spacetime coordinates: the near future. Zone 414, a dark colony of humanoids known as “the city of robots.”
Tag: detectives
1951 – Malignant (2021)
spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Seattle / Seattle Underground
Malignant is a 2021 American supernatural horror film directed by James Wan. It stars Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, and Michole Briana White. Malignant was released theatrically and on HBO Max in the United States on September 10, 2021, by Warner Bros. Pictures. (wiki)
‘Malignant, is camp horror at its finest, a leaky cauldron of influences that mix into a wild third act as gory as it is unpredictable. From its murder mystery to its flickering neons to its wide-eyed, fragile protagonist, Malignant is first-and-foremost an ode to Italian giallo.’ strangeharbors-review
1941 – The Philosophy of Disco Elysium: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Absurd Modernism (YT 2021)
“Disco Elysium, an award-winning game from developer ZA/UM, created what I would consider one of the most brilliant pieces of interactive literature in recent memory. For this, we explore its foundational philosophy and narrative(s) throughout.” (Epoch Philosophy channel)
I continue to admire the incredible quality of these YT channels, and Epoch Philosophy is one of the best (although I just watched the Deleuze & Spinoza and Friedrich Engels, Socialism and Utopia ones – Engels which I have learned to appreciate during the years). This one is again on gaming and a particular game – a push to analyse games and treat them as true objects of philosophy or as applied philosophy, with movies (or anime or cartoons) already being the established medium of such exercises. This particular game dwelling on the intricacies of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the pervasiveness of ideology and the role of relationships in a dysfunctional world with its own history seems like a prime example, one that makes (in the words of the maker) it on par with Kafka, Sartre or other examples of the modernist canon. What i like is how, without spoilers encourages a certain critique or critique and dialectical analysis. Even if it psychoanalytic determinism is there (including neuro- determinism), there is a lot to be said about how political identity works nowadays. Politics is somehow everywhere and discussions in the game always turn into political discussion without transforming it all into a permanent critique or postmodern irony.
1913 – Sweet Dreams (2017 book by Tricia Sullivan)
spacetime coordinates: London 2022
Then I fall asleep on the Tube and wake up all the way out at Heathrow Terminal 5. Feeling like lost luggage.
“The Dream City isn’t anything like real London unless you count the Square Mile – and then only in that both are full of swerves and unexpected openings. Making your way around is like playing a video game where the designers are having a laugh at your expense. There’s no map of it, no overview, and very little concession to reality. Streets can turn into canals and canals into bridges, and occasionally roads go around corners that are greater than 360 degrees with no apology. Yet somehow it all holds together.
For architectural chutzpah, the Dream City is like Singapore. Showy, extravagantly futuristic. There are neon bridges connecting the tops of buildings. There are fleets of cyclists riding point to point in transparent tubes. But when you explore on foot you find old parts underneath mossy cloisters of pitted stone with broken statues, canals that smell like ditchwater and plunge unexpectedly underground. You can ride through these dark tunnels poled by animal gondoliers who use recycled smartphones to light the way.
If you look, you can find railway-siding houses with piles of junk rotting in their back gardens just like in real London. But the back gardens in the Dream City are overshadowed by mysterious honeycomb towers whose structure looks like a cross section of bone under a high-powered microscope.”
(…) “Sometimes there are snorting horses drawing carriages over cobbles, and steaming reeks rise from manhole covers as if an underground machine is gearing itself up for a very rude belch. Sometimes the buildings are square and shiny plastic, as if they’ve drifted in from the archetypal sleeping Lego Republic.
Sometimes the city is muted to utter silence.
Sometimes the streets are metal grates over jungles that release a fume of fruit and rot and animal smells. You can’t get down there or see beyond the top of the canopy, but you can taste the moisture in the air of all that trapped life and you can hear the birds and insects in full cry.”
Review
Tricia Sullivan
1903 – 1983 (2018 TV Mini Series)
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.
1873 – The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)
spacetime coordinates: the trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, 1981 Connecticut.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (also known as The Conjuring 3) is a 2021 American supernatural horror film directed by Michael Chaves. The film serves as a sequel to The Conjuring (2013) and The Conjuring 2 (2016), and as the eighth installment in the Conjuring Universe. (wiki)
1869 – Mindhunter (TV series 2017–2019)
spacetime coordinates: 1977 – 1981 US
Mindhunter is an American psychological crime thriller television series created by Joe Penhall, based on the 1995 true-crime book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit written by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker. The executive producers include Penhall, Charlize Theron, and David Fincher, the latter of whom has served as the series’s most frequent director and de facto showrunner, overseeing much of the scriptwriting and production processes. The series stars Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv, and it follows the founding of the Behavioral Science Unit in the FBI in the late 1970s and the beginning of criminal profiling.
The first season of ten episodes debuted worldwide on Netflix on October 13, 2017. The second season was released by Netflix on August 16, 2019. In January 2020, Netflix announced that the potential for a third season was on indefinite hold as Fincher wanted to pursue other projects but may “revisit [the series] in the future”.
Mindhunter revolves around FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), along with psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), who operate the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit within the Training Division at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Together, they launched a research project to interview imprisoned serial killers to understand their psychology with the hope of applying this knowledge to solve ongoing cases.
The first season takes place from 1977 to 1980, in the early days of criminal psychology and criminal profiling at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Cameron Britton has a recurring role in this season as notorious serial killer Edmund Kemper, who is the first to assist Ford and Tench in understanding how a serial killer’s mind works. Other notable serial killers featured in the first season include Montie Rissell played by Sam Strike, Jerry Brudos played by Happy Anderson, Richard Speck played by Jack Erdie, and Dennis Rader also known as BTK, played by Sonny Valicenti.
The second season takes place between 1980 and 1981, with Ford and Tench investigating the Atlanta murders of 1979 to 1981, which included at least 28 deaths, mostly children. This is based on the real case of Wayne Williams, who was charged and convicted for the murder of two adult men but was never tried for the killing of the children and adolescents, causing mass outrage and questions over Williams’s guilt as the children’s cases went cold. The second season also features other infamous murderers, such as David Berkowitz, also known as Son of Sam, played by Oliver Cooper, William Pierce Jr. played by Michael Filipowich, Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. played by Robert Aramayo, and Charles Manson, played by Damon Harriman. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 