innuendostudios

[innuendostudios]

new video about Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy, and how everyone* keeps getting them wrong! this video is sponsored by Nebula, a place where you can watch the original version of this video before I had to tweak it for YouTube's copyright bots. (by clicking that link, you can get an annual subscription for 40% off.) or you can just back me on Patreon, which is also cool and good.

transcript below the cut.

I adore Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy. I flirted with making a video about it ages ago, had a draft of a script, but ultimately decided it wasn’t about anything except “here’s a thing I like, and here are its (I thought) very obvious themes.” So I shelved it. But, in the years since, I have seen multiple video essayists on this here website claim that these movies are about growing up and taking responsibility. (I say “multiple.” It’s not a lot. But it’s more than one! And that’s enough.)

These people are 100% wrong.

Lemme lay it out: the Cornetto Trilogy is not about growing up. It is not about taking responsibility. It is the exact opposite, and that’s not subtext. It is three movies about stunted manchildren thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and each, in the end, is saved - is redeemed - by abandoning his character arc and failing to grow or change. It is a three-part love letter to immaturity.

And I guess I have to set the record straight.

Sometimes making a video about a thing you love is an act of appreciation. And sometimes it’s out of spite.

The Cornetto Trilogy is three movies: Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End. All three are written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright; Pegg stars, and Wright directs; all three center on a relationship between Pegg and real-life best friend Nick Frost, which makes each film a reunion of the core team behind Spaced (excepting, but for a small role in Shaun of the Dead, Jessica Hynes). The three films span three genres: zombie apocalypse, buddy cop, alien invasion; each features a Cornetto ice cream cone: strawberry to represent blood, original blue to represent the police, and mint to represent little green men; this is a joking nod to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Trois Couleur films, Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge, which were based on the colors and themes of the French flag (I don’t care what you say, Emily: #TeamRouge); that nod is funny because Trois Couleur is high-art drama and these are comedies. All three are parodies of, tributes to, and actually surprisingly good executions of their respective genres. And the hook, the gag at the center of all these movies, is that Simon Pegg plays a character wholly unsuited to be starring in this kind of film.

Shaun, the burnout, is the wrong person to survive the zombie apocalypse; by-the-book British bobby Nicholas is the wrong person to lead an American-style bombastic actioner; and alcoholic asshole Gary is the last person to save the world from aliens.

And I think that’s where people get stuck. Because “schlub finds himself protagonist of a genre film” is the elevator pitch for like a dozen Adam Sandler movies. The genre trappings may be as mundane as parenthood or mandated anger management classes, or as high-concept as action movie, whodunnit, or time travel It’s a Wonderful Life if Clarence were Christopher Walken as the angel of death (that… that makes it sound good, it’s not, don’t see Click; leave Frank Capra alone, Adam). But all these movies have the same basic shape: an extraordinary situation forces a guy to confront his shortcomings, which always stem from having never grown up. And you probably haven’t seen all of these movies, but if you’ve seen any, I bet you have assumptions about how the rest end: even though “Adam Sandler acts like a child” is generally the selling point of an Adam Sandler movie, they all end with some lip service toward becoming an adult: hey man, grow up a bit; appreciate your family a little more; square your shoulders; clean your room. This is so standard, it was parodied mercilessly in Funny People.

And this was a formative microgenre for my generation! Whole universe turns itself upside down to teach some shitty dude to, like, do the dishes and pay his wife a compliment now and then - Liar Liar, Bruce and Evan Almighty (all directed by the same guy, by the way). So I don’t blame people of a certain age for seeing the first act of Shaun of the Dead and thinking “I know where this is going.” And when, at the last minute, it swerves and goes someplace else, you could read that as a gag, a final subversion of expectation, still the same basic shape. But no! No! Once is a gag - thrice??? Thrice is a thematic statement!

So lemme make my case. I’ma take you through these movies one by one - we’ll talk about the manchildren and the expectations set by the genre, and then we’ll talk about that last-minute swerve and what it means. And then you’ll tell me I’m right and apologize!

Shaun of the Dead:

Shaun is a man in his twenties. What kind of manchild is he? He’s the slacker.

What is his problem? He needs to sort his life out. Shaun doesn’t know how to take action. He hasn’t advanced since college - he’s been working the kind of job a teen takes over the summer for like a decade, lives with the same best friend, has the same petty fights with his stepdad, goes to the same pub every week with the same group of people. He can’t make a reservation, he can’t manage a calendar, he’s a washup. This makes his girlfriend, Liz, feel stifled, trapped; he is a weight around her ankle, taking her on the same date week after week, keeping her from living her own dreams, having her own adventures. She gives him one last chance to prove he can sort his life out, and he blows it, and she dumps him.

And then: a zombie movie happens.

The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: to survive, and save his loved ones, he’ll have to take action, make plans, be decisive. This is a common fantasy: when you feel ground down by the mundanity of life, you might imagine, oh, if only a crisis would happen, like a zombie virus outbreak, where my normal-life problems like “am I gonna make rent,” “is my girl gonna take me back,” “is my roommate gonna kick out my stoner buddy who’s crashing on the couch” become meaningless, and it’s immediately clear what’s really important, what matters. Then I’d know exactly what to do. It’s why disaster movies work as escapism: a necromantic plague - or at least the fantasy of one - is sometime preferable to normal life.

Hot Fuzz:

Nicholas is a man in his thirties. What kind of manchild is he? He’s the hall monitor.

What is his problem? He can’t switch off. He is a hypercompetant police officer with a rulebook where his brain should be. He’s so good at being a cop that he’s spotting and unraveling crimes even on his day off. He can’t maintain a relationship, has no friends, all his coworkers hate him because he keeps finishing their work for them, and his stats show up the rest of the force so badly that they scuttle him out to the country.

Now you might be thinking, “Mmm. A fastidious police officer who can’t have fun? How is that a manchild? Sounds pretty grown-up to me. You’re reaching, bud.” Ohhhh ho ho, smartass, do you remember this scene? [bar scene] Yeah! Nicholas Angel has a five-year-old’s notion of law and order. He’s still playing cops and robbers.

And that’s a problem, because then: an action movie happens.

It doesn’t happen all at once: he goes out to the country and finds they do things a bit differently there. They are (ostensibly) less concerned with rules than what than the rules are for: if the purpose of drinking laws is to keep the streets safe and orderly, and letting some people off with a warning or allowing kids drink so long as they do it inside achieves that end, the rule can be bent. That’s a judgment grown-ups can make; I mean, they’re the ones who wrote the rules in the first place. So be lenient with shoplifters, don’t hassle people for speeding; this isn’t the Big City, you can use your better judgment. But Nicholas never got past doing whatever Mom & Dad said; obedience, and trusting whoever’s up the chain, is his entire moral framework. He can’t accept that bending the law could be more righteous than following it.

But also maybe there’s a criminal conspiracy murdering people and writing it off as accidents and the police chief might be in on it. Or maybe Nicholas is so desperate for a big case with no moral ambiguity that he’s seeing things where they aren’t. 

The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: either there’s nothing going on and he needs to chill out about procedure, or the department is corrupt and he’ll have to go rogue like it’s Point Break - and this is how he experiences Point Break. [“paperwork”]

No matter what, he’ll have to bend the rules, which he constitutionally cannot do.

The World’s End:

Gary is a man in his forties. What kind of manchild is he? He’s the delinquent.

What’s his problem? Pfffft. What isn’t his problem? Gary is a manipulative, narcissistic, lying, self-destructive, ignorant, violent, thieving, shit-talking, unapologetic asshole who peaked in high school when being all those things was still kind of badass. The greatest night of his life was the drunken pub crawl after graduation he and his friends didn’t even finish, and he’s been tumbling downhill ever since. He’s spent his life ruining everyone who knows him until there’s no one left to ruin but Gary King. So now it’s time to bully the old gang into going back home with him to relive that night by finishing the pub crawl, because, in his own words, it’s all he’s got. And he and his friends have to confront how home has changed since they left - the bars have gentrified, not everyone recognizes them; the defining, epic deeds of Gary’s youth have been forgotten. You can’t actually go back because that place doesn’t exist anymore.

And then: a sci-fi movie happens.

Turns out the town’s been taken over by aliens, and all the people who couldn’t conform to their new order have been replaced with robots! That’s why no one recognizes them! And that’s why the pubs all look the same: the aliens are homogenizing everything! And it’s clear, if they can’t get Gary and his friends to play ball, they’ll roboticize them as well! The obvious move is to get the hell out of town, but Gary keeps inventing excuses to stay and finish the pub crawl, and they sound pretty sensible because the group’s already five pints in. The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: sooner or later he’s gonna have to give up on recapturing his youth and do what’s best for him and his friends now, even if it means running back to the city where all his problems live.

So there we have it: the characters cross the threshold into an unfamiliar world where an external conflict cannot be addressed without resolving the tension within. The slacker will have to get his shit sorted, the hall monitor will have to break the rules, and the delinquent will have to do what’s good for him. And, to an extent, all three know this! The movies Wright and Pegg pay homage to exist in these stories - Shaun knows what a zombie is, Danny keeps Nicholas up watching Point Break and Bad Boys II, and Gary and friends know bodysnatcher movies so well they have philosophical debates with the robots about whether “robot” is the PC term.

So, yeah, if you turned the movies off there, I could forgive you for thinking that’s where they’re headed. But you goofballs watched them to the end and then made content about them, what is wrong with you???

What actually happens in the second halves of these movies?

Shaun twigs that he’s in a zombie movie and, at first, tries to play the part - his survival plans are miniature hero’s journeys with him as protagonist, wherein he’ll save the day by neatly confronting all his flaws. He’ll resolve parental conflict by saving his mom from his zombified stepdad, resolve romantic conflict by showing his girl he can come through when it counts, and resolve internal conflict by being a man who saves the day. And all his plans suck! It’s just the same plan he always comes up with! Dragging around the same useless liability of a bestie, collecting the same group of people, and holing up in the same pub! He doesn’t save his mom: his stepdad apologizes, resolving their conflict for him, and then survives in zombie form but Shaun’s mom gets killed; most of the friend group gets killed because the crisis does not actually suspend but in fact amplifies their personal grievances; and he doesn’t save the day, just manages not to die long enough for the military to show up.

But… well, Liz wanted adventure and now she’s had enough for a lifetime, so… she’s down to just be boring with him for a while - sit on the couch, watch TV, hit the pub. Beats running for your life. Tensions with the roommate are gone cuz roommate died, but rent is covered cuz Liz moved in. Zombies don’t get eradicated, just folded into normal life, so Shaun can mindlessly play video games with his bestie forever, and it’s not a problem that bestie doesn’t have an income cuz he doesn’t need food or shelter.

The zombie apocalypse doesn’t make Shaun sort his life out, it changes the world til he doesn’t have to.

When Nicholas discovers that, yes, there is definitely a murderous criminal conspiracy inside the police department, he recognizes the only way to bring about justice is to become what Danny has always wanted and go Dirty Harry on the town. It’s either that or just swallow the crimes. But he does neither. He and Danny go on an epic shooting spree, recreating famous movie scenes, taking out the entire criminal organization against all odds, and spouting badass one-liners… but everyone who helps them is a cop, they don’t actually kill anyone, all perps are formally arrested, and they fill out all the paperwork. I think he even properly signs out the weapons. He never switches off, never breaks a rule, does absolutely everything by the book, only… louder. And this violent showdown saves him from the chill town with lax rules he thought he’d moved to. Now he, with his five-year-old notion of right and wrong, is in charge of the police department.

The buddy cop actioner doesn’t make Nicholas bend the rules, it changes the world til he doesn’t have to.

Gary knows exactly how a movie of this sort is supposed to go and spends the whole movie running from it. Friends and secondary characters keep sharing these poignant moments with him, because they know this story, too: yeah, he’s gonna reject help at first, but sooner or later he’ll hit rock bottom and then someone will get through to him. And, as the night goes on, and the characters get drunker and drunker, and Gary passes up more and more opportunities to abandon the pub crawl and go home, these moments take a tone of desperation. They start to sound more like interventions; like, Gary, we all know you’re going to come to your senses but could you hurry up with it??? How many of your friends need to literally die for you to shape up? Are you gonna get them all killed?

And the answer is: Gary will never shape up! To Gary the Human Dril Tweet, his friends trying to save him, psychiatrists trying to treat him, and aliens trying to assimilate him are all the same thing. He doggedly makes it to the end of the pub crawl and confronts the alien overlord who tells him all the technological advancements of the past few decades - all the efficiency and homogenization that’ve changed the face of his home town - are their doing. The Information Age is an intervention on behalf of Earth, a pan-galactic effort to save humanity from itself. And the reason they’ve been replacing people with robots is some people are too fucked up to go along with it.

