2065 – The Sky is Everywhere (2022 movie)

timespace coodinates: California 21st century

“The Sky Is Everywhere is a 2022 American coming-of-age romantic drama film directed by Josephine Decker and written by Jandy Nelson, based on her novel of the same name.” (wiki)

Suffice to say Josphine Decker (Butter on the Latch  2013, the erotic thriller Thou Wast Mild and Lovely 2014, the coming-of-age drama Madeline’s Madeline 2018, the semi-biographical thriller Shirley 2020) has made some of the most memorable and amazing movies to come out of the US lately. She keeps being higly experimental and refreshingly improvisational, without appealing to the usual cognitive estrangement devices typical to the modernist tradition. Her movies keep on being deeply involving and moving like no other director I know. She appears to be (a rare gift nowadays) uninhibited and unchained by production pressures from vested interests, rankings or audience approval. Josephine Decker is unique without the need to deliver a kind of identifiable signature, a recognizable handle – typical of many ‘male’ author cinematographers. Or at least I have not been able to find one other than her being always surprising each time around and this speaks to her advantage I think.

Her last movie is quite banal and complex at the same time, and i am willing to try and give you (without spoilers) hints of its overall contradictory effect on me or why I think it is as important as her previous ones even if completly at odds with her other work (pls take the following as disjointed notes on the margins of J. Decker’s last movie):

