I’ve been way too AWOL on here for way too long, so please accept this as some Hot Content for your eyeballs as recompense.

History’s Camera (on Fredric Jameson, 1934-2024)

Fredric Jameson died last fall, still working, at the age of 90. Sometimes when influential figures in the creative world leave us, their obituaries begin with phrases like “best known for his,” or “her most celebrated achievement was,” but Jameson was one of those figures who leaves a body of work and influence so vast that it can really only be umbrellaed under an eponym. To call something Jamesonian makes reference not merely to the key ideas he generated in his role as a comparative literature professor at Duke University or texts from his voluminous list of publications that spans best-selling books and capsule reviews of films, novels, and the political news of the day. The adjective Jamesonian has come to signify instead a mode of thinking, a critical approach toward aesthetics and politics, and importantly, a commitment to historical thinking at a time when capitalism has annihilated all temporal horizons beyond the perpetual present of the marketplace. His famous exhortation to “always historicize” didn’t merely offer us a new strategy to read novels or watch films against the grain; it connected us to an ongoing and collective struggle to “wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity” that began long before his time and which will continue past our own.[1]

Jameson located this struggle within the Marxist intellectual tradition. But his politics were not concerned with things like party doctrine or proselytizing from the holy texts. Jameson was interested in analyzing the “utopian dimension” in films like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), and in using HBO’s television series The Wire (David Simon, 2002-2008) as a “cognitive map” for understanding the complex political, economic, and cultural structures of an American city in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Such “political” readings of popular media texts may seem ubiquitous in the social media era, but Jameson began his work at a time when it was still legally dubious to identify as a Marxist in the United States, amidst scholars who refused to take seriously any art that dare be found outside of the museum’s curated white cube. During this time he saw—and named—the transition out of the high modernist artistic and intellectual culture of the early twentieth century that gave way to a cultural logic of “postmodernism” we still inhabit.

His interest in mass culture—and cinema in particular—illustrated this historical transition that bookended the ten decades through which he lived. As a result, his scholarship ranges from science fiction novels to Gustav Mahler, German philosophy to Hollywood cinema, architecture, painting, Soviet film theory, from the role of the “national allegory” in so-called “Third World Literature” to psychoanalysis—sometimes all in the same book. The point of unspooling such a tightly-woven thread is not meant to overwhelm his reader but to help them see the ways in which capitalism, in its multinational form that took shape during the late twentieth century, presents us with an unsolved challenge to represent it without simultaneously giving us the adequate tools to do so. Especially not to critique it! Cinema’s centrality to his work was thus not merely due to its nature as the dominant mass media form of the first half of the twentieth century in which he grew up; it was because Jameson wanted to teach us to see capitalism through a camera that had yet to be invented.

The best name we have for that camera might be history itself. His own can help situate the reasons for his vast literacy across the multiple aesthetic forms that rose to prominence during his lifetime, and the position from which he was able to synthesize such a gaze into a focused project. Jameson—whose penultimate book was recently published from a seminar he taught via Zoom during Covid-19—entered college in the 1950s, just as the modernist art movement was entering its final phase. He graduated with a PhD in French Literature from Yale in 1961, writing a dissertation on Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, a rare move for an American student at a time when European intellectual culture and its dalliances with the left was looked upon with skepticism by a culture that had just gotten through McCarthyism and the Hollywood Blacklist.

Jameson was a voracious reader since his youth. By early adulthood he became inspired by the “world literature” approach of poets such as Ezra Pound (who was alive at the time, remember), who wrote with a type of fragmented, totalizing method of narration and structure. Pound’s The Cantos (1915-62), for instance, assaults its reader with everything from Chinese logographs to references to medieval Italy and the founding of the United States, and then forces the reader to piece it all together. What this must have been like for a young reader! And not unlike a prototype for a Jamesonian argument about multinational capitalism save for a missing explicit commitment to emancipatory politics.

That’s how Jameson read. And read he did. His interest in aesthetic movements calling themselves things like “world literature” later provided him the opportunity to read William Faulkner through the French theorists who had started to turn the European academy on its head. This act of historical and linguistic translation was happening at a time when Faulkner’s work had mostly fallen out of print in the United States in favor of a new generation, but picked up by an exciting new philosophical movement that had been injecting new life into continental philosophy after the end of the war. If you were going to read the greats in the 1950s, this was one way to do it; analytically, American art seen through a European’s eyes.

At some point in his studies he was turned on to the work of the exiled German writer Thomas Mann. Because he learned how to think the way he did, Jameson eventually discovered that at one point during the writing of 1947’s Doctor Faustus, Mann had gotten in contact with a then-little known philosopher named Theodor Adorno for help researching music. Doctor Faustus is a novel that allegorizes Germany’s Nazi catastrophe through the life of its protagonist, a talented German composer who re-enacts Faust’s bargain only to find his life unravel into chaos and madness. Had this novel only influenced Jameson’s lifelong interest in allegory, it would still have been an upset, but you have to think about his later commitment to finding a way out of conspiratorial paranoia, something that only an effective and true cognitive map could provide. Jameson’s engagement with history didn’t end at thinking about it either. To this day many American college students first encounter Adorno through a book that contains Jameson’s own work.

When listening to Jameson talk about these early interests in a 2014 Madrid lecture, one cannot help but think of what it feels like to go down a hyperlink rabbit hole on the internet. Such maze-like conceptual exploration feels like a product of being online in our hypermediated digital age. And yet, Jameson was practicing this interdisciplinary mode of curation more than a decade before the rise of home video, or even the photocopier, made such pastiche widespread. This style of intellectual bricolage is precisely what allowed Jameson to see what was happening to global culture before it hit the rest of us, so to speak: by the 1960s, capitalism had not only set foot in every corner of the globe, it had begun to gobble up history itself to offer on a plate to the discerning customer through cultural forms like cinema, mass market print, television, even architecture, which in Jameson’s youth was undergoing its own postwar tranformation as the Western world began preparing for domestic peace. At that point, still in a mostly analog media culture dominated by print, celluloid, and broadcast technology, such breadth was something that only a French-reading American graduate student with an interest in modernist poetry and detective novels could understand.

But what would come next would take it out of the ivory tower and into Warhol’s prints of Campbell’s soup cans and the screens of the multiplex, stills of which began to be reproduced in this pages of his books alongside Jameson’s freely associative art history. Jameson’s interest in European philosophy and modernist literature was producing a philosophical consciousness that was also spending a lot of time at the movies. Faulkner on Wednesday, George Stevens on Friday; Jameson was capturing the last of modernism as it was departing the historical stage, leaving little crumbs behind in melodrama and the Saturday movie. Jameson saw in Hollywood film the same recognition of aesthetics and politics that may emerge from a more acculturated reading of the European avant-garde. And he was read by others who wanted to think about film—America’s true pictorial art form—the same way. His influence over film culture in America is not merely the result of three generations of film students having been assigned his essays in college; even Ti West’s MaXXXine (2024) seems indebted to an essay he wrote connecting the Westin Bonaventure Hotel with the nostalgic pastiche of 1970s Hollywood cinema.[2]

It wasn’t just Hollywood, of course. During the 1960s, Jameson studied in Germany and brought with him his interest in the French structuralism he had picked up in graduate school. Soon he found himself deeply invested in the dialectical tradition of German philosophy that ran through Hegel and Marx, and which took shape on the streets of Paris in May of 1968, filmed through the cameras of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. As the oft-repeated story goes, both directors emerged first as critics in of the postwar French cinephile culture of Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Française and the literary flourishings of André Bazin’s Cahiers du Cinéma, which by the late 1960s had taken an editorial turn towards a hardline Maoism that emerged in response to the global 1968 revolution.

But if the cultural trajectory of French cinephilia traversed this same intellectual path that Jameson had taken, from the existentialist humanism of youth to a politically salient historical materialism in the face of an emergent historical situation, the story was not the same for American cinema critics. While the American 1968 was in equal parts transformative, decades of anticommunism had extinguished a fully conscious Marxist cultural project from both the US Academy and broader cinema world. Jameson’s return to the US—what he calls the “homeland of mass culture”—thus marked yet another stage in his intellectual development, honed by the rigor and politics of a Europe where Communist parties shared in ruling coalitions with Western governments, and with an arts culture that had few counterparts in the US, save for the last remnants of the radical avant-gardes in New York and other urban metropoles.

Like his encounter with Faulkner, Jameson watched a lot of Hollywood movies both in Europe and back home in the States. His professing landed him various teaching appointments from Harvard, to UCSD, Yale, and UCSC. If the postwar lifting of the Nazi embargo on Hollywood films opened the eyes of young French critics to the world of the auteur theory and cinematic style, Jameson saw in Europe’s uneasy acceptance of Hollywood film distribution a moment of cultural translation mediated by a global market, conscious of the need to expand in search of new markets but in local contexts. His intellectual forbearers watched movies, even while they scoffed at the dangerous nature of the Culture Industry (later in that 2014 talk he notes that Adorno would attend Hollywood films “three or four times a week, bad movies of the kind he would condemn”). Here is that camera of Jameson’s, “seeing” the history of twentieth century philosophy through the eyes of historical experience that only a French-speaking, Hollywood cinema-attending American cultural critic into Hegel could possess. He claimed to have seen every film released in his local theater growing up between 1943-1950, and then in his time in Europe, he saw these same films exported to adoring French audiences through a glass darkly; here was the first taste of the kind of globalizing mass culture that would soon occupy a central role in his academic work. When the French did this they came up with the Auteur Theory and created a mythos for cinephilia we still re-enact on Letterboxd. Why can’t we do the same for Jameson’s version?

Following the end of the 1968 global revolution, Jameson spent the 1970s crafting his synthesis of French structuralism and German dialectical thinking into an aesthetic project of cultural critique he would announce in 1981’s The Political Unconscious. The book—which begins with a magisterial, 100-page elaboration of a critical method of reading cultural texts “symptomatically” so as to learn from what they don’t say, which can point us to our culture’s broader “political unconscious”—still remains fixated primarily on literature. However by the mid-1970s, Jameson had begun to take note of the broader cultural landscape of American mass culture, which by that point had exploded out from the diverse reading lists he encountered as a French graduate student and onto cinema and television screens, travel literature and advertisements, pop art and the international films that now came to him, teaching in Durham, North Carolina at Duke University, where he would remain until his death last fall.

His research from this era culminated in his 1991 masterwork Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Like that early Jameson, “clicking” through the hyperlinks of modernist literature before the internet gave them concrete form, this Jameson describes a world where those links can actually be clicked on, opening windows into new forms like video art, museum gift shops, nuclear power. By this point, Jameson was even more of an ideological rarity in the American academy. If his Marxism was politically questionable during a decade where politically-motivated bombings and plane hijackings dominated the news, by the late 1980s Marxism seemed like an exhausted project. The Soviet Union was collapsing, and with it, a sense of any alternative to a globalizing capitalism that now literally was in every corner of the globe.

Borrowing a term from Marxist economist Ernest Mandel (who himself borrowed from political economists writing in the 1920s), Jameson gave name to what he saw as “late” capitalism’s now-dominant “cultural logic,” which he called “postmodernism.” Postmodernism to Jameson is not a style but rather a period, one in which “aesthetic production…has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods…at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.”[3] Where art in earlier societies—even earlier phases of capitalism—retained a partially autonomous sphere from the market, it has now been completely subsumed by the market; even aesthetic critiques of capitalism cannot escape its totalizing logic and commodification. Postmodernism remains Jameson’s best-selling book to this date.

In Postmodernism, and its earlier drafts, Jameson introduced the idea of the Nostalgia Film (or mode, as he would come to call it). This might sound like old hat to us now, but when he posed the idea in the early 1980s he wasn’t thinking about literal reboots of Star Wars that brought the old cast back together for One Last Ride (to a shopping cart on Disney.com). We like think of the culture of our age as one enslaved to nostalgia, but Jameson saw this was already taking place in the 1970s; Lucas’s 1977 film referenced Kurosawa and Buck Rogers sequels, reaching back to the media he consumed in his youth. just as the 2010s Star Wars sequels were references to their own earlier iterations, the intellectual property of which is of course all conveniently owned by the Walt Disney Corporation. These aren’t just personal choices, they are logics that have been forced upon aesthetic production now that forms such as cinema and television have their own history to reference.

To Jameson, this was all a symptom of our inability to place ourselves in history in an age dominated by media representations of it, to effectively know when we are amidst an endless stream of photographs of the past or films depicting how it may have appeared. Jameson didn’t think of the nostalgia mode exclusively in terms of movies referencing other movies. He included in this category films such as Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), films which were either set diegetically in the actual past or in some strange in-betweenness: a past which can only be grasped through aesthetic representations of what we think it looked or felt like back “then,” since we can only access it through representation. What if, for instance, Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) wasn’t actually “about” its 1950s setting of drive-in diners and cool hot rods, but rather his generation’s incapacity to see any kind of path forward in their own lives after the tumult of the global revolution of 1968, the economic crises of the early 1970s, the terror of being called up to serve in Vietnam? Today, the nostalgia mode is similarly not “about” the past—Stranger Things is “about” John Carpenter movies and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II (2024) is “about” his own Gladiator (2000), which itself was “about” 1960s sword-and-sandals epics—but what they are actually about is our inability to feel like we are headed somewhere we understand. “History is what hurts,” Jameson once famously quipped, and one way I’ve understood that is that it always seems to rear its head when we least expect it, due in large part to the fact that we haven’t quite figured out how to grasp hold of it and steer it in the direction we know it needs to go, leaving us with nothing but the gap and an unfulfilled desire that can only be met with political commitment.[4]

In the years following the publication of his works on postmodernism, many cultural theorists took his ideas merely as I expressed them above. Blade Runner (1982), for instance, is a pastiche (Jameson’s term) of 1940s noir and the science fiction genre Jameson loved so much. And isn’t that cool? Postmodernism’s blurring of the line between high art and “lower” forms encouraged a situation in which potential artists might not be gatekept by elitist snobs. This is what some critics took from the book, including figures like Linda Hutcheon, who began reading pop cultural texts not symptomatically as Jameson suggested, but as containers of emancipatory potential for audiences newly visible to transformed modes of market research. But, again, Jameson warned us that postmodernism was not merely a style, it was a logic—in fact, it was the logic of capitalism itself transmogrifying out of its now-completed stage of industrial development in Western factories and local agricultural production now to screens, social media, even our consumption of art as a commodity itself. When Jameson speaks of postmodernism, he was really speaking of postmodernity—a clarifying, periodizing term that reminds us that capitalism is not in its final stage but that nineteenth and early twentieth century modernity, with its great artistic masters and heroic struggle between workers and capital, was indeed over, and we might not like what comes after.