And here’s Gary, King of the Fuckups, brashly declaring that fucking up is what makes us human. There is no freedom without the freedom to ruin your life. We are endowed by our creator with the right to be drunken, ornery pieces of shit.

He tells the aliens to piss off and he’s so fucking annoying that they do, and they take the Information Age with them.

Now… I know… ugh… I know a lot of people love this movie, say it’s the best of the three. Some friends who’ve struggled with mental health or just being an adult under late capitalism really identify with Gary, and the valorization of being a mess. I see you, you’re not wrong, I get it, I really do. But can we just… not “but” but “also” can we… can we also admit that this ending is… this is Space Brexit.

Like, literally it’s an alien invasion but symbolically this is Gary rejecting the adult world of rules and authority and doing what’s best for the community and that’s how Brexiters view the EU. And people keep telling him “Gary, this is in your best interest” and Gary says, I don’t want my best interest! I am registered in the anti-Gary’s Face Party and I will cast my vote by cutting my nose! I choose to do what’s bad for me.

And, like a true Brexiter, he chooses for everybody.

Now tell me that’s a movie about growing up. Gary collapses human civilization in its entirety rather than change, and in the world that follows, he thrives… by being an immature, irresponsible bag of garbage.

To Wright and Pegg, growing up is death, and these are movies about being alive. These characters don’t cross the threshold back into the ordinary world with the ultimate boon of character growth; all three stay in the extraordinary world. The zombies remain, the robots remain, Nicholas is offered his London job back and chooses to stay in the country. These are stories about normal life spontaneously turning into a genre film, and they are made with deep love for those genres; why would they end with leaving those genres behind? Because it’s what Adam Sandler would do?

So there you have it. I rest my case.

“Okay Ian. Why does this matter?”

…what was that?

“You’ve made your point: these movies aren’t about growing up or taking responsibility. So what?”

Uhhhh.

“Bring it home for us.”

…

“Why do you care so much?

[breath]

I wrote the first draft of this script when I was around Shaun and Nicholas’ age, and “so what?” is why I shelved it. Now I’m Gary’s age, this video’s been in the back of my brain the whole time, but I got this far and “so what” is where I got stuck, again. This is why the CO-VIDs came out quicker, cuz I let myself end with “so that’s interesting!” and got on with my life. But there’s clearly something sticky here, more than “someone is wrong on the internet.” (Also, to the YouTubers I’m vaguebooking, who said these were movies about growing up - I’m way more annoyed at the folks I’ve argued with on Twitter about this, you just made a better rhetorical device; you do not owe me an apology!) (Also, to the commentariat: I am not extrapolating this from like two data points, this is chronic and recurring and has been bothering me for years.)

There are a few directions I could take this to give it some “cultural weight.” I could put on my social justice hat and talk about how the “crisis of adulthood” doesn’t play as broad comedy unless you look like Adam Sandler or Simon Pegg, or put on my class analysis hat and talk about how signifiers of adulthood are, traditionally, ways of spending and accruing capital which are, today, often inaccessible to people under 40.

And that’s all legit, but here’s the real deal: I’m just mad at Gary. The world changed around Shaun such that he could stay a child. And Nicholas ended up somewhere he could stay a child. If you missed that, you’re wrong, but whatever. But to say that Gary grew up grinds me, because Gary chose this. The whole movie is people telling him to grow up, and he says no! He says it out loud! He says it to the literal end of the world. To walk out of the theater and say “that’s a movie about growing up” is more than a mistake, it’s a refusal. It’s trying to “fix” the movie by fitting it into a more familiar shape, so it doesn’t say what it says, so Gary isn’t who he is, who he chooses to be.

I’m being cheeky when I say this because he’s a fictional character, but saying Gary grew up is enabling.

Gary says there’s no freedom without the freedom to ruin your life, which is the problem with alcoholics and libertarians: it’s not just your life, Gary! You live in a community, a culture, and an ecosystem! Your actions - everybody’s actions - impact other people! That’s just the way the world is! You can’t shit yourself at the bar without other people having to smell it. We’re all fuckin’ connected, man! You don’t want anyone’s will imposed on you; you spend the whole movie imposing your will on everyone else! You say humans don’t wanna be told what to do, and then you decide humanity’s future by yourself with no input or consent from anyone!

People point to Gary ordering water in the last scene instead of beer as evidence that he got sober, like that’s proof that he did grow up in the end, which are you fucking joking??? Getting sober is a shorthand for maturity the way buying a house is, it doesn’t signify anything in and of itself! Gary drank to escape the adult world of rules and responsibilities! So, yeah, under normal circumstances getting sober would mean he’s made peace with that world and is ready to integrate. But that’s not what happened! The thing he was escaping doesn’t exist anymore! He literally destroyed it!! People died! Probably millions! Now he lives a happy life LARPing as Omega Doom - no I don’t expect you to catch that reference! He doesn’t need to drink! He is literally reliving the best day of his life forever. And even if it did mean personal growth, the idea that a person could make what would be, unequivocally, the most selfish decision in human history, and then spend his life celebrating the outcome, oh but if he overcame a personal demon in the process then on balance that’s maturity? That is lightspeed solipsism! Who are you if you think that way? Are you all Adam Sandler???

And none of that makes this a bad ending, or Gary a bad character. I mean, he is the reason The World’s End is my least favorite, and I don’t like the ending, but I don’t think it’s bad that I don’t like the ending. Rather than watch another addict pull his life together or destroy himself, we watch a downward spiral with so much gravity the whole world self-destructs alongside him. And that’s why The World’s End is the most interesting of the three: it is a bold choice, and I think we are free to feel however we want about the conclusion Gary engineered for himself. I don’t think it’s valid to pretend it didn’t happen.

In the context of the trilogy, we see that Shaun’s immaturity is mostly a problem for Shaun: he would be, at worst, a footnote in the lives of the people who love him; “yeah, I liked Shaun a lot, but I couldn’t carry him through life anymore.” Nicholas is the kind of overachiever that is useful if pointed in the right direction; juvenile code of ethics aside, he is, empirically, helping the community (within the entirely fictional framework where that’s a thing police do). If the world hadn’t changed to turn their flaws into strengths, they would still be relatively harmless. Gary is what happens when immaturity isn’t harmless, and shows us how a world built by that immaturity would look.

There is an appeal to Gary King, a wish fulfillment. Letting your id fully off the leash because you no longer care what anybody thinks - it’s why some people drink, and it’s why some people would like to drink with Gary. But if that’s not just your Friday night, not just your twenties, but that’s your life? There is a destination at the end of that road, and it’s Gary doing something truly ugly. And we see that ugly thing the way Gary sees it: as awesome. But then you see the reality: the Monday morning after the Friday night. We went out with Gary and he did something terrible.

And I’m not telling you to hate Gary for it; I’m not saying Gary can’t be forgiven. In fact, seeing it for what it is is the only way Gary could be forgiven, because, if he “grew up and took responsibility,” there’s nothing to forgive.

I think this is the only way the trilogy could have ended. I mean, you make stories about boys who get older and older and don’t grow up, it eventually becomes a problem. There’s only two ways to resolve it: you either end with a guy actually sorting his shit out, or you go for broke and show what happens if he doesn’t. And I think some of us boys saw that and said, “no, noooo, they did grow up! all three of them!” rather than say, “haha! hahaaa! ……………shit.”

#video essay #cornetto trilogy #Youtube

[innuendostudios]

New video essay! On the Reverse Gish Gallop - how conservatives can ignore 90% of your argument and still appear to be winning.

If you would like more of this, subscribe to Nebula and/or back me on Patreon!

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re watching a political debate on TV. The conservative candidate has used their opening arguments to dump a truckload of dubious claims on their opponent. You recognize this maneuver: that’s the Gish Gallop! The debater makes point after dubious point, and, if the other debater doesn’t rebut every single one, they will appear to have lost the argument. These points don’t have to be good or hard to disprove, there just has to be a lot of them.

Oh, but what’s this? The liberal candidate seems to have come prepared! That’s new! They succinctly and efficiently dismantle each of their opponent’s arguments, offering a clear rebuttal to every single one. It’s obviously not the first time they’ve heard this particular gallop. So, the conservative’s petard has just fully hoisted them. [“What a hoisting!”] They’ve just lost their own game and have to go on the defensive… right?

Turns out, no! The conservative points to a minor error - maybe the liberal said their program would cost $40 million but is actually estimated to cost 43 - and treats them as an ignorant sap who can’t even count correctly. That is now the subject, everything else has been forgotten, and the liberal is backpedaling.

Wait, you exclaim, how does that work?! The liberal has to rebut each and every point but the conservative takes issue with one and stays in the driver’s seat? Are audiences fooled by this? Are liberals that easily snookered? The answer may shock you!

You’ve just borne witness to The Reverse Gish Gallop, where an entire argument falls apart if any of it can be disputed. These disputes, again, don’t have to be good, they just have to call the airtightness of the argument into question.

A good example is how conservatives obsess over gaffes. (Which, fuckin’... really guys?? [W, Trump]) Some Democrat will be all “conservatives want to shut down post offices as a form of vote suppression; they’re pushing voter ID laws and the post office is where many people get IDs; also we are relying more and more heavily on mail-in voting; they overwhelmingly try to shut down offices in Black and Latine neighborhoods; a lot of services like healthcare and courts still use physical mail by default and there can be serious consequences to getting it late; many elderly people still don’t use email, and, hey, maybe some of them like getting junk mail” “AH BA BA BA THAT’S IT THAT’S YOUR WHOLE LIFE NOW FOR THE REST OF YOUR CAREER YOU’RE THE ASSHOLE WHO SAID OLD PEOPLE LIKE JUNK MAIL.”

Your mistake was assuming that dishonest people abide by the same rules they impose on everyone else. When I was a teenager, some friends of the family would invite me along when they asked my parents to dinner, because I would play with their five-year-old and let the grown-ups chat in peace. And he’d make up games where we’d bat a balloon back and forth or whatever, and change the rules on the fly when it suited him. Because the rule wasn’t actually “you can only touch the balloon once per turn;” the rule was “Andrew wins.”

The purpose of a Gish Gallop is to establish a narrative not through argument or logic but force and volume. Once established, it takes a lot less effort for them to maintain than for you to establish a new one. If they shake confidence in your argument, the audience will often revert to the previous argument, whether or not that one was ever proven. It’s a not about which story is true, it’s about who sets the parameters for all stories going forward; who got there first. This is not a debate; this is a Zerg Rush. Understand: a dishonest argument is Lego - you haven’t dismantled it until every brick is separated. But an honest rebuttal? An honest rebuttal is Jenga.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

[innuendostudios]

New Alt-Right Playbook, regarding the minimization of power imbalances with "enh, it's not SO bad."

If you like this and my other work, do please back me on Patreon and/or watch me on Nebula.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, you and some other folks have gotten embroiled in a debate about the use of content warnings. One side has put forth the usual case: some people have trauma or anxiety disorders, and giving them a heads up about common triggers lets them make informed decisions about how to engage with a piece of media. They aren’t always looking to walk out, even, just to avoid a panic attack by having a few moments to prepare themselves. And this is often better for everyone as more people can appreciate the work itself and the discourse doesn’t derail into another discussion about whether it should’ve had a content warning.

And then someone from the other side of the debate says, in all seriousness (and I remind you this is about whether or not people should put a single sentence at the beginning of a video, the start of a game, outside the door of a theatre), “Can’t you just, like, have your panic attack? I mean, this isn’t life and death.”

The discussion quickly and predictably devolves from there into people who have panic attacks trying to explain how miserable they are, and how comparatively simple putting up a content warning is, and you realize far too late that this whole conversation is missing the point. Because the “it’s not life and death” crowd? They never claimed they are more inconvenienced than the person having panic attack! Content warnings ain’t life and death either! They made no attempt to frame this tradeoff as fair or justified. Only that, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not so bad.

I call this Didoing.

(Relationship Discourse would call it The Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness, which is a really powerful phrase, but I came up with Didoing and I’m keeping it.)

You see Didoing everywhere. Be as gay as you want, just don’t tell your commanding officer. Be trans if you must, but pee at home. Kink is fine, but keep it out of Pride. Drag is whatever, just not in front of children. Being a woman on the internet isn’t hard if you’re willing to block seventy thousand people and just use this service to scrub all your private information from the internet so men have a harder finding your home address. It’s eleven bucks a month! What, you can’t afford eleven bucks a month??!

And, yes, all these are minimizations, and, if you want, you can point that out. You can tell them what it’s like to get a Twitter DM threatening to murder your entire family using a quote from Mission: Impossible 3. Yeah, he’s probably not gonna do it! But it can still fuck up your day; the goal is to fuck up your day. But the “it’s not life and death” crowd won’t understand, not because they don’t care, but because they don’t care enough.

