TimeSpace Warps

timespace coordinates: 2020’s Eastbrook

Ick is a 2024 science fiction horror comedy film directed by Joseph Kahn and starring Brandon Routh, Malina Weissman, Taia Sophia, Zeke Jones, Jack Seavor McDonald, Harrison Cone, Jeff Fahey, and Mena Suvari. The film follows former high school football star turned science teacher Hank Wallace (Routh), who teams up with his student Grace (Weissman) to fight an alien threat in their town. (wiki)

I guess Joseph Kahn has a few more intellectual champions since his Detention (2011) hyperkinetic horror debut, but I still eagerly await his (relatively rare) feature movie output with trepidation. I guess there are many explanations for that: 1) I was (lab/TV) growing into puberty on the MTV explosion on cable TV in the early 1990s in the Eastern Bloc. Mind-blowing animations such as Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux (1991-1995) were born on MTV’s Liquid Television experimental showcase (many being adaptations of Art Spiegelman’s RAW) and Mike Judge’s Beavis & Butt-Head, which was incredibly annoying, juvenile, viral and repugnant at the same time, that we all started quoting by heart (to the annoyance of our parents, teachers and adult friends). This and a bunch of music videos we copied directly onto our VHS recorders so we could re-watch at will. As he said in an interview, his style is not just MTV it’s MTV that’s probably shaped by his style (and other music video directors). MTV was groundbreaking, even if we considered it commercial (but we also had fhe French MCM), if allowed for incredible creativity & high production values that no one outside the advertising industry could afford. 2) I am not going to try to dig out the 2010 CCC debate of Slow Cinema vs Fast Movies, nor its accelerationist framing – because hey, it is 2025, we are all TikTokers now, and the digital (apart from some analog holdouts) is pervasive. Gen Z has grown and is confronted conditions with shameful & ludicrous levels of inequality and transfer from the poor to the wealthy, it is media savvy, pro Palestine and has thrown its weight behind some of the most visible protests of 2025. Its frustration with lack of access to affordable healthcare and education and with new bouts of austerity politics – is felt across the globe and lies behind some of the most comprehensive protests we have seen in recent years (from France to Serbia and Indonesia, and from Morocco to Nepal). We cannot ignore either its proclivity, anger and anxiety over unsatisfied expectations nor its global reach, nor I might add its sensitivity, affective tone and ‘structures of feeling’. Here is what the music director, Joseph Kahn, said in a Variety interview about today’s Gen Z from a media/technology standpoint:

Gen Z speaks my language a lot more than my own generation did, because Gen Z grew up with editing tools and camera phones. The funny thing about the Gen Z audience, a filmmaker from their point of view isn’t just someone that points a camera at someone, they point it at themselves. They spent their entire lives making films. So that sort of editorial rhythm is something that’s very natural for a person that’s grown up with these tools.

3) I love the premise of ICK – a creature feature & catastrophe that is already here. It’s not about something waiting to happen but something that is slightly off from the first shots. You can see some strange spots, weird hanging slime that doesn’t belong there and everyone looks just very good at suppressing the knowledge of its existence. It also DOESN’T (yet) DO anything. It is this non agency that is most annoying not the fact of its existence and when it starts to act – it’s is almost exhilarating. ln contrast with other invasive biological fictional creatures it does not spring into action.

ICK is about a dormant and latent catastrophe, not the blockbuster Roland Emmerich disaster movies that thrive on everything collapsing everywhere at some moment in time. Initially the ICK is not even icky. There’s also a lot of biological information – about sexuality transmitted diseases, asexual reproduction in amoeba, there’s drawings of cells or bacteria ona blackboard, information about plant metabolism about photosynthesis and parasitic wasps – the whole gamut of shool biology class & pop science news. The main hero former quarterback is a bit of an odd one, a former alcoholic and present science teacher that is cought in a nostalgia bubble. Not the evil popular guy but a likable (Barbie & Ken?) failure. Is the ICK monster – a “plant-like” creature (disease?) brought by a meteorite (like in the ‘space disease’ version of what killed the dinosaurs)? Initially it is intervening with its invisible hand in the most annoying ways and is also kind of unsurprising. Also unsurprisingly, during the early COVID days fringe theories about space catastrophism had a comeback (such as those taken from Diseases from Space is a book published in 1979 that was authored by astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe). Don’t get fooled by the looks the VFX was a fraction of today’s movies that is why most of it was filmed on location in Houston, TX. Everyone knows about tjr ICK (science, the Gov, the kids, their parents etc) and even so, everyone is absolutely indifferent or impervious to its presence. THE ICK is a divisive matter, exactly the opposite of people coming together and fighting the “evil” from outer space. Expect lots of very direct jokes about the COVID response, disinformation & counter expertise and general anti vaxxer anti big gov libertarian paranoia. In all the divisive atmosphere +there’s also mainstay – ‘traditions’ weird college customs and prom rituals that seem fairly consistent across generations. But then comes thr ICK – the tradition itself becomes the monster. It’s sort of is like the climate change or the COVID pandemic but most of the time like the virome if lives and jumps species unseen. I guess you could call ICK the hyper-normalization of catastrophe of new bad things (to quote Jameson quoting Brecht) happening all the time.