Because Postmodernism came to offer a periodizing method and term for the work of art in the age of digital reproducibility, Jameson gathered his writing on film from the period into two texts that stand as his most explicit forays into film theory. The first came with 1990s’ Signatures of the Visible, which reads Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975), and The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) as allegories of an America losing its historicity as it groans into the very postmodernity the New Hollywood that put them on screen. The book closes with an essay titled “The Existence of Italy,” in which Jameson offers American film theory’s first real great contribution to the debates on cinematic realism inaugurated by Bazin and the postwar Italian filmmakers by challenging the idea of the indexical trace in photochemical film, expressed in the long take, as something which is always already filtered through a kind of visual translation of cultural space that the viewer imposes on their interpretation of what is represented on screen (it seems fitting an American reading French and quoting German would be the first to see this). But it was with 1992’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic that Jameson contributed to the film theoretical canon his next great idea: that of the conspiracy mode, 1970s Hollywood’s other great formal innovation into film genre that emerged from a specific historical moment and its influences.

The Geopolitical Aesthetic adds to conspiracy thrillers readings of then-recent films from the Taiwanese New Wave, Third Cinema, and Godard, who remained a touchstone throughout his life. Where a more traditional film scholar might feel hesitant to dip their toes into the controversial “transnational cinema” approach for fear of flattening difference or reading the West into postcolonial areas of the world reclaiming their own history, Jameson saw a throughline between these disparate films that was not merely humanist in nature but diagnostic of the nature by which capitalism was entering its era of complete global spread. He got in trouble for this, too, but he remained steadfast in his insistence that his quest to find in art a way of understanding all of our experiences of global capitalism was not only a useful way of thinking but urgently necessary. What good comes from drawing impenetrable lines between Kidlak Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare (1977) and All The President’s Men (Alan Pakula, 1976) if it doesn’t allow us to see that both films are responding to the same decolonizing world: a world that could usher in one man’s disillusionment with the West he so admired, and two others’ attempt to take down the President of the United States involved in the carpet bombing of the other side of the globe?

These films’ representation of the “degraded” attempt to map the spatial totality of the global capitalist world that was emerging as the twentieth century was drawing to a close illustrated to Jameson our need for better cognitive maps, but the irony is that we now hold in our hands technology that can instantaneously connect us to any part of the globe at the drop of a hat. And yet, we remain just as lost and confused, conspiracy runs rampant, our lack of utopian thinking, he once quipped, makes it easier to imagine the end of the world than capitalism itself.

But while his world groaned on its axis, spinning towards an uncertain future, he remained committed to his vision of the world expressed most clearly one hundred years earlier, that distance from his present a reminder that the now is always full of the potential to break in another direction, if we can see it. Central to Jameson’s commitment to the Marxist project was his repeated insistence on the need for utopia, for utopian thinking—not that ideas will save the world, but rather that the core of emancipation must always be tied up in the belief that the world could be made different than it is, and that our lack of utopian visions in art is rather a symptom of our general inability to actually act on it.

It would behoove us to remember this in our own time, as global catastrophes fill our social media timelines and conversations about theatrical slop convince us that there’s nothing of value waiting for us down the line. Art feels bad these days? Figure out what it’s not saying so new language can take form for thoughts we have yet to speak. You can’t imagine the world without capitalism? Maybe first we have to learn how to see, using a camera called History, which we have yet to learn how to operate to its full potential.

Correction: An earlier draft described Jameson watching films “back home in Ohio,” which was a breezy paraphrase of Jameson’s own account in the embedded video. I was too loose with this, and was helpfully corrected by one of Jameson’s own students, Ethan Knapp, who teaches in Ohio and knows a thing or two about both topics! Jameson’s American filmgoing began later, when he was living in suburban New Jersey. Thanks Ethan!

[1] The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, p. 9, 19.

[2] “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” New Left Review 146, July/Aug 1984. < https://newleftreview.org/issues/i146/articles/fredric-jameson-postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism>

[3] Postmodernism, Durham: Duke University Press, 1991, p. 4-5.

[4] Jameson, 1981, p. 102

If you aren’t familiar with Cinejourneys you should fix that. It’s a new-ish online platform that offers a wide-ranging set of film courses taught by losers like me but also critics and figures across the world of cinema, from academia to TCM and the broader world of criticism and culture (Imogen Sara Smith, Tiffany Vazquez, more exciting names coming soon). I view my courses as an opportunity to not just explore interests that I don’t get a chance to dive into in my university job, but also as seminars for exploring big ideas.

While I’ve taught courses like Film Theory and Genre Theory for Cinejourneys, these two are unlike anything I’ve taught for the company before: specific arguments about the historicity of film history, and its lessons for us in our present moment of crisis and transformation. In both classes I will be offering access to scholarly resources as part of your $100 registration fee that you can peruse at your own pace; we will be discussing them in class, but no reading or screenings are required. So the answer to your “do I have time for this?” question is: if you can make the meetings, yes you do!

Now. If you’ve ever taken a film course at a college or university, you’ve probably encountered films like Metropolis or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as you learned about the cinematic techniques developed in the 1920s like German Expressionism. If you’ve taken a film theory course of any sort, you likely encountered André Bazin and the founding of the french film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, learning that young critics who wrote under his tutelage went on to influence world cinema by directing films in the French New Wave movement. Then something-something 1968. But I’m trying to correct these narratives with a set of questions I don’t think we ask enough outside of high level academic seminars, cordoned off from the general public and leaving cinephiles and people in general just looking for similarities in the past without recognizing that certain continuities are disregarded while others are oversimplified.

For instance: are we living through the same rise of fascism as Weimar Germany experienced during the 1920s and early 1930s? The answer in the left/liberal popular press seems to be: Yes. But I think that’s more of an emotional truth than a historical truth, or even an accurate understanding of our own moment. If you understand the cinema and culture of the Weimar 1920s as nothing more than a stepping stone to Nazi occupation, you’re going to read determinism in everything that may accurately describe what happens on the next page of the history book, but when transported into making sense of our present, only ends up reifying a darker future that we are all trying to avoid. What would it be like to return to Weimar in a different light, to see it as a radical rupture from an old that had to be dismantled? Or what about French criticism in the 1960s, the centrality of cinephilia to the founding of French film culture and later the world’s, all of which blew up in a chaotic mess during May 1968. Today we lionize these early critics and we so often try to emulate their methods. In my course, we will ask…why? What made postwar France the place where this certain mode of film culture emerged, and why is our moment radically different from theirs in such a way that we should perhaps not be looking to them for models but somewhere new?

Anyway, I’m very excited about these courses and would love to have you. You can find more details at the links below, but I do want to say that these courses are meant to be fun, informative, and to provide you resources that you can use at your own pace and level of investment. In other words, you can sign up and do nothing except show up for the Zoom meetings. You can look at the reading/screening list I will be offering at the beginning of the course and dive into secondary materials for further research (all of which I will be providing to you as part of your $100 registration fee). You can stay silent on the calls or engage in conversation with a great group of people, which has been one of my favorite parts about these courses. I hate that I’m using salesman speak right now—I was a terrible salesman in my job at Guitar Center back in the day—but I really do think that what I’m offering in these courses (and more like them in the future) is something you can’t find outside of places like the Brooklyn Institute, and especially not for cinema and media studies. The courses will be rigorous but they are open for everyone at every level of academic experience.

So sign up at the links below and hit me up with any questions. I hope to see you soon!

REGISTER FOR WEIMAR CINEMA HERE

REGISTER FOR FRANCE IN THE 1960s HERE

Occasionally I’ll log in here and see my subscriber numbers move around, both up and down, and then I see the number in the corner that shows me that some of you are graciously paying me a little bit of money every month, which causes me to panic. I’ve been needing to get this place up and running to earn your trust and eyeballs now that I’m a freelancer, but I realized over the past couple of months that I needed just one last little push in my personal life to get to a place where I’d be able to freely lance. Or something like that. I really, really don’t want this blog to turn into a diary, so I will keep this part brief; but you will be hearing more from me more regularly now that I’ve settled in and my book proposal (!) is near completion.

Until then, I thought I’d share some words that came to me after watching Sean Baker’s Tangerine after hours with my new Cinema 21 family (I’m managing the cinema on Sundays now). For the back half of September, Cinema 21 is celebrating its centennial, and we are bringing Sean Baker for a screening of his breakthrough hit on the 28th. We have a bunch of other special screenings you should check out over that timeframe, including an opening night celebration with a few unannounced surprises; tickets to which you can purchase here. That’s some of what I’ve been up to over the past two months, which also included two conference presentations that allowed me to work out some of my key ideas for my book proposal. I hope to tell you more about that soon.

Corbin and I also concluded our Digital Frontiers series over at The Pacific Northwest Insurance Corporation Moviefilm Podcast, and I’m particularly proud of our final episode on Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia for many reasons, including the intro bit which you can hear above. It was a chance for me to remember these episodes can be more than just two microphones picking up blabbering for two hours once a week.

Anyway, more soon, including news about forthcoming classes at Cinejourneys, one of which will be a timely look back at Weimar Cinema. For no reason. Yknow, very little we could learn from that moment right now.

Tangerine (dir. Sean Baker, 2014)

Man, I really regret waiting this long to watch this. I saw the clips, read the articles, and felt like I kind of got the gist; not because I had no interest in the film or its subject matter, but rather due to what I had been up to in my work over the past decade. I have been teaching a post-cinema/digital cinema course since 2017, which has required me to stay "up" on anything like this with an interesting production history or formal structure, regardless of the film's content or my own interest. At some point, you have a giant-ass list of movies that never gets smaller, since you stupidly chose to research an unfolding topic rather than a historical one. So I put this into the "someday" pile, thinking I had understood its relationship to the unfolding post-cinematic academic project well enough to go on without it.

This view was compounded by watching the response to The Florida Project, which I followed online and also sat in the room half watching with my wife when it hit streaming. By this point I really felt like I understood what this whole Sean Baker thing was: a return to an American neorealist aesthetic following the whole mumblecore thing (ugh), a necessary subversion of that genre's twee millennial cringe with transgression and Real Shit, supported by a new wave of filmmakers who grew up online rather than with the VCR. Now, if you've gone to grad school in the humanities, you're trained from day one to always be skeptical of anything claiming to be Real in opposition to some vague (and usually undefined) Not Real. "Real" is a construction--not only aesthetically (within film history: pulling from the Italians in the 1940s to the French direct cinema/verité movements, or American indies from Cassavetes to the 90s festival wunderkinds, always existing in opposition to the normative Hollywood system of the time) but also ideologically (as a marketing gimmick that makes your commodity more "Real" than those "Fake" ones, belying the fact they are both fake, because they all being sold for the same reason!).

From what I've seen, The Florida Project aggressively fails at both these tests: that transgression subdued and commodified for the emerging A24 crowd, which transforms realism's purpose away from critique to a marketing tool that can be used to paper over a classic Hollywood story in line with the dominant ideology of the time, in which Hard Work and Perseverance are offered as ways out of the system, excusing its contradictions. My surprise at the madcap, slapstick turn midway through Anora, then, was a realization that I had gotten this all wrong. Doubly so when I watched this. I had even shown clips from Tangerine in class while teaching about digital cinematography, although purely as a formal exercise. But to be honest, the more I sat through this film last night, the more I realized I needed to wait for Anora to really get what Baker's whole deal is.

I think Tangerine works best if we take the entire thing--narrative, production history, critical response--as a metaphor for making digital cinema in our era of ubiquitous screens and smartphone cameras. Book it as a double bill with Soderbergh's Che, a movie that uses the revolutionary history of Cuban armed struggle against a colonial power as a narrative exercise for Sodey to suggest he's doing something similar inside Hollywood, armed with a RED camera, flaunting a middle finger to the Harvey Weinstens of the world. Tangerine practices this same move, but instead of revolutionary history, it uses transgression, equivalence, and illegality as its devices. Note how its characters are not merely "at the margins" in society but also literally occupying spaces this way within the diegesis of the film: Razmik uses his cab to pick up trans sex workers, each of whom know which block you should and shouldn't go down, our comedic leading sex worker protagonists Sin-Dee and Alexandra are either fresh out of prison or doing business in the lobbies of donut shops.

Are these narrative attempts to work within a hostile system, subjecting our protagonists to the margins of the law, navigable only through transgression...not like shooting a movie on an iPhone without a proper permit? Saying Fuck You to doing it "The Right Way," breaking both cultural and legal norms to get what you need? If Hollywood is one law then so is the state's view of sex work, and also gender itself. The breaking of each of these three laws is not posed by the film as merely "fun" or even ethical (Baker is wisely utterly disinterested in a kind of feel good liberal moralism that gives us crap like Emilia Perez). It is instead posed as necessary, but also liberatory. Baker made his movie and he made it by transgressing, because the rules need to be broken. That is a victory, as was giving jobs to his two formerly non-professional leads; but Marvel still won the decade, and now the Republicans are trying to legislate trans people out of existence. But that's what makes this film feel so alive here in 2025, coming to us from a moment of possibility when things didn't feel quite so dire. I wonder what it would look like to keep this spirit alive not just when we think about cinema but also the lives of the very real people this film depicts for us on screens that don't typically feature them.

Back to the film. By now, Baker knows how to block, stage, and shoot a scene backed by the resources and trust of independent financiers, indie studios, and smaller distributors. Note the way Anora's madcap sequences in the back half of the film use longer takes with his actors moving their bodies in space, interacting with their physical environment in ways that Marvel Green Screen Hegemony and Netflix austerity pushed out of regular practice on sets. In Anora, Baker understands that frenetic energy can emerge from longer takes if his actors conjure it, if he holds his camera with shaking hands, or if his mise-en-scène and soundtrack become props of their own to throw around the room and smash at will. When he breaks up a scene by cutting quickly, it's usually to map the space over a call on speakerphone between two locations, cross-cutting while two ends of a phone call scream at each other in attempts to locate either side to no avail. It works so well in Anora, because it seems to understand that the best way to manipulate Hollywood continuity is not just to throw it away but to control your viewer's access to its rules imposed by the demands of narrative and intended affect. When we stay in a longer shot with fewer cuts, we feel stuck in a room; when we are frantically cutting back and forth between two people across town yelling into their phones, we are just as confused as the characters, searching for some kind of unity to make the whole thing fall into place.

This is one of the reasons why Anora was compared to the energy that the Safdies deployed so effectively before their split: something like a new American style seems to be emerging in response to the hell world of apps and texts from your bank telling you you're out of money, but one literate in Classical Hollywood form that Marvel and streaming has pushed off our screens over the past decade.

