timespace coordinates: 2010’s United States, Germany, India
Origin is a 2023 American biographical drama film written and directed by Ava DuVernay. It is based on the life of Isabel Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as she writes the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Over the course of the film, Wilkerson travels throughout Germany, India, and the United States to research the caste systems in each country’s history. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: the long 20th century
To say that this epochal documentary with all its flaws, its non-sequiturs, and under-theorizing has marked our generation is an understatement. Some things are left unsaid in retrospect (it is almost 10 years or more since I have watched this series), particularly one should situate this in the context of modernity and the transfer of peoples of ideas that went on between Europe and the US, none of which went one way only. Again this is a very Eurocentric history (for a different perspective on techno-modernity check here), so it has definite and clear limits as it is mostly about the Euroatlantic world and Central Europe. The Century of the Self is also the triumph over the European Old World bourgeois civilization of the US consumer culture zeitgeist aptly described by Victoria de Grazia in her magisterial study Irresistible Empire.
Source: Charnysh 2022 quoted by Adam Tooze (not Curtis!)
But then, on the other hand, you have had the immense impact of these foreigners with bad Middle European or Eastern European accents forced to flee, outernational émigrés escaping anti semitism arriving in troves from the continent. Besides the German Frankfurter Schule critical theory – you also had another cultivated emigree diaspora from the former Habsburg Empire that brought to the East Coast with them the vivaciousness and sophistication of Viennese 1900 cultural life and went on to define advertising, marketing, and even how Western liberalism identity started defining itself during the Cold War against the Communist bloc. Another history that barely gets mentioned is how the Western democracies have been using for example – “rational choice theory” (and here the names of William Riker, Kenneth Arrow, and James Buchanan stand out) – to try and immunize the ‘Free World’ and its values by constructing a ‘scientific’ approach to social science research against the Marxist critics of Western democracies. Some ideas found a better reception across the ocean,
Psychoanalysis is just one such example to follow in the wake of the fall of the Habsburg Empire. One could pinpoint others, starting with the Genevese school of neoliberal economics. Another one, followed in detail by Adam Curtis is the trajectory of Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays (developer and early pioneer of PR) and Anna Freud in the United States. We should be wary of a pharmakon way of explaining everything or giving too much attention to ‘interiority’ and inner mental states, but since Foucault, detailing such genealogies and discoursive fields helps us understand how we came to be where we are. This documentary is also influenced by The Century of the Self is still a very compelling history of how the SELF became so central not only to advertising but also to identity politics and individual freedom of liberal capitalism also to the anthropotechnics – ways in which Western counterculture has tried to free the human subject or a hidden identity through mindfulness, techniques of meditation, human potential, yoga retreats, actualization what is known as New Age – especially as developed by the Esalen Institute since the 1960s California. It is also the perfect documentary about control after “decentralization”, or what follows in the wake of the uneven transition from the disciplinary society to what Deleuze has termed the society of control in his seminal essay from 1990 (some even say that this was his most important testament). The century of the self has become even more evident in the 21st century – the time when protocols or algorithmic capitalism is really ruling the day and when AI-driven scams, influencers, and deep fakes abound. The century of the self should be also put into dialectical relation with its inverse – the “personality cults” and authoritarian styles of the former East it was meant to overcome, and such a retreat into interiority and VR, when faced with the horrors of Vietnam War, and the government of the US supporting dictators abroad or signaling a failure of nation-building abroad or a certain developmental model. Silicon Valley is itself a piece in this puzzle, an innovation hub based on a startup model supported by Venture Capital funding to ensure US technological hegemony by sponsoring former dropouts of the counter-cultural revolutions of 1968, raised on psychotropics and weaned on petro-dollars.
They Cloned Tyrone is a 2023 American science fiction comedy mystery film directed by Juel Taylor, in his feature film directorial debut. The film stars John Boyega, Teyonah Parris and Jamie Foxx (who also serves as producer) as an unlikely trio uncovering a government cloning conspiracy. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 1988 London Japan / Soviet Union
Tetris is a 2023 biographical thriller film directed by Jon S. Baird starring Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, Sofia Lebedeva, Anthony Boyle, Toby Jones and Roger Allam. It is based on true events around the race to license and patent the video game Tetris in the late 1980s during the Cold War. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 1950s utopian experimental community ‘Victory’, California
Don’t Worry Darling is a 2022 American psychological thriller/mystery film directed by Olivia Wilde. The film stars Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Wilde, Gemma Chan, KiKi Layne, Nick Kroll, and Chris Pine. The film follows an idyllic housewife living in a company town who begins to suspect a sinister secret being kept from its residents by the man who runs it. (wiki)
Although the film is set in a place described only as “Victory Town” onscreen, it’s very clearly set – and its exteriors were filmed – in Palm Springs, California, from which most of its interior design is directly derived. The city has one of the largest caches of mid-century-modern (MCM) architecture and design in the world, and nearly every single visual element in the film draws heavily from the MCM aesthetic.
Frank, the Victory Project’s leader, is shown living in Kaufmann House, one of the most well-known mid-century homes in the world. Although the Kaufmann House’s exterior has been shown at various times over the years in both film and TV, “Don’t Worry Darling” is the first film to feature scenes shot on the property itself, including several peeks at its rarely seen interiors.
The hilltop headquarters of the Victory Corporation is the iconic “volcano house” in the Mojave Desert community of Newberry Springs, California.
