Lost Ollie is an American live action/computer animated miniseries created by Shannon Tindle. The series is based on the 2016 children’s book Ollie’s Odyssey by William Joyce. (wiki)
imdb / rottentomatoes / Behind-The-Scenes
“Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle… Everything I do is stitched with its color.” WS Merwin
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a 2022 American absurdist comedy-drama film written and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as “Daniels” [Swiss Army Man]). The film stars Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis.
The plot follows a Chinese-American woman (Yeoh) being audited by the Internal Revenue Service who discovers that she must connect with parallel universe versions of herself to prevent a powerful being from causing the destruction of the multiverse. The film has been described as a “swirl of genre anarchy” and features elements of black comedy, science fiction, fantasy films, martial arts films, romance and animation.
Kwan and Scheinert researched the concept of the multiverse as far back as 2010, and began writing the screenplay as early as 2016. Originally written for Jackie Chan, the lead role was later reworked and offered to Yeoh.
The film features music composed by Son Lux, including collaborations with musicians Mitski, David Byrne, and André 3000. Critics lauded its imagination, direction, the performances of the cast, and its handling of themes such as existentialism, nihilism, and Asian American identity. (wiki)
Many thanks to Pnea Gabi for arranging and posting this here.
A confession: after enthusing about this movie before even watching it. I’ve joined the hype around it and it is really impossible to extricate from it. I owe it to those on TW that have made me aware of its existence either by posting its beautifully chaotic poster art or by giving intriguing detailed spoilers. A good movie is one that gets discussed a lot – not in the sense of the last SW or the last Obi-Wan pitting various camps against one another – but by the variety and plurality of its responses, cold or hot takes, perspectives and viewpoints. It’s about how it tends to reach, stimulate, agglutinate these views, working its way from body visceral cinema response to daily chit chat. I say “body” because Everything Everywhere combines everything typical of what Linda Williams identified as body genres (genre’s involving powerful almost, unavoidable bodily affective transformations): slapstick comedy, melodrama, horror, and even kinky (if predictable and worn out) porn antics.
First I am going to quote from Scott C Richmond’s paper ““Dude, that’s just wrong”: Mimesis, Identification, Jackass” for a fragment I hold dear because it finally recognizes something important in the Jackass movie opening scene with Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O willingly submitting to paper cuts (as you maybe remember Michelle Yeoh’s character taps into her other multiverse selves by doing the very same Jackass stunt). Scott Richmond calls it “critical stupidity” and reminds us how stupid it is to dismiss what would otherwise be “riotously stupid” scenes. One cannot but feel pulled by both the aversion and attraction to these ‘wrong’ acts. Words do not suffice when we’re living through something that can be at once radically social,and radically antisocial. Critical stupidity could be a way to confront what is “inarticulate and deeply human” or help us deal with “irreparable exposure to others”. Denying this we end only as dismissive contemporary media refusniks basically, falling back on the tired if refined certitudes of the pure intellect. Why not give importance and enter (tumble?) a terrain of intimate and consummate ‘wrongness’?!
Theory, for Scott Richmond (and cinema theory especially so) has to deal with the most hilariously stupid, decerebrated moments of today’s dominating media experiences (think Tiktok, YT challenges, alternate reality game etc. + their horrific counterparts such as right wing replacement thesis influenced shooter youths) :
Today we must feel as pressing, somehow, that there‘s something we don‘t yet know how to account for even (or especially) in the stupidest moments our media gives us. These moments may not seem to call for an accounting, on account of their stupidity. It has seemed to me for some time that our contemporary popular cinema has lost whatever faith it may once have had in articulateness or intelligence. It has placed its faith instead in a perceiving, affected, porous, and voluptuously and irreparably exposed body. This faith in the
body is not new, but it is both increasingly intensified, the object of an aesthetic elaboration, and newly endemic, ubiquitous in our contemporary media.
One may say it has been going on especially in the work of such directors as Cronenberg yet I think it’s more about Mo Lei Tau (see below). Going to jump here to a series of worthy reviews (I am sure there is many more out there in the critical multiverse of the net), before going fractal on Everything Everywhere with what came out of an intense exchange in Romanian with good friend/cinephile Felix Petrescu from electronic duo magicians Makunouchi Bento. We like to disagree and we also gave it a long (over +30 emails) tail, in my mind close to the ‘multiverse’ format of the film. The popularity of the multiverse genre (not just from Marvel’s Dr Strange and the Madness of Multiverse to indie production but also regarding string theory is a testament to the ‘multiverse is the new zombie’ TW. On one side I agree with this diagnosis, especially the one formulated by Thomas Murphy below. No mistery that under current franchise TINA (there is no alternative) – absolute permutability appears inevitable to today’s realism capitalist enchanted by multiverse theories. This diagnosis of the exhaustion of possibility is nowadays propped up by every movie discussing availabilities that are not there for a majority of people. What is one to make of multiverse theories & future contingent possible worlds beside most of these being cringe (in TM’s view):
Thomas has got a clear point there and convergence culture offers overwhelming proof, but I am also pulled away by Guy Lardreau’s metaphysics of fiction here (further explored in a great post by Steven Shaviro). Fiction (for Lardreau’s philosophical fictions) may exist only when the real does not join the necessary. Leibnizian permutations do not exhaust possibilities or embrace some version of the anthropic principle, they do not start with our world as the best of all worlds, nor do they refuse the desolation of the actual world. These permutations do not turn away but in spite of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss caricature, which should be taken seriously (after G Lardreau) not just as a caricature of Leibniz, but a plunge into going beyond experience or failure of imagination into how bad and disastrous most of these worlds tendentially are, especially when one has to confront an incalculable number of world making. Secondly it’s also about the compossibility or such worlds (not just of effects but of worlds within worlds) – how much they can pack, how much micro/macro they carry along.
