more than one 20th-century philosophy (and their variants). Downstream (or parallel?) are artistic genres that also express the idea, though in far less overt terms. One can easily get lost down a hole, seeking the bottom (alternatively, the root of things) but finding only the abyss. For that very reason, I have acquaintance with philosophical themes but have not truly sunk into them deeply. Nihilism is not something to mess with, even as a thought experiment or intellectual inquiry — especially if one is inclined to connect strongly with those same things. In Everything, the nihilist conclusion (i.e., that nothing matters) manifests absurdly as a giant, black, everything bagel that can literally suck a person into its hole. Well and good enough; probably best not to overexplain that McGuffin. But it demands a conclusion or resolution, which comes in the form of the mother rescuing the daughter. Ironically, it was the mother (from an alternative universe) who had introduced the daughter (also an alternative) to verse-jumping, who then (the daughter) got lost down the hole and threatened to collapse the multiverse into the everything bagel in a final gesture of despair. In effect, the mother had tinkered with powers well beyond her control, unwittingly created the daughter-monster with out-of-control feeling and unexpected powers, and had to clean up her own mess. How does she (the mother) do it? Through the power of love.

OK, fine. Love (especially unconditional love, as opposed to romantic or familial love) is a universal salve capable of healing all wounds. Except that it’s not. When the film finally depicts the rescue, saving the daughter and multiverse from destruction, it comes across as flat, obvious, and ineffectual (to me at least) and breaks the tone and pacing of the film. Lots of films resort to the power of love to save the day (typically just before the stroke of midnight), but they usually (not always) have better set-ups, which is to say, their film universes cohere and deliver cogent conclusions rather than waving a magic love-wand over everything to solve and resolve. The writers of this film are adept at the enjoyable absurd parts that launch and propel the story but could not stick the landing. Introducing (albeit comically) doomsday philosophy but then failing to treat it seriously enough left me deeply conflicted and dissatisfied. Perhaps it’s a case where my suspension of disbelief was not complete enough. Or maybe I brought too much into the film from outside, but we all have inescapable frames of reference. I wasn’t exactly triggered, merely frustrated. YMMV

Review: West Side Story (2021)

Was surprised to learn a while back that West Side Story (1961) was being remade by none other than Steven Spielberg. Yeah, that Steven Spielberg. Among the spurious reasons (I gather) for the frankly unnecessary remake was a desire to recast with actors of the proper ethnic origin. Ugh. Sure, the original actors who portrayed Bernardo and Maria were Americans of Greek and Russo/Ukrainian descent, respectively. So what? Spielberg’s casting didn’t get much closer (Canadian and American/Colombian, respectively), though the newly cast actors certainly look like they could be Puerto Rican. Any further updating of this particular adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (one of many) for today’s woke sensibilities was also foiled considering the plot (starry-eyed, ill-fated, would-be lovers divided by rivalrous families/gangs) remained essentially unchanged and the original 1950s NYC setting was kept. In addition, the original musical score (altered — more on that below) and choreography (updated? I can’t tell) were used. It wasn’t a shot-for-shot remake, and I presume some of the dialogue was changed, but I didn’t make direct comparisons. Lastly, considering the 1961 original won numerous awards, who exactly was crying out for a remake? Unsurprisingly, the remake was also nominated for awards.