1. The way it foregrounds nature – this movie is not naturalistic in any conventional sense. You can almost see it as a very stylized version of a natural surroundings, full of magnificent trees and resplendent flower gardens. Here you have a specifically post-hippie Californian US West Coast enchanted forest – but one that is highly specific and situated. Its artifice is not so much flower power as Pre-Raphaelite painters (William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti etc.). Californian high weirdness is a rich humus that has been nourishing both cyberfeminist Donna Harraway and sci-fi author Ursula K. LeGuin. The old growth redwood forest grove from The Sky is Everywhere may seem pretty far from the concerns of Silicon Valley Big Tech giants and its (annoying) bro-culture. This ‘natural’ surrounding is one that Erik Davis has been busy exploring in his Burning Shore series of Californian High Weirdness and at the same time one that somehow resurges even in the most mathematically abstract – quantum computing enviroments (such as the DEVS TV series directed by Alex Garland). There is a lot of animation involved – and all of the animated part, even genuinely disturbing imagery fits perfectly well with the rest (almost like the wonderful 1977 Hausu japanese horror extravangaza). There is also a kind of theatricality or even a puppet theatre feel to it – almost like Japanese No theatre – where Nature (capital N nature) is embodied by invisible or slightly visible dancer bodies (here dressed as flower beds, earth spirits?) that seem to animate, enhance or intensify the overall feelings expressed. All the time, the most absurd and zany events seem to contradict the overall ‘holiness'(sacred Grove) and the subvert the natural by introducing ‘unnatural’ aspects in these surroundings (‘wire fu’ floating flying while playin music or listing to it). Wind blows the messages and loveletters (to a dead sister) written on leaves makes everything feel a litle comedic, tragic, flipped out, full of unecessary bathos. If nature is animated as part of an ‘Animatic Apparatus’ (Deborah Levitt), kin relations are wonderfully biotech and still wrenching – the dead sister is the result of an IVF involving a presumably unknown sperm donor (I think this small detail is also part of this general postnaturalism of the movie).
2. There is no way I can explain (nor would I want to) the timing of this movie. It comes at a very disconcerting time – one could say that at no other time in the history of the human species have we been more aware of our disproportion, the disproportion of the tasks at hand & our abilities. Time seems to tick against us, and even our meager attempts at climate deadlines may keep the false impression that there’s still time or that we still haven’t got there (as in Mark Bould’s book “Anthropocene Unconscious”). We live at a time in which we can not deny any longer the disproportionate impacts we have on our enviroment in terms of both energy use or resource depletion and unequal distribution of costs. There’s no way we can ignore how disproportionately this has impacted those already at the brink, especially non-white, non-Western cultures (in comparison with the average Euroamerican – average – hiper consumer). It is overtly clear that no forecast, nor doomsday scenario comes as a suprise nowadayse. Climate reports, UN warnings fall on deaf ears, everything has been already said. All the previous modernist devices (the literary burgeois fiction tradition, the realist tradition etc) show their incapacity in front of the unbelievable realities confronting us and the disproportionate planetary issues at hand. These issues are no secrets, no conspiracy in this sense, they are common, yet there is no possiblity to have a coordinated effort or apply any common framework to address them. The world of early 21st seems to slide towards a myriad of isolated and detached private spaces (Conspirituality, QAnon, luxury bunkers being just a few of these) at the same time that there is talk of a new Cold War and nationalist economics (new economic and strategic blocs or the end of Globalization), especially when everything impacts everything else. Everybody else seems to be cought in fhe crossfire. There is this larger sense that nothing can be ignored, nothing can be detached, that nothing is easily disconnected or disentangled while people still hang on to their sadly dysfunctional worldview or consumer patterns(say online shopping) that are being daily contradicted by the fact that everything else depending on everything else. There is an incredible cost in loss of lives, both in terms of COVID 19 mortality and the fact that wars, both in Yemen and Ukraine have been either been ignored or suddenly made accute. The Sky is Everything comes at this particular juncture – and offeres no philosophy, nor easy answers, no redemption, yet it l somehow integrates immense personal loss and senseless death into everything, pulling everything together. On one level it is just a bland US coming of age -young adult (Grace Kaufman) mourning for her much beloved dead sister. On this level – everything seems selfish, indidualistic, very personal and quite detached from everything else happening in the world. One’s whimsical quest for love, or the misshaps of love – can easily appear as the most abnormal thing today – or really completly lost among these world changing events mentioned above.
3. It is a incredible anti-romantic movie – ‘romanticism’ (as a movement, a sensibility and philosophical current) is almost like a thing one needs to get vaccinated against and one is never immune to. Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë is referenced troughout this colorful and pleasantly unhinged movie. Iteself Wuthering Heights is a corny piece of literature (like this movie?) and this seems to be remarked on serveral times by Grace Kaufman’s character. It is corny because it is a pastiche of a pastiche in a sense influenced by both Gothic fiction and Romanticism. In a sense she’s the picaresque heroine of 18th century. To me The Sky is Everyhwere draws comparisions with the earlier Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (written in 1803 but published posthumously in 1817) that does not get mentioned in the movie so far as I know. It is almost like a parody of the Gothic genre and its 17 year old heroine Catherine Morland coming of age and even on the consumption of doom, withouth being a condemnation of frivolous anguish and pain. There is also a necrophiliac sensibility in the air that one should not ignore or condemn. There is in this movie a scene where the romantic literature and pathetic love – is all being ritually bannished, or even being faulted for all the uncessary tourmoil happening in the movie’s heroine’s soul or all the subsequent (female) generations. Is this a pun on the whole movie? Are there any larger aspects to consider here? It feels like this to me. What are we to make of this strangely empty stylised gesture – working perfectly to somehow underscore that one cannot detach or feel immune against the strange tugs and pulls that link a 21 st century teenager heart with the invisible strings of ‘older’ history of (Modern Western?!) affects or literary models.
4. Nothing is neutral. There is a sense where everything kind of sings or is part of a bigger coreography. All the loves and all the encounters are magical – everything is magick in a very corny yet effective way. I love actually the fact that one cannot eliminate or psychologize nothing in this movie. One cannot somehow debunk all the love interests in this movie as empty romance, basically an exagerated set-up, wishful thinking or the result of hallucinations or trauma. In fact this is one of the best recent movies about – that overall and coverall term “trauma”. It is a very difficult to approach because it has became so overused and emptied out as to basically say everything and nothing at the same time (almost the same as “creativity” or “innovation”). In some sense a new reality and new materiality vibrates (with unmistakable corny accents) and contradictory feelings that circulate and envelop everything that swirls around.
5. It is the first time I have seen a movie about death – and even afterlife, or let’s say the possiblity that death is not final that does not repelling, where the afterworld is coexisting or immanent with this one. It is not final in the metaphysical sense of why “perpetual perishing” offers (in AN Whithead organic philosphy) a porose boundary between subjective immediacy and objective immortality. For me, this movie does not find a place in Mark Fischer’s important distinction between the eerie and the weird, because it is neither weird nor eerie, even if it deals with things that should not be there or with familiar things that feel discomforting or uncanny. For Fisher, places of ruin or the eeriness of natural surroundings (think A Field in England) is where the outside stays outside, where an eerie empty cry echoes in a countryside that should be empty but is not. This is not a hauntological movie yet it deals with hauntings in a peculiar YA way – one that is very colored, entranced, intoxicating and almost suffocatingly over the top. Poltergeist and spiritualism – are an American species one might argue – yet it is one that is almost exclusively seen as distinct from the weepy dramas. Horror has to stay horror, it cannot join romance or melodrama. Yet as we know since William’s essay about body genre’s (pornography, horror, melodrama), they all appeal to affected and affecting bodies. This movie is not at all horrofic or dark in any sense. One could only characterize it as something necro-uplificting, as something fruitfully floridly putrid!
6. There is a peculiar tradition of communicating with the netherworld or the afterlife via mostly female mediums etc. Somehow mediums have been the early modern US feminist shamans. In the midst of rapid technological change and gaslight patriarichy, they appear to mediate between private worlds and also to somehow keep us in communion with relatives long gone or with presences that have been denied or excluded from official histories. It is typical that to communicate with the invisible or talk about the invisible, to give it presence and bring the potential and virtual into existence has been (in the artistic realm proper see Hilma af Klint) part of why patriachy has been denying the role of such women in the history of arts. The Sky is everywhere manages to not make an appeal to any traditional images of an afterworld or any kind of limbo. It is all happening in this one world. There is no communicating with spirits or departed dear ones that involves the usual trappings (oujia boards, ceremonials, rituals etc.) etc. At the same time there are plenty remains, residues of the dead in the living and part of the living. There is a sense in which agency is not clearly defined as ending with death. There is a lot of going on’s and free flow with the dead, their clothes, their perfome and even their lovers. Nothing stops at the threshold and everything overflows, engulfs in the most embarrassing & outrageous way.