Not so for Tangerine. In the film's first half, Baker is cutting like Dziga Vertov on his first dose of adderall. I regret to say I wasn't really a fan, and compared to the controlled chaos of Anora it felt amateurish. But I think there are two ways to read this. For one, it's a director starting to discover his superpowers, while at the same time not yet knowing how to control the electricity flowing from their fingers. I have taken to calling this Magnolia syndrome after PTA's ambitious but irritating first encounter with a big pile of money. When Baker does this to stitch together the various threads at the beginning of this movie, it feels as if he can see the final product in his head, understanding that he wants that chaos to burst through the screen at the viewer, but lacks the resources both financial and technical to really pull it off. I'd imagine part of this comes from using on-the-fly performances from his non-professional performers. You can imagine him on set, holding his phone camera in a tiny rig, rolling for thirty minutes with new ideas spontaneously coming one after the other. This mode of digital capture has long been part of the digital revolution, where directors can let scenes play out forty different ways, later stitching the takes together into one "perfect" take made up of so many different line reads. If you have the resources of David Fincher or Alfonso Cuarón, you can stitch these into even seemingly unbroken long takes; but here I can imagine Baker just trying shit out and tossing it all together in Final Cut like a proof of concept for the real thing. Except this is the real thing.

But on the other hand, maybe that's the point. A more generous reading would be that this type of rapid editing is an inevitable product of a mode of film production that uses new, cheap consumer technology, emerging--and this is important--at the exact moment of social media's ascendancy to power. Today, our aesthetic experience is no longer conditioned by cinematic or televisual time. We live instead in the world of the eternally updating feed. Of course our images need to move fast to adequately reflect this shift, where reality itself is increasingly given to us via montage when we swipe up on our feed of course. Baker shooting all these takes and then throwing them into a non-linear editing program on a laptop later that afternoon wasn't then some groundbreaking idea, it was just what was possible at that moment of technological convergence. It also puts the film in conversation with other digital film techniques that have been emerging over the past few decades, from the handheld DV of the Dogme movement to the indie horror wave that emerged out of the YouTube short and creepypasta meme scene. But that doesn't really make Tangerine all that interesting. Putting these early scenes together like this feels more to me like a filmmaker discovering the same things every generation of filmmakers discovers as they attempt to break into an industry with powerful gatekeepers, armed with whatever new technological form was emergent at the time, be it 16mm film or the VCR tape.

About halfway through Tangerine, you start to see the Baker we now know start to show his face. The film's eventual climax--where poor Razmik's mother in law drags his entire family to the donut shop, in which Sin-Dee and Alex's plotline is also converging (Bordwell's double plot line!)--might have been the place to really put that rapid editing to use. But the film smartly gives it up about halfway through, finally allowing us to settle into its world, as unfolding actions on screen finally, mercifully, play out from start to finish. This shift isn't arbitrary, either. The moment Tangerine finally slows down comes (heh) during an incredible long take depicting a(n illegal) sexual encounter taking place in the privacy of Razmik's Taxi, going through a drive-through car wash, the act unfolding just below the screen while the soap sensually streams down the windshield shot continuously from the backseat like a view we shouldn't have access to, but do, because we all have cameras in our pockets now. I was blown away by this shot (heh x2), and it was at that moment I realized that this movie is almost one big sizzle reel for Baker to flaunt to an otherwise hostile industry, saying Look at this shit. Look at what I can do. Give me some money!

There is textual evidence for this "transactional" reading of the film, too. Baker's script understands that everything that happens in the film's diegesis--and by extension the decaying late capitalist social system we are all stuck in where we watch his movie--is also nothing more than a transaction. Everyone is always working; our trans sex worker protagonists are not just always looking for money, their social structure is entirely constructed by necessary transactional relationships that allow them to navigate their marginal relation to the "proper" and "legal" social totality that doesn't have a place for them as they are. Is this not what we all do, every day, regardless of the particulars of our subjective particularities? The film is smart about this. It's not just about "being trans" or "being a sex worker," both of which would make for great films on their own; it's about abstracting the particularities of what reads to normative American hegemonic culture as transgression in order to tell us that we are all stuck in this system, this shit is imposing itself on all of us.

Take for instance the aforementioned climax of the film, where Razmik leaves his family's Christmas Eve party under the guise of "work" to see Alexandra. By this point it seems clear he isn't just looking to get off; he legitimately desires her, and wants to be with her. He lies to his family with the excuse he needs to get more work done; but let's be honest: what he left to do was work. Everyone is working here; Alexandra performing at the club, Razmik is paid to know how to navigate the streets of Los Angeles, even Sin-Dee, violently dragging around another sex worker she later has an intimate encounter with while getting high--is navigating this economic structure imposed on all of them that equates mobility with labor. The whole thing breaks down at the end in classic screwball comedy fashion, but what would have happened had it all gone right? Razmik would likely have paid Alexandra for the emotional encounter at her show, either by his ticket at the door or something else. Nobody shows up to her performance, but even if they did, we discover that Alexandra paid the club to sing rather than the other way around. It's not just these two: the film's dialogue is riddled with transactional language. The woman working at the Donut Shop tries to break up the fight by shouting "Stop yelling! This is a BUSINESS!" Razmik coaxes information about Alexandra's location from another sex worker coded like an order at a fast food restaurant (the final bit of information costs "a cheeseburger and fries"). This is just how you do business in the world of sex work, but it's also increasingly the way all social interactions function. Everything is commodified, from intimacy to selling your labor power itself. Which is what Baker is doing shooting this film on an iPhone! Selling his labor power in a transgressive manner! He scrounged up a tiny bit of money and bought anamorphic lenses to put on a bunch of consumer smartphones, and dammit, it's a REAL film even if "You" don't think it is.

Something that pop criticism of capitalism has not fully grasped in this turn back to Marx since 2008 is that capitalism isn't just "when there is money" or "The Economy," but is rather an economic system that reduces every social appearance to economic value through a system of equivalence. Marx tells us that money in a capitalist economy functions as the medium to account for differences by reducing them to abstract equivalences. It organizes the structure imposed on all of our social lives by reducing what we ontologically experience to an abstraction of value that can be expressed by a number. Tangerine is a film then that not only shows us what this system feels like after it has run out of things to plug into the equivalence machine, forcing people to live at these margins. It also gives us a story about searching for a Real within that system that requires transgressive actions like using your employer's car to seek human contact society has rendered illegal, or using an iPhone to make a movie that plays on the same screen as the big studio pictures done the "Right Way." All of this is the same, and it calls into question the division of Real and False, Right Way and Wrong Way within this system of equivalence, as if to break it apart from the inside out.

In the climax of the film, when Razmik's Armenian mother in law catches him at the Donut Shop talking to Alexandra, she recoils in horror when she discovers they are....gasp....not only "prostitutes," but MEN!!!!!!! Razmik rolls his eyes and trying to calm her down, tells her "No, these are regular people!" That the film also formalizes this appeal to a Real that is not outside the system but within it regardless, down to the technology it was shot on, makes it one of the most compelling films of the decade. I just wish he would have cooled it with the jump cuts in the first half.

I just got back from Los Angeles where I attended the inaugural Hollywood Conference held at USC. I was invited to speak on a roundtable on “Industrial Death” put together by my friend Peter Labuza, a former grad school colleague who now does research for IATSE; he also invited Alena Smith, who created Dickinson for AppleTV+, and is now executive-producing an upcoming FX show called Cry Wolf (dude, I may not “have a job,” but how cool was that to type??!).

It was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended, although I’ve only got a decade under my belt. If you have been reading me online for however long, you know what kinds of things I talked about, some of which I want to put into my book. So this gave me a chance to more formally “try out” some of these ideas, so to speak. And I think it went well! Even more enjoyable was the opportunity to reunite with some dear friends from grad school and elsewhere and get lost in the infamous Westin Bonaventure Hotel ourselves.

I shit you not this place is even weirder than Jameson made it out to be. I always thought he was overselling it for rhetorical flourish! Now that said, it’s not like we stumbled in after a late flight, desperate to find the check-in desk. Our entire visit was intentionally charged with the energy of the Bonaventure Hotel anecdote rattling around in our heads, which ultimately became a rolling set of jokes throughout the night, occasionally interspersed with insightful questions like how has the view of LA’s skyline from the rotating, rooftop restaurant changed in the years since it was built? and so on.

I teach that anecdote in class as much as possible. I think it’s the best way to crack Jameson’s whole project, and sometimes I think that the reason he can seem so mystifying is because readers encouter the diagrams from The Political Unconscious first and then freak out. But when I start with this story, my students excitedly figure it out right away. Every time! It’s such a cool teaching moment; I know that Postmodernism has dropped off syllabi over the past decade and I think that’s a bummer. As a result, some academics haven’t had the chance to experience this moment of clarity this generation of students have when encountering his ideas for the first time. I think it’s in part because the book got old and tired profs wanted to move onto other ideas after a few years, and maybe it was always a little a bit much, wasn’t it? But whenever I teach it—from fancy private institutions to giant public universities with a 91% acceptance rate—my students seem to have no trouble concretely understanding the metaphor all the way through to its many abstracted ends. That’s the best thing there is, that moment when you see that spontaneous Understanding just pop behind a set of eyes. At this point, I tend to think our jobs as academics should be to make this moment happen as much as possible. It should be redundancy for when they start tearing the campus buildings down, too.

So what is this anecdote that brought us together? Well, the story goes that Fredric Jameson supposedly got lost inside this very same Westin Bonaventure Hotel shortly after it was built while visiting LA for a conference one year, and then later used it as a metaphor for describing what it feels like to live under the conditions of late capitalism in general for the first chapter of his book on Postmodernism. What is postmodernism? It’s not a style of art, it’s a historically specific experience, it’s like when you can’t find the god-damned check in desk in a giant hotel. It’s such a cool bit of academic lore, its strength coming in large part from Jameson’s own literary flourish (a very modernist aesthetic tendency from the author who declared that period to be over!). But also everybody has been feeling a bit more generous to Jameson these days, which I of course think is good, so the truth is there were many reasons to be there that night. For instance, someone was taking what appeared to be promotional exercise photos on the exposed racing track at around 9:45 PM at night, yes, that’s right, I wrote the exposed racing track, inside the hotel, near the top floor. It just suddenly appeared and intersected our path as we were walking from one elevator to another, on our way to get to the restaurant. I think I want to put this anecdote somewhere…

But all in all, it was a nice way to cap off a productive week that saw me make progress on my book proposal as well as finish my first five-week Cinejourneys course on Film Theory. It was a cool experience and I want to thank everyone who joined up; I’ve taught online during Covid but this is a completely new form that I’m still trying to master to make it worth your money, time, and interest, but also to be an effective class that actually teaches you something.

Cinejourneys

After this first course I think I have a little better idea about how I want to run these things, and what the structure of each class will look like. Some of that will be easier with classes about specific film genres, periods, or ideas rather than a compressed introduction to the basics of film theory—which, I should acknowledge is just my version of the tradition. But I think we had a lot of fun. I got to make some cool slides!

I love showing paintings in class. By the way, I won’t lie to you—if you take one of my classes, chances are I will make you look at at least one painting. It took me a while to understand my own sense of what I think cinema actually is, and I think these screengrabs should give you a sign as to what that sense might be. This is the kind of stuff I like to talk about. You think we are going to just talk about story? Nah dog, we are gonna be looking at paintings from the 11th century and a few tweets, and then you’re going to see a clip from a documentary about the postwar French film scene. You’ll like it, trust me! Come take a class!

Ok two last slides, I was particularly proud of showing these outside of the university for a film class:

We show clips in class and I like to do formal analysis. But I don’t want you to feel like it’s needlessly complicated. I’ve always felt that my best strength as a working academic is that I know how to translate complicated theoretical abstractions into more useful vernacular forms. My advisor used to chew me out for this in my scholarly writing, and instead of realizing what he was actually telling me to do, I spent the better part of a decade trying to make my writing sound all Proper and Intelligent, and then I forgot how to write. I quit writing and just read a shit ton, and started teaching teaching teaching, and now I seem to have remembered how to write down those ideas because it turns out I’ve been thinking them out loud in front of a classroom full of students for years. Now, it turns out that’s actually how academia is supposed to work, but you wouldn’t think so, not with the way it is currently set up!

In any case, I want my Cinejourneys classes to be a chance for you to come think with me, and to learn about cinematic art, culture, and history in the process. I want to make you a better viewer, and I want to show you some cool stuff. But I also want to show you how to look at things, including movies you might not think are interesting to look at because you didn’t realize they are asking to be seen another way. As I’ve been piecing together the theoretical and historical structure of this book for the past few years, I’ve really missed the chance to just get my hands dirty talking about movies. My next set of classes for Cinejourneys are going to be more in that direction.

For now, I can tell you about my next course, Genre Theory, which you can register for while you are reading this. The class runs over Zoom for five consecutive Mondays, starting August 11th, at 8PM.

I would love to have you in the course—this one is a new offering for me and I’m excited to try out a new theory of cinematic genre I have been developing for the past two years. Register at the link above, and I will leave you with a description of the course I put together a few weeks back. Toodles!

Last weekend I was in Fairbanks, Alaska for the Midnight Sun Festival, an annual event that draws 30,000 tourists to the sleepy former mining town to witness 24 hours of daylight on the evening of the Summer Solstice. Fairbanks is the northernmost “city” in the United States, if we aren’t counting smaller towns like Utqiagvik, where 30 Days of Night was set—and boy, you feel that distance when you’re there. A drive across town takes about 12 minutes, passing a few hip coffee shops and a handful of the usual retail fixings of McAmerica. There’s a good university, and the town certainly leans into its outdoorsy identity with touristy infrastructure and nature attractions. But for the most part, Fairbanks is caught in this eerie netherspace between the early 1970s and the present, its architecture in various states of decay surrounded by trees as far as the eye can see.1

When retail death comes to the suburbs of the lower 48, it leaves behind empty warehouses on the edge of town, with burned-on K-MART branding where a functioning sign used to be, empty churches to a dead god, keeping watch over gigantic empty parking lots. Depending on where you are—Ohio, Reno, Nevada—this wreckage either becomes the place in tow where you “don’t go,” or becomes a magnet for a new Shake Shack or Starbucks across the street, after which those silhouetted signs of an earlier retail economy are soon covered up with a Spirit Halloween banner. Not in Fairbanks. In Fairbanks the K-MART never left because it never came, but the building is still there, somehow. When the sun never goes down you can’t really place yourself in time, but that happens in Fairbanks on all 365 days of the year, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky.