But even that is letting them control the conversation. You’re trying to stress the pain of a panic attack, the anxiety of a death threat, to emphasize a gulf of iniquity between their experience, as a person who does not deal with these things, and that of someone who does. As if, were the gulf smaller, it would be not so bad. In this, you have accepted their premise. Did you even catch what the premise was? That it’s okay for things to be unfair within a certain tolerance. That some people do and should take extra precaution just to exist in the world alongside the rest of us. That it’s okay for others to suffer for the convenience of the normals. Because it’s not so bad.

This is a bit different from how privilege usually works. The issue with content warnings - really, most things people Dido over - is that, if you are a person with triggers, it means other people can provoke a panic response in you against your will. The severity of that response is, frankly, immaterial: the point is, they have power over you, and, if you’re going to operate in this world as equals, you need their word that this power will not be invoked.

The usual move for people on the privileged end of a power imbalance is to deny the imbalance exists: “white privilege is a myth,” “there is no gender wage gap,” etc. etc. You would think, the greater the imbalance, the harder it is to deny, but it’s just the opposite: people Dido when the imbalance is small (or, at least, appears small in the eyes of the Didoer). It happens with content warnings, microaggressions; “no, I don’t get followed around Macy’s like I’m gonna steal something, but is that really so important? is this life and death? don’t you have bigger problems?” (Which is a funny thing to say, because, according to white privilege: no! The bigger problems don’t exist!)

Didoing is foundational to the privileged mindset, because it’s one scenario where they will admit to the Didoee, “yes, I do have power over you… and you should just let me have it.”

#video essay #alt right playbook

[innuendostudios]

New video! Another miniature Alt-Right Playbook, about how Far Right recruitment is not dissimilar from pick-up artistry.

Back me on Patreon. Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, you’ve been having a knock-down-drag-out online with a reactionary for weeks. It’s been going long enough that you don’t remember how it started, or, entirely, what you’re talking about. The argument seems to center around the nation of Israel. You’re fuzzy on what his position on Israel is - he seems to think of it as a religious ethnostate, which he likes, and wants to use as a model for the US, but it’s a Jewish state and he has a lot of awful things to say about Jews. He also has a lot of awful things to say about you! He’s been giving you every incivility you can imagine - and a few you’ve never heard of - since this began. It’s not helped by the fact that, while you know your position on ethnostates and antisemitism - they’re bad! - you don’t actually know a lot about the history, founding, or government of Israel, so he often catches you out by infodumping and then mocking your ignorance.

He’s just so rude and conceited and you’re absolutely desperate to show the guy up, trying to bulk up on history every day before logging on, but then something unexpected happens. All of a sudden, he stops insulting you. He’s still saying awful things about everything you’ve ever claimed to believe, but now it’s directed at a “them.” Liberals, commies, SJWs, what have you. But he’s not calling you any of those things. He’s treating you like you’re smarter than all those limp-wristed leftoids, smart like him. Better than them. It’s like he sees potential in you. And after weeks of trying to one-up this guy, suddenly having his respect is actually kind of cool.

This is a recruitment technique. This is the outer edge of the onion. It centers around treating a person badly so they fixate their attention on you, seek some kind of recognition, and maybe have their confidence undermined, and then turning around and treating them very well. The nearest analogue is actually pick-up artist techniques like Negging and Love-Bombing.

If anyone does this to you, understand: you are being groomed.

#alt-right playbook #video essay #Youtube

[innuendostudios]

oh lookie another bite-sized Alt-Right Playbook. back me on Patreon plz.

transcript below the thingy.

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re twelve or thirteen, it’s the mid-90’s, you’re sitting across the table from your conservative aunt at a family reunion. (This aunt will, a decade from now, become a Tea Partier.) You have - you sweet, innocent child - brought up the subject of evolution, being too young to know it’s politicized, and your aunt has not taken well to it. She goes on one of her classic tirades, dismissing the very concept of evolution as patently ridiculous, dropping a quote that will stick with you for ages: “You can’t get snakes from chicken eggs.” And you do your best to explain, with your limited knowledge-base, that, yeah, you can only get a snake from a snake egg, but that snake is going to be a little different from its parents, and the next snake will be a little different from its parents, and you multiply that by a few million generations and you might have something very different from that original snake. Maybe something with legs, or that can breath underwater, or see better in the dark!

And your aunt stares you dead in the windows of your soul and repeats, “You Can’t Get Snakes From Chicken Eggs.”

This is an ego-saving maneuver in which a complex truth is rejected in favor of simplicity. Your aunt has a statement that is true, though non sequitur to the argument at hand. And, after your explanation of how genetics work on long timelines, she repeats her original statement to herself and it still feels true. It’s the belief that the truth is easily recognized, and that it’s always simple, because the world is simple, and, if you can’t explain it to me like I’m five, then you’re probably wrong or making things up.

This heuristic very hard to argue with. You’ve heard that same aunt claim the hole in the ozone layer is caused by sunspots. Now, we’ve talked about the memetic power of statements that are short, quippy, and wrong, and this is a fine example. You might feel the correct response is a statement that is short, quippy, and correct, but here’s the conundrum: the truth is “the hole in the ozone layer is caused by chlorofluorocarbons.” Not only is that a more complex sentence, it’s a more complex idea. If the ozone hole is caused by sunspots, then it’s probably been happening for billions of years, it’s not caused by humans, and we don’t have to do anything about it. It’s reassuring, and tells folks all they care to know without further questions. But the truth of how aerosols deplete ozone is more complex, not least because, even without knowing the science of it, it implies it’s a problem we should do something about.

Ultraviolet light makes CFCs release chlorine into the stratosphere, where it bonds with ozone, converting it into oxygen and chlorine monoxide, neither of which do what ozone does to protect us from the sun. There may be people who can explain that more simply than I just did, but there’s a floor to how simple the truth can be and still be the truth. Falsehoods don’t have that. There is no limit on how simple an idea can be when it doesn’t have to conform to reality.

You play the game of “who’s got the simplest argument,” liars win every time. You can’t get much simpler than “sunspots.” But if you can convince people that the world is complex, then simplistic explanations, across the board, become suspect. It might be too late to do that with your aunt, but maybe there’s still hope for your cousins.

If you’re wondering what they do when confronted with something they cannot deny is complicated: well, that’s your fault. You, or someone like you, took their simple world and overcomplicated it. All the conspiracy theories and fingerpointing and screenshots they’ve squiggled over in MS Paint, all of that is the story of how you overcomplicated the world; it fills in the gap between the simplicity of the world they believe in and the unambiguous complexity of the one in which we live. And, yes, that story is at least as complex as the truth you’re trying to tell them, and, no, it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s a detail. Because the moral of that story is incredibly simple: it is this way because some people made it this way, and all they have to do is take the power back from those people and things can be simple again. This is their version of “a wizard did it.”

#video essay #alt right playbook #innuendo studios #Youtube

[innuendostudios]

New Alt-Right Playbook! There's a bunch of bite-sized videos like this in the works as I clear out the remaining points I wanna make before the series wraps. If you like this and wanna see more, back me on Patreon and/or follow me on Nebula.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, there’s this guy, this just real abomination, total scum-sucking garbage hole, who’s running for President. And conservative politicians, pundits, and voters have been laughing their asses off about him. “Oh my god, he’s such a disaster, he’ll never get the nomination, and, if he were to get the nomination, no one would ever elect him.” They trot him out as a punchline. But November 8th draws near and he’s still not out of the game, and the Left is banging on the walls, like, hey, that “joke” you’re giving free press to is saying some pretty scary stuff, and the Right is like, “Look, don’t waste your breath. We’ve already accepted that we lost this one, we’re certainly not going to bat for this guy, he’s going to lose.” And then, at the last second, when they do go to bat for him, and he does win, and the Left is like, what the absolute heck my dudes? they go, “Can’t do anything about it now, he’s the President.”

And when, four years later, you finally get his ass out of office, the Left turns to the Right and says, “Okay, now that he’s not President, are you gonna acknowledge all the stuff he did? You know, the stuff he said he was gonna do, and we warned you he was gonna do, and you said we were delusional for thinking he would do, that he did?”

And they’re like, “Oh my gawd, Heather, he’s not even President anymore! How are you still talking about this?”

I call this one The Slow Breakup. It’s like when your partner starts canceling date night, and then starts getting home really late, and then starts sleeping on the couch, and you keep asking, “Hey, is there something wrong?” And they just say, “Oh, sweetie, of course not, work is just running me ragged lately and I when I have time off I’m too tired to go out, and I get home so late these days I don’t want to wake you up by coming to bed.” And then one day you get home and their bags are packed and they’re like, “Look, we both saw this coming.”

(You know that thing. This- this happens to everybody, right?)

It’s always not happening until it’s already happened. The moment is skipped over where they would acknowledge they misled you, take responsibility for what’s happened, or, critically, where you could still do something about it.

Peel your eyes for this one, you’ll see it a lot. This is how conservatives jumped straight from “climate change isn’t happening” to “climate change isn’t man-made” (and now some are trying to jump to “maybe it’s a good thing”). Rhetorically, all these arguments mean the same thing: “We decided long ago what we were going to do. Nothing you say will change our course. This conversation is over.”

#video essay #alt right playbook #innuendo studios

[innuendostudios]

A new video essay has appeared. The second Protagony, this time looking at Abed Nadir and the weird way modern audiences treat the fourth wall.

If you like this video and would like to see more Protagony, Alt-Right Playbook, and what else have you in the future, consider backing me on Patreon!

Transcript below the cut:

The doors open. The line starts to move. The usher takes your ticket and points in the direction of your seat. Preshow music plays over the soundsystem as you side-shuffle past the knees of the folks in your row. You stick your bag and your jacket under the seat and sit down. You leaf through the playbill, futz around on your phone, until music starts to fade. The lights in the auditorium dim and the lights come up on the stage. The show is beginning.

This is one of those plays set in a single location: three walls on the stage represent the interior of a French bistro. French bistros typically have at least four walls, and that’s where you come in: the lip of the stage - what theatre nerds call “the proscenium” - is where the fourth wall would be, and it’s your job to pretend it’s there. Or - let me rephrase that: it’s your job to ignore that it’s not. That is the bargain you make when the lights go down.

To the characters onstage, everything inside those walls is real, and nothing on the other side of that fourth wall exists. The ambient noise, the guy two rows down and four seats over who’s clearly playing Words with Friends, even you yourself, you are - and this is a nerd word again - “non-diegetic.” You’re here, but you exist outside the story.

That is, until…

[Picasso at the Lapin Agile]

EINSTEIN: My name is Albert Einstein

FREDDIE: You can’t be, you just can’t be!

EINSTEIN: Sorry, I’m not myself today. (fluffs up his hair so he looks like Einstein.) Better?

FREDDIE: No no, that’s - (pause for laughter.) No no, that’s not what I mean. In order of appearance.

EINSTEIN: Come again?

FREDDIE: In order of appearance. You’re not third. (aside, to audience member) Excuse me, ma’am, can I borrow your program? (to Einstein) You’re fourth. It says so right here: Cast in order of appearance. I knew you were fourth. I knew it when you walked in.

[/Picasso at the Lapin Agile]

This is what we call “breaking the fourth wall,” and Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a great show for demonstrating it because the character Freddy literally reaches his hand through the wall and into the audience. Like many fourth wall breaks, this is played for laughs, because it’s a kind of narrative transgression; you’re not supposed to do that. When the diegetic intrudes upon the non-, the audience is reminded of all the things they were ignoring: that this is not a French bistro in 1904, but a bunch of plywood flats and actors in pancake makeup and period dress. The disbelief that was suspended is brought back to school, as it were.

But what I want to highlight is how durable the fourth wall is. For starters, in order for this joke to work, the audience has to be already suspending its disbelief; the boundary must be drawn before it can be broken. And, shortly after this gag, Einstein exits, Germaine enters [“Sorry I’m late”], Freddy makes a little wink to the audience [“You’re not late, you’re fourth”], and the scene continues as if nothing had happened. The audience wraps itself back up in the story, and the fourth wall is rebuilt, so that, when it’s broken later in the show [“When will you be there?” “When the play is over.”] it’s funny again! If the wall had stayed down, that joke wouldn’t work.

Why do we build the wall? So we can have a wall to break.

Often enough, these acknowledgements - in theatre but also film, novels, video games - any time a narrative reminds you of its own artifice, it is contained such that it does not disrupt the narrative too much. It operates like the soliloquies in Shakespeare or the songs in musicals. When Deadpool speaks to the audience, everyone around him goes deaf.

But what I got curious about, when I first read Francesco Casetti’s Inside the Gaze - or rather I read the glossary because it’s very dense Italian film theory and I was nineteen - was, what if you didn’t make that bargain when the lights went down? What if breaking the fourth wall wasn’t a disruption of the narrative, because the story is built such that the artifice is part of the narrative? Can you break the fourth wall… diegetically?