2004 – Discognition: Fabulations and Fictions of Sentience by Steven Shaviro (book, 2016)

there is actually slime mold linking, growing and tracing the title of this book

I think Steven Shaviro should be something like one of the patron saints of timespacewarps and I will briefly state why here. Happy to be able to introduce him together with Darko Suvin over here.

I think, of all the various cultural theorists, whatever-hip-thinkers or walking talking encyclopedic humans out there – he is one of our most important purveyors relating to lived time, of how feeling relates to time, and is almost a creature (entity – to put in ANW terms) of time flow. He is a weird processualist, a tireless sci-fi enthusiast/reviewer and proponent of his own brand of speculative realism, a supporter of relational-panpsychist (or pan-experientalism), a critic and theoretician of music videos and post-cinematic affect and one of the most intellectually generous people I know of on the whole of Internet (most of his stuff is found for free online under digital form or on his blog). He interests go far afield, from the extremity of Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs to third kind philosophical encounters btw Deleuze, Kant and Whitehead. He might be (in his own words) a “misanthrope”, “highly dissociative”, an unapologetic “kitsch Marxist”, living in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University, yet he is to be found on both E-flux discussing Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption (2013) or Extrapolation, fabulation and speculation (as of October 2021) at Russian Moscow online courses. His numerous books have been instrumental imho in moving continental philosophy away from postmodernist/linguistic turn or deconstruction/ text-centered hermeneutic models towards the ontological or the very nature of reality, thus allowing for a widening reception of the so-called ‘speculative turn’. His huge and always nourishing reading list is open for everyone.

