Second Date Amid Pandemic

We are both at the designated meeting spot, but cannot find each other.  Starting off with a metaphor, I guess. 

He texts says < Where r u??>  with two question marks, which annoys me slightly, so I say:

  

He finds me at last.  In the small crowd (very small crowd for Columbus Circle) everyone is wearing protective facemasks, but as soon as we see each other we both pull them down; an understood concession to the danger and thrill of meeting right now, at this time, when it’s either illegal or ill-advised (I’m not sure which). 

He’s a seven; on our first date, before this all began, I thought he was an eight.  No biggie—he’s successful and kind and has been very attentive during these few very strange weeks of the COVID-19 quarantine.  He is impressed by me, which I always found flabbergastingly attractive.    He is so nervous and it is cloudy and I can tell immediately that we only have about 1 hour before rain, and also that I could never love this person.

Something of the classic second date for me, I guess.   We walk through Central Park and in the overcast light I am amazed by how beautiful it is here.  Slightly thinned of tourists, the lush veins of its paths are saturated and intricate, and we get lost in them—then found—then lost again.     I’m pretty sure that’s North.  I’m pretty sure that’s an azalea.  I’m pretty sure it’s going to rain.  I’m pretty sure we walked through here.  I’m pretty sure the quarantine won’t end in May.   I’m pretty sure it may never. I’m pretty sure I don’t want kids, not anymore. 

I’m pretty sure I’m over my ex.   Is there a more instantly-combusting sentence I can’t imagine it. 

He tells me he has never really been in love. 

Our coffee gets cold as the conversation reaches that sad and familiar chasm for us both:  there is no a possible way to tell my story to this person.   This stranger.  He tells me his love languages (Acts of Service, and Touch!) and his sun sign (Libra) and we walk in long meandering orbits around the Bethesda Fountain before the gravity fails us,  and we spin off into a grove of cypress trees—where we both take a piss.   

Among ferns, we stop to share a pastry that I brought along.  The world is ending, but Paris Baguette is still serving $5 croissants.    He takes clandestine beers out of his bag, which strikes me as the most beautiful  gesture in the world.  We sip them and there are tulips everywhere and I think, for the first time in weeks, what a city.

But it's fleeting.  I get antsy: wonder what's for dinner, wonder if I can still get a game of Smash Bros. in at home, wonder what I'll watch tonight, wonder how early I'll wake tomorrow.   There's something about the overcast day--this particular percent humidity--that has this thick, lugubrious quality that makes time viscous and clinging; not flowing but alternately clumping & releasing, trickling in fits in starts, not moving at all, then whizzing by.    The afternoon quickly becomes interminable.   

We choose a direction at random and it turns out, as it happens, to be the way home.  He is thoughtful and bright, and has kind eyes, but I will never see this man again.

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

I may not know shit from shinola but it’s pretty clear to me that Boots Riley’s new film SORRY TO BOTHER YOU is one of the weirdest, most transgressive broadly-marketed comedies that (some of) you will (maybe?) see this year (or likely next year, once Boots is given a best director or at least the compensatory best-screenplay Oscar nod).

On the heels of the (womp, womp) shocking critical and commercial appeal of GET OUT we have what seems like an easily-loglineable premise: a streetwise Oaklander hustles his way up the corporate ladder in a Telemarketing firm by turning on his trust-inducing “white voice”.  Ha ha ha, YT’s be dopey, it’s funny because it’s true.  But what seems like an easily understood joke—the apodictic code-switching that is almost incidental to life as a minority—quickly becomes something truly, deeply more trenchant and frightening: it isn’t human behavior but human systems that perpetuate the socio-economic loops that benefit a select few.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen: this is a cautionary tale.  But in true Marxist fashion, we aren’t being cautioned against what could happen but rather what already is: this is late-stage capitalism, baby, and y’all is fucked.

