2059 – Reproductive Futurism and the Politics of the Sequel (video essay 2019)

“This video essay examines the politics underlying the gendered past and future of Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017). It argues that the sequel form endorses an ideology of reproductive futurism that normalizes stereotypical gender scripts and perpetuates nostalgic notions of family, heterosexuality, and biological reproduction.

Original essay published in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 6.3 (2019): mediacommons.org/intransition/reproductive-futurism-and-politics-sequel“(vimeo)

Eastern Europe, including Romania has seen a concordance between homophobic transphobic pro-Family marches and the politics certain brand of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has thrived on deregulation & disruption. As a pejorative term it is being being used in a confusing way and it is important to understand that while it is not an ideologic monolith and there’s plenty of internal controversy – there’s also general common traits that make it instantly recognizable, based on the ten points of the ‘Washington Consensus“.

So how come ‘traditional family values’ , the most non disruptive things one can think of – are being elevated during neoliberalism as sacred? How do free markets – go together with supporting anti-choice anti-abortion reproductive politics and “family values”? What has the individualism and atomism of utility maximization (the concept that individuals and firms seek to get the highest satisfaction just from their economic decisions) at the heart of neoliberalism have to do with families?

Well in the absence of a welfare state (disappearing pensions, failing – because underfunded public health system) the whole responsibility, deficit spending debt payments all of it and care work is placed on the family and not any family, but the global poor.

This explains the paradoxical alliance of social conservatism and free-market promoters since the 1980s Thatcher and Reagan. It was not just union busting and cutting government spending but also propping up traditional family values. Why did families vote for those that would apparently endanger or make financial cuts that would endanger their existence even more? Why did they vote against social security and how did the racist and derogatory term “welfare queen” (see Romanian centrist media attacks on ‘asistați social’) got to be used as a campaign scare, attracting such families into practically accepting the destruction of the welfare state? When Thatcher said there is no society, few people remember that she never said that there is no family. Families (at least on paper) tied people more and more to value extraction. You can actually see this – in Romania where migrants are sending money back home. There is an increased dependency on these family ties as a guaranty for continuous (“plata in rate” in Romanian) sources of money in rates, as payments to banks, etc Household debt is paid by migrant workers working under harsh conditions, working far from home yet tied to family relations with the ones back home.

Melinda Cooper a researcher of biopolitics has been exploring this strange unlikely US alliance that has also became a staple in Eastern Europe. Her 2017 book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservativism aims to explain and trace the history of this unlikely alliance that we now see everywhere, including in both Trump’s USA and Putin’s Russia. I added this to the above wonderful video essay exploring something else the critique of “Reproductive Futurism” – through various SF franchises, because I think that this dependency and “chrononormativity” fits in very well Melinda Cooper’s study about ‘family values’. In most current SF the image of the child as wager for a selfsame future (the new is more of the same) – or the mother/child link exists to basically justify all current injustices (everything is done so a future kid may enjoy it) or to reproduce current conditions ad infinitum.

1918 – Lovecraft Country (2020 series)

Lovecraft Country is an American horror drama television series developed by Misha Green based on and serving as a continuation of the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff. Starring Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan Majors, it premiered on August 16, 2020, on HBO.

The series is about a young black man who travels across the segregated 1950s United States in search of his missing father, learning of dark secrets plaguing a town on which famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft supposedly based the location of many of his fictional tales. (wiki)

I cannot add much the excellent review by Lauren Michele Jackson in the New Yorker. In spite of my own initial enthusiasm for the new takes on Lovecraft’s inheritance – I was dumbfounded by both what she aptly signals (the lack of melodrama, the lack of tension and of bi-dimensional characters), as well as the sensation (sensed by others as well it seems) that everything has to be spelled out, and that we are made an unwitting participant in a prestige piece that takes all historical struggles either as a clear given or that tries to dispel all ambiguity and supply all the answers. All the ideological problems are already marked as finished, explained or to be check-boxed. It is as if Lovecraft’s perverted sense of inchoate slimy materialism, both formless, as well as degenerative and racist, gushes out to over-write, over-describe, literally to suffocate and overload all that could be said or shown about power or class relations. It is as if the desire to actually finally film and remake black history in a more just way, and the urgency of this nowadays, ends up over-labeling and indexing all historical settings and severely limiting all outcomes, circumscribing all relationships of this series, beyond the actual segregation and racial apartheid into some sort of finished, vacuum proof product.