The geometric dancers featured in the film are based on the choreography of Busby Berkeley, most known for his film musicals released in the 1930s.
spacetime coordinates: 1950s US
directed by: Josephine Decker
It is a pleasure to write about Josephine Decker’s movies, as she is without a doubt one of the most inventive and unpredictable filmmakers out there. Her work is one that refuses and avoids any easy classifications and also avoids the easy trappings of arthouse cinema. I watched “Shirley” a few years back and I still feel the strong impression it left on me (as do all of her movies). The movie is a fictionalization of the life of American Gothic horror writer Shirley Jackson who wrote such classics as The Haunting of Hill House (the movie The Haunting directed by Robert Wise in 1963 – is genuinely scary and has haunted me since adolescence). The casting is magnificent and it is one of that period 1950s movies where you realize it is about now.
The movie starts with the recollection of a young couple of newlyweds – the Nemsers who end up entering the bizarre clammy nest of Shirley J and her husband, a philandering but sharp and appreciative critic and supporter of his wife who seems to encourage her bouts of drinking and lethargy. As I said, I have seen the movie a while ago – and will restrict myself to the obvious and striking details. Shirley is magnificently played by Elisabeth Moss, who appears to be surfing and suffering a combined assortment of phobias and fears at the same time they all feel the ‘proper’ response to a world still unable to tackle the Kinsey Report. The whole society around her seems to supply her with intolerable horrors of blandness and conformity. The relationship between these two women – Rose and Shirley is alluring, hypnotic, and central to the movie. In spite of unequal or let’s say unstable relations, there is an air of constant seduction with Rose falling under the spell of Shirley in spite of being treated with cruelty and being transformed into a caretaker by her husband. Even this cruelty is erotic in a way, it keeps complicating a deep feeling and attraction between these women. Both of them are always lying on the edge of a precipice, swerving and avoiding various dead alleys, the precipice of conformity, bad husbands and crushed illusions.
There is also a feeling of of what i cannot call otherwise than ‘literary vampirism’ – the feeding from and off the experiences of others. The ‘Norman Rockwellesque US keeps unwinding and even it its academic or high cultural fortress appears to be actually a sham. In fact, there is an underbelly, a twilight reality that escapes most of the contemporaries, a chthonian shadow theatre or a constant shadow play with death, decay and bewitchment that seems to transgress boundaries of gender, fiction or reality.
Mushrooms also play a role and at some point, with Shirley almost transforming herself into some sort of stereotypical witch, a wise woman of the forest or corruptor – as well as the ever more rapacious (min) detective, able to see all the misdeeds, to follow all the injustices, the only true if unnerving feminist gumheel. We will never know if mushroom poisoning means making available like in Alice a mismatch of these worlds that are adjacent and contiguous.
I love how ambiguity and clandestinity is played upon by Josphine Decker – since she perfectly integrates the nastiest relational or couple aspects and you feel like celebrating the remorseless attitude of a writer at the top of her trade. Shirley is a writer that is somehow super aware of the various pitfalls and falsities of her circumstance and is never a victim of it. There are no supernatural elements even after being walled in that house (even this feels so much like a Poe – Gothic trope in Tell-Tale Heart) and everything feels like gaslighting. As in classic feminist Gothic The Yellow Paper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, Shirley seems to slowly mutate and shapeshift while also being able to expose all the foibles of what every talented woman has to pull through by living in a male (cisgender) world. It is not the world beyond but the world out here – the daily horrors that people inflict upon one another. Even if I have no way of recognizing this as a male cisgender – in a bizarre way but very familiar way I was stuck in my home several times(even before Corona) and even developed some form of dread of getting out or meeting people. That struck a chord with me. It is also somehow the other side of lockdowns, of those lockdowns that already happened, totally unrelated to quarantine or social distancing (here society itself is being shunned away). The world she writes about is actively seeping through, and becomes the reality of her own life, while the inverse of course is true as well.
“A Documentary about how Hustle Culture, Workaholism, Toxic Productivity, Self Improvement, and Self-Help gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk function as a form of Social Control which the Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls Psychopolitics. Psychopolitics is a form of smart power that governs our Neoliberal Society of Control and Hustle Culture and Positive Psychology (Toxic Positivity) are just some of its many manifestations. It is leading to burnout, depression, and anxiety.” (1Dime channel)
Honestly sometimes I find the concepts used by Byung-Chul Han a bit simplistic, and also a bit redundant, considering that others have been using nearly the same terms. For me it is a bit unclear why psychopolitics is better than neuropolitics, or why smart power is somehow better than soft power. Some of these terms feel a bit too fancy or just slightly upgraded versions of something else. When calling something ‘smart’, just because everything tend to be called ‘smart’ nowadays, there is always the pitfall of reinforcing or even unwittingly hyping up the very things one tries to warn against.
That being said, this documentary is voicing out a general dissatisfaction and sense of doom regarding work – bullshit jobs and the whole protestant ethic, as well as the entire self help industry that is trying hard to re-educate and optimize everything in times of climate crisis, dwindling opportunities and general burnout. There also more and more the feeling that the so-called CEO mindset is being sold and advertised to everyone. This is not anymore the get rich quick scams online but an inescapable reality of theological proportions, of insanely rich CEOs (what the Chinese are already calling their own rich as crazy rich) acting like everybody else is disposable.
TimeSpace Warps 