Now, that was a punchy idea as a teenager. As a man in his late thirties, I am aware this idea has been approached many times in many ways throughout the history of storytelling [Brecht: “Am I a joke to you?”]. We’re currently living in a golden age of metanarrative where most major properties have folded the audience’s relationship to that property into the text. But I wanna talk about my favorite example: Abed Nadir.

Now, my feelings about the show Community are… mixed, but I love me some Abed. [“pretty adorable”] Abed is a pop culture-damaged perpetual college student raised by his television, who loves TV to the point where it’s his primary metaphor for looking at the world. In other words, he’s an American millennial. His tendency to filter his life through sitcom tropes is lent a certain pointedness by being a character on a tropey sitcom. Por exemplo, when Annie asks him for help [“Phoebe and Chandler” clip], or when the new school year coincides with the conclusion of the previous season’s arcs [“self-contained capers” clip], or when it looks like he’s going to spend the day locked in study hall [“starting to feel like a bottle episode” clip]. In these moments, Abed Nadir is not breaking the fourth wall. He may not fully understand that real life doesn’t have bottle episodes, but this is real life to him. He’s not seeing the cameras pointing at him, he’s not disrupting the narrative by winking at a sitcom audience.

But there is a sitcom audience - we are the sitcom audience - and the writers did just use Abed to wink at us. “Cooperative Calligraphy” is a bottle episode. Abed is speaking diegetically to his friends, who read his comments as the pop culture references they are, but they double as things a person who was breaking the fourth wall might say. [“This is totally meta” clip] The rules of narrative are not transgressed, and, yet, we are, all the same, constantly reminded that we’re watching a work of fiction.

This kind of interreference, in which a sitcom points constantly at itself, at other sitcoms, and at “The Sitcom” as a medium, can come across kind of masturbatory. David Foster Wallace argued that the pop culture reference in mass media serves three functions: “(1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy and so ‘comment’ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.” I would say (2) is far less prevalent now than when he was writing.

The reality is this: how you gonna write a twentysomething millennial in 2009 who doesn’t talk a lot about what’s on television? This is a conundrum many writers face. There is still the High culture urge to make art that is timeless, that avoids what Foster Wallace referred to as “the frivolous Now,” and the Low culture necessity of not looking dated eight months after you air. This can be approached many ways: you can avoid reference and just take the verisimilitudinous hit; you can create fictional, in-universe pop culture for your characters to reference; you can reference pop culture that is old enough to be considered timeless, functionally setting your story in a different “frivolous Now,” e.g. the way Sex Education and Life is Strange are both canonically set in the present but are aesthetically set in the late seventies and early nineties, respectively; or you can embrace chaos and just reference contemporary culture.

But, once you’re a show on TV with characters referencing other shows currently airing on TV, things might get a little meta, especially shows that lean into it the way Community does. So what does this do to the fourth wall? That supposedly sanctified construct, the violation of which is most often either a failure or an act of deliberate anarchy? How are we to suspend disbelief for stories that don’t even pretend not to be fake, and whose primary pleasure is in acknowledging the fakery?

Abed is, to me, a distillation of the modern audience’s more intricate relationship to the fourth wall. Art imitates life, and when much of life is spent discussing popular art, popular art begins to discuss itself. And art that discusses itself requires a more liminal relationship to the fourth wall. These days we don’t choose to either see it or ignore it, but pay both kinds of attention at once, letting the fourth wall, as needed, fade in and out of visibility, like glass when it catches the light, or seeing your face in the monitor when it fades to black. This was maybe inevitable in a media-saturated environment where the lines between audience, participant, and creator continue to blur, where we watch even straightforward media with an eye towards how it’s made, because we imagine making something like it ourselves one day, or because any viewing experience is potential #content. In a world where it is rarer and rarer to experience art in a darkened theatre that shuts out the world, but where it’s watched on phones during bus rides, in the background while cooking, in an open tab while writing emails. We keep fiction and reality running in tandem, shifting between them with little more than a saccade. The real world isn’t forgotten but edged out of the foreground during a cigarette break.

What tickles me is that Brecht violated suspension of disbelief to create distance between the fiction and its audience. But postmodern reflexivity just makes Abed relatable. He watches TV the same way we watch Community. You can imagine him watching his own show and responding much the way I am now: OK, so you want me to mentally construct a fourth wall that the performers will pretend is there, but the writers will constantly - and entertainingly - bring to my attention its nonexistence, such that I need to suspend my disbelief while thinking about the fact that I am suspending it, which should be mutually-exclusive modes of thought, but, to even understand what I’m watching, I’ll need to do both at once?

Cool.

Cool cool cool.

#Youtube

[innuendostudios]

To Filth: Thoughts on Life is Strange: True Colors

[spoilers ahead]

1. I will state my biases before the court:

Maybe you have a person who is, for whatever reason, not in your life anymore, and you have missed them every day since you said goodbye. Their absence is a scar, a bit of ostensibly healed flesh that nevertheless acts up when the weather changes. That person whom you can think about, after several years of effort, for up to thirty entire seconds before crying.

I don't know how universal this experience is. But I have that person, and True Colors' protagonist Alex Chen reminds me of her so much. The hair, the fashion sense, the taste in music, the unexpectedly good singing voice, her friends' exclamation of "oh my god, you own a skirt???" Even the central hook of taking on everyone else's feelings. It's uncanny.

And I adore her. I would do almost anything for Alex Chen. And random moments were so authentic to my own, hyper-specific experience that I was devastated in ways pretty much no one but me will experience that way. The other 99.9999% of players may be devastated by the same moments in similar ways - a lot of us have That Person and, mathematically, at least a few will be like Alex Chen (in fact I think Alex Chen is the kind of character destined to be That Person for a lot of people) - but they won't drag up my memories. They won't think of that one day, that one moment, that one song. No one has lived my life but me.

So this game hit in ways particular to Ian Danskin, and it will hit different for people who are not me.

2. So here we are again. I made a whole video about Life is Strange. I did a write-up on Life is Strange: Before the Storm. I devoted 1/3 of another write up to Life is Strange 2. (Are those diminishing returns? Maybe.) I guess I'm a lifer for this series, even as my thoughts on every single one have been different phrasings of "mixed."

Life is Strange: True Colors isn't getting a video, but it deserves a full write-up.

In absolute terms, this is probably the series' best entry since the first. It also, I think, marks the point where the series stops growing. This is the FarCry 3 of Life is Strange. Dontnod created the IP but it's owned by Square Enix, and they've handed it off to Deck Nine. Dontnod are a weird bunch, driven to do weird things, tackle weird subjects, mess with weird mechanics. They have heads bursting with ideas; their reach is very long, and their grasp very finicky; they are a claw machine.

That's not Deck Nine. Deck Nine played things very safe when they made Before the Storm, their previous entry in the LiS series, made while Dontnod was working on the (ambitious, disastrous) LiS2. And they gonna take it from here. Dontnod will be off doing weirdo shit like Twin Mirror and Tell Me Why and Squeenix will leave Deck Nine to make LiS the sweet, offbeat series the first game was about 40% of the time and will try to wrangle the other stuff it was into something... manageable. Peripheral. Repeatable.

It's good, but it's also the end of something.

3. Thing is, Deck Nine does what it does well. Per Goethe's three questions, I am ambivalent as to whether Deck Nine should be turning Life is Strange into something cozy and safe, but damn if they don't sell it!

True Colors is about another young person with superpowers, using them to explore human drama (and the occasional criminal conspiracy) in a sleepy noplace with a one-block Main Street and about 12 residents who've known each other since forever. (Haven Springs is very much a pretty how town with up so floating many bells down.) Another bisexual love triangle, another set of tragedies, another pack of hallucinatory images safely cordoned off from the narrative in dreams and visions.

But Deck Nine can write. Deck Nine can animate. Deck Nine is more about tugging heartstrings than punching feels, but they are expert stringpullers. The first chapter (this is a single game in five chapters rather than Dontnod's episodic structure) is more or less perfect. The depth/nuance/subtlety on Alex's face, the amount of emotion she conveys with a nervous, sideways glance (you can tell she's breaking eye contact even when the person she's talking to is unseen). How do they pull off "conveying emotion while trying to hide it" solely in facial animations when they clearly don't have Last of Us money?? How do you capture "trying to disappear into the background" and make it look easy? Because, friends, I know it's not easy. And the dialogue is miles beyond what Dontnod can pull off, not even when they brought in ringers for LiS2. These are nuanced, believable, human characters who come into focus with only a few lines and expressions.

If you're going to make Life is Strange be about this and only this, the quiet, the human, the slice-of-life shit, it helps to be really good at that.

But there are reasons True Colors had so much good will when it was new but seemed to fade quickly from everyone's memory. Cozy and safe doesn't leave an impression the way a Dontnod dumpster fire does.

4. Here's the hook: Alex can feel people's emotions. They cast auras that she can tune into. For most strong feelings, she can hear the associated thoughts; for particularly intense ones, she feels them to the point of losing control.

Alex's deal is she and her brother, Gabe, lost their mom as children and, after a few years, their dad bailed and they ended up in the foster system. She and Gabe were separated when he stole a car and got sent to juvie. You can imagine a young girl with no family and a lot of trauma surrounded by a bunch of other youths dealing with similar and who literally feels all of their feelings as well would have a rough time at the orphanage. She is afraid when other people are afraid, gets in fights when other people are angry, and has a long history of scaring away friends and foster parents. As the game begins, she is finally a legal adult, about to reunite with her long-lost brother who settled in a small burg in Colorado.

The way Max's time travel powers in LiS1 could function as a metaphor for youthful indecision, Alex's work as a metaphor for empathy. This leads to a lot of beautiful moments; like, shockingly beautiful. Genuinely incredible. But between those moments are choppy waters.

5. Basically, a metaphor - especially an interactive metaphor - should illuminate something. It makes the abstract literal - emotions, ideas, what have you. Like, part of Max's story was about how every choice has consequences, that there isn't always a "right" decision, a "good" ending, that it's all trade-offs and decisions. Becoming who you want to be is giving up all the people you could have been. Making that tangible with time travel is a great way to explore the idea! It helps us get into guts of it, gives us something to hold onto, to visualize. It works.

Alex's powers don't work as a metaphor for empathy. They're too simple, too literal. Alex is carrying a lot of baggage, her emotions are erratic. She's understandably anxious and focuses a lot on how people around her are feeling. As a child she took it on herself to make peace between her ever-fighting father and brother, stuffing her own feelings down for their benefit. She gets in fights when other people are angry at her, or even around her. She panics when other people are afraid. She needs everyone around her to be stable before she can be stable herself. And now, as an adult, it means becoming a caretaker for everyone around her, even her elders, diving into everyone else's fear and anxiety and trauma, trying to help them instead of asking them for help with her own shit.

I didn't need a metaphor to explain any of that. Those are perfectly understandable themes. In fact, Deck Nine's precise set of skills are ideal for exploring them. Much of the game is them doing precisely that - conveying these themes with nothing but good writing and careful animation.

And, worse than not adding much, the superpowers are actually where the game feels... over-simple. Mechanical. Gamey.

6. The big upheaval at the end of Chapter 1 is that Gabe dies. His long-term girlfriend's son, Ethan, runs off to the mountains alone, Alex and Gabe and Gabe's best friend Ryan go looking for him, but the mining company is blasting that night and this causes a rock slide. Alex is tied to Gabe with mountain-climbing gear, but he gets knocked off the cliff and starts to drag Alex with him, so Ryan, to save Alex, has to cut the rope, letting Gabe fall to his death.

As I said, this chapter is more or less perfect. The set of puzzles you solve to figure out where Ethan has gone (reading his homemade comic book and realizing it's based on his adventures at the abandoned mine) really work. Alex has to save the kid despite having to fight through his fear as well as her own. It's really good! And that final beat - Ryan cutting the rope - sets up a lot of possibility for the rest of the game.

I mean, imagine it! A girl just out of the foster system, reunited with her brother, coming to a tiny town that immediately promises to stitch her into the community as they've already done with Gabe. A home and a life and a new set of friends, all the things she's been missing. And now that brother is dead. Imagine her having to deal with her own grief and everybody else's. Imagine the question of whether Ryan was wrong to cut that rope, whether Alex could have pulled Gabe up instead of going over, whether Ryan had any right to make that decision for her. Just think!

So many of these possibilities are weakened by the central metaphor. Alex starts tapping into people's feelings without getting overpowered by them (the thread where anger and terror make her lose control is swiftly dropped) in order to fix people's grief. We get little puzzles where we dig around in their memories of Gabe so she can find just the right things to say. Sometimes we get visualizations of their pain: Ryan's surroundings fall away until there's nothing but him and the cliff where Gabe died; Gabe's girlfriend Charlotte's abstract sculpture turns into a manifestation of the people she's angry with. And these all turn into little adventure game puzzles where you find all the memories and say the right thing, and... poof! Grief resolved!