Aside: In arts and entertainment media, remakes are restricted to cinema. No one rewrites a book. Restaged theater and musicals are merely new productions. Rerecording a pop song is understood as a “cover” of the original, not a remake. The rather large discography of classical music includes many, many different versions of the same works, e.g., Beethoven symphonies. (Some suggest, “Does anyone really need yet another version of Beethoven Symphony No. 5?” That question loses legitimacy when asked about live performance.) One might argue that those, too, are remakes, except that there is rarely such a thing as a definitive original. Moreover, consider that music is a dynamic art typically practiced live, in real time. A musical recording fixes that experience, whether live in concert or in the recording studio, on a playback medium intended for repeat play. Comparison of different performances can be quite interesting and enjoyable. Further, a recording of a sporting event might be made for more convenient rebroadcast shortly afterwards and/or for archival purposes, but repeat experience (i.e., rewatching the 1985 Super Bowl vs. listening repeatedly to a favorite music album) is anathema when the outcome has already been seen. Similarly, repeat viewing of TV shows and movies is best at wide intervals, after memory of original viewing fades. Cinema, in contrast with music, has always been a fixed form. Cinema is also not understood as a recording of a live experience. Its genesis as playback differs from stage theater or musical theater. (Some critics and superfans — especially the YouTube variety — don’t wait but instead immediately go back in search of Easter eggs and continuity errors.) Finally, only a modest number of TVs shows have been remade or rebooted, whereas remaking and rebooting movies is comparatively commonplace, which has been characterized as “Hollywood out of ideas.” Take note that West Side Story was first a stage musical and only later committed to film.

Offered Without Comment 14

From an otherwise, rambling, clumsy blog post, this portion from an extended analysis of Mad Max: Fury Road caught my attention:

Ideas that cannot be challenged, that cannot bear even the slightest scrutiny, are ideas that can’t evolve. It doesn’t matter whether they are right or wrong.

They are static, mechanical and ultimately devoid of life itself.

This is our world today in the hands of the Woke Left, a world where the destructive and vindictive feminine has been elevated to the point of unimpeachable rightness. But this isn’t any kind of healthy feminine. It’s a Furiosa-like feminine, devoid of nurturing, all implied violence, all sexuality suppressed to the point of masculinity.

Look at Furiosa and tell me it isn’t asking another vital question, “In a dying world, is there any room for fertility while clinging like moss for survival?”

In our world feminism has robbed women of their greatest attribute, the ability to gestate and nurture life itself. Hollywood has spent two generations giving us female action heroes who are ultimately nothing more than Doods with Boobs. It’s the ultimate power fantasy of Third Wave feminism.

It’s not as destructive an archetype as the sluts on Sex in the City, mind you, because at least it can be tied in some ways back to motherhood, i.e. Ripley in James Cameron’s Aliens, but it’s still damaging to the cause of the healthy feminine nonetheless.

Furiosa is what happens when gender roles are maximally out of balance.

Review: Back to Our Future

David Sirota, author of Back to our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now — Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything (2011), came to my attention (how else?) through a podcast. He riffed pretty entertainingly on his book, now roughly one decade old, like a rock ‘n’ roller stuck (re)playing his or her greatest hits into dotage. However, his thesis was strong and appealing enough that I picked up a copy (read: borrowed from the library) to investigate despite the datedness of the book (and my tardiness). It promised to be an easy read.

Sirota’s basic thesis is that memes and meme complexes (a/k/a memeplexes, though Sirota never uses the term meme) developed in the 80s and deployed through a combination of information and entertainment media (thus, infotainment) form the narrative background we take for granted in the early part of the 20th century. Children fed a steady diet of clichés, catchphrases, one-liners, archetypes, and story plots have now grown to adulthood and are scarcely able to peer behind the curtain to question the legitimacy or subtext of the narrative shapes and distortions imbibed during childhood like mother’s milk. The table of contents lists four parts (boldface section titles are Sirota’s; descriptive text is mine):