First here is a draft Intro to his 2016 book Discognition

Hard to write a review on this one – because it is such a favorite. While I have just started reading his new 2021 Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life I realised I had to pay my due to this one.
Here are a number of things that might make Discognition unavoidable reading for our times. Of course, you could just read Steven Shaviro’s short dense book as a direct shortcut to key ‘thought experiments’ in mind philosophy (hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s room or the knowledge argument, cognitive eliminativism etc) and the various philosophical responses to them (Churchland, Nagel, Churchland, Dennett, Brandom, Brembs, etc.) as well as Shaviro’s own. If you are interested in the original volume with a lot of the original essays that he uses as source materials feel free to check There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument.
What makes Discognition completely different from most cognitive science & countless mind philosophy books is that he will make us enjoy mind philosophy as an exercise in science fiction (or paraliterature as Samuel “Chip” Delany calls it). And if we manage that, we will rather sooner (than later) realize that mind philosophers can hardly keep up with speculative fiction’s proclivity and SF’s daring adventures in matters of cognition, consciousness, affect, physicalism, subjectivity, reason, responsiveness, sentience etc. in imaginatively devising thought experiments that would be practically impossible as a program for cognitive sciences or within the preserve of cognitivist paradigm.
Steven Shaviro makes no secret about his own pan-psychist leanings, or rather his pan-experientialism orientation (in line with both William James pragmatism or what Alfred North Whitehead metaphysics tried to probe), yet this position comes forth after giving due attention to many other perspectives or philosophical currents. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as in his previous books The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, remains a point of reference.
The title “DISCOGNITION” is a great way by Steven Shaviro to try bend our cerebrated (yet dualist and disembodied) and vaunted capacities further and further, to be able to try and circumvent the heavy toll of constraining cognition as well as to switch tables on our faltering human exceptionalism. Cognitivism has been listing a growing list of human biases and fallacies, confirmed by research – all largely expanding on critical philosophy’s founding gestures: Kant’s categories and forms of thought. Yet the fundamental tenants of cognitivism (u could also call them metaphysical presuppositions) get more entrenched than ever. As ‘neurobullocks‘ has been infusing much of neuro pop from TV series to criminal psychology – or be it advertising and neuro -marketing, nowadays only neurodivergence manages to question the neuropolitical underpinnings of neuronormativity.

In the end, we have nothing to lose (he seems to tell us with every chapter) – but our embittered speciesism, a narrowing cognitivism-only path that allows only brains, higher functions of the human mind or consciousness to act like proper scientific models, exquisite literary presences or proper philosophic objects – at the dispense of everything else, with the risk of ignoring various instantiations of “what would be thinking like”: a machine, an artificial intelligence, a computer, a murderer, a slime mold, an alien etc. (a list that could be potentially endless).
We are bound to central nervous systems, and yes, sapience is a wonderfully rare thing, yet this comes at a heavy price of ignoring the largest majority of our experience as well as other (for us largely speculative) modes of thought. Recent SF, carefully chosen examples by S. Shaviro – put consciousness in proportion and show how human thinking processes might be themselves just a narrow sliver – a wonderful but limited and limiting way to even define experience as such.
He brings all these examples to roost and many others – including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects or Peter Watts Blindsight or R Scott Bakker’s Neuropath.
To his merit, Shaviro always emphasizes that he is neither a philosopher nor a science fiction writer – though to my knowledge, he is uniquely poised to enjoy doing what he does and never make the authors and thinkers he reads cry (as Deleuze said). He is one of those very rare raconteurs that never disparages his material, offering an attentive mind and affective stance that takes science fiction and philosophical speculative bets very seriously, pushing them to their ultimate ends. He is never tone-deaf, never forcing himself on the medium but letting it speak loudly and clearly. His close-reading discipline works almost as a direct how-to example in helping delineate difficult questions posed by the authors themselves. He redefines and refines complex relations and attempts making difficult distinctions by contrasting philosophy with science fiction or with science proper. There are always differences as well as deep resonances here, and there is always the potentiality of mutual learning from each other:

Fictions and fabulations are often contrasted, or opposed, to scientific methods of understanding the world. But in fact, there are powerful resonances between them; they are both processes of speculative extrapolation. In other words, constructing and testing scientific hypotheses is not entirely different from constructing fictions and fabulations, and then testing to see whether they work or not, and what consequences follow from them. For science is far more than just a passive process of discovery, or a compiling of facts that are simply “out there.” Rather, science must actively approach things and processes in the world. This is the reason for making hypotheses. Science needs to solicit and elicit phenomena that would not disclose themselves to us otherwise. It must somehow compel these phenomena to respond to our questions, by giving us full and consistent answers. All this is necessary, precisely because things in the world are not cut to our measure. They have no reason to conform to our presuppositions, or to fit into any categories that we seek to impose.

1946 – The Universe is Hostile to Computers (YT video 2021)

For me this video has some metaphysical dimensions – and you will perhaps pardon me for that. There is something very encouraging (even if with micro-catastrophist repercussions) in the fact that there is this flippancy of bits all around us, or the fact that all the Mars rovers are using some old hardy tech in order to minimize or become resilient in the face of the chaotic, unpredictable behaviour or highly energetic particles. Most of the time life here down below is kind of disconnected from the above (outside the realm of critical astrology or the like). This video exemplifies in a very specific way the proximity of the realms, of the so below as above, the fact that effects somehow overrun causes, that we cannot deal with a unicausality, and particles energized by black holes at the center of our galaxy actually reach us and somehow – influence or may affecteven results of e-elections. There is also these proof of vibrant materialism all around in the words of Jane Bennett, something that the micro processor industry had to deal with since the beginning. This enlarged affectibility (panexperientialism?!) – the affectations of matter in the Spinozist terms are all around, and even ultra rare events such as antimatter collisions highlight an invisible universe that is made visible via all sorts of glitches, via gaming impossible feats. Visionary artists such as Hilma af Klint that participated actively in the feminist occultures (like Theosophy that acted like a feminist liberation theology) around 1900 where also increasingly sensible to the insensible and the invisible realms and with the discovery of various ends of the spectrum – and new theories of “quanta”, “fields” and rediscovery of atomism, became also the artists to try and imagine and represent our first modern art abstractions.

It is important to keep thinking how the discovery of cosmic rays impacted our pop culture – even in the origin story of superheroes such as the Fantastic Four.

1880 – Irma Vep (1996)

Director: Olivier Assayas

Irma Vep is a 1996 film directed by the French director Olivier Assayas, starring Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung (playing herself) in a story about the disasters that result as a middle-aged French film director (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) attempts to remake Louis Feuillade‘s classic silent film serial Les vampires. Taking place as it does largely through the eyes of a foreigner (Cheung), it is also a meditation on the state of the French film industry.

The idea for the film was born out of an attempted collaboration among Assayas, Claire Denis, and Atom Egoyan, who wanted to experiment with the situation of a foreigner in Paris. In the 1915 original serial, written and directed by Louis Feuillade, Irma Vep was played by French silent film actress Musidora (1889–1957). Much of the film depicts set-related incidents that echo scenes in Truffaut‘s La nuit americaine (English title: Day for night), to which Irma Vep owes a large thematic debt.

However, Assayas publicly stated that although he considers La nuit americaine a great film, it is more about the fantasy of filmmaking than the reality. Assayas credits Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s Beware of a Holy Whore as a greater inspiration.