If we are using Fairbanks as a laboratory for constructing metaphors to map the antimonies of American history, it’s almost too obvious to periodize the break in the 1970s. Are we being treated to another Don’t Look, It’s Neoliberalism! story? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about it, but there just so happens to be a reason. Seventy years after the Klondike Gold Rush brought a wave of immigration that kicked off the modernization of the upper left corner of the North American continent, one final wave of industry swept the region following the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field in 1968. Excavation work eventually led to the construction of the privately-owned Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which runs the vertical length of the 50th state and today facilitates 13% of the U.S.’ total domestic oil production. But to the chagrin of the Republican Party, the pipeline nevertheless only operates at 25% capacity these days. Like the rest of the town, the whole thing feels like an allegory: you really get a sense that there’s an entire generation missing from inside Fairbank’s social architecture where development—even creative destruction!—was supposed to unfold.

Speaking purely anecdotally, from the places I visited last weekend, the town appears to be peopled by the descendants of those who arrived in the twentieth century and those who were already there: indigenous peoples mixing with the descendants of White European settlers who arrived in the 1890s in search of gold, and interestingly, a still-sizable Russian-speaking population. This was fascinating to see first hand: while Alaska was at one point Russia, today seems the Fairbanks’ true connection to the post-1989 world of global capital flows runs not only through the pipeline on the edge of town, but also with waves of Eastern European immigration to the existing multigenerational communities of 130-year old Orthodox congregations buried in the woods across the state. This makes the area ripe for cross-Atlantic economic integration in the form of exchange programs that bring Bulgarian college students to town on their summer break to staff the restaurants filled with American tourists on vacation to see the midnight sun. The most famous eatery in the town of 31,000 is a Moldovan restaurant, and I passed a number of Eastern European grocery stores in the center of downtown. In Alaska! I couldn’t tell if they were meant more for tourists or locals; the answer surely is Yes.

All of this was interesting and would have been what I noticed had I come to town on any other weekend, but what made last weekend’s trip so particularly weird to me was the way I experienced Fairbanks phenomenologically. The average high temperature in Fairbanks in June is 72 degrees Fahrenheit; the week I visited it had been around 90 degrees for a number of days without rain, and predictably, a number of wildfires had broken out across the entire region. Something like 40,000 acres had been engulfed in flames by the end of the weekend, resulting in ensuing evacuations, road closures, and mobilizations that brought planes to the sky to try and stop the fires from spreading. You would hear a distant groan up above and when you’d look, as your eyes reached the hazy, brownish gray sky ceiling, you’d notice that the smoke seemed to be coming from just over the hill, like, over there, in that place, an area nearby that you could probably drive to in a matter of minutes. It gave the whole thing an eerie apocalypticism, compounded by the fact that as a visitor, I couldn’t tell if this was unusual or just another Saturday in Alaska in the twenty-first century.

Because the town doubles in size each June, I only needed to walk about ten blocks from my hotel to get to the small downtown area where the festival was talking place. I could have walked down the middle of the street if I wanted to. It’s difficult to overemphasize the extent to which the town really does look like a lot of other American towns, with four-lane streets and traffic lights dividing commercially-zoned blocks. The difference is that here there were maybe four cars out at any given time, and it didn’t seem like the festival had all that much to do with it.

Eventually, I arrived in the heart of the festival. Tents filled with local artisan trinkets lined the streets, selling everything from traditional indigenous Ulu knives to tie-dye anime t-shirts. A few hundred people were roaming the streets with open containers of beer they had snuck out of the beer garden, and like most of these things, you saw just about every flavor of Guy (gender neutral) they make in America. Kids would bump into you while playing chase and cackling in glee; their parents were across the street in line to get their sun-baked faces caked over with paint to look like an elephant or a mouse.

I only lasted about fifteen minutes before I started to get light-headed. The AQI had been fluctuating between unhealthy and dangerous levels all weeked, and the entire thing was cast with a vaguely orange hue under a sky entirely painted over with a layer of smoke covering a sun that refused to set. My headache was getting worse, and I started wishing I had brought a mask. But then I noticed that nobody—I mean nobody—was wearing one. I was standing there thinking about all of this when my phone buzzed and I pulled it out to read that Donald Trump had just approved airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear sites. I fired off a couple of tweets after scrolling the timeline and then put my phone away. In this moment it seemed clear the reason there were no masks had less to do with any kind of coherent anti-mask conservatism and more that everyone wanted to pretend things were fine and that this was a weekend just like any other, and that the tears in their eyes were maybe coming from a joke that had them doubled over rather than the charred particles forcing themselves in through everyones’ sensory organs. I didn’t last much longer and decided to go inside.2

I snuck in the elevator just as it was closing, and the guy inside asked me what floor and I said seven. Standing next to him in the corner was a woman I’m assuming was his mother, or perhaps aunt, who was silently staring at the wall as the elevator beeped past each floor. As we reached my destination and the doors started to open, the woman who had until this point been silent suddenly let out in the most stereotypical Disappointed New York Jewish Mother voice I’ve ever heard, THERE IS ASH, FALLING FROM THE SKY! The guy made eye contact with me and you could read his embarrassment as he said “have a good night,” and I hope that the look I gave him back read as Knowing. When I opened the door to my room it smelled like smoke inside, so I shut off the fan circulating the external air and dealt with the heat, sitting in a room with sinewy strings of light sneaking in past blackout curtains and no air conditioning, inside my hotel room near the arctic circle, which was at that point on fire, 5,614 miles away from a place that was also engulfed in unexpected flames.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted and I wanted to give you a little update and proof of life. Hi! Things have been pretty crazy over the past few months. I don’t want this blog/website/newsletter—whatever it is—to be a diary, and despite the fact that I am extremely online and relatively open about my life, I really don’t want this to become a place for Matt Lore to fester. So many interesting writers let that stuff overtake their talents now that the demands of creating on social media platforms require a different mode of engagement than, say, the life of a midcentury newspaper columnist or obscure academic.3 But since some of you are paying me, and as I have been sort of dancing around what’s been going on for a while now with cryptic posts and slapdash prefaces, I suppose you deserve an update.

Last fall I got word my renewable NTT contract at Portland State was being axed along with seemingly half the rest of the university as part of a new financial stability plan for the University that just so happens to also be happening all across our higher education system at Universities of all shapes and sizes (Crazy coincidence, huh?). I was very lucky to get that job at PSU to get me back home to Portland after spending about a decade back east in Providence, first for graduate school and then with a few teaching gigs in the years after finishing my PhD. I had already decided I was likely going to leave academia before landing that job, and I knew that it was probably only a matter of time before the hammer fell for it too: but it was going to get me and my wife (and the boy (dog)) back home, which is where I wanted to be anyway.

Knowing something is inevitable honestly makes it worse when it arrives. I realize now I was basically pre-grieving for what I knew was coming and had sunk into a pretty crippling depression for a number of years, really, not just since finishing my PhD but before, as a result of the double-punch assault of Bernie getting ratfucked in the 2020 primary and then COVID locking me inside with a drinking problem, a fully-paid dissertation writing fellowship that meant I didn’t have to be anywhere, and an unhealthy obsession with Marxist economics that started as an academic pursuit before turning into a wet blanket of despair. Long story short: after a lot of personal turmoil that I don’t want to glorify or make into anything different than what everyone feels by dint of being alive right now, I checked out of rehab in January of this year and started rebuilding my day-to-day life to set myself up to make the career change I knew was inevitable.

But then a funny thing happened, as a certain British documentary filmmaker likes to intone. I started to like working again. I’ve had really crippling writer’s block since graduate school for reasons I only now really understand. I learned how to write at SB Nation, where I was on deadline to publish multiple Seattle Mariners game recaps each week for a website that was just as interested in aesthetic experimentation as it was sports reporting. But this didn’t work as well in grad school. Addiction certainly had something to do with it—I am a master avoider and booze gave me a handy out—but so too did the way I never really felt all that comfortable with the responsibility of being a Proper Academic, some of which I guess you could say is a class thing but really its more that I’m stubborn and don’t like being told what to do, to my detriment.

My success with experimental baseball writing did not prepare me for writing a dissertation. I only really know how to write this way, where I use too many em-dashes and cuss and capitalize Important Words to convey ideas to you in ways that it seems we all talk these days, even though I had been learning how to navigate the more formal spaces of seminar rooms and conference presentations for the past decade. Every time I tried to write my anxious brain would just send me down a spiral where I anticipated my advisor’s feedback so much that I would find myself reading something completely irrelevant to the argument I was supposed to be making so that he wouldn’t yell at me (again, I need to reiterate: this behavior was not grounded in any reality).

But sometime over the past few months, the motivation had returned (probably because I wasn’t soaking my brain with a depressant every night). Word was still terrifying, and in my frustration I began to ask myself why it was that every time I tried to write in Word I was poorly ventriloquizing what I thought a Real Academic sounded like, and yet when I used to look at Vox’s CMS for my baseball gig the words would just flow like a broken dam? The day after Trump won the election I drove my wife to the airport at like 4AM and then set up shop at a Stumptown Coffee and opened this website and started hammering shit out in my web browser. I now write everything in the Substack CMS, from blog posts you read here to idea dumps I need to get out, and even to essays I now pitch to Real Magazines and academic journals—you know, what I was supposed to be doing this while time. It’s funny what happens when you dig yourself out of a Mind Prison of your own construction.

I thought I was going to make a clean break from academia after receiving news of my non-renewal, but as I had a little more time left on my contract before the academic year ended, I suddenly found myself doing what I was supposed to be doing all along. So after getting word I would still have part time classes through the year at PSU—and importantly, after getting a LinkedIn only to discover the “real” job market is just as bad as the academic job market—I said fuck it. The only jobs I was seeing with my skillset were offers of temporary contracts to help companies train the AI that would eventually replace that temporary contract in the first place. I realized that I had been spending all this time waiting for the switch to Normalcy after the waiting room of grad school, as if all the trappings of middle class life were waiting for me to pass one last test. But it’s just not true! We are all of us in a serious moment of historical rupture, and nobody knows what’s going to happen in two weeks let alone ten years. AI is being forced on us, capital’s latest attempt to keep accumulating past the hard limit of 1973 that we’ve been ignoring with debt and zero-percent interest rates, moving manufacturing overseas to hide profits and keep the slop machine running before the entire house of cards comes crashing down. We are all scared about what is coming, and it’s going to come for everyone, and there’s really nowhere to hide unless you somehow know how to grow all your own food and are also a multi-millionaire

So to get to the point: my plan is to cobble together enough freelance stuff—adjuncting at PSU, teaching online with Cinejourneys, writing here and for various outlets—along with part time work in the film exhibition world I’ve been lucky to land, to try and make this work. I’m lucky to have a supportive partner and a good network to at least give it a shot before the economics prove unwieldy. How much riskier could it be than any other job, two regimes of accumulation removed from the ideal midcentury MAGA fantasy of full employment and a car in every garage?

More concretely, I want to thank you all for being so supportive over all the years, and I hope that I can keep your trust and interest as I push forward with this, which feels like a very different plan than I had been anticipating while working towards my degree, but in practice is really just the same thing I’ve been doing for 15 years now. Now I’m doing that work with a new focus and healthier sense of what it means to do be in this line of work in a world where we are rapidly destroying the institutions our society has used to produce knowledge for a thousand years. I’m not pretending like I have any answers for that, but I do think it makes this work all the more urgent.

My main project at the moment is my book, tentatively Against the History Machine. Hopefully I will have more details in the coming months (if you’ve been reading this blog you know what it’s about). I will continue publishing here (hopefully at a better pace than I have been), and am at the moment working on the second installment of my ongoing piece on the mythopoetics of Star Wars and Hollywood franchise culture as a strategy to juice a regime of accumulation that is rapidly decaying before our eyes.

More concretely, I think I am going to finally start utilizing the paywall on this site, with “news dumps” on Fridays analyzing that week’s Happenings, thoughts on what I’ve been watching, reading, or listening to, or I dunno, maybe a picture of my dog. I won’t charge you to look at a picture of my dog, I’m just kidding. But look for that soon and if it sounds interesting, I’m only asking for a few bucks a month, which will also give you a discount to my courses over at Cinejourneys. I have some upcoming classes that I’m really excited about, and I’m trying to take advantage of the freedom this mode of pedagogy allows.

So that’s the state of the blog. I suppose I’m saying that I’m transitioning to independent scholarship, but I don’t like that: I still teach at a University, and even if they don’t take what I do seriously, I do. I really do think that in my own life there will be a time where the University as such doesn’t exist. The work will, even if AI comes to replace every institution of learning or aesthetic production we have, and so the only way any of us will survive that is to keep on plugging away with the opportunities we have, assuming that anyone is interested enough to seek it out amidst humanity’s coming A.I. hibernation.

So thanks everyone—I love you, I’m excited for the future for the first time in a long time, and you know where to find me. See you in the funny pages.

Over the next few months, I will argue here that the Star Wars franchise offers us perhaps the single best case study for understanding the rise and fall of the culture industry of late capitalism in its American manifestation, from the mid-1970s to the early 2020s.1 Bookended on either side of this periodization are different political regimes, incommensurable economic imperatives, modernist Hollywood cinema and mobile phone gambling apps designed to look like video games, all of which we are told serve the same purpose. I will be arguing that the franchise and its industrial history offers us one of the most concise documentations of the consolidation of corporate control over our media apparatus, which affects not merely the look of blockbuster genre films but the political concerns and coalitions that apparatus makes visible every day. At the same time, I will be arguing that the films and their ancillary media can help us see the transformation of aesthetic logics and reading practices during this same period. This latter story is one we desperately need to understand in order to make sense of our broader media culture in our own galaxy, today, very near to us, with a history that stretches back to a much more determinate point than those iconic words that preface each film’s opening crawl.

Periodization: 1973-2025

Scholars have been using this rough periodization to make sense of the world since it became intelligible as an object of analysis in the early 1980s. A survey of key texts in literary studies, geography, economics, and political philosophy outline this problematic. On the other side of the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, some social scientists began to argue that the events they just witnessed were evidence of a shift in capitalism’s logics from a phase of “Fordist” economic logics to that of a more flexible “Post-Fordist” period, one that we could understand by analyzing everything from profit rates to the content of movies like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Others argued the period in question could more accurately be understood by paying attention to changing aesthetic and consumer logics, an understanding of which might expose to us an emergent “cultural logic” called “postmodernism.” Others argued “power” as such had undergone a transformation over the past few centuries, landing in the postwar, decolonizing world with new philosophical ideas about how the individual relates to their social totality, ruling through the softer power of economic control rather than the forceful repression of violence; let’s call this “neoliberalism.” Evangelicals were making documentary films about the end of the world, and computer nerds teamed up with disenchanted hippies to build a virtual fort inside their CRT monitors where mom couldn’t tell them to clean their rooms. It was a wild time!