• Liking Ike, Hating Woodstock. How the 50s and 60s decades were (the first?) assigned reductive demographic signifiers, handily ignoring the true diversity of experience during those decades. More specifically, the boom-boom 50s (economics, births) were recalled nostalgically in 80s TV and films while the 60s were recast as being all about those dirty, hairy hippies and their music, drugs, and sexual licentiousness, all of which had to be invalidated somehow to regain lost wholesomeness. The one-man promotional vehicle for this pleasing self-deception was Michael J. Fox, whose screen personae (TV and film) during the 80s (glorifying the 50s but openly shitting on the 60s) were instrumental in reforming attitudes about our mixed history.
• The Jump Man Chronicles. How the Great Man Theory of History was developed through glorification of heroes, rogues, mavericks, and iconoclasts who came into their own during the 80s. That one-man vehicle was Michael Jordan, whose talents and personal magnetism were so outsized that everyone aspired to be “like Mike,” which is to say, a superhero elevated beyond mere mortal rules and thus immortalized. The effect was duplicated many times over in popular culture, with various entertainment icons and political operatives subverting thoughtful consideration of real-world problems in favor of jingoistic portrayals.
• Why We (Continue to) Fight. How the U.S. military was rehabilitated after losing the Vietnam War, gifting us with today’s hypermilitarism and permanent wars. Two principal tropes were deployed to shape public opinion: the Legend of the Spat upon Veteran and the Hands Tied Behind Their Backs Myth. Each was trotted out reliably whenever we needed to misremember our past as fictionalized in the 80s.
• The Huxtable Effect. How “America’s dad” helped accommodate race relations to white anxiety, primarily to sell a TV show. In contrast with various “ghetto TV” shows of the 70s that depicted urban working poor (various ethnicities), The Cosby Show presented an upscale black family who transcended race by simply ignoring the issue — a privilege of wealth and celebrity. The Obama campaign and subsequent administration copied this approach, pretending American society had become postracial despite his never truly being able to escape the modifier black because the default (no modifier needed) in America is always white. This is the most fraught part of the book, demonstrating that despite whatever instructions we get from entertainment media and pundits, we remain stuck in an unresolved, unhealed, inescapable trap.

Everything and Nothing

In the introduction to an article at TomDispatch about anticipated resumption of professional sports currently on hiatus like much of the rest of human activity (economic and otherwise), Tom Engelhardt recalls that to his childhood self, professional sports meant so much and yet so little (alternatively, everything and nothing). This charming aspect of the innocence of childhood continues into adulthood, whether as spectator or participant, as leisure and freedom from threat allow. The article goes on to offer conjecture regarding the effect of reopening professional sports on the fall presidential election. Ugh! Racehorse politics never go out of season. I reject such purely hypothetical analyses, which isn’t the same as not caring about the election. Maybe I’ll wade in after a Democratic nominee is chosen to say that third-party candidates may well have a much larger role to play this time round because we’re again being offered flatly unacceptable options within the two-party single-party system. Until then, phooey on campaign season!

Still, Engelhardt’s remark put me in mind of a blog post I considered fully nine years ago but never got around to writing, namely, how music functions as meaningless abstraction. Pick you passion, I suppose: sports, music (any genre), literature, painting, poetry, dance, cinema and TV, fashion, fitness, nature, house pets, house plants, etc. Inspiration and devotion come in lots of forms, few of which are essential (primary or ontological needs on Maslow’s Hierarchy) yet remain fundamental to who we are and what we want out of life. Accordingly, when one’s passion is stripped away, being left grasping and rootless is quite common. That’s not equivalent to losing a job or loved one (those losses are afflicting many people right now, too), but our shared experience these days with no bars, no restaurants, no sports, no concerts, no school, and no church all add up to no society. We’re atomized, unable to connect and socialize meaningfully, digital substitutes notwithstanding. If a spectator, maybe one goes in search of replacements, which is awfully cold comfort. If a participant, one’s identity is wrapped up in such endeavors; resulting loss of meaning and/or purpose can be devastating.