I start with Matt Donato’s excellent review of Detention directed by Joseph Kahn (2011) an unduly forgotten self-produced mad movie that was severely underappreciated but merits rediscovery under the fresh entry of 2020 Everything Everywhere. Twenty years after, Detention needs to be appreciated as a revolutionary, fractal, groundbreaking mad SF young adult cinematic experience. Detention paved the way for Daniel’s Everything Everywhere “celebratory chaotic energy”.Their experimentalism and innovation is a result of ‘post cinematic’ ways of directing music videos and both amply confirm how important it is to train yourself beyond the cinema. Detention was the first bulwark against the rising tide of toxic nostalgia cultural industries that are built on fan-servicing and self-confirmation loops. One cannot appreciate this movie if one ignores the other (ten yr later). Like Riley says: “The only way to change the past? Change the present.” “(By finally watching Detention.)”
Then the fine point made by reviewer Kyle Turner for WM magazine. Seen through the lense of queer theory and the history of ‘lower’ cultural form(s)” of slapstick and gross-out comedy” or of Jackie Chan’s (apparently before Michelle Yeoh, Daniels centered everything around J. Chan) dealing with the Asian (and later in his Hollywood movies with Asian American) maleness. The infamous ‘butt-plug scene’ becomes here a stumbling block to the whole comedic queering of masculinity and gender, a proof that this movie is far from perfect and trips over its own well-scripted & choreographed antics. The risk is that this ‘everything everywhere’ is not an elsewhere or elsewhen but very much limited to here and now (more akin to Zizek’s decaf reality point I guess).
Even Jacobin Eileen Jones endorsed Everything Everywhere as a “Rare Triumph” for marshaling Evelyn Wang as a multilateral “ordinary person” faced with extraordinary pressures of today’s hustle culture world, facing the constant assault of capitalist disruption mantras or Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism while inventing her own “way of fighting”.
Then there is Mona Eltahawy’s review essay: the Menopause Multiverse – while I read this I felt the multiverse can really need more Michelle Yeoh’s and also (obviously!) if it is to explore the multiverse and not the retro-verse or a uni-mono-verse. The movie offers a valid critique of today’s society’s ageism as well (cultural products and movies mostly depicting or centered around young adults, adolescents, etc.). One cannot stick with the butt plug arche-jokes nor with a scene (since MTV) dominated by adolescent masculinity or superhero franchise multiplications and tired tropes. In her words: “Between crushing anxiety, hot flashes, red hot rage and brain fog, who does not want to beat the whole world up?”
GEOPOLITICS OF BIG TROUBLE
So here are a few personal notes, extracted from the email exchange. They aim to add a (forced?) geopolitical slant to Everything Everywhere that otherwise seems firmly embedded in the US Asian American histories. For the moment I would you to ignore the specificities of Asian American experience and representation in media, amply explored in Michelle H Huang’s excellent video essay Inhuman Figures: Robot Clones Aliens (which I covered in SFitze #3) that I urge u to watch. Somehow I see this movie as an impossible entanglement of China and the US, at a critical moment of their decoupling. This ‘divorce’ is harder and harder to assess because it feels mostly farcical and rhetorical. It feels like it is here and not here at the same time (at least in this worst ‘what if’ potential actualizations). In the face of (racially motivated) mass shootings, Asian hate crimes, anti-abortion legislation and the rising tide of ethno-politics (not just in the US), the US cultural avant-garde is trying to salvage multiculturalism against vociferous anti-immigration pushbacks, trying to avoid aligning itself with what sounds like the worst of Cold War McCarthyism (see for ex the FBI arrest of Chinese American physics professor Professor Xiaoxing Xi from Temple University in Philadelphia) or with echoes of Interment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Feels ‘multi-‘ verse is becoming popular when the ‘multi’- polar or ‘multi’- cultural is getting more and more unpopular. So in spite of multiverse exploding in cinemas (here I agree with Thomas Murphy) it seems almost to signal exactly the opposite – the failures of one version-, one- power, one- hegemon to rule them all. Everything Everywhere is about growing insecurities (in spite of all the security talk) and about saving the future by acting in the present and the dwindling ‘roles’ and opportunities for those un-aligned. One has to choose sides, and stick with any version, as economic, commercial, and technological competition btw the new blocs is gaining momentum. There is a feeling that at a moment when one cannot do without the other, everyone (especially in the West) is trying to prove that one can stake it out alone. It’s is not improbable that China would mirror that, and in the face of this US-China honeymoon cracking, they have to stick with what they got, fly low and hope to toughen it out. No matter how derived, imperfect or remote, your own version of the US will have to do, even if this means just the victory of Disneyfication. Theme-parking the US can well happen in China without US approval. In a universe segregating from the multiverse, militarism has become acceptable, jingoism has become matter of fact and spying accusations, copyright wars, National Security State biceps flexing is the new normal. So, is it foolish to be longing for the multi-perspectival or to try and find (impossible?!) cross-overs?! Where can one build upon those interior ChinaTowns and madcap admixtures or revisit Big Trouble in Little China for all the sustenance one needs in Everything Nowhere times like these? Or maybe this is the one chance we have to welcome a last hysterical attempt (no canned laughter this time) that we might regain some measure of Sinophone or Sinophile acceptance when everyone seems to abhorr ‘verse’ jumping.