Whatever name we choose to describe “it,” whatever institutions, practices, and forces we decide count in our analysis, and whatever diverging or overlapping scholarly tradition we consider ourselves in conversation with, almost everyone now tells some version of this same story: (in) or about the middle of the 1970s, the world system changed. And we now live a world shaped by its consequences. Even liberals are starting to think with this periodization, realizing as they are that the economic ideology they assumed was akin to nature is losing its purchase in a society that seems to be forgetting how to distribute the resources necessary for everyday citizens to reproduce their way of life. “Neoliberalism,” that hafhazardly-defined term, dominated the academic literature on this question from about the late 90s to the mid 2010s, replacing the “postmodernism” of literature departments, or whatever was happening in most social science departments of the time.2 For the most part, depending on what you chose as your experiment’s control—political economic philosophy, the U.S. prison system, the structure of global capitalism itself, novels, gender and its relation to social reproduction—there seems now to be a free-floating consensus on the importance of this period and the interconnected social transformations that followed in its wake.

So why does it feel so weird add in Star Wars to this academic conversation? There are many reasons. On the one hand, it just feels silly to talk about Friedrich Hayek and the Death Star in the same sentence, as if the fan-theoretical culture of finding easter eggs hidden in popular media is the same thing as rigorous, politically-informed art historical scholarship. It certainly doesn’t help that an entire sub-discipline within the academic study of film and media—“fan studies”—emerged in the middle of the period in question, which convinced many scholars both within and outside the discipline that this is all film and media studies can offer to the project of knowledge production. Even proper academic studies that situate the franchise within its objective economic and industrial history often seem to fall under sway of the Beloved Object; good books often forgo engagements with canonical scholarly literature on the franchise, while bad books written by self-professed “aca-fans” dress up blog posts about fan conventions as radical scholarly praxis.

In what follows, I will do my best to avoid these pitfalls. I’m sure you know my feelings about so-called “fan studies” by now, even before reading this article, but it is also true that I grew up in an era when Star Wars had an outsized influence on American popular culture, and I was not immune. At the same time, I will be approaching the series and its relation to popular culture through a disinterested acknowledgement of this fact: that the influence of the franchise and phenomenon demand our attention as cultural historians and theorists, regardless of the way it so often appears in film and media studies scholarly discourses. I want to similarly transcend lazy aesthetic criticism that views the study of moving-image media as the interpretation of representations on a screen, which tell us what they mean by dint of their appearance.

By the conclusion of this series, I will offer a reading of Andor, Disney’s recent successful television streaming series that has raised my interest not merely because it is a piece of Star Wars franchise media that seems to be produced with a different set of imperatives than the usual slop-shoveled-by-executive-committee that gave us such masterpieces as 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story (credited to Ron Howard, who really came in halfway through a disastrous shoot to ensure they could stitch together any useful footage). “What is Andor?” was the draft title of this article, which I began intending to be a four or five paragraph extended Letterboxd review but now has me wanting to sharpen this larger critique I’ve been developing since starting my dissertation back in 2017.

What astonishes me about Andor and the discourse surrounding it is the way full-blown, self-identified leftists are reading the show—a prequel series set before Star Wars that depicts a period during the formation of the “Rebel Alliance” our intrepid heroes would later join—as a revolutionary text. Many of these readings are coming from the same corners that used to (accurately) chide liberals for their Hamilton obsession, as if a make-believe ahistorical musical about rapping founding fathers was a weapon ready to take down Trump 1.0. By now even Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has responded to the so-called “controversy” over the musical (is “it’s bad” a controversy?) by turning the whole issue into one of “good” versus “bad” representation. The resulting “conversation” has redounded into an Kafkaesque architectural maze, tracing which viewing identity can properly identify with what character played by this actor or that actress with different identities than the historical figure they represent who may or may not be represented by other figures in the audience who, due to their positionality might………you know. This is an approach to media criticism that many leftists understand as a confusion over the emancipatory potential of media representation without noting the “re-” part at the beginning of the word’s verb form. Such approaches—dominant in fan studies and online discourse about most popular franchise media—often ignore the way for-profit commercial media economies seek to commodify every subject and every identity for membership in their ideal audience. There is no outside to capital, just as there is no outside to representation; our emancipation will not come from being seen more clearly by those who also have 24/7 access to the microphone on your smartphone.

But this will not be another agonizing story about “Woke” and its consequences. No, what I find interesting about Andor, a show which is narratively a kind of pastiche of the way “revolution” has appeared in other media, is that it seems to offer us a mode of address we haven’t seen from the franchise since the first film. I think this is legitimately interesting, and it has an influence on the show’s politics and the way they are mediated to us within the broader media ecology here in 2025.

Today it’s hard to remember that the first film arrived in a world without Star Wars, long before the expanded universe(s) of franchise intellectual property exponentially stretched the attention of fans and toy consumers so wide your parents needed a guidebook just to keep track of what you were seeing on the screen and in the store. But Star Wars wasn’t “seen” as Star Wars in 1977; its initial success came in no small part from the way Lucas offered audiences a film with a mythopoetic mode of address at the precise moment that the popular American mythology of the mass culture era had begun to fracture. By the 1970s, the Western genre—perhaps America’s first autochthonous mythic narrative—was beginning to die out with the generation that bought pulp novels at the dime store, who posessed a living memory of their parents’ recounting the California of the 1880s. Silver screen icons that once signified Hollywood and everything it stood for were now being cast as villains in postmodern genre pastiches, vestigal reminders of a time quickly slipping through the out door, leaving a trail of wreckage in its wake for the next generation to clean up.

But it wasn’t just the American Western mythos that was being replaced by the rise of Science Fiction and the multimedia age; a broader America mythic crisis was unfolding during the 1970s that gave rise to fundamental questions about what it meant to live in American society and the economic contract it claimed to offer. Not only were the complications of structural inequalities gathering voice through new media outlets and the various political movements of the 1960s, stagflation caused economists and trusted news anchors to question fundamental assumptions about what it meant to live in a society as such. The promise of the New Deal and the coalition it called into being, a mass movement that counted amongst its members rural farmers, urban factory workers, intellectuals, artists, and an increasingly diverse and radical youth movement, was collapsing. Trust in the American project waned with each new revelation of the government’s involvement in illegal overseas conflicts. And the technological horizon that had seemed within reach only a decade earlier and which put a man on the moon had stalled out with broken down machinery, mass layoffs, and a shrinking government that could do little more than prop up the necessary farming economy that allowed American society to eat the food that let them go to work doing jobs that increasingly seemed pointless. Lucas’ crafting of the first film’s narrative could not have come at a time better suited for a mythic rebirth in culture; that he can’t seem to get his story straight about when he first got this idea is evidence it may have almost emerged organically to meet a need that found its own solution (in other words, a myth!). We’ll talk about this next time.

It is incumbent on me to place this argument within the existing scholarly discourse that earlier I criticized other Star Wars scholarship for ignoring. In each installment of this series, I will choose a historical moment, its concepts, and its key scholarly interlocutors that many of you will likely be familiar with. It will come as no surprise to see the name that you are already reading in your peripheral vision below this.

Fredric Jameson wrote about Star Wars in an early draft of what would become the introduction to his book on Postmodernism, noting that Lucas peppered the film with nostalgic references to the media he grew up watching. Chief amongst these references are the film’s nods to Buck Rogers science fiction serials, which Lucas watched as a child on Saturday morning television broadcasts (seems fitting that many of these broadcasts were the results of studios selling their library vaults to TV networks, a move Lucas would echo with his sale of his empire to Disney decades later). Star Wars takes from Buck Rogers its episodic narrative structure (the second film was titled Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back), opening title crawl, and intergalactic alien supervillains; later fans have noted the nods to the Akira Kurosawa samurai films he watched as a film student at USC (and even the strange, Leni Riefenstahl-esque framing of the final throne room sequence, which shows Lucas was willing to take from everyting!).

Jameson notes that Lucas passed these simulated memories of his own off in pastiche form to the audience of Star Wars, many of whom were too young to know they were looking at a representation of media from “a long time ago,” despite feeling a strange sense they were somehow the recipients of a comforting communion with some kind of past. “(I)t is a complex object,” Jameson notes, “in which on some first level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artefacts (sic) through once again.”3 That these conflicting viewing positions became one of the franchise’s central contradictions as it grew through the decades would merely be an interesting anecdote if they didn’t also show up in the way different generations and viewing publics now seem incapable of arriving at a shared reading of whatever news broadcast they choose to watch. We are constructed by the media we consume, and afterwards, many of us go on to construct the media later generations will consume, and the cycle begins anew. It seems fitting to note here that the place where these business decisions are being made—Silicon Valley—is just a stones throw from where Lucas chose to build the new headquarters of his various post-Star Wars business enterprises.

So yes, the history of the Star Wars franchise might seem like a metaphor for the story about our broader service and entertainment economy as it grew out of the crises of the 1970s to its uncertain present. But treating this as a metaphor is a trap, one that treats textuality as mere representation like all those approaches I complained about earlier. I think a good deal of the hesitancy to treat popular media as a serious area of scholarly concern is fear of falling into that trap. But thankfully, at least insofar as it gives us something clear to complain about, the Walt Disney Company Company’s purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012 provides an explicitly material chapter in this history, one that demonstrates corporate monopoly logics and their direct engagements with broader political economic and technological concerns. Later, we will see how Disney’s purchase of the franchise’s existing intellectual property presented them with both a problem and opportunity for establishing new income streams designed to endlessly produce value; that it didn’t work, and required revision might remind us of what Marx described as “so-called primitive accumulation” were we to treat IP as a commodity that exists within the diegetic universe they had just colonized.

But all of this will come later. First, we must return to the world in the last moment before Lucas’ film opened to the world on May 25th, 1977.4 We need to see how Star Wars came into the world and what it meant for people to watch the film—Star Wars, not “Episode IV: A New Hope”—from this moment through to the 1990s. In our next installment, we’ll engage in a little Hollywood history, recounting the well-tread story of how the film came to be but, this time, in conversation with the histories of American culture and art. Jameson’s and his “postmodernism” periodization will be central here, as will more formal economic history. In the process, we will come to see the mid-70s as a key moment in the rise of what we would come to call neoliberalism, both at the level of economic institutions but also in the cultural imaginary. This is important: what I am calling the first film’s “mythopoetic mode of address” will be a focus of the piece and offered as a kind of ideology. We will close read images and sequences from the film alongside more contemporary franchise objects to see how 1977’s Star Wars demands a different kind of spectating consumer when viewed at different historical moments.

In the process, we will also peel the curtain back on the myth Star Wars tells about itself, how Lucas—and later Disney—have sold and continue to sell the film not merely as blockbuster spectacle but as a cultural ritual for a desacralized age. This mythic narrative of New Hollywood’s greatest cinematic myth will bring us in conversation with the life and career of a man who came to play a complicated role in all of this, less as the source of Star Wars’ cultural power (which some credit him with), and more as a logic, a way of thought. This mode of thought had been attempting to find form for some time by the moment that Star Destroyer first began its slow descent on the screen, a never-ending display of power both in the universe on screen and in the bank account collecting all the box office receipts.

This idea, this myth, had until then failed to find the voice that Star Wars would eventually provide. It wouldn’t even take shape by the time the original trilogy’s final film, Return of the Jedi, was released, in 1983. But that following year, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, George Lucas sat down in an auditorium to hear a retired academic-turned popular writer named Joseph Campbell give a talk on what he called the “Inner Reaches of Outer Space,” an idea that finally found shape and form, giving birth to a myth we have yet to name but still tell ourselves, every day.

At the risk of turning this announcement post into an exercise in narcissism, I will just say that I am obsessed with this problem. Against the urge to be sober about one’s employment in a commodified and bureaucratic institution—we are workers, as the return to labor consciousness in the 2010s reminded us—it just is true that teaching is a vocation and one that serves a foundational role for the stability of liberal democratic modern societies. It’s personal to me; after entering the academy in graduate school, coming off a ten-year stint taking random classes at community colleges while working retail and living in a van driving around the country playing music, I had a bit of culture shock. I loved undergrad at Portland State, taking classes with people like me, who didn’t get into fancy private institutions after high school, all having an opportunity to think together. Fuck class differences, this is something that everyone is capable of, as long as they have interest. This ethos made me resist a lot of the professionalization of the academy throughout my graduate studies, which in retrospect was probably to my detriment (but none of those people have jobs either so Fuck It, We Ball). I don’t think any of the above makes me unique, in fact, it’s just what happens when a generation that has wider access to higher ed (good) live in an environment where the productive forces of the economy also more equitably distribute downward mobility (bad).

This is all a long way of saying that my dream was always to get a PhD and then go teach at the kind of institution where I got my undergraduate degrees, peopled by students with full-time jobs in income brackets that reflect what American society is actually like. I got to do that for two years at the very same institution that I was holding as a model! But now here I am, trying to find a way to keep teaching. So while this hopefully won’t be my only foray into online teaching, it’s a first. Thanks for bearing with me, now for the details.

Cinejourneys

I’m very grateful to have teamed up with the Cinejourneys folks just as it is getting off the ground. The project was started by true Movieworld vets, and its instructors include people with wide experience in the film world over the past few decades: critics, academics, writers, DVD commentators (I’m available, distributors!), ranging from experience at places like Criterion, Turner Classic Movies, to academia, podcast, and the festival world.

Click through the website to see how it works. It’s just getting started so the full offerings aren’t up yet, but the idea is pretty simple. Essentially, you sign up for an account with the site (free or pay for perks), and then use that account to sign up for the courses that interest you as they are scheduled, which we instructors—”guides”—design and offer over Zoom, for a one-time fee. Some courses focus on a particular auteur and their body of work, others movements like the Japanese New Wave. I have plenty of ideas for future classes and want to thread the needle between interesting and unique, stuff you can’t get anywhere else, but also foundational and useful as a scholarly endeavor. There are other benefits across the website, such as “Journeys” that are shorter in length and come with your basic account; it’s a really cool program and I encourage you to click around on the main site.

As I experiment further with online pedagogy, I’m trying to brainstorm ways to offer more rigorous academic courses through a more academic institution of some sort. But the goal of my courses at Cinejourneys will be to thread the needle between offerings that interest a wide range of cinephiles and the theoretical and intellectual methods that I think are foundational for any intellectual project. It will still be the me from my writing and posting, but it won’t be like taking a graduate seminar with a huge time commitment. There will not be assigned readings in these courses, but I will have suggested texts for each class meeting that I will be using to build my lesson plans, and you can follow along with links I will provide (elsewhere, because of The Law, so shhhh).

