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spacetime coordinates: 2019 farm in south-western France.
The Swarm (French: La Nuée) is a 2020 French fantasy-horror / drama film directed by Just Philippot. The film stars Suliane Brahim, Sofian Khammes, Marie Narbonne, Raphael Romand and Nathalie Boyer. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: in the not too distant-future of a devastated Earth
Tides (also known as The Colony) is a 2021 German-Swiss science fiction thriller film directed and written by Tim Fehlbaum. In the not too-distant future: after a global catastrophe has wiped out nearly all of humanity on Earth, Blake, an elite astronaut from Space Colony Kepler. must make a decision that will seal the fate of the people on both planets.(wiki)
Tides is a small independent European SF – that I have seen together with the recently released Settlers. Very different from Settlers that plays on a future biodome Mars that feels like a Marstern (?) that tips it hat over to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, rather than Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star. Nevertheless they both exbit a contemporary preoccupation, not to say anxiety around what Dominic Pettman has termed Peak Libido or what Rebekah Sheldon identified as a common thread in recent SF as “The Child to Come” of Generation Anthropocene.
Demographic fears, low fertility etc are part of contemporary ‘breeder culture’ baggage that sees to be hailed along movies as different as Interstellar (2014) and Children of Men (2006). It is also part of the usual pro-Family values propaganda of an unlikely alliance between free market warriors and traditionalists. I am not saying they endorse this way of thinking, although breeder culture is to be found everywhere from Ikea adverts to political campaigns. SF does what it does best if it keeps receiving all of these vibrations yet it splits the spectrum, trying out other outcomes, changing conclusions, sometimes against the premises or the initial (even unspecified) presuppositions.
Demographic fears coupled with anti-immigrant sentiments, homophobia, transphobia and ethno-politics, has become a familiar tune that seems to afflict and flare up nationalistic fervor diverting attention from unsolved wide income disparties, lack of opportunities, dissatisfaction with working conditions. unemployment or climate change. Restarting or jumping back into productivity mood has been difficult for many after having their time back after so much lack of time and probably old fears and insecurities abound. Again I want to emphasize, I do not dismiss the reality of these concerns and fears, considering just that they do not go wide enough, or comprehensive enough. ‘Replacement’ fears and discussions online are easy to ridicule or to join into, there virality is demonstrated, what is more difficult to grasp is their underlying, unspoken larger concerns or what is left out of them. There is a sense in which it is good to take seriously the idea that the planet has an “expiration date”. The simple, banal, very basic observation, that translates from products onto planetary matters and towards our overall growing obsolescence is far from being just cursory or trivial matter. Yet the conjunction btw commodities, unstoppable productivity, climate trouble, job making and job killing, entire failed cities, genomic-capitalist intertwining etc seems to escape our SF imaginary, only then entering only once it is SF entering the bounds of what cannot happen yet happens.
The rapid and growing aging population and what is seen as a failure to reproduce (reproduction of the rapidly obsoleted workforce!) seems to take precedence as a major obsession all around the so-called developed world. Increased technological prowess, high living standards and higher education is coupled with lower reproduction rates and thus becomes always an easy propaganda tool banded about or inserted into conspiracy materials that energize right-wing ‘replacement’ paranoia. QAnon pedophilia rings built on older antisemitic conspiracy memes derived from a poor understanding of kosher traditions as well as blood symbolism add to that. Children are being suddenly invested with this double sacrificial value and also hope for a confiscated future. Children become the ultimate object of vulnerability and globalist abuse. What is evident is that they are suddenly in opposition with older interests, with entire generation that seem to have spent the future’s chances beforehand. Not only reproduction is at stake, but children constant status as sacrificial lambs, as the primary target of satanist plots and elite perversion. It is intersting this shift from the 1970s fear that we are eating our old (in 1973 Soylent Green) to the current children being the hidden cost behind what we see around (just think of 2013 Snowpiercer). In a sense we seem to have reverted to the Victorian fears about the early workforce that did not magically disappear but was moved out of sight in sweatshops all over the world. This also obsession with satanist rings pastes over some of the most demonic and atrocious attempts at forced urbanization, brutal nation-making and colonial education projects, including the criminal ineptitude and squalor of modern civilizing projects in the ‘New World’ that targeted mostly indigenous children. What is also new is also China’s joining the aging trend, and the associated demographic fears from this powerhouse of the world, made it life its One Child Policy and start pushing cash for families with more kids.