INSTITUTIONAL MOODS
Who’s afraid of Taxation? One of the major questions that Everything Everywhere raised was why the scene at the IRS with IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre (played Godzilla style by an incredible Jamie Lee Curtis)? Nobody in the above-linked reviews discusses or mentions this “IRS audit” scene beyond the ensuing martial arts battles or antics. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something there. I am tempted to quetion this universal acclaim at the fears & hates of a bare knuckles encounter with an IRS inspector (no matter if you are in Germany or Romania or US). Tax declarations produce a lot of pain. Still, for me this alignment feels disingenous (like that other US inherent evil: bureaucracies, Big Government, anything that smacks of redistribution or regulatory government bodies). Naturally, nobody is going to believe a bunch of millionaires at Davos this year protesting with “Tax Us More” signs. What is the position of the IRS baddie in pop culture, comics, movies? Doesn’t seem to be a fixture in pop culture – and there are countless examples of US libertarian bias against both taxation and goverment agencies. Cults are gothic pop, even a reccurent haunt of the youthful republic since its inception (think Brockden Brown’s Wieland or later or Hubbard’s Scientology), and only be declaring yourself a religion (or a corporation) one might hope to escape the reach of the IRS. IRS is probably the closest you can come to a nightmare of US right-wing survivalist thinking, their worst enemy within, the Commies at home in Washington DC that prey on the ‘average citizen’, small and middle income family businesses and skins them alive for the last nickel. Family businesses, supposed ‘mom and pops’ shops are also becoming what Melinda Cooper identified as the underpinning of an unlikely alliance: that btw social conservative values & extreme market liberalism. There is one comics example I recently discovered – DC comics Lobo Death and Taxes 1996 4 vol (check especially Tax Death of the Universe) which (of course) treats the IRS as the most horrendous institution in the universe. In a system that favors tax evasions and tax heavens for the rich and where corporations pay close to no taxes, the small entrepreneur makes for a perfect victim, so audits and taxes (think laundromat owner) make for a lot of chagrin and laughs.
Of course, there are worlds where the IRS and its inspectors can be your friends (even lovers), and this is what I like about how Everything Everywhere takes on the trope of the monstrous showdown. It is also one in which the worst of the worst is not what one expects. The worst anti-climatic showdowns are bureaucratic the movie seems to tell us, and no superhero is yet a match for that. In a sense ‘verse- jumping’ also has a bureaucratic component – one has to do the unexpecte, make a request in the system. This has multicultural parallels, especially with that Chinese fictional meta-text Journey to the West – where the heaven bureaucracy is akin to the earthly, so everything is tied to filling a form – even for establishing the amount of rain. There is much hate for the IRS, but few have managed to make it a central part of the action or transform it into an arena of cosmic proportions.
ANIMATEDNESS EVERYWHERE
Everything Everywhere is also an important piece of what Deborah Levitt calls the “Animatic Apparatus” and the way it foregrounds different styles of animation (from CGI, stop-motion, motion graphics, VFX to hand-drawn animated children’s doodles styles) is a proof that we truly live at a time when animation has become a dominant medium of our times. It is also a movie that even if controlled and intentionally done – throws everything at you and does not resort to Netflix segmentation, parcellation or niche-building. No garbage separation but everything all at once. “[A] brand new world of allatonceness.” announced for McLuhan (quoted by Shaviro – McLuhan 176; McLuhan and Fiore 63) the realm of electronic media. The allatonceness present in the movie’s very title signals this synchronicity of processes happening all at the same time, as opposed to the serial (cinematic?) mechanical Gutenberg’s printing press or Ford’s assembly line. We get a sense that every Evelyn Quan Wang is doing her own thing – even if the focus seems to be just on one at the same time, with the exception when her own image cracks – and seems to split or fan out like the traces of movement in the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey.
