The Sweet East is a 2023 American satirical surrealist road film directed by Sean Price Williams in his directorial debut from a screenplay by Nick Pinkerton. It stars Talia Ryder, Earl Cave, Simon Rex, Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris, Jacob Elordi and Rish Shah. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: Set in 1962, the series’ main setting is a parallel universe where the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan have won World War II in 1946 after Giuseppe Zangara successfully assassinates United States President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, creating a series of developments that include the Germans dropping an atomic bomb on Washington, D.C. (now renamed “District of Contamination”). The German Reich extends to Europe and Africa and the Empire of Japan comprises Asia, but most of the series is set in the former US and in Germany proper.
Western North America, now part of the “Japanese Pacific States”, is occupied by the technologically less-advanced Shōwa-period Empire of Japan, which has assimilated its formerly American citizens into Japanese culture, although high-class ethnic Japanese are extremely fascinated by pre-War American culture. Japan’s Trade and Science ministers work in the Pacific States’ capital, San Francisco. The Japanese rulers subject non-Japanese people to racial discrimination and grant them fewer rights.
Eastern and Midwestern North America is a colony controlled by the Greater Nazi Reich (GNR) under an aging Führer Adolf Hitler. The colony, headed by a “Reichsmarschall of North America”, is commonly referred to as “Nazi America” or “the American Reich” and its capital is New York City. The Nazis continue to hunt minorities and euthanize the physically and mentally sick. The superior technology of the Germans is highlighted by the use of video phones and Concorde-like “rockets” for intercontinental travel.
A Neutral Zone, which encompasses the Rocky Mountains, serves as a buffer zone between the Japanese Pacific States and Nazi America due to Cold War–like tensions between the German and Japanese blocs. Another buffer zone is present in the Urals.
Films collected by the eponymous “Man in the High Castle” show views of numerous other Earths, including some where the Allies were victorious, some featuring executed Allied leaders (such as Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin), and some where an American resistance is doing well.
The Man in the High Castle is an American dystopian alternate history television series created for streaming service Amazon Prime Video. It was created by Frank Spotnitz and produced by Amazon Studios, Ridley Scott‘s Scott Free Productions (with Scott serving as executive producer), Headline Pictures, Electric Shepherd Productions, and Big Light Productions. The series is based on Philip K. Dick‘s 1962 novel of the same name. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: 1920’s Cambridge, Göttingen, Switzerland > 1930’s California, 1940’s Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1950’s Washington, D.C.
Oppenheimer (/ˈɒpənhaɪmər/ OP-ən-hy-mər) is a 2023 epic biographical thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. It stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist credited with being the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in the Manhattan Project—the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons.
Based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the film chronicles the career of Oppenheimer, with the story predominantly focusing on his studies, his direction of the Manhattan Project during World War II, and his eventual fall from grace due to his 1954 security hearing.
The film also stars Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife “Kitty”, Matt Damon as head of the Manhattan Project Leslie Groves, Robert Downey Jr. as U.S. Atomic Energy Commission member Lewis Strauss, and Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s communist lover Jean Tatlock. The ensemble supporting cast includes Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, and Kenneth Branagh.
accuracy and omissions // classifications and censorship
Oppenheimer’s simultaneous release with Warner Bros.’s Barbie led to the Barbenheimer cultural phenomenon, which encouraged audiences to see both films as a double feature. (wiki)
On July 2, 1996, an extraterrestrial mothership enters Earth’s orbit and deploys saucers (each 15 mi (24 km) in diameter) over major cities worldwide, including New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
Independence Day (also promoted as ID4) is a 1996 American science fiction action film directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Emmerich and Dean Devlin. It stars an ensemble cast that consists of Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnell, Judd Hirsch, Margaret Colin, Randy Quaid, Robert Loggia, James Rebhorn, and Harvey Fierstein.
The film focuses on disparate groups of people who converge in the Nevada desert in the aftermath of a worldwide attack by a powerful extraterrestrial race. With the other people of the world, they launch a counterattack on July 4—Independence Day in the United States.
Considered a significant turning point in the history of the Hollywood blockbuster, Independence Day was at the forefront of the large-scale disaster film and sci-fi resurgence of the mid-late 1990s. (wiki)
Censorship // imdb
Twenty years after the War of 1996, the United Nations has founded the Earth Space Defense (ESD), a global defense advanced research program that reverse-engineers alien technology and serves as Earth’s alert system against extraterrestrial threats. Civilization has been restored and relative peace among nations exists following the human race’s victory over the aliens’ attacks, and major cities around the world including Washington D.C. were rebuilt and modernized with amalgamated technologies. After establishing Area 51 as its headquarters, the ESD set up bases on the Moon, Mars, and Rhea, a moon of Saturn, and orbital defense satellites above Earth, as fortifications against future invasions.