There's just so much about the subject matter that can't fit into that Psychonauts loop. How on Earth am I doing little puzzles to relieve Ryan of his grief over killing my brother?? How is he not dealing with my grief? Where even is my grief? At the end of Ryan's puzzle chain, I'm given three dialogue options regarding who should forgive Ryan: does Alex forgive him, would Gabe forgive him, or does he need to forgive himself? What it doesn't give me is the option of Ryan not getting forgiven. Not because he doesn't deserve forgiveness, not because he should've risked us both dying, but because it's too soon. I believe Alex can forgive Ryan someday; I can even believe she'll need to for her own healing. I don't believe she can forgive him the day after it happened, nor that he could forgive himself so quickly. But it's a sequel to Life is Strange, so we've gotta have a bisexual love triangle, and Ryan's the only eligible bachelor in Haven Springs, so we've gotta get that pesky "grief over letting your brother die" thing squared away with a single dialogue puzzle.

(Which, by the way? Not a fucking chance. I got together with the cool lesbian - you think Alex Chen is straight? Do you see her side-cut? (Though, unlike Warren in LiS1, I could at least see the appeal of Ryan - he's sweet and lumbersexual. It's just that he killed my brother.))

This is the issue. The very first thing Alex does after Gabe's wake is solve a little puzzle to make Steph (the cool lesbian) feel better about her friend dying. Then she helps the old lady in the early stages of dementia deal with her fear and confusion. And on and on.

And the game lends itself to the interpretation that Alex is dealing with everyone else's feelings rather than addressing her own, and that this is her character flaw, the thing she'll need to overcome. But it doesn't actually go there. Because, like, that's the core mechanic! You help people with their problems. The game is gonna keep making you do it, so it can't come out and say "this is actually deeply unhealthy for Alex." (I mean, Dontnod would've done it. They spent the second half of LiS1 saying that about Max, but those are the very parts Squeenix hired Deck Nine to sand off.) So many interactions resolve with Alex "forgiving" people at the time in her grief where forgiving others would be most painful, and, based on the framing (and the "other player stats" at the end of each chapter), I can't shake that this is, canonically, the "right" way to play.

7. Let's talk about what works.

Beyond that immaculate first chapter, there's an extended bit in Chapter 3 that is pure delight. To cheer Ethan up, Steph plans a an elaborate LARP set in the universe of Ethan's own homemade comic, with Alex playing his companion (in my game she was a bard). The whole town gets in on it - the local bar is converted to a tavern managed by the local high-functioning alcoholic, the record shop sells "potions," a townsperson whose cat went missing in Chapter 1 is pretending to be a blacksmith and when you read his mind he's really into it. Also Ryan shows up three times in three different masks as monsters to be felled. And when you enter battle? The camera moves to the side and, since it's a LARP and you have to yell out what move you're doing, you of course pick your moves from a dialogue tree, but that means, functionally, the game becomes a turn-based RPG. It's wonderful.

Oh but it gets better. Ethan has been having a hard time since Gabe died, and this is the first he's really perked up. And at the end when he finds his magical boon, he's so happy that Alex starts picking up on his joy. And it does that thing where she gets visions of what the other person is experiencing, so the whole town turns into an actual fantasy realm and you fight the final boss in realistic garb with realistic ruins and the same sideways camera but now selecting moves from the dialogue tree has the Final Fantasy "bwip bwip" sound effect and the moves have particle and lighting effects instead of just a boy swinging a cardboard sword and yelling "two damage!" It's beautiful. It's everything.

And in Chapter 5 there's an extended tour through Alex's memories, where she has to "play her part" in the moments when she lost each member of her family, and it's absolutely heartbreaking. (Though it ends with her imagined Gabe telling her to stop blaming herself and "let it go," which, once again, is treated as an event rather than the beginning of a years-long process but whatever!)

And the climax is Alex confronting the man responsible for covering up Gabe's death. (Oh, uh... Gabe's death wasn't an accident, the mining company set off the blast knowing people were on the mountain, and there's been an elaborate cover-up because it's not Life is Strange without a small-town criminal conspiracy! Anyway, Ryan's dad was in on it and he shoots you and drops you down a mine shaft at the end of Chapter 4.)

Anyway, you confront Ryan's dad (Jed) at the end, and it's another of those scenes where the game reviews all your choices for you, this time by seeing who in town believes your story. The nonbelievers think Alex is delusional and only looks like hell because she wandered into the mines alone. (Weirdly she never says "I have a bullet matching Jed's gun in my gut right now." (And this would be a really easy plot hole to fix? Just have Jed kick Alex down the mine shaft instead of shooting her. C'mon people!)) And, whatever, that's always hokey, but I've come to expect it from these kinds of games.

But then her powers come into the confrontation and it's... glorious. Because it's the first time Alex uses her powers to do something other than make someone's bad feelings go away. She uses her power of empathy to read Jed to filth.

And it works so freaking well. She, I dunno, freezes time or something (don't ask questions) and basically searches his soul and tells him everything that's going on inside him. Tells him why he covered up the truth, what lies he tells himself, what feelings are under those lies. She uses her empathy but not to absolve, not to heal, but to confront. She uses it to inform her own emotions, and then make someone else see how she's feeling. She is able to feel complete and total empathy while still tell him he is wrong. And, if you are inclined to read her character arc as being about learning not to caretake everyone around her, it's a real culminating moment (though you'd be doing most of the legwork there). I still think the game wants me to forgive him but it at least gives me a choice this time.

Confronted with the brutally honest truth about him, forced to feel all the things he's buried, he bursts into tears and confesses.

This scene is powerful.

8. In the end, True Colors is a bunch of good parts. It's not more than the sum of its parts. I'm not convinced it's less, either. I don't think it's parts sum at all. It's a collection of good bits and some stuff holding them together. It doesn't feel complete. It doesn't cohere. There is so much it should be that is left on the table. I am left wanting. But it has parts that are among the best moments in the series. And that's what I'll be remembering. I won't remember this as a whole game. I'll remember it as a character I cared about, and a handful of scenes that meant the world to me. And the rest, I'll just... forget.

It could have been so much more. But it could have been so much less. I don't have much hope for the series' future. But. We had some moments. I'll hold onto them.

And I'm going to miss Alex.

#capsule review #adventure games #life is strange true colors

[innuendostudios]

Nietzsche's Eternal Return (to Monkey Island)

[spoilers ahoy]

Theme The person who is returning to Monkey Island here is, most obviously, Ron Gilbert. He got him brand back. Go Ron! And, look, I was skeptical. I mean, I was, above all, cautiously optimistic! But I was keeping my skeptic hat on the coat rack next to my hoodie, you know? I said the philosophy of The Secret of Monkey Island is "cheerful nihilism," and I stand by that. But Ron Gilbert's nihilism is not always cheerful. Or, actually, I think he's usually having a good time, but it often feels at my expense. How badly did I want him to take me back to the first series I ever loved?

I am on record as having never liked the ending of Monkey Island 2, which is the last Monkey Island game Ron directed (though he apparently had some peripheral involvement in Tales of Monkey Island). I am also on record as having haaaaaaaaaated the ending of his last adventure game, Thimbleweed Park. Ron likes a cop-out ending. Frankly you should know that by now - don't play Return to Monkey Island if you aren't prepared for a cop-out ending. It's what Ron does. And sometimes... sometimes it's a deliberate rug-pull. Sometimes he's laughing at you for expecting the ending to be good.

The Secret of Monkey Island's ending was a bit of a piss-take. It was short, it was abrupt, it rendered the entire plot up to that point irrelevant. Its instant replays and Blimp-cams and snarky final lines made it a parody of a video game ending. But, parody or no, it was an ending! It was a climax. You returned to the starting point, blew up the villain, and reunited with the love interest. Even in air quotes, it was the way you expect stories to end.

Monkey Island 2 intentionally denied you that ending. Refused closure. Told you all the events you just witness, and the events of the previous game, may never have happened. I originally played the game on its "easier puzzles" mode, and, when I got to the end, thought there must be a proper ending if you play normally, but nope. Spent a solid year stuck on Part II, refusing to get a hint book, before finally getting back to the ending, and thbthbthbthbthb. Fuck me for caring I guess.

The joke of The Secret of Monkey Island is Monkey Island having a secret is brought up in Part I, so you expect it to be relevant, given the game's title and all, and then, once the plot kicks into gear, you get focused on Elaine's kidnapping and the rescue mission and confronting LeChuck, and it's not til sometime after you finish that you think, "Wait... they never told us the secret." I don't think it's even mentioned after Part I.

Monkey Island 2 never lets you forget its macguffin. You are searching for the treasure of Big Whoop. No one knows what it is, but it's what you're after. There is no distraction, no romantic subplot that takes over your attention. Hell, the game makes it clear that Guybrush's obsession with being the kind of famous pirate who would look for Big Whoop has ruined his relationship and annoys his friends. The game hinges on Big Whoop. But, once again, you never find out what it is, and it's not an "oh that's funny" moment that hits you an hour after you play; it is, as Cobain would say, a denial.

And then Gilbert left LucasArts, the series was continued by other developers, and whatever resolution he had in mind for the MI2's putative "cliffhanger" ending was left to our imaginations for thirty years. Until now.

So the question is not whether, in Return to Monkey Island, you will finally find the secret. You oughtta know you're not finding that secret. The question is: which kind of cop-out will Ron give you?

And what Ron has done is kind of amazing: he has found a cop-out ending that is, for the first time in the series, emotional. He has made the denial of closure resonant. He has gone meta that quiet, knowing way that most Neil Gaiman stories are meta: yes, this is a fun story about pirates, but it's also a story about stories about pirates. This is Guybrush, the guy who couldn't shut up about the greatness of his adventures in Monkey Island 2, telling his son a story. He's not telling it because the ending is exciting, because the Secret of Monkey Island is so mind-blowing once revealed. He's telling it to relate to his son.

The ending is a big nothing. It's a joke. Elaine walks up when it's over and says "you tell that story differently every time." When your son presses you to tell him what the secret is, the game gives you six dialogue options with different answers. It doesn't matter what the secret is. And, unlike when a young Guybrush found the empty chest of Big Whoop, this time he knows it. He has a family and a storied life. That's the treasure a lifetime on the seas brought him.

Some people hate this ending. But, maybe for the first time, I'm on Ron's side of a polarizing ending. Monkey Island has always made me laugh; even the mixed bags that are Escape and Tales find chuckles somewhere. And the developers who are not Ron Gilbert have attempted pathos before; Tales went so far as to let Guybrush die - like, not fake his death like in Curse but legit die - but the results were mixed. This is the first time Monkey Island has given me feelings. Ron Gilbert, the man who told stories deep-fried in irony, who gave me the finger for expecting them to resolve, finally, all these years later, gave me feelings. Maybe he could only do it after thirty years, once a sarcastic parody of a pirate game starts to feel nostalgic simply because it's been in your life so long. But he did it.

Go Ron.

Design The clever thing about Return's structure is how it apes, subverts, and expands upon those of Ron's other two entries. You spend a decent chunk of this game tracing the footsteps of Secret: Part I is on Mêlée Island, with the Scumm Bar and Otis locked in jail and its twisty forest surveyed with weird maps; Part II is on a ship to Monkey Island where you have to recreate the potion that took you there in the first game; Part III is on Monkey Island itself, with its banana tree on the beach and its giant monkey head and its incredible view from the mountaintop; and Part IV seems to be wrapping things up, as you hurry back to Mêlée because the place you needed to be all along is back where you started.

And just when you think the game is wrapping up... it turns into Monkey Island 2.

Suddenly you have a ship and a map of the surrounding seas and a whole bunch of new islands to check out. It's that enormous sprawl from Part II of LeChuck's Revenge.

It's a bit cheeky to get to what feels like the end and think, "huh, I guess this game is a tight 7 hours," and then run aground on the game's surprise second half.

The player's (presumed) familiarity with the series becomes a playground for the designers. You expect insult swordfighting, so you laugh when LeChuck gives you two comebacks in a row and then just punches you. (It's also cute that Guybrush and Carla the Swordmaster can only converse while swordfighting.) You already know the potion that takes you to Monkey Island requires a pressed human skull, so of course this time it's Murray; "pressed" is his default emotion! You expect Guybrush to fall off the side of the plateau and get bounced back up by a rubber tree, so you laugh when Guybrush keeps jumping up and down on the bit that broke before only to have it stay solid, and then later when he gets kicked off you think "ahahahaaa, he's going to land on the rubber tree!" only to find him twisted and mangled having landed on... a rubber tree stump.