*

You’re too deep into the film by the time you realize you have no idea what you’re in to/in for.  If you are sitting on the aisle you may consider leaving, not because the film is bad or not entertaining, but because it feels wrong—almost like you walked into the wrong theatre and although all the actors and lensing and setting are what you expected, the mise en scene is askew.  I’d like to report that that off-beat wrongness abates as the film continues for two hours and settles into its groove; but I can’t, because it doesn’t.  Wrongness is at the heart of this film, this story, and the economic system it lacerates.  But not just any wrongness, wrongness with just the right number of 0’s on the end of its grubby check.  For something this periodically-asinine, surreal, and madcap there is uncanny sense that only something as fucking absurdist as this can really capture what capitalism is all about.  It’s frightening because it’s true.

*

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU is sorry to bother us, the casual viewer expecting a GET OUT, with something as un-filmic as dystopian Marxism.  That’s the brilliance, it leads with an apology in its title, but never apologies again.   The relentless film cashes ever check it writes.

But if a film requires the rich and subtle tones of metaphor or characters with complex emotional motives to be a success—STBY is a failure even before it begins.  even so, this is a capital-A Art because in its crash-and-burn spectacle it has ideas to spare, and not all of them belong to Karl Marx.  In fact, I don’t remember a film with a higher ideas-per-minute ratio.  Yes, my friends, debts are indeed owed: and not just from Management to their slavish employ.   The smart weirdness about STBY is that you can’t quit tell what homages are overt.  Is that Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL or just general Monty-Python-ness? And clearly George Orwell owns the anthropomorphic denouement, right? Yet most of the cinematic and theoretical references are more obtuse or feel deeper-set in the genotype—somehow they are if not un- than certainly pre-conscious.  Friedrich Engles via Louis CK’s Pootie-Tang; Mike Judge with melanin; a Gondry/Kauffman mindfuck with Tarrantino gumption…or (deep breath)… UHF, Requiem for a Dream, On the Waterfront, Black Mirror, and a couple of Spikes (Lee and Jonze) added to the punch (shit this is sort of fun—I could literally keep going forever, which is the point). 

The pastiche is a purposeful and postmodern inversion on what is an uber-modernist narrative (the Labor Rises to Overthrow a Monopoly of Capital, yada yada).  By mooring us in a something a bit hackneyed and Orwellian, while unmooring us by denying a simple and compact stylistic genealogy, Boots Riley pulls a number on all of us.   We can rejoice at the “left-eye rebellion” and the triumph of Art, but ultimately are we indicating or being indicted?  When the smoke clears, is our conscience clear…but also will our checks clear?  (Just checking.)    

Or will our nostrils flare when we discover we’re one of Them too?

MOONLIGHT: gay, male PRECIOUS?

I feel like this one may land with a thud, considering everyone and their mother seems obsessively interested in extolling this film, but I thought MOONLIGHT was massively overrated.

This film, which lightly traces the hard life of a gay black man beginning life in an impoverished neighborhood in Miami, is certainly beautiful and poignant.  The acting is meritorious – I’m a sucker for good child acting and this film kills it in this regard.  If a movie’s power derives from hardened silences, tearful reunions, human tenderness juxtaposed on callous circumstance, MOONLIGHT is essentially CITIZEN KANE.

To the white and privileged (including myself), the nefarious marketing ploy of MOONLIGHT prays on the same problematic liberal instinct that the movies PRECIOUS and BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD exploit.  These are impoverished African-American characters with drug problems, their lives are harder and more complicated than yours, their neighborhoods more dangerous, their choices narrower, their poetry starker.   These undertold stories from underheard communities must be important (right?) because they are undertold and underheard.  I have to like this movie—right?—because it’s important.  It’s Oscar-worthy.  It’s…real.

But what speciously feels like I’m racist if I don’t like this, is actually (to employ just a little hyperbole in the name of syllogism) I’m racist if I do.  I’d argue that one aspect of racism lies in a tendency to under-critique individuals in favor of socially-bequeathed tropes about what THOSE PEOPLE are like, how THAT GROUP acts, what PEOPLE LIKE HER know, what GUYS LIKE THEM perpetrate.