I view this idealistically. In the 1960s and 70s, cinephiles—especially in France but across the world—thought and wrote about cinema in a deeply informed and theoretically engaged manner. Figures of this time included academics—Metz, Bordwell, Wollen—but also critics and artists, really anyone interested in media and culture with a political consciousness (one of the most influential 70s film theorists had a day job as a dentist!). I have a sense that the level of thinking that was being done at this point was far more disciplined and productive than the Rotten Tomatoification of cinephilia online, which gets absorbed into stan/fan culture, misreadings of concepts such as Mulvey’s male gaze, and fear of or even disdain for careful textual analysis. My courses at Cinejourneys will be designed and taught in this spirit, taking all attendees seriously whatever their background, and trusting that they are capable of thinking Big and that I can learn from them too. I believe this is vital for us in our historical moment, and while these courses aren’t going to like, change the world, I hope they are chances to help anyone interested in art have a steadier foundation in intellectual and political history at a time when most discourse on contemporary cinema is generated by Chat GPT.

FILM THEORY - MONDAY NIGHTS STARTING JUNE 16 - JULY 14 @ 8PM - SIGN UP HERE

My first course will run for five weeks, meeting on Monday nights at 8 on Zoom from June 16th-July 14th, and it will be an Introduction to Film Theory. In it we will learn in a rigorous way not only key concepts in film theory—apparatus theory, identification, ideology critique, formalism—but also how such concepts relate to the development of intellectual history, capitalist society, and the project of modernity. In other words, the course is for everyone, and it will teach you important tools from the film theory tradition that will be useful for you however you relate to cinema. In equal measure we will be entering into a much larger debate about the relationship of art to culture and hegemony in late capitalist societies. For all my courses I have designed a little preview of structure you can see on their main page, outlining the trajectory we will be taking. Check out what I’ve got set up for Film Theory, which I’ve structured both chronologically and around key concepts each week—from classical film theory’s focus on ontology and realism to midcentury debates over signification and ideology, studies of spectatorship that range from feminism, queer theory, and critical race theory to phenomenology, film as art (the auteur theory, etc), and finally the questions posed by digital technology’s rise and our return to a monopolized culture industry.

What to expect? Our courses will not be structured as intense seminars, which can lead to performative posturing unhelpful for actual learning, nor derailing ourselves with less useful rabbit holes about this or that aside in the text. Rather, they will be big, open conversations that I will lead, built out of a rigorous lecture each week, and you will have the chance to be a part of the conversation throughout. We will meet once a week (Mondays at 8PM Eastern) over zoom for a few hours, and I will provide screening and reading lists as well as to give anyone interested a chance to develop some kind of material result (advice on an article, check out your work, or even just continued conversation about theory—pose me what you want to get out of it!).

GENRE THEORY - AUGUST-SEPTEMBER - SIGN UP HERE

My second course will be the same thing but focused on Genre Theory, which I understand to not merely be the typification of style but rather a technology for crafting the sensible as societies move forward in time. I’m really excited about both of these courses, but this one in particular will be something I don’t think you can get anywhere else on the open internet. My goal with all of these courses—including the more academically rigorous courses I hope to teach online—is to bring my expertise as a thinker and researcher to you unencumbered by student loans or the scarcity of program admissions.

The last bit I need to mention is the cost. My pricing for these first courses is a flat $65 fee that covers all five weeks and gives you access to materials. To be all neoliberal, this is obviously way cheaper than a college course, and I’m only undercutting them because they don’t give any of us jobs anymore. HOWEVER—for paid subscribers of Histories of the Present, I am offering a discount of $15 per course that will bring the total cost down to $50. If this is successful and I teach more classes, I’ll make this work out to be a better deal for you. But for now, I have tweaked my subscriber benefits to account for this, which you can access for the $5 per month level. You will receive the code via email when you sign up as a paid member of Histories of the Present (if you are already a paid member, shoot me a message for the code). I know that $5 a month doesn’t mathematically add up to big savings on a five-week course that doesn’t even start until June, but I’m also about to start adding more benefits here on my Substack for you to actually feel like you’re contributing to something that provides you a benefit.

Anyway, thanks for bearing with me as I enter the freelance world. I am really hoping to make this stuff work and am brainstorming new ways to (ugh) monetize my skills and I really hope you continue to have interest in what I do and what I can offer. I really appreciate all of you for just reading this blog, before we get into any kind of subscription system. I really hope to see a number of you in my courses this summer.

Although his initial ratings bump produced something of a hot commodity in the diegetic world of the film and its media industry drama, by the film’s midway point, it has become apparent to UBS that Beale had gained a little too much soft cultural power in the US mediasphere, causing tumult in The Order Of Things. As Beale presses on with his paranoid rantings, The Real Bosses of The World call in Beale for a “meeting” in a powerfully underlit back room where he finds a towering and mysterious figure played by Ned Beatty, avatar for the entire corporate world, to sit him down and explain who really runs the world.

It’s an iconic scene and worth quoting in full.

(Beatty): You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: Why me?

(Beatty): Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Beale: I have just seen the face of God.

(Beatty): You just might be right, Beale.

Earlier today, Trump announced a 90-day pause on the absurd tariffs he announced last week that sent global markets into a chaotic and destructive spiral, reversing the market plunge at least for the time being. The whole thing seemed absurdly fit for our stupid postmodern times, the announcement coming with a giant print-out list of the tariffs that looked like a placard presented at a high-school science fair. The numbers were supposedly arrived at by plugging data into Elon Musk’s Grok, X’s AI, which typically receives input from idiot blue-check gamers to ask for summaries of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or, hilariously, critiques of Elon himself. But for all the nihilistic humor the tariffs made possible, there was a real fear of the destruction they entailed.

Speaking for myself, I found the entire thing darkly comedic as all of the billionaires who thought they were just signing up for a tax cut realized they had handed over their giant money printing machine to Brick from Anchorman. But last night, the bond markets started to respond poorly; suddenly real economists online started to shift their tone from one of shocked bemusement to sheer terror. Briefly, what was happening was an emerging sign of a serious crisis rippling out from the patchwork nature of our global financial system. As traders tried to navigate the possible effects of the tariffs on their holdings by selling off this and shorting that, yields on US Treasuries started to skyrocket. This is a potentially apocalyptic sign; US Treasuries are supposed to be stable and safe places to dump money for investors to ride out market fluctuations, and the price of the dollar and US financial power is implicitly indexed to its strength. Signs of a panic started to appear and people rightfully started freaking the fuck out as investors began running for safety by ditching their lifeboats and building up their bug-out bags (it’s ironic too; conservatives freaking out about our national debt aren’t always just cynically using household economic models to fool people into going along with austerity measures; they think that China, who owns a good amount of US Treasuries, will *supervillain voice* SELL OFF THEIR DEBT AND CRATER THE AMERICAN ECONOMY BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!! And here Trump was making us do this to ourselves. Psychoanalysis is real.).

With the caveat that I’m a humanist who has done my own research into economic and political theory for projects on how markets are mediated in popular culture—I’m no expert on this stuff—I myself was starting to panic last night, scrolling the timeline in bed, even though I told myself I was going to throw on a movie and avoid both big screen and little screen. I’ve been on the record saying that soon there would be a conflict between Stable Capital and Stupid Capital. This was the time for that contradiction to start contradicting. And what was happening? Bill Ackman was tweeting out his own desperate, bargaining phase of acceptance, US “house” economists like Larry Summers were going on TV instead of like, the backrooms where all the world’s levers are to hope that some kind of publicized analysis would be powerful enough to set the boat afloat (look at that—Larry Summers joining the project of Critique as if to banish the Latourians from the department). They even sent Ted Cruz and Tim Scott to Fox News to speak directly to President TV to beg him to stop. And it still didn’t work!

A key strategy of the neoliberal project over the past 50 years was to dismantle the world order which was falling into crisis, where wartime national economies were run in near-command form by leaders they feared had too much power to force economies into what they saw as personal and dangerous visions that put strictures on The Market as a magical force for good, alongside its postwar remnants in the welfare state. FDR and Stalin and Hitler were all viewed as historical disasters because they told The Economy what to do instead of letting it do its thing. Their vision was one where power was distributed into a network of relations, mutually reinforced by the nature of free trade’s competitive advantage (which of course in their vision really meant freedom for Western capitalists to do whatever they wanted). But there was still a sense that somewhere, in a back room, the Real Men Were In Charge, a Ned Beatty who was allowing Howard Beales onto Fox News to stir up skepticism over taxes to the rubes so that they could continue to exploit the world’s economy for their own gain. And yet, here we were, the moment of truth, and they were nowhere to be found.

Of course this room is a metaphor, and I’m not suggesting that they actually met in some conspiratorial Bilderberg Group-style meeting to plan the secret order of the world. But I think everyone did have a general sense that the Real Economy—perhaps less in the accumulated structure of consumers buying cars and more in who determines how the money printer works—is structured to serve specific class ends. This is how the United States has been run since the end of the Bretton Woods system following the crises of the 1970s. It was terrifying to learn that the way this system had matured following the generational passing of twentieth century capitalists to their failsons and debt-addicted clingers-on was a networked, complex system designed to keep the free flow of capital afloat but one that was supposed to be staffed by smart people. But they also simultaneously have been waging war against smart people since the 1990s. The monkeys really do run the zoo, but this zoo has guns and complicated institutions that can be mobilized for destructive ends if the idiots are given the login information.

Thankfully, this afternoon, Trump blinked by announcing a 90-day pause on the tariffs (although he kept the China tariffs, and a general 10% across-the-board intact).

Later in an interview with NASCAR drivers in the Oval Office (jesus man, lol), Trump let slip that it was the panic in the bond market that made him step back from the ledge. He also said that Jamie Dimon “said something had to be done” and that he was visited by 87-year old retired eponymous CEO Charles R. Schwab himself, who he was apparently surprised to learn was actually a guy and not just an investment firm, earlier in the day.

Trump said that Schwab told him that he has been wanting tariffs for “40 years” and he gushed over what he clearly took as an ego-boost and proof he was right all along. I think what really happened is that the room from the end of Network materialized by default, built into the system in the way the neoliberals actually designed. They just got him to fall in line by sweet talking instead of a lecture. It’s fitting that the film was called Network, about a television broadcast network at the moment when broadcasting was about to be deregulated and replaced by a digital network with a functionally different model (distributed across computers rather than emanating out from one transmitting center to be received by the masses of listeners or viewers). In this sense the film was allegorizing our shift into the present moment, perhaps not literally understanding how the world was being remade at this moment, but effectively serving the same purpose by narrativizing a situation in which capital broadcasts poison to the masses with the hope they can fool enough people while keeping the keys to the back room on their keychains.

But you may have noticed that sometime over the past few years most metal key lock systems have been replaced by magnetic swipe cards, from hotels to your work I.D. You can copy metal keys, but it’s a lot easier to duplicate magnetic cards and send them out to more people. It looks like The Room still exists but more people have access to it. As prescient as the film’s vision of the emerging neoliberal order was, it still couldn’t imagine what networked power actually would look like in practice, and the destabilizing danger such a dispositif entails. It should be noted that at the end of the film, they find a way to conveniently dispose of Beale live on air, the entire thing ending in a mess with the damage done but the Real Men still in charge, perhaps even better off than they were before. With the market rebounding after this entire fiasco, you can’t help but feel the whole thing effectively became a giant pump and dump scheme (or dump and pump?). I’m not sure what to make of all of that but I think we learned something about capital’s relationship to the state today and I’m looking forward to the actually smart economy knowers to tell us more in the weeks to come.

This afternoon, Trump announced his long-promised tariffs in a televised event held at the White House rose garden. Until the last couple of weeks, The Tariffs were an abstraction bouncing around the collective MAGA hivemind, floated by Trump and his moron leeches as well as extremely online crypto maniacs who have given themselves brain poisoning watching their corner of the market behave erratically since 2020. Trump, ever the showman, had been hyping up the announcement like a WWE match or Big Fight on pay-per-view—advertising a "Liberation Day”—which of course sounds all well and good if you’re stupid. As with everything this administration does, you’d drive yourself insane trying to memorize the actual numbers they propose which might be talked down tomorrow morning after the market opens, or tripled if Trump sees someone on Fox expressing doubt about the plan. So in lieu of details, which you can find elsewhere, I want to talk about what I think might be happening here at the level of ideology and political legitimacy.

If you are reading this blog, you know that Americans in general have very little idea about how the economy works; this is due in part to the norms of our education system and the dominant ideology of consumer capitalism that wants first and foremost to inject a business ontology with defined roles onto individuals as if they are in a theatrical production called The Economy. As the current iteration of the GOP continues to entrench itself through our political institutions, many commentators have noted the extent to which stupidity reverberates in every corner of their coalition. RFK, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is two steps away from hawking colloidal silver as a cancer treatment. We spent all of last week freaking out because it turns out the guys actually in charge of doing Army stuff plan it all on their personal phones using a texting app. And voters, analysts like to remind us, only seem to care about the price of eggs without understanding the reasons why and how the numbers on the grocery store price tag go up or down at any given moment.

But it seems to me that underneath the terrified response to the tariffs is not so much that the White House lacks knowledge but rather that we have an imbalance between our analysis of the right that places too much focus on “Evil or Stupid?” I’ve long been of the opinion that balancing this scale is not a zero sum game, that one can be Stupidly Evil; but I do think, as Nathan Tankus noted on Bluesky, that we discount the extent to which everything that pretty much anyone in power is doing at the moment (let alone the GOP) is entirely seat-of-the-pants, on the fly stuff. That’s because what’s really happening right now is a legitimacy crisis: capitalism in its neoliberal form long exhausted itself as a productive project for producing value with a general buy-in from both workers and owners. This happened in the 1960s and 1970s (albeit with stronger alternative ideological systems vying for ascendancy), and it’s happening again.

I do tend to follow Althusser in viewing ideology as a transhistorical and necessary component to the stability of any society—that ideology has no history, that there are only ideologies. What is happening right now is the first real serious appearance of a post-neoliberal project out of the discursive realm and into the Real. It has been brewing since the mid-2010s and has been intensifying in more violent articulations with the right’s use of the bipartisan state of exception to deport at will. But capital has, for the most part, been in the driver’s seat as a collectively networked entity. I think what we are seeing now is less some general sense of stupidity and more the attempt to thingify what had heretofore been merely ideas into the concrete.