It would be easy to over-analyze and over-intellectualize what meaningless abstraction means. It’s a trap, so I’ll do my best not to over-indulge. Still, it’s worth observing that as passions are habituated and internalized, their mode of appreciation is transferred from the senses (or sensorium) to the mind or head (as observed here). Coarseness and ugliness are then easily digested, rationalized, and embraced instead of being repulsive as they should be. There’s the paradox: as we grow more “sophisticated” (scare quotes intentional), we also invert and become more base. How else to explain tolerance of increasingly brazen dysfunction, corruption, servitude (e.g., debt), and gaslighting? It also explains the attraction to entertainments such as combat sports (and thug sports such as football and hockey), violent films, professional wrestling (more theater than sport), and online trolling. An instinctual blood lust that accompanies being predators, if not expressed more directly in war, torture, crime, and self-destruction, is sublimated into entertainment. Maybe that’s an escape valve so pressures don’t build up any worse, but that possibility strikes me as rather weak considering just how much damage has already been done.

Calling All Directors

The old saw goes that acting may be just fine as a creative endeavor, but given the opportunity, most actors really want to direct. A similar remark is often made of orchestral musicians, namely, that most rank-and-file players would really rather conduct. Directing and conducting may not be the central focus of creative work in their respective genres. After all, directors don’t normally appear onscreen and conductors make no sound. Instead, they coordinate the activities of an array of creative folks, putting directors in a unique position to bring about a singular vision in otherwise collaborative work. A further example is the Will to Power (associated with Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer) characteristic of those who wish to rule (as distinguished from those who wish to serve) such as regents, dictators, and autocrats. All of this sprang to mind because, despite outward appearance of a free, open society in the U.S., recent history demonstrates that the powers that be (PTB) have instituted a directed election and directed economy quite at odds with democracy or popular opinion.

The nearest analogy is probably the directed verdict, where a judge removes the verdict from the hands or responsibility of the jury by directing a particular verdict. In short, the judge decides the case for the jury, making the jury moot. I have no idea how commonplace directed verdicts are in practice.

Directed Election

Now that progressive candidates have been run out of the Democratic primaries, the U.S. presidential election boils down to which stooge to install (or retain) in November. Even if Biden is eventually swapped out for another Democrat in a brokered nominating convention (highly likely according to many), it’s certain to be someone fully amenable to entrenched corporate/financial interests. Accordingly, the deciders won’t be the folks who dutifully showed up and voted in their state primaries and caucuses but instead party leaders. One could try to argue that as elected representatives of the people, party leaders act on behalf of their constituencies (governing by consent of the people), but some serious straining is needed to arrive at that view. Votes cast in the primaries thus far demonstrate persistent desire for something distinctly other than the status quo, at least in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Applying the cinematic metaphor of the top paragraph, voters are a cast of thousands millions being directed within a larger political theater toward a predetermined result.

Anyone paying attention knows that voters are rarely given options that aren’t in fact different flavors of the same pro-corporate agenda. Thus, no matter whom we manage to elect in November, the outcome has already been engineered. This is true not only by virtue of the narrow range of candidates able to maneuver successfully through the electoral gauntlet but also because of perennial distortions of the balloting process such as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and election fraud. Claims that both sides (really just one side) indulge in such practices so everything evens out don’t convince me.

Directed Economy

Conservative economists and market fundamentalists never seem to tire of arguments in the abstract that capitalist mechanisms of economics, left alone (unregulated, laissez-faire) to work their magic, deliver optimal outcomes when it comes to social and economic justice. Among the primary mechanisms is price discovery. However, economic practice never even remotely approaches the purity of abstraction because malefactors continuously distort and game economic systems out of self-interest greed. Price discovery is broken and equitable economic activity is made fundamentally fictitious. For example, the market for gemstones is famously inflated by a narrow consortium of sellers having successfully directed consumers to adopt a cultural standard of spending three months’ wages/salary for a wedding band as a demonstration of one’s love and devotion. In the opposite direction, precious metal spot prices are suppressed despite very high demand and nearly nonexistent supply. Current quoted premiums over spot silver price, even though no delivery is contemplated, range from roughly 20% to an absurd 2,000%. Supply and demand curves no longer function to aid in true price discovery (if such a thing ever existed). In a more banal sense, what people are willing to pay for a burger at a fast food joint or a loaf of bread at the grocery may affect the price charged more directly.