Animatedness redefines what is “biological life” or that there are multiple routes to intelligent life or consciousness (or rather sentient life). There is a lot of talk about what are ‘good’ special effects or outstanding cgi nowdays, how does something unnatural feel ‘natural’ or how does the CGi history of a particular film director stand up to the scrutiny of fans. As we are becoming more versed in spotting the limits of unilateral FX (one might say “intrinsic limitations and inevitable breakdowns”) like the ‘third eye’ debate surrounding Sam Raimi’s last Dr Strange, FX can enliven or animate ‘dead’ stones, or even put googly eyes on eveything (including Michelle Yeoh’s ‘third eye’). Arguably it is FX and animation that make ‘multiverse’ or many-world theories more available or more popular than ever in video-clips, movies and countless other media. Animation traces the multiple forking paths and other ‘evolutionary’ outcomes along cinematic alternate universe. Otherwise the ‘hot-dog fingers’ (with both reference to Kubrick’s savannah opening scene in the A Space Odysee) would not be so inherently cartoonish and relatable. Cartoons since the early days of cinema have been showing off their independence, showing us their wobbly, elastic spastic members and fat (middle) fingers! They show off their carriers as neither evolutionary ‘fit’ nor ‘unfit’. Walter Benjamin has been attracted to the non-human aspect of animations and how such animated images have allowed non-human form gain wider acceptance, even if later he also sensed the dangers associated with this ‘everything everywhere’ modularity or malleability.
As prehensile fingers are transformed into a non-prehensile mess, the defining feature of the human species and its close primate relatives becomes an embarassment and a burden (and yes primates do not hold the monopoly on that, since there is a lot of other species with prehensile members – such as Chameleons or even caterpillars). The contingency of a world with a species having (just) five fingers or that happened to have hot dog fingers becomes apparent. Animation is not only a tool for fun but also helps us explore a more vast evolutionary phase space. CGI animations are actually the closest we have to reconstructing possible life on other exo-world & other planets, or extinct worlds from the deep past. At the same time, this animatedness also defines the felt pressures on our daily working life, where low pay & overtime has become the rule, a world where one feels pulled apart like an elastic cartoon by all the demands of productivity, efficiency and multitasking. In a cosmic and metaphysic sense, the ‘animatic apparatus’ also helps us conceive our current world around us as too responsive, too panpsychically unruly, too agential and full to the brim with much more eyes than we care to count or look into.
There is perhaps also a brash tribute (maybe a bit wistful) to that absurdist genre of action-comedy pioneered in Hong Kong – mo lei tau, the one that I also grew up with in Romania being fed on badly translated but so good. I cannot unsee those superbly choreographed and edited HK action comedy movies. Mo lei tau is unsurpassed by any other comedy genre in the west imho. I think one should never ignore this Diasporic dimension of Everything Everywhere that goes beyond the usual Asian American references, especially one that is open to an influx of different expressions coming from the ‘Asian Tiger economies’ (winks at Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan) and mainland China. Especially Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer, All For the Winner, Flirting Scholar and much more) masterpieces in the footsteps of Jackie Chan, Samo Hung and Chow Yun-fat, or even farther back to Hui Brothers trio from the HK 1970s. Mei lei tau comes from Cantonese phrase of mo lei tau gau which literally means ‘cannot differentiate btw head and tail’, or usually translated as ‘coming from nowhere’ or ‘makes no sense’. The neo-dadaism of this slapstick genre is mostly lost to the West since it involves a lot of verbiage and quick turns of phrases. Mo Lei Tau became intrinsic to Hong Kong popular culture and its socio-political background, being a harbor for mainland immigrants and also developing a new vernacular with its own verve and style, a style that would go against linguistic conventions and would be steeped in localism and cant.
spacetime coordinates: 2020 in Boston, Massachusetts
Black Friday is an American horror comedy film directed by Casey Tebo. It stars Devon Sawa, Ivana Baquero, Ryan Lee, Stephen Peck, Michael Jai White, and Bruce Campbell (who serves as producer). (wiki)
spacetime coordinates / Synopsis: 2010. Meguro City, Tokyo, Cat Earth, a world of corporations and commercialism, where a giant mechanical Colonel Sanders wanders the streets with an axe embedded in its head, loudly advertising the restaurant. Tamala, bored with the city, leaves her home against the wishes of her human mother and flies away in a personal spaceship bound for her birthplace, Orion. Her ship is shot down by the Mysterious Postcat, and lands on the outskirts of Hate City on the Planet Q
TAMALA 2010: A Punk Cat in Space is a 2002 Japanese animated film written, directed and featuring music by the two-person team t.o.L (“trees of Life”), known individually as K. and kuno. The film features both 2D and 3D computer animation, and is mostly black-and-white. The characters, designed by t.o.L and Kentarō Konpon, are reminiscent of Sanrio‘s Hello Kitty and 1960s anime and manga such as Astro Boy. The creators admit that one of the film’s central plot points, about a cult operating as a postal service and corporate monopoly, is influenced and adapted from Thomas Pynchon‘s novel The Crying of Lot 49.