As I wrote back in November following Trump’s second victory,

Some Marxists and the Anti-Imperialist Umbrella have a tendency to let their analysis slip into these simple abstractions. Oh they want you to do this. Capital wants this, or Empire does that, while the idealized countervailing forces range from Putin to Assad or just a local co-op serving fair trade coffee. But have any of them ever read what The Wall Street Journal says about Elon Musk? The WSJ fucking hates Elon Musk! They ran hard with the stuff about his ties to Putin and reported exclusively on his shaky finances before the election. Capital may be “mutely compelled” to accumulate but did we all forget that capitalists are in competition with other capitalists?!?!!?!?! Elon Musk and Trump have both made Reddit or Truth Social-brained overtures to the Ron Paul style idea of getting rid of the Federal Reserve altogether. Do you think that Jeff Bezos—who invited Fed Chair Jerome Powell to a party in 2020 with Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—wants the dollar to be pegged to crypto?

I’m not in the game of making predictions and I certainly don’t have the adequate financial expertise to even make educated guesses as to how this or that wing of capital will respond. What I do know is that within capital itself, what some tend to call neoliberalism in the form of Hayekian economic policy still tends to run the show. It’s a bitter irony that this project, so built off an insight that no single actor can access enough knowledge about an economic system on their own, that it is the network of buyers and sellers and all the other hands in the pile that together aggregate into the “knowledge” itself which can only be measured, is now caught unawares as the dumbest president in the history of the country says fuck you I’m the boss.

It’s going to be very interesting to see how what I’m starting to call Stable Capital responds to this event. Maybe they will shake some sense into the White House after the market tanks tomorrow, or maybe they’ll roll up their sleeves and get to work figuring out how to navigate a new reality as an opportunity to creatively destroy competitors. Maybe this was the first shot in what will move from a trade war to a real war. I am not the person to be reading for advice on any of that, but I do know enough to say that there is a contradiction unfolding: everyone is “stupid” in the face of these tariffs because nobody thought they would actually do it. But they just did.

On the one hand, it seems clear that Silicon Valley capital has been trying to nudge up to Trump here in the early days of his administration, perhaps knowing full well the man runs on nothing other than narcissistic ressentiment. Maybe Stable Capital will follow suit and use the tariffs to negotiate certain conditions with the White House in exchange for political donations, ensuring a streamlined power structure in the kind of coup the liberals have been warning about. Or maybe not! So without trying to guess who which CEO is secretly going Joker mode behind the scenes or what market will try and take advantage of the situation, I think it’s fair enough to say that today was a capital-H Historical Event in the historical trajectory of political and economic ideology and its articulation within the political institutions in the United States. Everyone is calling this stupid because of what it’s going to do to Any Existing Business let alone your average consumer (literally anywhere in the world), but perhaps that Evil/Stupid scale isn’t so helpful in this case. With these tariffs now real, the right is beginning to push towards, if not a coherently articulated new political philosophy, simply something else. So forget the evil/stupid thing. History is open!

For evidence of this, one could point to the fact that Trump was going to announce these tariffs before the market closed, but they decided to delay them until afterwards. This tells me there’s either a little less stupidity going on here or that there are active contradictions within the White House itself. Here’s another fascinating contradiction: for the past few decades, America’s dominant bipartisan political economic ideology has been to protect and manage the accumulated capital that petty booj homeowners have. These guys are the ones who buy cars and refinance their mortgages to refinish their bathrooms; both parties chase these voters as Real Americans because they vote for their interests and have their interests addressed as the only real political action that can ever happen in this country. Well all these people, chief amongst them Gen Xers and Boomers heading to retirement, newly retired, or nearing the end of their lives living off their stocks, are about to have everything go up in smoke. Do you understand how different this is than even 2008? That was a contradiction that emerged out of a hairbrained scheme for capital to juice the economy and get more and more people into the homeowning business so it could keep the cycle of accumulation going. This is a declaration that there’s a new boss in town, and you might even be able to say it’s the first policy either political party has devised in at least my lifetime aimed towards not only my generation but future generations to come. This is a step towards a new economic contract, one that has a terrifying and completely idiotic vision of the world order. Of course it’s disastrous, but is it really stupid?

Moving forward, I think we need to take seriously the idea that the old rules no longer apply and that what we are actually seeing is a fight over emergent forms of political ideology in the concrete. Part of the reason the Bernie movement failed when it did is because liberalism still had enough legitimacy through the existing political and electoral institutions that prop up our government. That is increasingly no longer the case, and I think we need to act accordingly.

Sixteen years ago, during the peak moments of the financial crisis, finance ghoul Rick Santelli famously freaked out on CNBC from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange after hearing about Obama’s plan to bail out Fannie and Freddie, demanding a new Tea Party in response. We all know what happened after this. Today we stand in the wreckage of this rant, living in a world it helped usher into being. But people today are just as freaked out as they were then, probably even more, and even if they voted for Trump, they didn’t want this to happen. How will the left respond? I think we should take a little time to gloat myself, just because I spend too much time online, but I also think we should get to work and figure out how to mobilize the confusion and fear that is currently radiating out from the black hole at the core of the economy before new dogmas start to crystallize from the right wing media apparatus and Dumb Guy podcasts.

Mark Fisher once famously misquoted Jameson about the whole imagining an alternative to capitalism thing, and while it wasn’t exactly what he meant, I think it came to stand in his wider body of work as a desire just for something else to happen. Something else may have just happened. What are we gonna do about it?

I had a chance to see a 30th-anniversary 35mm screening of Se7en over the weekend and was reminded how great the movie truly is. In my post-credits daze, crawling out of the theater, I overheard a few shocked reactions and exhortations of disapproval, which got me thinking. Se7en is, ultimately, a widely misunderstood film; one problem is that many negative readings are the result of mistakenly treating the film as a work of vulgar auteurism in such a way that one misses the trick the script is pulling on its viewer. Why is this? It’s because David Fincher's rise to auteurdom came at a time in which the Hollywood mode of production had shifted away from its high-Classical period of vertical integration, with its strict division of labor (directors being assigned scripts), and towards one where what it meant to be an auteur was for directors to have a deep hand in the crafting of their filmic narratives (think Coppola hiring Mario Puzo to write The Godfather) or simply wrote them themselves following the run-and-gun 1980s American independent years (Tarantino).

Se7en is of minor interest as a chapter in Fincher's filmography, a preview of the concerns he would interrogate much more skillfully later in his career. It is clearly not the work of a master artist yet; it oscillates formally between styles that feel more like attempts at homage than a distinct authorial mode. The action scenes are thrilling, but the camera moves so quickly it can be hard to make out what is going on (see the chase through the apartment complex), shot as they were in handheld 35mm. It doesn't seem as if the film is trying to present you an overwhelming sensory affect here as much as it didn't quite know how to skillfully speed up the pace and tempo without losing the careful procedural energy it has in the slower scenes, which would become a key signature of Fincher's in his post-Zodiac work.

Those scenes also present a bit of a problem, coming as they are right on the cusp of the end of print culture. Fincher's rise to become one of our two greatest auteurs of digital proceduralism, a role he shares with Steven Soderbergh, could only happen after the invention of the RED digital camera and the proliferation of non-linear editing systems that gave each the total control their obsessive styles demand. At one point in the narrative, Freeman's Detective Somerset has to go to the library to receive information to propel the narrative forward (in a key moment, our protagonists pay off an FBI informant who has access to some secret database where the Feds are keeping track of what books everyone checks out from the library, a fantastical invention that surely seemed to serve as a creative way to get from point A to point B but one that, it turns out, was actually a warning of what was waiting for us in the smartphone era!). All of which is to say nothing about the general sense that Fincher takes himself Very Seriously as one of America's great 90s music video pomo directors, an eye-rolling work of Male Genius that we supposedly grew out of (but lets be honest with ourselves, ended in an era with a spoiled party kid president who destroyed the middle east, a spirit cinematically embodied in McKay's Step Brothers).

(you can almost see Fincher and designer Kyle Cooper in music-video mode in the film’s iconic opening credits, trying to invent Final Cut with glue and scissors just before it existed)

But Se7en's true genius is Andrew Kevin Walker's script; for my money the single best of the decade, one which we might even be able to argue is playing a joke on Fincher himself. But it’s also, I think, playing a joke on many of its disturbed viewers who misunderstand what the film is actually up to. It is a script that fundamentally understands Hollywood storytelling in an era of empty genre pastiche, especially one in which the "neo-noir" became the privileged site of detached, ironic postmodern play. This is a movie that takes the absurdity of its premise deeply seriously, not in an edgelord, Reddit way--"man wouldn't it be FUCKED UP if (describes the torture contraption Leland Orser's character uses to horrifyingly perform the killer's "Lust" murder)?!?!"--but rather to ask, What if that happened? What if things like that weren't just Epic thought experiments in the spectacle for Dumb Guys, what if there were actually people who did shit like that? It seems harder to laugh at that suggestion after reading the kinds of things Gen-Z neo-nazi posters talk about in their group chats! It's a warning from a more innocent time, one that was misread by progressive pomo liberals as playing with moral panic, but one that comes not from a reactionary place (what kind of judgements does the film encourage its viewers to make about its victims or the causes of crime?) but rather an awareness of what was waiting just around the corner during the high, End of History triumphalism of the early 1990s. This is a film that actually does what Fight Club defenders claim that film is doing, and that it refuses to play by the rules its critics wish it did is emblematic of the film’s project of critique.

In this way, it's ironic people treat the film as a kind of 90s/00s bro, edgelord object. Much of this comes from our short historical memory in the digital era, as well as the need for dominant culture to make fun of what was previously popular by somehow blaming all the current enemies of What's Cool for the oppressive insistence on What Used To Be Cool they take as their fault, even though these two things are hardly ever related. We have constructed a false memory of the decade: 90's ironic pomo culture was sincerely insincere, dominantly liberal. It was young and hip and Cool, detached, Smarter than anyone trying to slow things down and tell people that History might have other plans for everyone. What do you mean take things seriously, are you a fucking square? But once the murders start to hit, Freeman's weather-worn detective Somerset--a Black institutionalist who seems to operate both within and without the urban landscape without becoming an avatar for any dominant generational ethos--is the only one who understands what is happening and takes it seriously from the start. R. Lee Ermey's police captain is desensitized to the whole thing--he can barely keep track of new victims from the other, unrelated victims he manages at the head of a sprawling, inhuman bureaucracy. Somerset’s first place to go is the library, reading old shit like Dante while the rest of the police on the scene play cards and wait for someone to burst into the public space to announce their crime and force them to do their job (the film repeatedly reminds us this is what cops actually do). And then there is Brad Pitt's Detective Mills, who has to order Cliffnotes because he doesn't read; what is he, some kind of loser?

Freeman's Somerset is repeatedly warning everyone he encounters that they need to grow up and start taking things more seriously. Importantly, this isn't out of knee jerk reaction but a place of serious, sober concern for those around him and the society he deeply cares about. He doesn't want to do this job anymore; an instance of the one-last-job motif that popped up again and again especially in neo-noir pastiches beginning in the 1970s which was there meant to signify the pastness of prior media objects being pulled into the present to be mined for one last run through the Content Wringer, but here signifies History's desire to be done and over with before realizing that everyone seemed to miss the lesson it was trying to warn us about in the first place, and so maybe they are going to have to stick around a while longer (Freeman’s last line in the film, “(I’ll be) around”). Paltrow's character is the polar opposite of a 1940s noir femme fatale, she's just a normal person who wanted a normal life, being dragged into some personal psychodrama by her maniac husband. One reading has suggested the film thinks she is somehow stupid; I think she, along with Freeman's Detective Somerset, are the only sane people in the entire script. It is a story in which America is caught obsessed with its own reflection at the End of History, full of an ironic postmodern detachment that is ultimately just a mask for a naive narcissistic sincerity that (PROVED ITSELF!) completely ill-equipped for handling a world where History was waiting again around the corner, either in the form of Kevin Spacey's murder turning himself in or Trump winning the 2016 presidential election.

In fact, Pitt's Mills is the too-cool, Above It All critic of this movie, rolling his eyes at everything he encounters (that he would have known about had he done the reading). At some point the work it takes to keep up that act becomes the new definition of sincerity itself, a desire to blind oneself from what's uncomfortable for fear of being forced to act in a world that demands moral compromise without easy solutions. I'm reminded here of those legitimate heroes who spend time researching neo-nazi internet communities to try and warn us about what they are up to while most normies would get one whiff of anything remotely disagreeable and say "what a FREAK!" as if that is an answer for how to stop them. In Se7en, Pitt's Mills assumed he won the culture game, he assumed he was the protagonist of the twentieth century, achieving the "hard-fought" job out of the Academy only to land in an apartment underneath the subway tracks, but one that would allow him to prove himself one day with all the markers of Having Made It His Way, because what's really important is that He made it, above it all. Meanwhile Detective Somerset is trying to warn Mills about what's waiting around the corner; he’s not prepared to see what’s inside the box.

By the end of the film, in the car on the way to the final reveal, Pitt's Mills face to face with the film's representation of the Real finally captured in the back seat, you would think he would be able to finally face what's coming. Instead he just mocks it spittingly, "You're a movie of the week! You're....you're a fuckin' T-shirt!" How many people do you know like this who didn't take the events of the early 2010s--no, screw it, even the early 2020s--seriously enough to do something about it beyond complain? And what the film presents as a counter to this--masterfully worked out in the script in the film's best sequence, where Somerset and Mills debrief over food shortly before the film's climax--is two worldviews sparring it out, the film clearly taking the side not of reaction but of a true sincerity, one that doesn't hide in silly genre cliches or pop-cultural signifiers meant to convince the utterer of their superiority over what's uncomfortable instead with a sober realization that this stuff is out there in the world, demanding of us not a retreat into reaction or the detached stupor on Pitt's face as he is driven off to the funny farm, but for us to wake up tomorrow, roll our sleeves, and get back to work.

Recently, I was asked to contribute a piece to George Washington University’s Illiberalism Studies program’s new project, “Frontiers of American Reaction,” on the cultural effects of neoliberalism in crisis. I decided to put something together combining precisely both of these worlds! Check it out here.

While some film scholars such as David Bordwell have argued Hollywood’s narrative and visual “rules” adhere to classical narrative logics that run through Ancient Greek theater to the present, others, such as Noël Burch, have argued that narrative film’s formal “rules” of construction can be seen as the products of an emerging late nineteenth to early twentieth century liberal, capitalist industrial society mediating an ideologically coherent world for an Americanizing labor force that included large numbers of European immigrants from countries with their own film industries. We typically imagine Hollywood narrative films to have psychologically defined individual protagonists who offer us something like a helping hand into the narrative world of the film, and that this protagonist’s “looks” are mediated through the camera’s own—which must act as a “silent, invisible observer.” What to do, then, when audiences made up of diverse immigrant laborers in New York City were watching prints that had come to America from Italy, identifying with that film’s “Old World” address and not integrating their social and psychological lives into industrial modernity’s emerging American labor force? One tactic was to work to ban foreign imports, as Richard Abel has outlined, which served to “universalize” the address of the films that made up Hollywood’s emerging monopoly over the cinema industry (of course with all the problems that selective universalization entailed).