Assayas married Cheung in 1998. They divorced in 2001. They again collaborated in 2004 on the film Clean. (wiki)

1879 – The Education of Fredrick Fitzell (2021)

timespace coordinates: multiverse, MWI (many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics)

Flashback or The Education of Frederick Fitzell

Director: Christopher MacBride

Perhaps sensitized by Carlo Rovelli’s last book Helgoland: The World of Quantum Theory – here was an occasion to see how cinema would deal with the infinite copies of yourselves, taking the preposterous strangeness of Schrödinger theory seriously, by pushing it to its extremes. What could be well enjoyed as just another memory addled guilt-trip into young adulthood or nostalgia for college years, could as well be treated as a more philosophical trippy endeavor into ‘potentiality’ and ‘actualization’ (important A N Whitehead’s terms for process philosophy as well as various quantum theory interpretations). I am currently reading the Romanian translation of Religion in the Making by Whitehead, published in 1926, only one year after the momentous trip Heisenberg took to the lonely (and Pollen free!) island in the North Sea where he started to see the matrix mechanics taking shape from his math tables. This book is the only Romanian (ANW) translation I’ve found and probably one that most current Whiteheadians would skip, yet I found it rich in hints that his generally realist & naturalist metaphysics (&theology!) had also somehow absorbed the shock of quantum realities (and general relativity). In part, it’s almost as if even at his most ‘theological’, he offers living proof that one cannot ignore the latest results or skip the consistent questions raised by these tested and re- tested theories and permit a mindset that is ready to welcome the rattling & shaking of everything we thought we knew about the world. Even if completly remote from our daily lives, there’s this increasing ‘remote – close’ familiarity with the pleasurable absurdity of quantum theory interpretations, not in the preposterous quack “quantum therapies” (Rovelli also ridicules) but in its cultural or even aesthetic implements or speculative wagers.

First, I do not think one has to dabble in quantum theory speculations – or even pretend to do, in order to actually make such a movie or profess to intuit far flung influence. A lot of current good SF work is rich in diverting the fallout of quantum theoretical enrichment into pop adventures (even sexual proclivity in Sex Criminals comics where the protagonists freeze time during multiple orgasms), without lecturing or without even pointing fingers towards specific ‘favorite’ interpretations of it (take ur pick!). I think that Occupy by Tricia Sullivan offers the golden standard here. It is very intimately entangled (no pun!). Building a constructively hallucinatory experience, concerned with transmitting the ‘living through’ and delving into extraordinary examples of ‘wave functions’ and ‘collapsing the wave function’. As a inter dimensional being one switches first, second person to third person all in one, getting across what it might be to actually to live in a universe with higher dimensions or higher realities. The POW is still there, even if it always hovers as if it continuoiusly splits and gets twisted along those realities. What is best is that it is clearly T Sullivan isnot interested in the slightest in delineating technical details or getting bogged down in explanatory gaps.

What appears to be a drug-induced non-linearity (which it could well be), in Flashback movie aka the Edu of…. branches off into a “many worlds” interpretation (unmentioned in the frame of the movie!), where each “I” separates or exists simultaneously with all the others, each with its own branched world”. Although one could even say slow motion doubling, tripling etc would be a better visual characterization. There is a plethora of other recent movies that deal with multiple selves, but rather than making it a psychological (medicalized) multi-personality disorder, or claiming some sort of karmic or reincarnation multiplicity, Flashback makes these versions of a very slippery self all unnerving & ontologically real. Moving in repetitive and discontinuous (quite scarry) jumps enables one to move into various other existences, without renouncing the stable (boring) initial one. Ontologic surprises are not explainable just via substances, although substances are always a good way to start or to question. There is always the possibility that reality and memory is actually rich in staining those branching worlds, that these worlds are multifarious, and that there is always a sense of ‘out there’ enjoyment of all the missing splendor or decrepitude of this multiverse concretness. So even if I think Rovelli has a point about keeping the brambles of many worlds at a minimum and focusing on the infinite relations out here that make our world so vaporous and enticing, there is always a slippage. Affect, missing opportunities and unrequited love might also be a good guide among the various worlds.