TAMALA2010 was originally envisioned as the first episode of a trilogy – the latter two parts were given the working titles TAMALA IN ORION (which would chronicle Tamala’s search for her real mother) and TATLA (which was to explore the character of Tatla in greater depth). A colour TV series was also planned, with the working title TAMALA IN SPACE. As of 2020, none of these has surfaced – instead there have been two shorter works, the t.o.L written and directed TAMALA ON PARADE
and TAMALA’S “WILD PARTY“
–two short stories from different writers, storyboarded and directed by Shūichi Kohara and animated by Studio 4°C. Both of these are included on the TAMALA ON PARADE DVD, released in Japan in August 2007. This DVD does not have English subtitles.
A sequel named TAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK has been under production since 2019. (wiki)
A Town Called Panic (French: Panique au village) is a 2009 internationally co-produced stop-motion animated adventure fantasy comedy family film directed by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar.
The film is based on the TV series of the same name and stars Aubier, Jeanne Balibar, Nicolas Buysse, Véronique Dumont, Bruce Ellison, Frédéric Jannin, Bouli Lanners, and Patar, among others. It premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and was the first stop-motion film to be screened at the festival.
Empire magazine were very positive awarding the film 4 stars, summing it up as “Toy Story on absinthe” (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 2000’s New York City, Washington, D.C. / 2010’s London
Night at the Museum is an American media franchise of fantasy-comedy films based on the children’s book The Night at the Museum by Milan Trenc, are directed by Shawn Levy. Starring Ben Stiller as a museum night security guard named Larry Daley, the films also star an ensemble cast featuring Owen Wilson, Robin Williams, Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan, Patrick Gallagher, Rami Malek, Mizuo Peck, Mickey Rooney, Bill Cobbs, and Dick Van Dyke. (wiki)
Night at the Museum (2006) – imdb
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) – imdb
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014) – imdb
Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again (2022) – imdb
timespace coordinates: near future HK China
Director: Henri Wong
based on novel: Monster by A Lee Martinez
https://twitter.com/athenogenes/status/1340358488363511812
I wanted to start with a critical quote by celebrated author and Sci-fi feminist Ursula K Le Guin as an entry point to something quite different: the new Chinese movie Monster Run taking risks. Indeed, we hear it more and more often: “Commodified fantasy takes no risks”.
a screen within a screen within a screen
21st century blockbusters tend to adhere piously to this dogma. Apart from instances of tokenism, it is less about world building new worlds, but only about propping up the old ones. Banking on previous successes is what big franchise do nowadays as a matter of good economic course. This stale creative output (i mean here mainly Marvel capitalist superheroines and superheroes) can be sure entertaining, yet incredibly predictable. And yes maybe they are not cinema and this for good reasons(and not especially becose M Scorsese sez so). I am not going to rehash old/new media-technologically significant histories of why the first half of XX c was ruled by cinema and why cinema gave way in the 1950s to TV in the US, or why 1970s Godfather gave way to the The Sopranos. The debates around post – continuity cinema from a few years ago, theoretically mapped by Steven Shaviro in his Post-Cinematic Affect have been stimulating to everyone, including me. What I’m trying follows up on those fruitful debates but also keeps an eye of fan studies and fandom in general. Cinema is not cinema anymore because it also commercially engulfed like a process of phagocytosis – all these previous non-artsy core fandoms, especially older comics/male-dominated geek cultures – that were already contested & blasted from within. Ursula K LeGuin is herself part of a generation of radical women writers (together with Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ & others) that actively & successfully challenged the most cherished ideals of Golden Age Sci-fi establishment in the 60s &70s & 80s that went hand in parallel with developments within comics. IMHO we are just entering a phase of truly global fandoms & one more diverse (artists, authors, publics, critics) than ever & completly bonkers in the best sense – one that the titans of media struggle to keep up with or try to ignore at their at their peril. Marvel nowadays exemplifies a sort of mise en abime mediatic spiral, the rush of older (retro) canons & fanon (full of contradictions & unsolvable antinomies) carried along and modulated by always mutating & rapidly changing technologies.
binging your way trough the time warp
New “structures of feeling” manifest as current meta- series reflect and build on our own binge status – #fullretromania churned by streaming giants (the Netflix Apple+ Disney + era) under Corona stress loockdown conditions. The soap opera TV series mass appeal success – gets to be lionized within the confines of streaming services such as Netflix. Importantly, and out of the Anglophone bubble – not everyone is Netflix & chill. There’s also in Eastern Europe (especially Romania satellite TV multi-channel bonanza) an acquired post 1989 TV taste & fandom of an older generation (those in their 60s or 70s and still quite gendered – say the generation of our moms) enjoying a whole array of Turkish dramas or Korean historical k-dramas. Otherwise no accident that some Marvel series and movies are self-reflexive, self ironic (postmodern cultural logic at work) chocke-full self-referential digital products. WandaVision is practically one single (and quite unsettling) uninterrupted history of home entertainment in a screen whitin a screen within a screen shot. To me they are like Nam Jun Paik art installations assembled for stay-at-home public in a serial form. Audience is akin to the special agent- (SHIELD-like?! NSA LOVINT?) pay-per-view binging and media analyzing to death 1950s 1960s 1970s US drama universes. The Marvel prosumers live within their screens and pay with their distracted & highly trained attention or continue tele- working uploading new YT replies or reaction videos about their favorite shows. For me it is not important to condamn binging or to relegate it to the addictive. Even if addictive it should still teach us something about our current status – of beings living trough very fast technological change, while almost doing the equivalent of a inter-planetary (or inter-galactic) trip. Binging feels almost like a trance state where nothing is portioned, where supposedly you get the whole season in one gulp. It is the media equivalent of constant guilty pleasures – basic ally what woman audiences have been been accused of all along. Binge and bulimic habits converge and a moralizing attitude akin to the moral panics of the 1980s has been internalized & casualized.