Firstly a few things on the aesthetics of Tides – it is quite a beautiful cinematography, a sort blueish extended beach world (North Sea? Reminded me of Kiel or Gdansk?). Earth is seen mostly as abandoned harbors, inundated coast. Imagine all the hubs of international maritime trade and supply chains of today being now derelict places populated by the newly formed societies that have reverted to small, scattered, scavenger gatherer-fishermen tribalism. My only critique is that somehow these maritime folk do not really appear plausible in the movie. Where is the whole range of adaptations of real Sea Nomands or Sea Gypsy austronesian, Han or Indian etc people? These existing people together exhibit an incredible much more diverse range of architectures, lives and a much more tight connection with water that is far more convincing somehow (see Man on the Rim 1988). The mudflats like the mangrove are a very specific and hugely important route of migration for contemporary maritime populations as well as for older prehistoric peoples. Yet, I appreciate the effort in building and suggesting such a clific future post-climate change world.
That being said, the vast horizon, the light and the misty, rusty musty atmosphere of the place transports you out there among the new tribalism of future Earth. These tribes find themselves in a neo-colonial situation – as the technologically advanced returnees from the elite ruling class colonies return to Earth, take over and start educating and ‘civilizing’ the remains of woman/mankind. This top down attitude never worked out. Earth seems to miraculously bring back their fertility and so secretly the elite explorers start siring their own offspring in relative secrecy before giving information back to their home colony. This brings to me several recent scandals, as the 2018 Oxfam sex exploitation scandals in Haiti after the devastating earthquake and a dark history of international aid charities. The capitalist charitable spirit is also plagued by a certain Malthusian preference and bias in practice. Availability to contraception methods is vital all over the world, yet Population Bomb fears generally end up in targeted population controls, state-sponsored forced sterilization campaigns and skewed family planning (aptly described by Mytheli Sreenivas), that contrary to the Western ‘replacement’ conspiracies, do not target the Global North, but take underdeveloped and unprotected areas of the world as their terrain for clinical trials or as lop-sided charitable action.
The transhumanist elites that settled on an off-world colony become sterile and cannot reproduce (mysteriously) after some sort of Peak Libido, seemingly also because they have been using some dubious eugenics or genetic screening methods. Negative biopolitics is a boring staple of SF dystopia (Brave New World, GATTACA etc), yet here the elites have to deal with the limits of their technology (bodies?) and with material consequences of their action. Having a small gene pool was never a good idea and a presumably grooming for an elite genome speaks about how intimately genomics has been subsumed into the abstractions of capital (as detailed by Eugene Thacker in Global Genome).
The expedition on Earth crash lands and the surviving female pilot gets trapped into local power plays and skirmishes that turn out to be not conflicts over resources but conflicts over demographic politics,kidnapping children and abusing (or at least trying to control) ‘native’ terrestrial women. The colonist men’s access and ultimate dependence on local women’s reproductive cycles seems to drive a lot of current right-wing pro-Family propaganda. So this SF, in its small wy is trying to think trough some of these questions. Tides strives for honesty and non-masculinist take on things, outing the hypocrisy behind such selfish concerns, uncovering a masculinist dogma that somehow got embedded into the laws and cultural customs of Maid’s Tale as well (and similar real-life examples). That is whenever women get reduced to just ‘mobile wombs’. Extinction and X-Risk as such, and as more probable and calculable risk is an absent topic somehow, seemingly drowned by the movie’s Elites own self-preservationist and classist modus.
Tides also combines something like the old The Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now by Joseph Conrad with It Is Hard to Be a God concerns over interventionism by Strugatsky Brothers, yet it is still an interesting mix, managing to steer as along a difficult return to future Earth.
spacetime coordinates: Set during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty, three years after the Imjin War. (the Japanese invasions of Korea 1592–1598 – three years after the famous “Battle of Unpo Wetland”)
Kingdom (Korean: 킹덤; RR: Kingdeom) is a 2019 South Korean political period horror thriller streaming television series, created and written by Kim Eun-hee and directed by Kim Seong-hun and Park In-je. The series is adapted from the webcomic series The Kingdom of the Gods, which was authored by Kim Eun-hee and drawn by Yang Kyung-il.