Nowhere is it more true that we’ve shifted to a directed economy than with the stock market (i.e., Wall Street vs. Main Street). As with the housing market, a real-world application with which many people have personal experience, if a buyer of a property or asset fails to appear within a certain time frame (longer for housing, shorter for stock, bonds, and other financial instruments), the seller is generally obliged to lower the price until a buyer finally appears. Some housing markets extraordinarily flush with money (e.g., Silicon Valley and Manhattan) trigger wild speculation and inflated prices that drive out all but the wealthiest buyers. Moreover, when the eventual buyer turns out to be a bank, corporation, or government entity willing to overpay for the property or asset using someone else’s money, the market becomes wholly artificial. This has been the case with the stock market for the last twelve years, with cheap money being injected nonstop via bailouts and quantitative easing to keep asset prices inflated. When fundamental instabilities began dragging the stock market down last fall, accelerating precipitous in early spring of this year and resulting in yet another crash (albeit brief), the so-called Plunge Protection Team (PPT) sprang into action and wished trillions of dollars into existence (taxpayer debt, actually, and over the objections of taxpayers in a classic fool-me-once scenario) to perpetuate the casino economy and keep asset prices inflated for the foreseeable future, which isn’t very long.

The beneficiaries of this largesse are the same as they have always been when tax monies and public debt are concerned: corporations, banks, and the wealthy. Government economic supports are directed to these entities, leaving all others in the lurch. Claims that bailouts to keep large corporate entities and wealthy individuals whole so that the larger economy doesn’t seize up and fail catastrophically are preposterous because the larger economy already has seized up and failed catastrophically while the population is mostly quarantined, throwing many individuals out of work and shuttering many businesses. A reasonable expectation of widespread insolvency and bankruptcy lingers, waiting for the workouts and numbers to mount up.

The power of the purse possessed by the U.S. Congress hasn’t been used to help the citizenry since the New Deal era of FDR. Instead, military budgets and debts expand enormously while entitlements and services to the needy and vulnerable are whittled away. Citizen rebellions are already underway in small measure, mostly aimed at the quarantines. When bankruptcies, evictions, and foreclosures start to swell, watch out. Our leaders’ fundamental mismanagement of human affairs is unlikely to be swallowed quietly.

Fiction Intrudes on Reality

Purpose behind consumption of different genres of fiction varies. For most of us, it’s about responding to stimuli and experiencing emotions vicariously, which is to say, safely. For instance, tragedy and horror can be enjoyed, if that’s the right word, in a fictional context to tweak one’s sensibilities without significant effect outside the story frame. Similarly, fighting crime, prosecuting war, or repelling an alien invasion in a video game can be fun but is far removed from actually doing those things in real life (not fun). For less explicit narrative forms, such as music, feelings evoked are aesthetic and artistic in nature, which makes a sad song or tragic symphony enjoyable on its own merits without bleeding far into real sadness or tragedy. Cinema (now blurred with broadcast TV and streaming services) is the preeminent storytelling medium that provokes all manner of emotional response. After reaching a certain age (middle to late teens), emotional detachment from depiction of sexuality and violent mayhem makes possible digestion of such stimulation for the purpose of entertainment — except in cases where prior personal trauma is triggered. Before that age, nightmare-prone children are prohibited.

Dramatic conflict is central to driving plot and story forward, and naturally, folks are drawn to some stories while avoiding others. Although I’m detached enough not to be upset by, say, zombie films where people and zombies alike are dispatched horrifically, I wouldn’t say I enjoy gore or splatter. Similarly, realistic portrayals of war (e.g., Saving Private Ryan) are not especially enjoyable for me despite the larger story, whether based on true events or entirely made up. The primary reason I leave behind a movie or TV show partway through is because I simply don’t enjoy watching suffering.