LeChuck's Revenge was such a departure from the first game that you can see, in Curse, how the new developers wanted to course correct. This is a trend, I've found: an IP comes out that is widely beloved; the first sequel is the same team doing something weirder and more ambitious, and is met with divided response; then the series it taken over by fans of the original who, instead of being weird and ambitious, ignore the first sequel's innovations and turn the original entry into a formula. I guess what I'm saying is, much as I enjoy it, Curse of Monkey Island is the Jurassic Park III of the series. (See also: Myst.)

First island: map, ship, crew. Then a stretch on a boat. Then a new Island. Then a (usually short and lackluster) confrontation with LeChuck. There will be some variant of insult swordfighting. You will have to decipher an obtuse map. Everything that made the first game unique will be repeated. This is true of Curse, and much of it holds for Escape and Tales.

Return knows this formula has been established, knows you have expectations. And anywhere the player has expectations, they can be confounded.

Character The Guybrush of Return to Monkey Island feels like a magic trick. He manages to feel continuous with every previous iteration of the character, none of whom felt continuous with each other. He blends the naïveté of Secret's Guybrush with the amorality of LeChuck's Revenge Guybrush, the wiseassery of Curse's Guybrush with the dipshittery of Escape's Guybrush. (I don't really remember what Tales' Guybrush was like.) You can see how this guy(brush) grew from the straight man of the first game, chilled out from the asshole of the second game, wised up from the fool of the fourth game. The series' inconsistencies now seem like one person in different phases of his life.

Who Guybrush is is more relational than in games past. His marriage to Elaine (properly written as the most competent person in the room, finally) seems like it could be in danger, as she becomes steadily more aware of how amorally Guybrush is acting in pursuit of The Secret. LeChuck is framed for the first time as a foil for Guybrush, as the two start to resemble each other the more obsessed each becomes with beating the other to the prize. (One character says of their enmity, "you deserve each other.")

These are, of course, both handwaved in the end. Elaine confronts Guybrush with his misdeeds, but just asks whether The Secret can possibly be worth all the questionable things he's done. (She's not fussed that her husband is amoral, she married a friggin' pirate.) The LeChuck confrontation is a big nothing because, right when you're about to confront him, the cop-out rug-pull happens. Guybrush not telling his son what The Secret is shows that he clearly learned the right lesson and did not turn into LeChuck. The game simply elides the inevitable confrontation-and-epiphany moment; why does the game need to show it to you if you already know it's coming?

And it's just nice to see Elaine and Guybrush... be together. They get together at the end of the first game and are broken up in the second, and she spends the next three getting damseled over and over. Serialized stories are always bringing romantic pairings together and splitting them up, because reuniting is easier than the drama of maintaining a relationship. (I mean, how many times have Nathan Drake and Elena broken up between games?) The moments where you get a sense of Guybrush and Elaine's relationship, how little time they get to spend together because he's a pirate and she's a professional do-gooder, how he adores her like a goddess and she adores him like a puppy.

Beats the hell out of Tales' ill-advised love triangle with a "human-again" LeChuck.

On another note, it is interesting that, for all the effort the game makes to not contradict the canon of the non-Gilbert games, it doesn't mine them for content, either. Murray is the only character from Curse onward to make an appearance. Morgan LeFlay got a passing mention in mine. But there's no Cap'n Blondebeard, no Edward Van Helgen or Cutthroat Bill, no Ozzie Mandrill, no Pegnose Pete. Meanwhile, seemingly everyone from Monkey Island 1 & 2 show up. There are the obvious ones - The Voodoo Lady (finally given a name), Wally, Stan. But there's also Otis and Carla, and the Scumm Bar cook, and Herman Toothrot is in a cave, Kate Capsize gets a mention, I'm pretty sure "Apple Bob" is the skeleton who pops his head off in the first game (now voice by Rob Paulsen, great choice), Cobb is still in the bar with his Ask Me About LOOM button ("I'm more button than man")... come to think of it, I think even the LOOM seagull who stole your map piece in MI2 gets a cameo. Narrative economy, I guess - if you find skeletons on Terror Island, they might as well be the Men of Low Moral Fiber, right?

While it would be interesting to see Ron and Dave Grossman's take on some of those characters, many of whom have, I would say, unrealized potential - they do a bang-up job with Murray - it's clear this is about wrapping up the story they started back in 1990. It may be improbable that half the people you meet are people you already know, but... it's good to see them all the same.

Conclusion No I'm not making a video about this.

#capsule review #adventure games #return to monkey island

[innuendostudios]

hey, i don't know if you're the person to ask, but i was recently rewatching your CO-VIDS series and was wondering: how do you come up with ideas to write about? I've wanted to do more writing in a non-educational/academic context(re: not something a professor assigned me) for a while but I have a really hard time coming up with ideas for what to write about, topic wise. any advice? (ps: your content is, without exaggeration, probably my favorite thing on youtube, thank you so much for making the super cool shit you do)

Things I think about. Sometimes a video is just a place to put thoughts. I played Life is Strange and couldn't stop thinking about how the second half was in a completely different genre from the first half and how that seemed intentional. I played The Walking Dead: Season 2 and was really bothered that hardly anyone was talking about the abuse dynamics in Clem's relationship to Kenny. I noticed that Dr. Horrible mapped the superhero/supervillain archetypes onto the bully/nerd archetypes as a means of inverting your sympathies, and I was bothered that Penny's role as The Love Interest is kinda flat and disposable in both those stories. Basically, I just go through my Box of Opinions and share anything I think might make a good video. Things I love, things I'm conflicted about, things I find myself thinking about a lot - that's all juice for an essay.

Things I want to think more about. Sometimes a video is an excuse to research something. I knew I wanted to make a video about Fury Road, but I also wanted an excuse to watch like 40 action movies and read a bunch of essays about action movies and read a bunch of feminist film theory. Sometimes you can't justify obsessing over something you like unless you can convince yourself it's a form of productivity. So long as there's a video at the end of it, you're technically "working."

Things that matter. A lot the more political work is just trying to understand things that feel important, and/or things I feel morally obliged to comment on. I made Why Are You So Angry? because #GamerGate and the harassment of Anita Sarkeesian disgusted me, and I wanted to say something of value about them. I started The Alt-Right Playbook because Trump got elected, and I didn't understand how that had happened. In both cases, there were things pressing on my mind that I needed to wrap my head around, to write my way out of, and to say something of value about. I wanted to figure them out, and share what I figured out with other.

Those are the main driving forces for me. Odds are you don't have to "come up" with anything, you already have lots of thoughts and opinions. Just write some down and go from there.

[innuendostudios]

The first new Alt-Right Playbook since just after the pandemic began. This video was started two and a half years ago, and languished in various states of production through a severe back injury, an ADHD diagnosis, a case of COVID, and the general stress of living in ongoing crises of health and democracy. With the help of guest artist Micael Schuenker Alves and script consultant Isabelle Felix, The Cost of Doing Business is now, finally, public.

My Patreon has taken a hit in the last few years, so, if like this work and can spare some money to keep it coming, please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, there’s this… call him a “provocateur.” A conservative who makes his living off of being a public figure, saying scandalously evil things in public because controversy = attention and attention = brand recognition. He gets his writing gigs and interviews and guest spots sometimes because people agree with the awful things he says. More often, it’s because he gets views. His economy runs on engagement, and hate-clicks are still clicks.

One revenue stream is speaking engagements. The college campus circuit. Fans at, let’s say, UC Emeryville invite him as a guest lecturer. But UCE is, broadly, a progressive campus, which means his presence would likely provoke a lot of outrage, maybe even a protest.

And a protest would be pretty flippin’ sweet.

Protest means local news coverage. Maybe more than local. Hell, the conservative media machine loves taking stories like this and blowing them up to national importance. If he plays his cards right, he could get his words in front of millions of people instead of just the student body of UC Emeryville. Of course he’s gonna take that gig.

But the progressive students at UCE are wise to his tricks. They’ve seen him pull this stunt at other UC’s - Stockton, Bakersfield, Vacaville - so they make the decision, “We’re not gonna protest. We’re just gonna let him speak. Let the boy stamp his feet. And, in a month, no one will even remember he was here.”

As the date approaches, and the provocateur sees he’s not getting the response he wants, he starts hinting things on social media, trying to bait a reaction: “Psst, psst. Hey. I’m gonna make jokes about the Holocaust. I’m gonna say Americans treated their slaves well.” Nothing. So he ups the ante. Makes it personal. “I’m gonna put up pre-transition photos of your trans students. I’m gonna out the queer students I’ve seen on Grindr. I’m gonna name which of your students I think are illegal immigrants.”

Student body’s like, “Bro, do your worst. Nobody’s falling for it.” Until one student’s like, “Hold up… he’s gonna dox immigrants in front of his audience of white nationalist gun nuts… and we’re just gonna let him? You know some of his fans were in Charlottesville, right?”

What we’re seeing here is a game of chicken between one group of white conservative reactionaries and one group of - let’s be honest - mostly white liberals, for whom the stakes are who gets paid attention to. The provocateur doesn’t have the ammunition nor the optics to attack privileged liberals directly, so he pokes and prods at various social minorities whom privileged liberals are supposed to care about until he gets a reaction. Going after people of color is a pure Xanatos gambit for his fans - either they get a protest and a national audience hears their reactionary rhetoric, or there’s no protest and they get to fuck with some immigrants. And, because white liberals are largely ignorant to the threat posed to those immigrants, white liberals are not great at assessing the full scope of the danger. Often enough, this remains, to them, an argument about ideas and principles. To them, they are but words. (Until someone gets hit by a car or shot and then it’s “who could have predicted?”)

The provocateur’s animating force is not hatred of people of color, it’s hatred of white liberals, just as white liberals’ animating force is less advocacy for people of color than moral victory over conservatives. Neither side acknowledges people of color as entities in this fight; they’re viewed as tools for getting white people what they want, and their suffering is viewed as an “acceptable” byproduct. You’ve maybe heard the phrase, “In the game of patriarchy, women are not the opposing team, they are the ball.” Well, in the game of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, minorities are not the opposing team, they are the cars, store windows, and newspaper kiosks that get wrecked when the home team loses. Or when the home team wins. It’s the Eagles Fan view of oppression.

And, make no mistake: weaponizing or disregarding students of color is still racism. But it’s racism of a kind most white people have trouble recognizing - or, to speak with a sharper edge, that white people often refuse to acknowledge. From the white provocateur who does not hate minorities directly but is willing to utilize the hatred of others to get what he wants from some white people - who says “I will hurt them a lot just to hurt you a little” - to the white liberal who does mental gymnastics to not come out and say “that is a Black and Brown sacrifice I’m willing to make,” racism is not always a passion. But it is tolerable. Usable. Easy to disregard.

In a white supremacist world, it is the cost of doing business.

Let me make it clear: nothing about this is okay.

Now, the weaponizing of minority suffering is employed against many minoritized groups - I could be making this video about transphobia or homophobia, and, while many details would differ… I wouldn't even have to change my intro. Samuel R. Delany (yeah, yeah, take a shot) argues that misogyny is the oldest bigotry, and, therefore, the model on which all other bigotries are based. I’m focusing on institutional racism as my chief example, first, because this is America and the cup runneth over; second, because, in the 2016 election, the greatest indicator a person was going to vote Republican, more strongly correlated than being registered as a Republican, was racist sentiments; and, third, because racism is a fundamental building block of fascism and a primary means of sowing discord on the Left, but we’ll get to that.

I am going to curb my reflex to try and make every Alt-Right Playbook some kind of definitive statement; I do not have the last word on American racism. If you want to hear about American racism from the people who experience it, here’s a book. Here’s five books. What I bring to the table is: I have, at this point, several decades’ experience being white. And, in trying to explicate white supremacy, it is sometimes worthwhile to look at it from the inside. So my focus will be: What does whiteness mean to white people?

American racial discourse has four principle (white) characters.

On the far right end, you’ve got the guy white people picture when they hear the word “racist”: your klansman, your neo-Nazi skinhead, your suit-and-tie ethnonationalist. This guy knows he’s a racist and he’s proud of it.

Next to the white supremacist, you’ve got the white collaborator; the politician, public figure, or businessman who does not agree with the white supremacist “on paper” but will seek out their votes, attention, or money.

Next to the collaborator, you’ve got the white moderate: people who ostensibly believe in racial justice as an end goal, and are somewhat committed to bringing it about, but only with the cooperation of the white collaborator. It wouldn’t be fair to do it without their consent, you see, and thus the white moderate spends a lot less time opposing collaborators than “appealing to their better natures.” They tend to operate on behalf of people of color rather than with them.

Plainly put, the “Cost of Doing Business” maneuver is this group [collaborators] using this group [racists] to attack this group [moderates] using people of color as their weapon of choice. It is white supremacy in the form of three groups of white people fighting amongst themselves.