embracing the comics no risk formula
Hollywood embraced the comics majors formula AFTER independent comics artists (especially IMAGE comics) started their own publishing, changing and countering such formulaic franchise monoliths to start with. Comics Marvel or DC where pretty much over-extendeding themselves in a gamut of remakes of remakes BEFORE they ended onscreen. They were always banking on their wide distribution and wide readership by indulgin into canonic fan service, killing various titles ritually, constantly burying and resurrecting their stars, cashing in on the formulaic, extracting value from their pedigree pop iconicity. TimeWarner has been shrinking DC comics division – after it merger with Telecom+ Before this cinematic conglomerate – comics merger, there were re-issues and re-adaptions of previous 50-60 years of lesser or bigger successes – all ij tow with their widening readerships, stagnating sales and diversifying sub- audiences. Various pop cultural aspects were infinitely debatable & exciting with endless discussions even back then via letters from readers or during face 2 face atComic Cons etc Although Ursula’s insightful rant aims at heroic fantasy & space opera (mainly resuscitated by SW) tired tropes (culminating perhaps in ridiculous 1987 Masters of the Universe movie) , it still cuts across everything that is most despicable nowadays; entire media empires as an extension of global theme-parking. Now one single Marvel blockbuster makes as much box office money as the whole US comics industry. The gold is in the ownership and control over the characters – the milking of old & established caped hero brands. Cutting costs and pension plans has become a priority in comics industry, especially since blockbuster movies became so profitable. Yes, there is incredible reductionistic ‘toyfication’ going on – changing and reversing the flow of production chains, so that movies get made ONLY in order to sell more plastic merch and build even more experience economy parks.
world-building and world-playing
While this has been our lot since at least the 2000s, I would like to try and recover at least a certain uninteded effect of toyfiction. There is defintely a golden age of Chinese sci-fi going on – kehuan – uses original concepts, images, constructions, techniques sometimes derived from classical or ancient times to surprising effect. In view of Chinese 2020 Monster Run movie – all religions might have thus a bottom-up cosmological readiness, practicing their skill with various toy universes. Thinking this way makes a lot of ancient sacred artefacts – revered in their time, seem very much like sacred toys, and I am not saying this in order to belittle religious experience or draw attention on the ‘infantile’ aspects of religion or in order to draw ridicule at their attempt to world-build and world-play. Toys also have to do with models of the world, with the speculative capacity to model the universe. What is basically that essential Ptolemaic instrument – the armillary sphere, or what is that Antikythera mechanism but a long series of elaborate pre-electronic cosmic toys?!
toyfiction: lively automatons and religious toys
It is maybe useless to see toyfication and toy-fiction as anything but as further attempt to sanitize, to cutify, to subsume all creativity, to repackage innocence and ingenue aesthetics into further expansions of capital. But toys have lead us in other directions as well. Well, if we regard the first lively automatons as religious toys participating in a theo- robotic history, then they are all expressions of a certain restless (neo-vitalist?) mechanistic mystery play. More often than not there is the possibility that any cheap toy u buy might be poisoned or produced under inhuman forced labor (laogai) conditions and thus be the preferred vehicle & embodiment of the darkest toxic forces of capital. With that in mind, I consider Monster Run a new example of how toons and toys blend into religious mechanisms and Escherian geometrical puzzles – mystical complexes reinvented as weird playgrounds of Spirits, Demons, Monsters, Gods.
faux gold auratic glow of the bloody fun fair parks
Such a natural philosophy of toys would regard humankind itself as human toys of elemental forces(or humans as playthings of the Gods). I say this in order to reverse engineer their infantile consumerist function and cautiously map their preternatural cuteness across an unexpected both sacred&profane terrain. Aberrant toys, cheap copies, fake plastic artefakes, lucky cat faux gold do have an unsettling auratic glow even as they are mass produced and easily reproductible. They also end up on the same mall stall – the golden plastic toothpick box next to the electoplated orthodox incense burners (both made in China btw). In a thoroughly commodified fantasy world, of Spirited Away theme parks abandoned and new ones being built, heaps of plastic toys, puppet limbs on beaches and microplastic slowly filling our oceans, toys become harbingers of ‘numinous’ doom. On the more auspicious note – there is a link between ancient Chinese lucky cats, old sayings (recorded in The Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang) about feline behavior and good omens that announce easy commerce or are supposed to ward off evil. Our 21 c plastic temples in contrast are left floating under more or less murky waters. Yet, they are more strange, more weird than your usual place of dedicated prayer. They are generally scary fun fair theme parks like party clubs mimicking Egyptian glitz or Las Vegas pyramids as sold and Made in and increasingly Created by China.