Independence Day: Resurgence is a 2016 American science fiction action film co-written and directed by Roland Emmerich, serving as a sequel to the 1996 film Independence Day. It stars an ensemble cast that consists of Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Maika Monroe, Travis Tope, William Fichtner, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Judd Hirsch. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Seattle / Ocean View, WA
Safety Not Guaranteed is a 2012 American romantic comedy film directed by Colin Trevorrow and starring Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass. The film was inspired by a joke classified ad that ran in Backwoods Home Magazine in 1997. (wiki)
“In 2002 Tooze was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History for his first book, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge.[citation needed] He first came to prominence for his economic study of the Third Reich, The Wages of Destruction, which was one of the winners of the 2006 Wolfson History Prize,[15] and a broad-based history of the First World War with The Deluge, published in 2014. He then widened his scope to study the financial crash of 2008 and its economic and geopolitical consequences with Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, published in 2018, for which he won the 2019 Lionel Gelber Prize.[16]
Tooze writes for numerous publications, including the Financial Times,[17] London Review of Books,[18] New Left Review,[19] The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian,[20] Foreign Policy,[21] and Die Zeit.[22] Since 2022 he sits on the board of the ZOE Institute for Future-fit economies.[23]” (wiki)
More by Adam Tooze on London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/adam-tooze
From the YT page: The history of American power, as it is commonly written, is a weighty subject, a matter of military and economic heft, of ‘throw-weight’, of resource mobilisation and material culture, of ‘boots on the ground’. In his lecture, Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity. This image gives us a less materialistic, more fantastical and more unstable vision of America’s role in the world.
By subscribing as a non-payed member to Adam Tooze Chartbook substack (I urge the one who can afford it to do it!) – I felt I entered some of deep end-hole of the “Matrix”, a place where stats and economic pieces of news meet policy making and even arts. He is one of the most active internationally (planetarily) “connected” people I know (and I do not mind using this over abused word when it matches). From the current Ukraine War to the so-colled New Cold War, from the Inflation Reduction Act to de-carbonization policies – this is a place to get your information. He is also not one of these usual pundits or experts – isolated and somehow affiliated to an ominous think tank, but a historian specialized on the war economy of Germany and one with a solid Keynsian background. At the same time he is a self confessed liberal Keynesian and not afraid to admit it. He also reads a lot, and follows a LOT of empirical evidence from just about everywhere. He’s also used to track down Marxist takes on the energy crisis – on the instrumentalization of the energy crisis by the fossil fuel industries (in what he calls a “Kaleckian moment” – Kalecki being this Polish left wing Keynesian that anticipated the resistance of the business lobby in thw face of government initiatives for full employment). He’s also challenging a lot of basic assumption – regarding China or the US at this crucial moment. What I like about his approach os the dynamic feeling – almost procesual caracter that is deeply informed but does not give in to settled fact or lazy thinking.
Here is the time to forget all what you thought you knew. We take the American century as being an inevitable outcome, an accomplished fact, from the closure of the West, its golden spike – also called The Last Spike toward the middle of the 19th c – to the disappearance of its native first nations (they are still around and still resisting oppression & depredation!). Well, here is a crash course into why the US as a great power of the 20th c or winner of the Cold War was more of a funambulist act. This is an important lecture to watch to follow because it makes all this triumph, inevitability and causal efficacy of the US as something manufactured, or at best an ad-hoc momentary or emergency issue. Stay with Tooze till the end and u will not regret it. Beside the summary of several other intersting books he quotes (such as Irresistble Empire or Fear Itself), he aims at starts revising (it is a revisionist history in this sense) some of the most cherished notions about America’s place in the world. As one question from the public aptly observed – it is “a great man history” take, and this feels a bit regressive to focus on a central banker, and a US central banker at that (Timothy Franz Geithner), but Geithner is somehow less known than Rubin, Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers. The financial history books of the late 20th feels they somehow missed how Geithner has “defied gravity” or why he put it in these terms. Globalization did not start with the late 40s after-war institutions highlighted by the extrordinary biographic book on the life of Maynard Keyenes (the so-called Washington Consensus at the Bretton Woods Conference) in earnest – but only in the 1990s. What he makes clear is that the Cold War was very nearly becoming hot during the 1980s and the war games of the Able Archer 1983 NATO exercise. There are longer histories here than the complacent aberration of the Trump event might suggest – and Tooze speaks about how the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods and the New Deal was built on a very peculiar coalition: Northern liberals, progressives, labor and the Solid South. Even the very notion of Manifest Destiny makes things less settled or anchored in reality or certitude. That is precisely the vote that has shifted to the Republicans. He has for lack of a better word – a dialectical view on the US, and he is more interested not in the Global New Order or the 800 US military bases around the world but in the new generation of ordering efforts by the US ruling elites. An order that somehow flies in the sense of common sense or even the gravitational pull of such players like China (who in one mentioned graph is supposed to have poured more concrete btw 2010 and 2013 than the whole of the US in the 20th c!).
spacetime coordinates: 2009 – 2012 India, Washington, D.C. the White House, China / Tibet / the Himalayas, Los Angeles, Yellowstone National Park, the Las Vegas Valley, the Pacific Ocean
2012 is a 2009 American science fiction disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich. The film stars John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt, Thandiwe Newton, Danny Glover, Zlatko Buric and Woody Harrelson. Based on the 2012 phenomenon, its plot follows geologist Adrian Helmsley (Ejiofor) and novelist Jackson Curtis (Cusack) as they experience an eschatological sequence of events including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, megatsunamis and a global flood, all of which were imagined by subscribers to the hypothesis. (wiki)
imdb // Alternate ending // the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar // Marketing
TimeSpace Warps 