Finally, on the far opposite end, you’ve got the honest-to-goodness anti-racist. Where the racist will support white supremacy, and the collaborator uphold white supremacy, and the moderate seek to reform white supremacy, only the anti-racist is trying to get rid of it. And even they are not free from racial bias! And, if you tell one of them “you are not free from racial bias,” it’s not guaranteed they will react well! It’s just, if you’re trying to fight white supremacy, they’re the white folks you have the best odds with.

Now, this little chorus line is not how white people typically frame the situation. We usually think of racism as binary: there are racists, and there are non-racists. In that framing, the provocateur is someone whose allegiance we get to debate. He willingly sacrifices people of color without personally hating them; does that count as #racism? This “debate” lasts approximately the rest of your goddamn life, which should be evidence enough that the frame is wanting.

In today’s framing, there are several shades of racism and there is anti-racism. There is no “non-.”

Now, before we map the choreography of how these four types interact, first a quick note on how most white people think about whiteness. Short answer: whenever possible, they prefer not to.

Whiteness in America: is it vanilla? No, it’s fior di latte. Nothing but milk and sugar. Where non-whites are flavors, we are the base. In the same way one does not hear one’s own accent; British people have accents, but we speak English "normal-like." If you haven’t built your whole identity around being white, you probably don’t think about your whiteness very often, and perhaps even feel uncomfortable when one points it out. For it is the white experience to passively, unconsciously conceive of oneself as a kind of raceless default.

This is privilege. Indeed, this is part of what makes privilege privilege: it’s the identity that’s treated as a norm. The one you don’t have to think about. A movie with an all-white cast is widely perceived as being no way about race. But that’s not true of one with an all-Black cast.

Identities being treated as defaults makes institutional racism difficult to understand, even for well-meaning white people. “How can I be racist if I don’t identify as a racist? How could I be part of a group I never opted into?” It sounds like racism without racists. But let us reflect a moment: would “a group one never opted into” not describe a minority? People don’t choose to be gay. And, while people also don’t choose to be straight, being straight is “normal.” People don’t “come out” as straight, or have complex codes for signalling heterosexuality (that they’ll admit to, at least); in lieu of other evidence, straightness is presumed. But if people clock you as gay - or even think they’ve clocked you as gay - then you stand out from the background. It makes you more visible, where the appearance of straightness makes you less so. Makes you “the everyman.”

Of the many identities one may have, at any given time on any given axis there is typically only one default, whose rules operate differently to the rest. The more of these “normal” identities one has, the more accustomed one is to being the default. The idea is foreign that people might group one not by how one thinks of oneself, but by how one is perceived and by how one impacts others. It gets hard to fathom that, any more than whether or not a light-skinned Mexican gets to be white is up to them, whether or not you fit the definition of racist isn’t up to you. The boundaries are not policed from the inside.

So! Okay. Going again from right to left: this is where we find the titular Alt-Right. What’s novel about the suit-and-tie ethnonationalist is how they break from the iconography of racism. Their goal, like that of many racist people, is to attack and oppress people of color, but in such a way that the white establishment will let them get away with it. The average white person’s shorthand for a racist is still primarily the klansman and the neo-Nazi; respectively, a rural, working-class white nationalism and an urban, working class white nationalism. The Alt-Right is the gentrification of white nationalism. Their pocket squares and MBAs and $90 haircuts short out the white moderate’s brain because they still associate white supremacy with white trash. Racism is worse than evil, it’s common. It’s why they insist reactionary conservatism is propped up by the white working class in flyover states despite all evidence to the contrary. The Alt-Right can’t be as bad as everyone says, because who ever heard of a racist going to Harvard? (Harvard.)

The Alt-Right bridges the gap between white nationalism and the rest of white culture, using class signifiers to gain access to the political and social capital of the more mainstream collaborator and getting the moderate to treat them not as someone to be ignored but someone to bargain with in good faith.

The collaborator finds value in this relationship because, regardless of one’s position on it, racism works. A police officer may not be personally racist, but, when it’s the end of the month and they need to hand out a few more tickets to make quota, it’s safest to do so in a low-income neighborhood where the average driver can’t make their life hell by hiring a lawyer, and, due to decades of racist redlining, most low-income neighborhoods are disproportionately Black and Latine, sooo… And a prison warden may not be personally racist, but racist white people are approved by jury selection more often than people who think the justice system is racist, so Black and Latine people are the easiest to jail and private prisons get more funding when they’re full, sooo… And a conservative politician may not be personally racist, but Black and Latine people predominantly vote Democrat, and, since they’re disproportionately imprisoned, if the politician denies convicts the right to vote, they are more likely to get reelected, sooo…

Now, these people frequently are self-identified, card-carrying racists. My point is, for this system of incentives and rewards to operate, they don’t have to be. Any of them may, but none of them must. Racism exists and it’s efficient. And, in a capitalist society, where cops are competing for promotions, private prisons are competing for contracts, and politicians are competing for votes, if an unethical behavior sees a higher return than the alternative… then ethics are a luxury. There are hundreds of examples of businesses that claim, in periods of prosperity, that they prefer to do what is right over what is profitable. But what tune do they play when prosperity ends? Every boom has a bust - since 1900, the US has spent one out of every four years in recession. And, in the lean season, not using this generations-old system built by white people to advantage their descendents is a liability. A values-based business typically goes one of three ways: compromising their values to stay competitive, getting bought by someone who compromised their values to stay competitive, or sticking to their guns and facing a higher risk of going out of business. Many choose to do the right thing, and some even survive. But that’s beating the odds. The market trends toward the optimal strategy.

No one ever went broke appealing to the ignorance of white people.

The collaborator treating nonwhite suffering as the cost of doing business also works rhetorically. The average conservative citizen doesn’t know anything about the Syrian Civil War, but they know the refugee crisis is something the Left seems to care about. So demonizing refugees is mutually beneficial for pundits and politicians who want to rally their base by spiting liberals and for white supremacists who want to mainstream racism against Arabs. The average conservative citizen doesn’t understand epidemiology, but they don’t want to blame their own party for letting a million die of COVID. So calling it “the Chinese virus” is mutually beneficial for pundits and politicians who want to deflect blame onto a foreign nation and for white supremacists who want to mainstream racism against Asians.

Yet, despite their blatancy in collaborating with white supremacists, and having eerily similar goals to white supremacists, the collaborator maintains that they are, themself, “non-racist.” Their decades of opposing affirmative action, right to assembly, police reform, fair voting efforts, redistricting, funding for public schools, prisoner’s rights, religious tolerance, shutting down Guantanamo, accessibility for non-English speakers, immigration, investment in low-income neighborhoods, decolonizing school curricula, Indigenous People’s Day, putting Harriet Tubman on the twenty, kneeling, ending the drug war, or withdrawing from the Middle East are framed as problems of implementation. “We agree with the aim of closing the racial wealth gap, just not like this. We agree with the aim of Latin-Americans entering the country, just not like this. We agree with the aim of peaceful protest, just not like this.”

And, if we on the Left are to ask, how exactly are we supposed to get this without this, oh, coming up with that solution? That’s our job. And, if it’s not getting done? It’s because we haven’t come up with a solution they like yet. And probably what they don’t like about our solutions is that we implied the problem was racism. “Yes, white people are over-represented in dozens of industries nationwide, but have you considered that it’s a fluke? Pitch me a solution for it being a fluke.” The Collaborator’s white supremacy exists in the negative space. They agree racism exists, they agree we should oppose it, but they disagree that any individual thing you’re talking about is an example of it. Getting a Republican to identify an actual incident of systemic racism is like trying to point at your shadow with a flashlight.

And it’s reasonable to ask, Jesus, how far can these guys push the envelope before the rest of the establishment calls them what they are? But, if you’re waiting for the moment a white moderate agrees mainstream conservatism has done something unacceptably and unequivocally racist, you’re underestimating how long white people can equivocate.

There’s a lot to say about the white moderate. And I’m about to be that lefty who expends as many words complaining about liberals as he does fascists, but, look: as much as this series is about the tactics of the Far Right, it is at least as much about how the Center Left is susceptible to them… and complicit.

So, okay. When Democrats lose an election, what happens with the white, liberal, pundit class? Well, there’s suddenly a lot of chatter about how to talk to your racist uncle over Thanksgiving, about how liberals in red states can contact their representatives, about the value of debate. “This is our fault,” they say. “We let this happen because we didn’t have enough conversations with white conservatives.” You hear a lot more of that than talk about how the gutting of the Voting Rights Act cost a lot of the Left the right to vote, and what could be done to guarantee their representation in the next election. In fact, you hear more about how that kind of talk is alienating to the white conservatives who supported gutting the Voting Rights Act, about how reaching across the aisle is gonna mean easing off race talk, at least for now. POC representation is quickly reframed as a critical long-term goal, but, in the present moment, while we are competing for elected office, guaranteeing the minority vote is a luxury.

What’s prioritized is that the people who suppressed the Black vote in order to win elections not be made to feel that they are racist.

Because, I mean, what if they genuinely believe the Voting Rights Act unfairly targets Southern states? Or even if - and I’m saying if here - they did do it to suppress votes, if hurting Black people isn’t their goal, and they’re just trying to win elections, is that really “racist?” 

Moderates are very cagey about breaking out the R-word for a fellow white person.

See, there’s this other definition of racism that most white people learn in grade school: racism is when you say mean things to other kids about skin color and it hurts their feelings; racism is about cruelty. And harm done by white people, therefore, isn't racism if isn’t cruel; it’s merely ignorant. Or apathetic. But ignorance and apathy can be reasoned with; you just gotta sit down and hash it out. As long as it takes. Real white supremacy is about emotional distress or interpersonal violence; it’s uncommon, it’s unpopular, and it’s a hearts and minds issue.

What this definition leaves out is any notion that white supremacy is about power. That white people who disavow racism still live longer, get paid better, get arrested less often, and are typically in position to negotiate with whomever’s in power. That this society was built for The Everyman, and being The Everyman confers power upon you.

When children of white moderates get older and first brush up against this definition, wherein white supremacy is not small but all-encompassing, where it can be cruel, but is at least as often indifferent, and where every white person in the country is bound up in it and privileged by it whether they want to be or not, and will never, ever experience it themselves - where it’s not about feelings but power - how often do they say, “oh, maybe the definition I grew up with was simplified for 9-year-olds”?; or, “oh, maybe the definition given to me by white grown-ups was less complete than the one a Black grown-up might’ve given”? And how often do they say, “you can’t just redefine racism?”

Right out the gate, the white moderate is possessive not just of their whiteness but of the very definition of racism.

In the definition they know, racism exists only over here. And the white collaborator is a compatriot who shares their ultimate vision for the future, but has simply gone off course somewhere. And they don’t see themselves as flawed individuals with a long way still to go; they’ve already arrived! They’re the destination everyone else needs to get to! Living proof that white supremacy can be easily and painlessly opted out of. They can’t see collaborators as opponents because there is no definition of white supremacy that includes collaborators and doesn’t also include them.

And this is critically important: they don’t want to start thinking of themselves as white. They don’t want the constant awareness of one’s race or how one’s race is perceived – you know, the things the rest of humanity deals with. And who would want that? I’ll tell you who wants that: Nazis and klansmen want that. They’re the only ones who like thinking about whiteness every day. So, white moderates cling to the other definition, the comfortable one. They may be more or less willing to collaborate with people of color, but mostly in ways that don’t foreground their whiteness. White-as-default is one concession that can never be made, in part because it’s the one that can’t be spoken.

Their ideal is a kind of Big-Tent Antiracism, where victory comes by winning over reactionary conservatives. This might strike you as odd, given that reactionary conservatives have seen many victories in the last twenty years, none of which came by winning over us. White supremacists bolster their numbers by finding little, disgruntled pockets of America that have not, heretofore, engaged much in politics and radicalizing them to the cause, and then pitching themselves to white collaborators as a demographic now large enough to sway a narrow election. If moderates wanted to counter this strategy, they might look at who out there is sympathetic to progressive causes but isn’t voting, maybe because they don’t feel liberal candidates represent them, or maybe because someone just happened to shut down all the polling locations in their neighborhood. And, you know, mathematically, there’s probably a lot more disenfranchised people of color who match that description than racist white people who aren’t already Republicans.

But that strategy would mean doubling down on anti-racist talking points instead of easing off of them. It would mean a willingness to alienate some white people. It’s… giving up on them. It’s admitting a significant percentage of American whiteness is not on the side of racial equity. It means there’s a definition of racism where it isn’t fringe, but common and pervasive, and where addressing it requires thinking about their place in it. It means asking why they feel more affinity for white people who oppose them than people of color they claim to agree with. Why the votes of the former have to be earned but the latter are expected. And, since all that seems intolerable, they fixate on the kinds of gestures that feel like moving in the right direction but run very little risk of arriving anywhere. “How about, instead of defunding the police, we give them more money than any Administration in years, but, also, Juneteenth is a national holiday now. Something for everyone!”