Another category bugs me even more: when fiction intrudes on reality to remind me too clearly of actual horrors (or is it the reverse: reality intruding on fiction?). It doesn’t happen often. One of the first instances I recall was in Star Trek: The Next Generation when the story observed that (fictional) warp travel produced some sort of residue akin to pollution. The reminder that we humans are destroying the actual environment registered heavily on me and ruined my enjoyment of the fictional story. (I also much prefer the exploration and discovery aspects of Star Trek that hew closer to Gene Roddenberry’s original vision than the militaristic approach now central to Star Trek.) A much more recent intrusion occurs in the rather adolescent TV show The 100, where a global nuclear exchange launched by an artificial intelligence has the follow-on effect a century later of remaining nuclear sites going critical, melting down, and irradiating the Earth, making it uninhabitable. This bothers me because that’s my expectation what happens in reality, probably not too long (decades) after industrial civilization collapses and most or all of us are dead. This prospect served up as fiction is simply too close to reality for me to enjoy vicariously.

Another example of fiction intruding too heavily on my doomer appreciation of reality occurred retroactively. As high-concept science fiction, I especially enjoyed the first Matrix movie. Like Star Trek, the sequels degraded into run-of-the-mill war stories. But what was provocative about the original was the matrix itself: a computer-generated fiction situated within a larger reality. Inside the matrix was pleasant enough (though not without conflict), but reality outside the matrix was truly awful. It was a supremely interesting narrative and thought experiment when it came out in 1999. Now twenty-one years later, it’s increasingly clear that we are living in a matrix-like, narrative-driven hyperreality intent on deluding ourselves with a pleasant equilibrium that simply isn’t in evidence. In fact, as societies and as a civilization, we’re careening out of control, no brakes, no steering. Caitlin Johnstone explores this startling after-the-fact realization in an article at Medium.com, which I found only a couple days ago. Reality is in fact far worse than the constructed hyperreality. No wonder no one wants to look at it.

Life Out of Balance, pt. 1

I was introduced to the phrase life out of balance decades ago when I saw the film Koyaanisqatsi. The film is the first of a trilogy (sequels are Powaqqatsi and Nagoyqatsi) by Godfrey Reggio, though the film is arguably more famous because of its soundtrack composed by Philip Glass. Consisting entirely of wordless montage and music, the film contrasts the majesty of nature (in slo-mo, among other camera effects) with the frenetic pace of human activity (often sped up) and the folly of the human-built world. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Indian word, meaning life out of balance. One might pause to consider, “out of balance with what?” The film supplies the answer, none too subtly: out of balance with nature. The two sequels are celebrations of humans at work and technology, respectively, and never gained the iconic stature of the initial film.

If history (delivering us into the 21st century) has demonstrated anything, it’s that we humans are careening out of control toward disaster, not unlike the spacecraft in the final sequence of Koyaanisqatsi that tumbles out of the atmosphere for an agonizingly long time (in slo-mo), burning all the way down. We are all witness to the event (more accurately, the process) but can do little anymore to alter the eventual tragic result. Though some counsel taking steps toward amelioration (of suffering, if nothing else), our default response is rather to deny our collective fate, and worse, to accelerate toward it. That’s how unbalanced we are as a global civilization.

The observation that we are badly out of balance is made at the species and civilizational levels but is recapitulated at all levels of social organization, from distinct societies or nationalities to regional and municipal organizations and associations on down to families and individuals. The forces, dynamics, and power laws that push us off balance are many, but none is as egregious as the corrupting influence of interrelated wealth and power. Wisdom of the ancients (especially the non-Western ones) gave us the same verdict, though we have refused intransigently (or more charitably: failed) to learn the lesson for hundreds of generations.

What I propose to do in this multipart series is explore or survey some of the manifestations of life out of balance. There is no particular organization, chronology, or schedule for subsequent entries. As an armchair social critic, I reserve the luxury of exercising my own judgment and answering to no one. Stay tuned.