Probability is not just probability but a gigantic real ψ wave in this movie. Carlo Rovelli is critical of this many world quantum theory interpretation on grounds of how it denies our own observable experiences of only one “I”, not its double, not its multiple (unless just as multiple personality disorder I guess). Yet, at the same time I would also say there is some sort of mixture going on, according to the process metaphysics there is always some concrescence solidarity of multiplicities going on haywire, with a more promiscuous now that is (always) being smeared or holding on the non temporal residue of what it could have been, or what never is, or what did not take place temporally. These atmospherics of the possible (according to a Whiteheadian scheme) are always, already part of each actualisation. The newly weds room of boxes is an apt reminder that in the current worst of worst worlds sold as best of, other realities, ‘many worlds’ become few, with less and less options and better left unboxed. Or who knows what might come out (Trump II? Another mutant Covid strain?), since clearly there’s no end to the worst case scenario and even easy cheapo escapisms have become impossibilties for a large majority.

What is a slow burn of a college love and various mysterious happenings, flashbacks, encounters, timeline and discontinuities built up into something quite remarkable in my view – an actual warped construction, cinematically speaking, of what it is to feel like one is dripping into some larger phenomenological reality that we can actually observe via the movie effects and the edits on screen. The non linear editing I found quiet elaborate and surprisingly unsettling and atmospheric. One has the feel there is also some monstrous selves out there, a sort of inchoate awakening. The college love is herself an incredibly guide into this larger, more generous reality that dangerously announces also some social and cultural precipes, of several lives lived, of turning points, of actual and very hellish limbos. The limbo aspect I found intersting – in one sense a very satisfying even if very cliché squatter hell of drug addled abandoned houses, but at the same time (from capitalist realist standpoint) one that is full of nasty surprises and literally the only divergence from the usual family-job-home ownership trajectory.

This I found very enticing – the exploration of an observable point of view, of ‘loosership’ as it is presented or constructed under capitalism, neoliberalism, call it what u want, achievement etc SAT scores. More and more of the young generation, including the gaokao exams in China and titles like “Scores Don’t Mean Security, Money Does”. Disappointing job offers (already well fused with life possibilities) in both US and China point to a certain expenditure of potentials, or of being handed out a lack of perspective in tge midst of general prosperity. Perspectival metaphysics takes this reality at heart – making ones own intersubjective perspective definitory in a way that does not slip into the old subjectivist or idealist trappings of the absolute point of view from nowhere. In a way, if we are to follow Carlo Rovelli’s last book and his relations RQM (Relational Quantum Mechanics), the way things ARE or appear, so long as they interact or intersect.

Found quite funny the stereotypical artist lifeline – the way he renounces his artistic creative side, a critical point, since creativity is completely commodified and remade into some sort of data mining or dreary pattern recognition job. It is ridiculous how such dreams of artistic life haunt the current lack of perspective – it is almost as when everything is artistic, when every ad and online advert animations involves lots of creativity one dreams of the 19th century painter with an atelier, a sort of displaced image of the creative, out of a job, the Romantic image of the 1950s US An American in Paris sort of trope that was already old at the time. Also this perspective no-perspective of an angsty, white hetero male tends to suck big time, I said it before and I will say it again. At the same time, I am in accord with Rovelli that one should always admit quantum strangeness in our vacuous midst, at the core of the slipstream cultural pop universe, under all forms and all shapes.

Thx go to Waka for suggesting this movie.

imdb

1790 – Sweet Home Seuwiteu Hom 스위트 홈 (webtoon 2017-2020)

Sweet Home webtoon thriller by Carnby Kim and Youngchan Hwang

(wiki) SH is a South Koreanwebtoon written by Kim Carnby and illustrated by Hwang Young-chan. First published in Naver Webtoon, the webtoon ran for a total of 140 chapters plus one prologue from October 12, 2017 to July 2, 2020. It centers on a suicidal high school boy who, along with a group of fellow apartment residents, tries to survive a “monsterization” apocalypse (goemulhwa) where people turn into monsters that reflect their innermost, most desperate desires.

1777 – Can’t Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021 documentary series by Adam Curtis)

directed by Adam Curtis (Pandora’s Box, The Century of Self, The Power of Nightmares, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace + many more)

Synopsis

Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is a six-part series that explores how modern society has arrived to the strange place it is today. The series traverses themes of love, power, money, the ghosts of empire, the history of China, opium and opioids, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, and the history of Artificial Intelligence. Inspired by the 2016 apex of populism—the political ideology which presents The People as morally good, and The Elite as morally bad—the underlying aim of the series is to show why the critics of Donald Trump and Brexit were unable to offer an alternative vision for the future.