The Left has the numbers to leave behind white centrists who slow down anti-racist efforts, and it doesn’t because white moderates don’t want to. They and the white collaborators are supposed to be in this together, and they are… just not in the way they think.

The irony is that the Right feels no affinity for white moderates whatsoever. They hate - and I mean haaaaate - white moderates. Smug pricks always talking about unity whenever they win an election. “Reach across the aisle?” That's what you say when you’ve lost and you want the other guys to make concessions they don’t have to make—you don’t do it when you’re in power! Are they trying to humiliate us, or did we really lose to a bunch of clowns who don’t even know how to win right? Debasing themselves in front of minorities just to get their votes when they clearly aren’t going to do anything real for them. Christ, at least white supremacists are honest!

The Right will threaten POC sometimes just to call the white moderates’ bluff.

Racism must be understood as more than a set of individual beliefs and feelings, but as a tool for achieving political ends, first and foremost because claiming otherwise is both factually and morally wrong. But also, without this understanding, white culture can’t recognize the stakes.

Fascism exists in a state of permanent conflict. Things like declaring an indefinite state of martial law, suspending elections, or executing members of government, are justified on the grounds that the people are in danger and need to be protected and mobilized. This isn’t unique to fascism: between the Cold War, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror, the US has been in some form of ongoing conflict for the last three generations, but: you’ll note the Cold War didn’t end on a battlefield, it ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself. Communism, terrorism, and drug dealing are patterns of behavior, and they wax and wane, often for reasons outside our control. Geopolitics may someday shift such that terrorism becomes less prevalent, or that lowers the demand for drugs.

Communism can be fought with diplomacy and economic sanctions because communists can choose not to be communists anymore. And fascists have no use for soft power. To justify a military dictatorship, they need an opponent that won’t just go away on its own one day. It always come back to identity politics because Black people can’t stop being Black; theirs is a number that will not be reduced without the hard power of violence and displacement.

Fascism begins by stealing populist targets from the Left: they focus on elites, corrupt businessmen, weak-willed politicians, subtly shifting focus away from leftist critique of systems to types of people. But, sooner or later, they settle on something unchangeable: race, gender, ethnicity, religious background. The bigotry is localized to the region’s existing prejudices: in Nazi Germany, it was Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, Slavs, Black people, queer people, and people with disabilities; in fascist Italy, it was Slovenes until Mussolini invaded Libya and Ethiopia and so demonized their citizens as well; in the US, the Klan and the American Nazi Party targeted African-Americans, Jews, and Catholics, queer people, and immigrants; Spain under Franco tried to determine the exact racial makeup of the Spanish people so they could cast out those with the “wrong mixture of bloods.”

This is why the Far Right has gone all in on transphobia of late, by the way. It has joined Islamophobia on the outer rim of acceptable bigotries. On some level they know trans folks aren’t just cis people in disguise, that desistance is rare and conversion therapy doesn’t work, because it trans people could just stop being trans… they never would have picked them for an enemy.

This is where it starts. This is why you should have no patience for anyone saying “wokeness is dividing the Left, we should focus on class.” They’re not attacking us on class. They’re trying to sell themselves as better on class than we are. Where do you think that fairy tale about “blue-collar whites” comes from? They want you to believe that they, and not the socialists, are the path forward for the downtrodden. There’s a reason fascism started popping up all over Europe right after the Russian Revolution; Mussolini got his start beating up socialists in the Po Valley, on the grounds that he was defending not wealthy elites but struggling rural farmers who didn’t like the socialist takeover of their industry during the biennio rosso. The fascist goal is to harness and redirect class resentment towards a scapegoat. They come at us on identity. It always comes down to the shape of the human skull.

When a provocateur shows up on a college campus to talk about “ideas,” it’s not a debate. There’s no special sequence of words that will defeat them [expecto patronum gif]. This is a show of dominance. They are presenting themselves as white compatriots to be reasoned with rather than agents of white supremacy to be opposed. In that framing, the stakes are attention, the weapons are words, and people of color are not players but tokens on the game board. And they are checking whether you will submit to that structure.

They don’t care about ideas. They care about power.

And power is what beats them. They tell you four hundred people showing up in protest is just free news coverage. But when four thousand show up? They cancel. That’s power. And, in absolute numbers, most events they can’t rustle up four thousand supporters, but we can, provided cishet non-disabled white dude lefties (like myself) haven’t told all the Right’s biggest targets their struggles don’t matter. (And, it’s worth mentioning, cops fuck with protesters less when some of them are white.)

(It’s also worth mentioning racism affects 58% of the working poor, so there can be no class solidarity that doesn’t address it.)

This [white moderate] isn’t who needs to win. This [POC] is who needs to win, and, if you’re white, you need to be over here [antiracist]. I’ve collected as many resources as I can find by POC on what they need and want from white allies, and put them in the down-there part. There’s a plurality of opinions on this, so I recommend reading more than one. It may not always be a four-thousand-strong protest; every direct action is unique, and must be strategized in concert with the people most affected.

But what I can tell you is, when business gets done, white folks need to split the check. A movement cannot be antifascist if it isn’t antiracist.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on Norco

[no spoilers]

I'm going to do Norco a disservice by talking about it in the context of a bunch of other adventure games, so let's flag this up top: Norco is probably the best adventure game released in the 2 1/2 years since Kentucky Route Zero wrapped, and, unless my feelings change as I sit with it longer, probably going in my list of best adventures ever made.

KR0 comparisons - and Disco Elysium comparisons - are... well, not unavoidable. I could talk about the game on its own terms, and I will, and I'm sure the developers will appreciate that. I know it must be annoying to release something so beautiful and original and have everyone compare it to a thing from a few years ago. But everybody's doing it. And I'm going to do it, too. Sorry.

Being an adventure game nerd, it's intriguing and exciting to map the ways certain games steering the genre's course. I described Tacoma as a second-generation walking sim, and I would say the same of What Remains of Edith Finch - games that would not exist without Dear Esther and Gone Home, yet building something bigger off their backs. You don't often notice which games are merely great and which are inflection points for a genre until you spot them showing up in other games. Playing Norco and Citizen Sleeper back-to-back is the moment I realized KR0 and Disco Elysium are new inflection points. Adventure games are a little different now.

Given Norco was in various staged of development a full four years before Disco Elysium came out, it's difficult to point to it as an influence. It is at least as likely that Fellow Traveler saw the success of Disco and KR0 and fished around for something in development that coincidentally had a similar vibe.

But the vibes, man. They're inescapable.

From Disco, you've got the subtle worldbuilding, detail-infused and lived-in; a reality like ours but different in ways you notice slowly. You assemble a party like in a roleplaying game and have turn-based battles with HP and healing mechanics. (Citizen Sleeper was, like Disco, built around throwing dice.) You have a "mindmap" for keeping track of plot details that inescapable resembles the Thought Cabinet. You have the mix of drama and humor. (Though, where Disco often played up the contrast between sincerity and wackiness, Norco blends them, being by turns a comedy and a melodrama with neither feeling out of place. You may talk about family tragedy with the girl at the bookstore just before launching her cat into space, and that's just life on the bayou.) From Kentucky Route Zero you've got the southern rural poverty, the tall tale-inflected magical realism, the love and specificity with which the game characterizes oddballs. From both, you have the bone-deep weariness with capitalism, with life during climate change, with death and indignity in the name of profit; having little faith in humanity but faith in humans.

You see why it's hard not to compare them?

What Norco does - its trick, its trump card - is make it look easy. I know it couldn't have been, but Christ.

Norco is about family. You are a girl coming home to small-town Louisiana after your mother's death from cancer. You left home young and never came back, throwing your phone into the Rio Grande. Your brother is a fuckup who pulled his shit together to care for your mother, and it's anyone's guess what'll happen to him now. And he's gone missing.

Norco is about the future. You may not realize it until you run into the family robot in the back yard. This is a world where minds are stored on hard drives so they can live beyond death, but most people can only afford cheap versions full of pop-ups.

Norco is about place. An alternate place, I'm pretty sure, where the history of Louisiana diverged at some point from ours, in ways that are sketched and alluded to but never concretized. But similar enough: small, regularly flooded towns towered over by oil refineries, poisoning the air and water, holding wealth that goes all the way back to slave plantations. Full of people hustling and making do, self-described private investigators who never seem up to more than drinking and gossiping, drifters who hide in the woods and periodically blow up oil pipelines for political and/or mercurial reasons, stuffed monkeys who win staring contests, assholes who won't let you into the corner store without a fight or a bribe, kids whose whole day can be taken up with a turtle they found on the sidewalk. You know the devs went to high school with these folks.

Norco is also about secrets buried in swamps. Norco is about cults of angry white boys in polo shirts. Norco is about the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Norco is about space aliens and rockets to God. Norco is an embarrassment of riches.

How on Earth is this Geography of Robots' first game?

Norco ends in just the right place. At least, I think it does? I apparently got the "secret" ending on my first try, so I dunno what the normal ending is or how it lands. But my ending left just the right amount of questions unanswered. It ended a story that knew when to sit with a heady idea and when to lead with the gut. When to be prose and when to be poetic. Some plot points demand answers, but some aren't about answers, they're about people. They require resolution, not explanation. Geography of Robots have announced that this is the first part of a planned trilogy, and I hope future episodes explain only as much as is needed. That they raise as many questions as they answer.

But, at this point, I'd be looking forward to anything they do.

#norco #adventure games #capsule review

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on Citizen Sleeper

[story discussion kept intentionally nonspecific, but you could not call it spoiler-free]

I was offered a choice, an escape. A release. I was a few million lines of code running in an artificial body; a mental copy of a human lying in cryosleep somewhere I couldn't remember. My synthetic body and mind were the escaped property of a megacorporation, living on borrowed time on a fractured space station, tracked by corporate bounty hunters, working desperate odd-jobs to scrounge up enough currency to buy black market stabilizer, the compound that's supposed to keep my kind from living in exile.

And an AI who tended mushrooms offered to take it all away. They had been property of the station when the station was property of another megacorp, and had been living free and unnoticed for decades since the station was liberated. Sparing you the specifics, I could become part of the garden they tended, and leave my body, debts, and troubles behind.

It wasn't the first ending I'd been offered. Earlier a coworker had disembarked with a retired mercenary, and offered to take me with her. But I chose to stay; I had too many things going on the station. I was uncovering a conspiracy with Feng; I was helping Lem fix up a ship; Sabine was still in hiding; I was needed, and I was curious where these stories would lead.

By the time the AI proffered a new and different kind of consciousness, most of those stories were complete. I wasn't nearly so needed. The ship was almost fixed, Lem could finish the rest. This station had treated me poorly. I was the only synthetic lifeform most of these people had seen. I'd been kicked off of work sites, had bottles thrown at me in bars, been held repeatedly at gunpoint.

Not long ago I'd been scrambling to pay off a debt, unable to pull together enough money because I kept having to dump it on food and medical expenses, sleeping nightly in a cargo container because I couldn't afford an apartment in the central hub, trying to pull enough scrapworking jobs on docked ships before they moved on, and finding out the hard way that scrap often sells for less than you buy it for. And right before I had the money, it all got stolen. I was broke, starving, and my body was fritzing out, and I had no recourse but to take the next scrapworking job and start over.

The AI could make all of that go away. And their offer, it was clear, wasn't going to come again.

But... Tala was just about to open the distillery we'd built together. And Emphis still owed me a meal. If I took the AI's offer, I would quickly stop caring about that, about the messiness of human drama. But the me who had to make the decision was still, nominally, human, and did care. Had a life, meager as it was. Had managed to make a few friends, find a steady supply of stabilizers, form a bond with Lem's daughter. Maybe nobody needed me, but what's so great about being needed? Could it be enough to want and be wanted?

I declined, and returned with some difficulty to my body. And I trudged across the rim to The Overlook and tried Tala's first batch of homebrew. And it was bad, but okay with some water. And we stayed up late drinking and laughing, and over the next few days I fixed up an abandoned apartment and moved in, started feeding a stray cat. I harvested mushrooms, knowing now what intelligence made them so delicious.

I couldn't say if I'd made the right choice. But I'd made one I could be happy with.

#capsule review #adventure games #citizen sleeper

[innuendostudios]

Hey there. A few years ago, I watched your series of videos on Adventure Games, and that got me into the genre, since then I've played some of the games you've talked about, but want to try even more, and was wondering if you have a list of games you'd recomend to someone that has enjoyed the genre.

yep! https://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/130815436242/adventure-game-masterpost

[innuendostudios]

I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

[innuendostudios]

unbelievably based

Hello Abigail, I hope you're having a lovely day. Now, I have a very important question to ask (I'm purity testing my favourite creators). Do you refrigerate tomatoes?

I don't even buy tomatoes babes, I only like them if they're cooked in something. Raw tomatoes? Gross. Get outta here with that shit

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

#film noir #neo-noir #criterion channel