new elasticity of time & space in the 21st century
Monster Run could be one such backdoor entry, a portal towards the 21st c inter-dimensional thinking & feeling. Onr that id still at odds with 20th c notions & certitudes. Thinking about the MULTIVERSE or about PARALLEL DIMENSIONS, PORTALS – has become pretty common, even maybe a signature of 21 c century spatial and temporal restructuring under both unbridled speculative daredo & as insidious algo-capitalistic means of reproduction. While most non-essential dream-workers work from home(ones that David Graeber hoped to wake up from their productivity slumber) bouncing off the four walls (and sometimes singing from their balconies). These dream workers are also exposed to time warps and bouts of binge-induced non-locality. We are always elsewhere, on The Expanse riding together with the Rocinante crew or chased by mutant monsters on K-drama hallways or deep inside a game level. This restructuring usually arrives via Sci-fi tropes but is also felt as the accretion of a condensed all embracing atmosphere precipitating from our daily experiences under lockdown. Binging on series, YT or TikTopk videos, or reading various lenghty novels is not just a time filler – it also explains something universal about sentient beings. Either cyborg or human they might be spending their long pod-status onboard life under lockdown crunching trough and enjoying media. This has been one of the universal constants of COVID time – something that would feel familiar to (Martha Wells’s) MURDERBOT onboard the long stays in between the landing stations. We are not alone even when alone or most solipsistic, but surrounded by various invented, imaginary creatures, attachments and life support systems as well as very material cloud computing infrastructures burning a lot of fuels that keep us glued to the ultra-HD streaming. We are closely interdependently enjoying various cultural serialisms at a time of general distress. This basic mediatic serialism (with healthy interruptions) during COVID pandemic staycation exhibits a new chewy elasticity of time spent mostly inside closed, built environments. An elastic time best expressed by the Indonesian notion of rubber time jam karet (check interview with Riar Rizaldi by bv film critic Łukasz Mańkowski ), one also taken up by Irina Gheorghe in one of her lecture- performances in Yogyakarta.
homemade creepiness and animatronic mystery plays
What would such a sacrificial rite (sacrificing childhood dreams, naivete, plain fun etc) look nowadays? Toys (animatronic ones especially) offer bloody movable spectacles – empty (abandoned) creepy temples where few make it out to tell the gory tale. Under their healthy, family-oriented innocence, what lies beneath amounts to a splatter grand-guignolesque childhood spectacle where a ham-acting Nicholas Cage plays along. Material toys do take part in a larger creep that includes a longer trail of various creepy digital objects. In fact this homemade creepiness is key nowadays. From creepypasta to YT toons – we unwind a disturbing children’s world gamified, exploited and uploaded by automated editing toolz that push non curated content under ur nose to ur toddler. These creepy hard-to-follow (for adults) content loops have been explored in the essays of James Bridle and their follow-up of rules and manic content filtering.
Chinese Boxes and Matryoshka universes
To go back to Monster Run in spite of what critics have been calling a mess and “salad script” -you can just mainly watch it for fun (if you find a good subbed copy of it). On one level it is just a very fresh Cantonese Taoist Ghostbuster story. My interest was the setting of this monster hunt conflict between worlds that wanders between sino-futurist city cyperpunkish back alleys, CGI interiors etc New Chinese construction sites (including the Belt & Road Initiative). They are the current inter-dimensional nexus hiding in plain sight but also offering the comfort of tiny houses or private otaku room interiors that offer respite from very brutal outer worlds. In this movie backgrounds are morphing, being constantly remade almost in a Minecraft way and with a view (for me) for neglected aspects of the Chinese 21 c miracle – (as opposed to the NY skyline of Nolan’s Inception kaleidoscope let’s say). Of course there is a lot of shamanistic goings on, gate-keeping, sliding and hiding in-btw worlds and worlds that are nested inside worlds like Chinese boxes or Matryoshka universes.
convenience store gate-keeping & monster rampage
The convenience store is integral to this border crossing. It is the place where the young Jing Mo (Jessie Li), the movie’s heroine and future inter-dimensional gatekeeper works. She works at the convenience stores at a dead ends job(a typical experience of pre-Corona youth no?) after being diagnosed, medicated and separated from her mom (who seems to be her only living relative). She is transformed into a patient because she sees invisible entities that influence and affect our world in very material ways. She also gets paid to dress up as a furry – in a monster costume that looks very similar to the real monsters in the movie. She has to try hard and ignore otherworldly creatures (monsters), beings that are oblivious to everybody else but her in the beginning. Later on she finds out that she is part of a group that have made a living out of hunting monsters that wreak havoc to our world. Monster do stick to her, and she attracts some gigantic hairy creatures (akin to kinda cute Yeti’s) that seem to freeze their victims (but not kill them). This convenience store is almost a mythical place in itself. Very colored, overly full of all sorts of specific Asian packaged products, bright stalls with products that get chaotically thrown around and misplaced after consecutive monster romps.