Part 1 — Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain

We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe, and America, societies have become split and polarised. There is anger at the inequality and the ever growing corruption—and a widespread distrust of the elites. Into this has come the pandemic that has brutally dramatised those divisions. But despite the chaos, there is a paralysis—a sense that no one knows how to escape from this. Can’t Get You Out of My Head tells how we got to this place. And why both those in power—and we—find it so difficult to move on. At its heart is the strange story of what happened when people’s inner feelings got mixed up with power in the age of individualism. How the hopes and dreams and uncertainties inside people’s minds met the decaying forces of old power in Britain, America, Russia, and China. What resulted was a block not just in the society, but also inside our own heads, that stops us imagining anything else than this.

Part 2 — Shooting and F**king are the Same Thing

This next part traverses the story of what tore the revolutions in the 1960s apart. Jiang Qing in China, Michael X in London, Afeni Shakur in New York believed that millions of people’s minds were haunted by the corruption and the violence of the past. They wanted to show people how to escape those ghosts. But they hadn’t reckoned with the fact that the old structures of power still haunted their minds too. They too had been scarred by the past, and some of them wanted violent revenge. While psychologists and neuroscientists were starting to discover what they said were hidden forces inside the human brain that really controlled what they did. But the people weren’t aware.

Part 3 — Money Changes Everything

This is the story of how in the 1970s, those in power set out to create a world free of the dangerous big ideas of the past. They banished the grand dreams of changing the world. And replaced them with money. People would live from now on in their own heads—in their own dreams. And the banks would lend them the money to create those dreams. While China would supply a wave of cheap consumer goods on a scale never seen before in the world. But then money broke free across the world. And people started to get frightened that things were out of control. Not just money—but the world’s climate too seemed to be behaving in a strange, unpredictable way. The systems seemed to have a life of their own. Beyond the ability of anyone to shape and predict.

Part 4 — But What If the People Are Stupid?

No one trusted politics or politicians any longer. Instead we were all one world of free individuals. And we could intervene to save other individuals around the world without bothering with old politics and power. And people became what they as individuals truly were—emotionally and sexually. But power was mutating and finding ways to work its way back into our heads. The politicians realised that they no longer had the support or the trust of the people. So they switched sides and gave up being our representatives who would challenge the powerful on our behalf. Instead they began to tell us what to do on behalf of the powerful. And they made new alliances—with the psychologists who said that human beings were irrational and needed to be managed. But we didn’t notice because we were too busy shopping.

Part 5 — The Lordly Ones

It wasn’t just the Slave Trade: 150 years ago Britain had wrecked China by forcing opium on the country. It made Britain the richest and most powerful country in the world. But it enslaved the minds of millions of the Chinese and helped destroy the society. But then the British got frightened of what they had done and created a dream image of a Britain that had never existed, to hide from the fear. This film tells the story of how from the end of the 19th century a magical vision of Britain’s feudal past was created by artists and writers. How folk music and folk dancing was invented to create a kind of safe dream of the nation that could hide the violence and the horrors. The dream persisted under the surface of the 20th century. But as the fears and uncertainties and the chaos of the last few years rose up millions of people started to believe that dream: that it was real.

Part 6 — Are We Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer?

The final episode tells how the strange paralysis that grips us today was created. How all the different forces of our age—that started out as separate have come together to create what is a block against imagining another kind of future than this. How, money and debt, melancholy over the loss of empire, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opioids, Artificial Intelligence, and love and power have all fed into creating the present time of anxiety and fearfulness about the future. And whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really also part of the rigid system—in the West and in Russia and China—where those in power have run out of all ideas. The film also lays out what are the different possible roads from here into the future, and the choices we will have to make about the very different futures we will have to choose very soon.

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