Set on a fictional, medieval-inspired Joseon, Kingdom explores the story of a Crown Prince, as he sets to investigate the source of a mysterious plague that begins to ravage his country. It stars Ju Ji-hoon, Ryu Seung-ryong, Bae Doo-na, Kim Sang-ho, Kim Sung-kyu and Kim Hye-jun. // wiki // imdb)
A special feature-length episode of the series, titled
was released on July 23, 2021 and focused on the supporting character Ashin played by Jun Ji-hyun.
The episode acts as a sidequel to the second season of Kingdom and explores the backstory of Ashin, the mysterious heir of the Northern Seongjeoyain tribe village, and the origin of the resurrection plant that triggered an unprecedented cascade of tragic events that swept through the Kingdom of Joseon. // wiki // imdb
spacetime coordinates: set in an alternate timeline in which the fall of the communist Polish People’s Republic never happened, and the Iron Curtain is still in place. / set in 2003; a coordinated terrorist attack on multiple sites took place in Poland in 1983 which altered the course of history and the Cold War did not end.
1983 was particularly appreciated by critics for its photography and atmosphere. The directors create a gloomy and cold Warsaw, where old Soviet-style apartment blocks stand side by side with futuristic and imposing government and police buildings, equipped with the most modern instruments of control. The secret services of the SB now use computer surveillance mechanisms, tracking cell phones and digitizing citizens’ data (classified according to their “level of danger”).
Society is run by the “Party”, a privileged elite who enjoy a good education and excellent economic status. The rest of the population is disinterested in politics and devote themselves to consumerism, at least as regards those goods that are not censored or prohibited. Opposing this system is the “Brigade of Light”, a group of young people who carry out resistance to the dictatorship in clandestinity.
Poland is then imagined to have seen massive immigration from Indochina, and in particular from the socialist republic of Vietnam. Some night scenes – set in overcrowded Asian neighborhoods – seem like a reference to the Blade Runner movie.
It is curious that there are very few explicit references to communism in the series (no statue of Lenin in the streets, no red star or revolutionary chant). The regime appears to have created an Orwellian state, whose sole ideological goal is the suppression of dissent and the control of individuals.
In this sense, it seems that directors are making a more general criticism of any form of totalitarianism, police regime and society-induced conformism. Agnieszka Holland herself underlines how the contents of 1983 are also current in Western countries, in contingency with the current crisis of democracy and the emergence of what the director describes as “a conservative counter-revolution”. She says in the same interview with The Guardian: “But the real questions are: maybe these people are happy? Maybe freedom is overrated?” (wiki)
1983 is a Polish crime drama streaming television series created and written by Joshua Long and based on an original idea by Long and Maciej Musiał, produced for and released by Netflix on 30 November 2018. A second season is being considered.
spacetime coordinates: New Orleans, Louisiana 2033 – 2035
The First is a drama television series portraying a team of astronauts who prepare to become the first humans to visit Mars, created by Beau Willimon and starring an ensemble cast including Sean Penn, Natascha McElhone, Anna Jacoby-Heron, LisaGay Hamilton, Hannah Ware, Keiko Agena, Rey Lucas, James Ransone, Brian Lee Franklin, Oded Fehr, Norbert Leo Butz, Annie Parisse, Melissa George, Jeannie Berlin, and Bill Camp. The series, a co-production between American streaming service Hulu and British television network Channel 4, debuted on September 14, 2018 in the United States and on November 1, 2018 in the United Kingdom. On January 18, 2019, Hulu canceled the series after one season. (wiki)
Blood Red Sky (also known as Transatlantic 473) is a 2021 German-British action horror film directed by Peter Thorwarth, who co-wrote the screenplay with Stefan Holtz. The film stars Peri Baumeister, Roland Møller, Chidi Ajufo and Alexander Scheer. It was released on 23 July 2021 by Netflix. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 1787. Amid the decadence of the Ancien Régime, Joseph Ignace Guillotin is responsible for investigating mysterious murders. He then discovers the existence of “blue blood”. This unknown virus spreads within the aristocracy. The virus has devastating effects: the infected nobles attack the “little people“, upsetting the established hierarchy. The revolt spreads and is the prelude to the French Revolution.
La Révolution is a 2020 French-language supernatural drama series produced by Netflix starring Doudou Masta, Julien Sarazin and Ian Turiak. In January 2021, the series was canceled after one season. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 