But is the movie good?  Haven’t we seen drug dealers?  Haven’t we seen Crack Heads?  Haven’t we seen poverty and tragedy, Bad Mothers and Absent Fathers, Bullying, Bigotry, Fear?   Does the story twist us in new ways, test our limits, make us hate or love better, make us scared for our own lives?  Do we get wet in the waves of it?  Do we shiver in its breeze?

I’d argue that we don’t.  MOONLIGHT traces a life, but that life is merely grand gestures of violence and reconciliation.  For a more that’s so god damn boring so god damn frequently, it’s so blithely unsubtle.  All these important conversations and silences have a way of rendering none of them important, and it’s exasperating.  I’m not saying the struggle of the characters here isn’t interesting, but to call MOONLIGHT the best or even one of the best movies of the year is to ignore that it is not particularly interesting in its telling.  It’s overlong and redundant; its perpetual Shallow Depth of Field and super-saturated Ghetto vistas become beautiful ciphers with little meaning (probably much like Miami itself). 

 But we aren’t allowed to engage with the text like that, because to do so would be to deny its power.  Instead, MOONLIGHT is the gay, male PRECIOUS because if offers reprieve from the preconscious guilt of white privilege—symbolic catharsis that confuses FEELING SOMETHING for DOING SOMETHING.  If we can heap praise and awards on undertold and underheard stories we don’t have to tell and hear the REAL story, and that’s how racism hides in egalitarian art.    There is nothing malicious in anyone liking this movie, but there is a reason to disbelieve.  Because the malicious thing is the fear of Other imbibed in human nature on all sides, which society strives valiantly to extirpate.  We’re not quite there yet.

#oscarssowhite, yes, but not because Viola Davis needs Oscars, like now.  The problem is that we need Viola Davis to get Oscars so we feel less implicated in the infernal machine of racism.  The Oscars are for us. 

MAD MEN: the real thing?

To me the post-SOPRANOS season finale is the ideal modern Rorschach Test—a projective screen for viewers to throw whatever asinine assumptions, puerile fantasies, and naïve fears they have on beloved characters about to leave their lives forever.  The finality of their exit allows for genuine emotion—not TV emotion, not “that show was fun but now its over” emotion—to siphon in.  Series endings are some fuckedup postmodern version of a graduation or a wedding.  They are as real as anything, because they take something very real away from us.  It’s pretty brutal, really.

All that said, I will keep this fast because I think anything that needs to be said has been said.

I give MAD MEN finale an A-.  For the record, BREAKING BAD got a B.  BOARDWALK EMPIRE gets an A. SOPRANOS gets an A+.  Sorrynotsorry.

I didn’t particularly like Peggy and Stan’s forced-fed romance.  Seems so uncharacteristically happy-ending hackneyed for a show that so stridently avoided cliché.  It seems Matt Weiner’s affection for Elizabeth Moss and her Peggy got the better of his artistic sense.  Why MAD MEN is great is that every time you think it should hit the throttle, it steps on the brake.  It’s been doing it for seven amazing seasons.  This withholding, this lack of splashiness, is very much the point, it’s what MAD MEN had to offer us overall: the idea that life doesn’t need Drama to be dramatic.  Peggy and Stan—the opposite of that.

Overall I was a little touched by Don and Betty’s phone call goodbye – it was simple and balanced and reflected the love and resentment they have for each other pretty remarkably.  Don and Peggy’s call—less impressed; a mere curtain call for the actors to have one last moment together.  Whatever... sentiment, move along.

All that earns it about a B.  What kicks it up to A-, classic series ending territory is that holy-shit-genius ending.  It’s such an instant-classic update on The Sopranos final go-dark moment. 