We all had outbreaks of avian flu before, but that did not prepare us in any way apparently fro the big one. Not saying that preparation is unimportant, only remarking that today’s jadedness and anti vaccine stance after a brutal global pandemic is maybe the Don’t Look Up aspect of things. Kahn does point fingers it just satirizes everything making everyone feel like a moron (including the annoying mansplaining anti heroes), refuses to moralize, and welds satire with gusto in the new bad times. His ICK exploration of the mundanity of the weird or the abnormal times – “Everything has changed.” but then “things do change, but ultimately, things go back to normal. People still live their lives. Now, that can either be an incredible act of stupidity or it’s an act of survival. I don’t know which.”(Joseph Kahn in an în interview below). I think he is a chartographer of this without being a parody of the creature feature bug hunt movie genre. 4) I just love the stylistic merry-go-round that Joseph Kahn masters, the way 2YK aesthetics get dispersed in the movie that starts in cca 1999-2000 (when also Leigh La Claire Berge’s book Fake Work plays) and ends up with a prom themed after the 2000 at today’s Eastbrook’s high with today’s version of 2000 millenial drag. There are good aesthetic analyses of the techno-utopianism of 2000, one that was proto Big Tech (no Google no Amazon, nor FB prominent in our online lives). Kahn has two dispersals in mind – when monsters appear (one could think Trump or climate change), pulverisation and scattering abound, but I think there is also an increasingly smaller cycle of nostalgia industry. In a sense, the eclipse 2000 or 2Yk is more remote today than even events from the Clinton era, let us say. Also, the prevalence of “woke jokes” makes it clear that it is somehow impossible to retrieve a pre-culture war period ofbl supposed innocence, and even if we play as if – even if we dress up as a version of that era, there is still immense amounts of cringe and embarrassment to be waded through. I may be wrong, but Gen Z is here to teach us some hard lessons. Finally it is also makes me and others feel like it’s OK to grow old and be fart – miss out on a lot of good things and still not try to make a complete mess of it all (remains to be seen)! I also had the good chance to have elderly or older friends and companions, so that always workers wonders when confronted with 20 year old gaps and newer,weirder cyborg generations (that one liner: “try explaining FB to your cyborg children”).

5) Finally, the monster VFX, it is quite strange – both plant-like (we learn that it uses photosynthesis and is vulnerable to UV light). It is both a vampiric disembodied substance, ash-like and angular, but also ramified and quite different than the Blob that, like an amorphous amoeba, engulfs everything in its way. From emerging in the midst of NFL matches to slithering through cars old and new, to merging with the most despicable characters flto embodying fathers and DESERT STORM wearing veterans the ICK is omnipresent. The fracturing fractalisation and polarization doesn’t cut through political or ideological lines by but pits small communities and neighboring towns – Vickelsberg vs Eastbrook vying for resources and federal funds. But like an amoeba and many other fictional substrates of the US horror movies, it subsumes everything, repairs, keeps, but also assimilates its members when they become important. It also feels a bit like a horror version of the Wood Wide Web. I am also tempted to see the ICK as yet another embodiment of the US’s always reactive anti-communist allergy (or long COVID/COLD WAR rash – it’s the Chinese reflex) post-ironic take of being scared of any form of meaningful collectivism and even at the slightest amount of dirigismë. Socialism – like a ghost hounding US politics almost like a monster itself (apart from world government another bugbear of the conservative mindset) is constantly and most ridiculously applied or used during the town meeting scene when US military gets all the Eastbrook citizen inside Small Mall – a scene that encapsulate a completly ridiculous state of things. Probably the most surprising is Bernie still being out there and Mandani in NY. Meanwhile, all monster swarmer movies & other cult horror sci-fi movies and other mass culture artefacts offer “some sense of the ineradicable drive towards collectivity that can be detected, no matter how faintly and feebly, in the most degraded works of mass culture”(Jameson, 148).