maximalist space, armilary spheres and Egyptomania
Another scene is set in the backside of a street vendor’s shop called uncle Ping. In fact this very amiable street vendor is a mythical creature; a shape-shifting half-lion half human. He could be part of a long series of wondrous antique shop owners or your favorite from the nearest China Town. I also saw him like one of the Ming dynasty scientist. He could also remind us of the Zicawei portrait of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci maybe because of the armillary sphere (no mother Mary thouh). There are all sorts of exotic artefacts in this liminal space, from Armillary spheres to incense burners. Egypt also plays a role too, although it is again almost a theme park show of Egyptian antiquity. Of course ancient Egypt was part of Imperial Orientalism and of course it became such an important iconic treasure trove to be ripped off by incipient European secret societies and even masonic iconography. Maybe indeed the Mummy’s curse was of course a memetic artefact of such British Imperial fears and hubris after pillaging most extra-European cultures, a process of appropriation that went unimpeded till recently. But this ‘hodgepodge’ is almost like an contemporary alchemist’s room, an unusually crowded, non- Ikea furniture space. No room for Marie Kondo, this is a non- minimalist maximalist environment akin to the setting of a Korean female shaman ceremonial or the dense arrangement of a Chinese pharmacist shop. Young Jing Mo is the next in line shamanic traveler & inter dimensional gatekeeper and the true battle of the movie pits her against an older, more power hungry (?!) matriarchal (shaman) generation.
There is also an incredible chase that feels like constantly folding space inside the lower lever of a construction site or parking lot. I really liked how the construction boom (cement) molded space is somehow itself folding and refolding into new temporal configurations as the monster hunters car tries to loose some pretty pesky nemesis. Importantly – folding paper is key in Monster Run.
folding space-time while folding paper
Somehow this topological art of the foldable translates perfectly into portal openings and folding space-time. Paper was invented in China and the main non-human character of the movie is Paper the sidekick of 2000s HK heathrob Shawn Yue – literally an animated spell (a piece of written paper that has taken a life of its own). The Chinese craft of paper sculpture is directly linked to the after-life and nether world. There are elaborate paper copies of golden ingots, paper money, paper humans, paper houses (even paper VHS or paper cars) also included figures of paper gods that were made (and sold) all over the Chinese diaspora, including Taiwan and Singapore. All these paper objects were intended to be ritually burned and thus mainly de-materialize HERE and re-materialize THERE in the great beyond. They are intended for the after-life and the ancestors cult. Recently this art form – as most of our paper products got replaced by (cheaper but much more noxious) petrochemical plastic replicas. Monster Run features some really nifty tricks involving recycled pop ephemera as idol posters, while -Paper- the Daoist side-kick appears to be made out of single use coffee cups or tetrapack packaging.
sentient flower portals
The novum of Monster Run is an inter-dimensional tunneling that is quite organic. I was totally surprised by this since it is not at all what inter-dimensional wormholes look like in usual Sci-fi settings or scientific illustrations. Monster Run spins these wormholes almost like the silk moth cocoon is spun. It almost fells like a soft funnel spider web without the poisonous arachnid chelicherae waiting for you. This inter-dimensional labyrinthine silky structure I dare say is quite different from other architectural mazes (as in The Maze Runner series for example) I have seen in movies, Sci-Fi books, science experiments (the famous maze solving slime molds!), comics or even speculative scientific renditions. This human-sized inter-dimensional spider web or silken cocoon blooms flowers portals at its ends. In fact these incredible moving gigantic peony(?!) flowers (see screenshot below) are the portals – like undulating, sentient fleshy sea anemones of sorts with moving, unfurling petals and feely touchy stamens. Peonies have been called “the longest-used flowers in Eastern culture” and they have such a diverse morphology ranging from your garden variety to 3 m deciduous shrubs! Last time we counted Paeoniaceae compounds it included 262 phytochemicals. What more do you expect of botanical alchemy? This amazing list include compounds that have shown antioxidant, antitumor, antipathogenic, immunomodulative, cardiovascular-system-protective activities and central-nervous-system activities (in vitro). Peonies are a cocktail of monoterpenoid glucosides, flavonoids, tannins, stilbenoids, triterpenoids, steroids, paeonols, and phenols. Monster Run CGI giant peonies are the first floral ‘sentient portals’ I have yet encountered in movies. Flowers of course are very important in Buddhism and Hinduism, and giant lotuses abound in Buddhist cosmology with a predilection for the floral as the seat of myriad Buddhas (such as the iconography of the Prabhūtaratna and Shakyamuni in the jeweled stupa wall painting from the Yulin Caves) or as spatial representations of various Buddhist realms. Hutzul minority in Ukraine & România also identified the lucky 4 leafed clover as a model of the universe. The various Lotus petals surrounding the central Pistil (mount Meru of Hinduism) are the various regions/cultural centers/worlds (Lokas). But you don’t need all these references – the CGI makes it something sui generis, aptly transporting us between computer game worlds and a backyard globalized reality. Anyways, the takeaway is that Monster Run, even without a big release is well worth watching even just for seeing these portals bloom!
TimeSpace Warps 
