“The Breakaway Movement is a bizarre Instagram Influencer “cult” seemingly designed to rope people into a pyramid scheme unknowingly. You start off in the breakaway movement thinking you’re going to learn things about business and how to be an influencer, but slowly the truth is revealed, that to join this elusive club you have to pay $5,000 for a kangen water filter, and sell for Enagic, which is an mlm for over priced water filters… So in this video I examine how the break away movement gets away with this scheme and stays under the radar while continuing to draw in young aspiring influencers into their mlm.” (YT channel description)
MLM schemes are some of the most pervasive expressions of neoliberalism and privatization transitional times in Eastern Europe (Romania and Albania both being rocked by such pyramid ponzi schemes immediately after 1989). There is very little chance that they will ever disappear, in fact, like this video demonstrates, they are mutating and taking on the hues of the particular times we are living in. If “abundance” is now the new mantra for both prosperity theology gospels as well as for the innumerable mantra and so called “abundance frequency” online videos, there are always new avatars and historically specific expressions of mlm. Roughly said this is a view into current ideological materials and also things in a moment of water wars. The fact that clean water is increasingly harder to get, and poor communities are forced to use lead-poisoned water such as the Flint water crisis is one aspect of it. The Breakaway – is not bizarre cult. It is just a scam adjusted to current anxieties and desires, such as the desire to work remotely (in Bali preferably), and working remotely or a nomad digital lifestyle is becoming one of the most polluting ways to exist. There is of course a lot of online BS regarding the environmental impact of becoming a digital nomad after COVID and cities being ranked according to their suitability for online remote working.
Same time this is a total takedown of celebrity – of online celebrity. Of course there is a lot of cultishness around such celebs and also the important thing to take home is that this is not an exception. It might seem exceptionally vacuous, and increasingly hard to pin down, but Breakaway does not stray far from the usual influencer ecosystem or entrepreneurship that is built on faking it on social platforms until you make it. It is a very good classroom example of current platform capitalism. What is interesting is also how all pretense at something slightly spiritual – or new agey, is gone, there is only some very thin layer of just vacation photos of happy white people (not that including black, brown or others into the picture might make it better) that promise you something completely shallow and hollow.
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).
TimeSpace Warps 