This said, I liked the portrayal of racist occult cop KKK cabal – and how the Lovecraftian monsters were turned against the racist cops, one thing that I badly miss happening in reality. The cabal of rich white immortalist Southerners is a good addition, but then again they all feel incredibly bi-dimensional and out of a right-wing Satanist plot proliferrated today by QAnon. That itself, might be a good lead, yet it remains undeveloped and rudimentary. A much better (comics this time) example I have in Saladin Ahmed’s and Sami Kivelä Abbot by Boom Comics – the villain being much more tangible upper class white old dude academic or even a dark web intellectual (IDW) that uses brutal occult forces to recruit and transformed the black characters into monsters. The battle over Lovecraftian Necronomicon manuscripts and the high seats of academia is much more engaging. I am not sure if flop is a good term, just because season 2 was cancelled in 2021, or because it definitely has somehow closed down some interesting and very important Lovecraftian – systemic-racism venues.

I speak thus with a certain deeper and bitter dissatisfaction, but who am I to say. Although there was so much production effort, good vfx, CGI galore, good action science, and ample classic era pulp exaggerations and body horror ontological excess – it still left a vacuum. Body swapping is an important feature of this series and it really shows the corpo-reality of it, the pain and difficulty of such a metamorphosis which I also found does not get representation in movies. The creature and monster design is just wow, and yet i am still left with the “Sundown” pilot episode as setting the scene, and being actually the best of the entire series (especially the Shoggoth design).

I feel it could well have stayed a long feature movie. There is also an attempt at K- and J-horror “Meet Me in Daegu”, with finally an impartial portrayal of the Communist side during the Korean War that is not being dehumanized or instantly relegated to the enemy side. There is also another intriguing eps with the multiverse branchings (“I am” eps), portal jumping trough a larger multiverse with various highlights of black history from Harlem Renaissance to Afrofuturist imaginings, places and other times where black lives matter. This was finally one funky adventure with a black middle aged woman in the role of inter-dimensional Hippolyta – at its center!

I liked a lot of over the topness of it, the kitsch, the way everything is carnal as well as magical, the way racism is more horrific than the most horrific of Lovecraftian entities, at the same time like Michele in her review, felt actors skills and characters got reduced to just anti-racist Ghostbusters. I like the queering of it and the actors effort, yet I am left craving for something else, maybe miss a touch of that good weird fiction that has resulted in such good literary and aesthetically interesting materials (dunno why the prose of Sofia Samatar Monster Potraits comes to mind).

imdb

1770 – John Was Trying to Contact Aliens (directed by Matthew Killip documentary 2020)

John Shepherd spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of miles into space.

Netflix’s John Was Trying to Contact Aliens is amazing and moving

The man who tried to contact aliens from his grandma’s living room

imdb

1653 – This Compost: Erotics of Rot by Elvia Wilk (July 2020)

Alice Crain, pair of white ibises, 2015

originally published in Granta magazine July edition

excerpt:

“Drunk birds

At some point in the early 2010s, variations of a pop-science news story about bird sexuality began to circulate online. study says pollution makes birds gay and gay by mercury, read the headlines. The story was about the fact that pollutants leaking into the environment are changing the hormone systems of animals and leading to new traits and behaviors. In the case that has gotten the most attention, high levels of mercury in wetland habitats are altering the ‘pairing behavior and reproductive success’ of a species of white ibis. Scientists observe that, rather than heterosexual coupling and reproduction, some white ibises now prefer same-sex relationships. One image accompanying a news item shows a pair of male ibises strolling together along a shoreline, looking very gay indeed.”