If you are wondering whether or not Don went back to NY to create that coke ad, or if Don had some sort of “true enlightenment” and stayed retired ad ifinitum, you are doing exactly what Matt Weiner wanted—and fully missing the point.  Like the “Did Tony Die” preseverating that followed Gandofini’s “series wrap”, it comes from a place of ego on the audiences’ behalf—we want to feel we own these characters, have a claim on their future, for christs sake know if they live or die.  David Chase denied us that; now Matthew Weiner does too—sort of brilliantly.  Don may have created the ad; sure that makes sense.  Or maybe it’s just a final coda of commentary—this saturated dream of Coca-Cola “bringing us together”—the steamrolling corruption of the corporate agenda.  But there is no “really happened”, there is no secret, there is no correct answer.  Debating it only shows what you project upon it. 

And for my half—I project a lot of bleakness.  MAD MEN postulates, as the Sopranos did, that real change is impossible for human beings.  We love and lose, we remarry, we fight and reconcile and dream and lets dreams slide away, but we don’t change.  We bring home the bacon or venereal disease, but we don’t change.  We enter into routines and break them and soul search and bob for apples at the county fair, but we don’t change.  Don cannot run from the past because it will never be wholly just his past; it is his present and it is his destiny, and it is so interwoven into his DNA that there’s simply nothing else to cling to, even if—even when—he wants to.  Long after it is of any narrative pertinence to the show, this always gossamer storyline of Don being Dick Whitman remains as a haunting reminder that it’s not who Don is but rather what he is that indicts him: he is a liar, he is a cheater, he is a man who—let’s not moralize here or opine on whether better men exist—is not a good man in the way polite society wants good men to be.  He is a Tony Soprano who kills softly, differently; who tries to feel; does feel; has vision; blurs vision; lights a cigarette; snubs one out; doesn’t change.

And like Tony when all is said and done, Don doesn’t live and Don doesn’t die.  He ends.

 

EX MACHINA: no gods here

EX MACHINA is a good film, though it is only about two-thirds as clever as it thinks it is.  The future it imagines is an uncannily plausible cocktail of Google Glass technology and sublimated narcissism.  The kind of future that all the money on earth buys the richest boys in Silicon Valley.

In short: Nathan, a Mark Zuckerberg-type young rich genius, invites one of his employees (Caleb) to his secluded complex to test the brain power of an android—an Artificially Intelligent fembot names Ava—with a “Turing Test” (not much of a ‘test’ really: does the flesh-and-blood human know this being is a robot, or not?).  Obviously Caleb falls in love with Ava’s perfect mechanical ass and, erhm, wit.  Obviously complications ensue.

Seamless (literally without seams—at what point did the hallmark of futurism become doors that don’t look like doors?) and inhuman, Nathan’s world is an exquisitely carved bio-dome seemingly plopped on Jurassic Park’s Isla Nublar.  Somehow you still need key cards to unlock doors, but whatever.  The technical wonder of EX MACHINA (and it is considerable—Ava is one of if not  the best-designed synthetic human I’ve seen in the movies) is a perfect foil for the stunning natural design of Nathan’s compound.  It manages to invoke certain questions of creation, erosion, and possibly limitless power.  In short, and very much on-theme, something godly.

I like movies with big ideas; especially great looking movies; especially great looking movies with amazing residential architecture, like this one.  I think people should see this movie—although don’t expect “I See Dead People” twists, much action, or even careful plotting.  The only intricacy here is Ava’s circuitry, considerable as it is.

But the real problem with the techno-babble and epistemological navel-gazing of EX MACHINA is that “A.I.” technology has been so beaten to death in pop-culture Sci-Fi that even dropping an Alan Turing reference and stirring in some Wittgenstein doesn’t change the fact that this is pretty thin soup (and metallic tasting, at that).  Robots, free will, somewhat facile mind games: been there, done that.

Ultimately, we expect the Greek-drama trope, the deus ex machina, from the get go: the craned-in god that will alter the course of the story, bring about the pat ending, deliver justice.  But, perhaps obviously in hindsight, this God never comes.  EX MACHINA clearly enough imagines a future without the deus, where sentient machines are their own gods. 

Where free will is a programmable, personal protocol.  God help us.