But today this political economic system is in crisis. We no longer live in its earlier period of industrial growth with an emergent new media technology such as cinema; privatization, precarity, and digital technologies have replaced those earlier historical phenomena as a means by which to continue the ever-declining profit machine. But this is not merely an economic shift. Our culture is one dominated by social media screens and targeted advertisements instead of the novelistic and theatrical narratives that came out of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, and our art reflects this. Rather than asking if these films “know” what they are doing with their confused narratives, constant extension with sequels and inconclusive “endings,” maybe we could read them as reflections of similar transformations underway in our post-industrial societies?

The idea for the series came from Corbin, who mentioned after recording one day he was thinking about that question that has been on so many of our minds in recent years: why does everything look like that these days? Hence: Digital Frontiers. Each week until August or so we are going to be covering a movie either shot on digital, a concept related to digital/post-cinema, or a movie that used digital technology in one way or another, made between the years 1998-2011. Our reasons for this periodization are multiple, but primarily, we wanted to see how the digital, austere aesthetic emerged before it was hegemonic across the Silcon-Valley-ized industry, one, and two, we are ending the year that ARRI and Panavision announced they were no longer going to be producing film cameras.

As for my contributions here: much of what I will be talking about will be related to the ideas on this blog. I have taught a class on “Post-Cinema” for a number of years now, and as such, am pretty familiar with the debates as they have existed within film studies. Many of these debates emerged out of the initial fear that digital technology would render cinema irrelevant in the media scape and destabilize its identity as a specific medium (fears that were, frankly, well-founded). But in recent years the debates have turned to questions about phenomenology and digital images, the nature of “truth” as it relates to image production and indexical image capture, and new modes of aesthetic possibilities for representation. In my view, these debates underemphasize the economic and art-historical shifts to the mode of image production in our culture during its postmodern, neoliberal recent past. I hope to get into some of that in this series, but also to simply talk about digital aesthetics and to help solve that question of why everything looks like shit these days. That never used to be the case with digital cinema’s promise, and I hope our series can help illustrate that.

I have a related piece coming soon over at GWU’s Illiberalism Project that I will be sure to link here. And I’ll have an update soon on what I make of all this stuff happening right now as Elon strips our government for parts and completes neoliberalism’s takeover of the twentieth-century state. For now, turn off the news and give our episode a listen. You can check the episode out here or through your usual podcast service.

Our first episode is about "Festen," ('The Celebration,' in English), The first certified Dogme 95 movie and an absolute banger. Topics include: the weird little camera they made it with and the heights of emotional intensity it archives, the family as a model for society, the usefulness of digital artifacts in creating an aesthetic, and skateboarding videos. 

Matt recommends some reading on digital cinema here. Corbin recommends Monster Hunter. Also of note for this episode, C. Claire Thompson's monograph on "Festen," available on University of Washington Prss (or a library of some sort, it's pretty expensive)!

Next week's episode is about "Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones." There is a chance you've seen it but if not it's on Disney+. 

Corbin reccomends TWO MOVIES currently in theaters. Ryder reccomends "Different Trains" by Steve Reich. Matt reccomends "Blueprinting" by the Aizuri Quartet.

Next week's episode will be the beginning of a new series, DIGITAL FRONTIERS, a history of the early days of Digital Cinema. Our subject will be "The Celebration" by Thomas Vintenberg. Watch it here. 

Corbin reccomends Skyrim, which you probably already own. Matt reccomends an appliance. Ryder reccomends 'The Creature' and 'Zeiram,' two weird little movies. Corbin also reccomends this essay by Patricia Lockwood. 

For reasons too tedious to get into here, next week's episode is NOT about Unrest. It will, instead, be about The Brutalist, which is currently in theaters. Ryder will be joining us again for the episode, which is pretty funny. 

Check out a really neat essay about the movie's multifuntional narrative here. Matt reccomends The Brutalist, currently in theaters. Corbin reccomends UFO 50, snag it here. Our next episode will PROBABLY be about "Don't Look Back," finally, but it could end up being about The Brutalist. We'll find out together. 

Next week's episode will PROBABLY be about 'Don't Look Back,' but David Lynch's death (RIP) might complicate that plan. Whatever the case it will exist. 

But the main reason I’m publishing it here is because, honestly, why would you bother putting in the effort to revise an old paper for a publication that will only be read by the two people who approve and edit it for publication, resigning it to the dustbin of history alongside the entire University in a few years? On top of all that, nobody wants to read another journal article or magazine piece on Children of Men, especially not when it would sit in peer review hell until 2030 when Greenland becomes the 50th state following Florida’s submersion into the Atlantic Ocean. So fuck it. You’re getting a Histories of the Present special.

I’ve given this piece just the lightest bit of editing so as to make it more readable in printed rather than spoken form. Unfortunately I don’t have the correct citations as this was meant to be presented rather than published, and I have no idea where some of these books are with half my shit in storage right now. Also I don’t really care enough to put in the effort. But I’d love to hear your thoughts, even if I don’t know what to do with them, or this article.

The End of the End of History

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, pitching his most recent book, “Enlightenment Now,” offered the following on his theory of historical progress:

“If history is about all the wars, all the disasters, you’re missing all this incremental improvement that can only be ascertained through data…I would say that it’s appreciating the progress that gives us the courage and conviction to try to strive for more progress. History tells us that attempts to make the world better tend to succeed. We’ll never achieve a utopia, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make things a little bit better.”

In one sense, this quote neatly sums up Pinker’s recent turn from his work as a cognitive and evolutionary psychologist to public intellectual, a self-made airport book therapist for our confused times. More troublingly, Pinker’s is a project the title of which seeks not to universalize enlightenment values as an ethic but as nature, the inevitable outcome not merely of biology, but also a trans-historical project connecting an ‘us’ back in time to a First Day, separated only by a linear telos in between. To admit anything else would be to admit said project might have been bunk to begin with. To Pinker, progress functions as both cause and effect, a tautology that comes to define what he sees as the very condition of history itself. One must appreciate progress, because history is progressing, which we know today because we have progressed. Paradoxically, this puts Pinker in roughly the same boat as liberal democracy’s other great apologist, Francis Fukuyama, who since the mid-90s has been man-behind-the-curtain’ing his famous End of History thesis through discursive turns to human nature and identification undergirding the contemporary liberal world order, as well as to controversial Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, who seeks to combat the so-called decline of the West by uncovering the ‘rules’ which govern humanity’s true nature. Of course ask a neanderthal who had the ability to create fire if they thought it was kosher to eat uncooked red meat and you’d have the clearest argument against the idea of inevitable progress one could imagine, but I have to keep writing, so let’s keep going here.

Despite any doctrinal or political disagreements these three men may have with one another, what they share is a firmly-held belief in progress either a meta-historical inevitability of human history and nature, or the crowning achievement of modernity on the other, that which is paradoxically under attack by evil forces seeking to undermine civilization itself. In these accounts, progress is either that which the long durée of history evinces, despite the latest headlines speaking of famine here and bombing there, or the actualization of what was meant to be all along, and what still will be, rather than what could.

Leaving aside the politics of the role of the public intellectual, it seems telling these concerns with progress emerge as they do in roughly the same period, something we might call the ‘neoliberal now,” following Linnie Blake, or the global imaginary emerging in the wake of capitalism’s final victory following the end of the Cold War. What is compelling here is not the emergence of a politics of historical progress, per se, which emerged out of Enlightenment-era philosophies of history running from Comte to Kant, or with the establishment of history as a specifically modern academic discipline in the 19^th century. My question, however, is different: why is it precisely following the so-called victory of Enlightenment-era liberal democracy and capitalism in 1989 that its decline becomes thinkable, not merely in response to emergent crises and changing conditions but rather to the fact that such progress can be identified as an object of knowledge for itself? Why is it that in the absence of a structural threat such as state communism, dominant theories of progress need such rigorous defense against spectral events that emerge out of chaos instead of undermining liberalism’s first principles, such as the chaos of climate change or the unpredictability of war? And crucially, why do two seemingly incompatible theories of history—that of the linear development of “all mankind” throughout “all history” to the defense of modernity as a historicizable project—end up making precisely the same argument about futurity within this period, the argument that it is progress itself which is either inevitable or naturalized and reified?

Versions of these questions have appeared in a number of ways since the end of the Cold War, and have evolved alongside the historical events which have followed therein. On the left, one could point to Derrida’s hauntology of Marx emerging after the fall of the Soviet Union, or to Jameson’s conceptions of a contradictory postmodern ‘cultural logic’ governing the period we might now call neoliberal capitalism. Recently, critiques following the work of Sylvia Wynter and Edward Saïd have proposed a project that strives for an assault on these epistemologies emerging from so-called modernity, which they see as a conscious rejection of the strictures the West outlines for itself and imposes upon the rest of the world not merely through physical violence but also thought itself. But these critiques are not limited to the left. On the center and right, one could move from Fukuyama to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” which sought to reinscribe the Muslim “other” as an emerging post-Soviet threat to the West. What none of these accounts address, however, are the ways in which critiques of Enlightenment-era notions of progress also seem to emerge precisely after the moment of progress’ total victory over the political imaginary in the wake of the Cold War. Are they symptoms of capitalism without an ideological alternative? Or is something else afoot?

One account of this trajectory might be seen as an intensification of the logics of 1989 as the contradictions of the postwar order and a transforming global capitalist economy unfold further and further. The left’s version of this argument might follow Derrida’s “spectre” of Marx, here gaining historical form once again with the rise of socialist political projects in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the crises of the 2010s. And on the right, we see a return to nativist revanchism in the contemporary GOP, which almost serves as a reifying mechanism for Huntington’s theory of civilizational clashes, a reactionary approach which seemingly never fully bought into the neoliberal promise of an open and free borderless society governed by the global market. But while one could view these intensifications as part of a much deeper history, I would instead like to suggest these earlier struggles were frozen if not in practice, then in popular discourse: frozen at precisely the moment at which Western notions of history and progress began to undergo a crucial shift as one world system gave way to another.

Perhaps what changes with capitalism’s ‘final’ victory in 1989 is precisely the definition and temporality of what stands in the way of the project of progress, from one in which so-called ‘civilization’s continued existence is threatened by the battles fought by an opposing ideological state project or the immediate threat of irrational individual agents with the ability to wipe out all life on earth with the pressing of a button, to one in which progress is threatened by the slow decay of deep history itself, outside human control. Here we are threatened not by new ideas but by simmering political tensions resulting from the structural failure of neoliberal capitalism as a stable economic regime, or the already-too-late warnings of climate change and decaying political institutions across the globe. If this is indeed the case, I would like to argue this epistemic shift can be seen precisely as a crisis within liberalism itself, one in which the very grounds of the liberal project become impossible due to the changing nature of how history and ‘progress’ are theorized in the wake of events that undermine its conception of the world and nature itself.

What I describe here might be seen as a move away from what Jameson called the ‘perpetual present’ of the post-Cold War neoliberal order towards something which looks more like Benjamin’s Angel of History, who can only look backwards while being forced into an unseeable future, this time without a commitment to fulfilling unfinished revolutions throughout history leading up to our present moment. In this account, the paradoxical union between those theorists of progress who tell a story about all of human history on the one hand and those who seek to protect the West against whoever is most conveniently threatening civilization at any given moment seems much less paradoxical. They ground ‘progress’ itself as that which must be defended rather than completed, on both the right and the left, waving its flag above the post-industrial battlefield in an attempt to conserve capitalism against the evolving challenges to its hegemony.

But can such an account even be called “progress” after these qualifications? At what point does liberalism’s theory of history break down in the attempts to make sense of an unfolding present that transforms its promise of inevitability (that it accuses communism for having!) towards a contingency that may solve the contradictions threatening its hegemony but which undermine its philosophical foundations?

In what remains, I would like to attempt to read this epistemic shift, following Jameson, as a kind of changing cultural logic in the wake of postmodernity through two moving-image texts that appear on either side of Fukuyama’s so-called End of History. First, Mick Jackson’s Threads, a 1984 BBC telefilm depicting the impact of global thermonuclear war on a small industrial town in Northern England, and second, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 high-budget studio thriller Children of Men, which imagines the collapse of liberal capitalism and any hope of a better future into a totalitarian fascism by the means of a metaphor of an unexplained fertility crisis. Here, I read Threads and Children of Men as films that foreground these two historicizable challenges to the historical notion of progress, each constituted within their own pre-and-post-Cold War historical epistemologies and discrete historical filmic and televisual forms. I will argue these films can be read as markers which bookend this epistemological rupture occurring sometime around the end of the Cold War, a rupture in which the notion of futurity as a political question shifts its temporality from the immediate to the gradual, or if we prefer, the return of History itself.

The crucial difference in what Threads and Children of Men thematize are as follows. First is precisely what kinds of threats to civilization the films depict: from global thermonuclear war and its impact on the environment to the slow decay of a political system wrought by the failure of a society to reproduce itself at the level of biology and social totality. These discrete but overlapping narrative threats, I argue, possess their own temporalities, indicating the changing nature of the way in which historical time and challenges to ‘progress’ are figured on either side of this proposed rupture; from the immediacy of nuclear war (which returns civilization backwards to into an earlier stage of a distant past), to Children of Men’s slow decay of deeper and overdetermined crises, which does not auger a “return” to a prior moment but instead descends deeper and deeper into an indeterminate future.

Second, both films situate their conception of temporality, progress, and time through the narrative devices of childbirth. This is an impulse, I argue, that illustrates the difficulty of conceiving of history and futurity outside the realm of a linear progression wthat sees biological reproduction as the ultimate driver of historical temporality (nature) rather than the development of society as such. Time’s passage here becomes unthinkable outside something like the ‘progression’ of the entire human race itself, which threatens to end all of time, even for the non human, once the last of ‘us’ passes on.

Threads

Threads is a curious film, one which outlines the fallout from global thermonuclear war entirely set in the rural, post-industrial steel town of Sheffield. From the outset, this narrative choice immediately turns the question of nuclear war into one of epistemology. The film’s protagonist, a young woman named Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher), has recently learned she is pregnant. In the film’s early moments, we see Ruth undergoing all the banal things a young person does in planning their future—renting an apartment, discussing finances with her partner, and so on—all while cryptic broadcasts of escalating tensions between the United States and the USSR over a Soviet occupation of Iran play out on televisions in bars she frequents or car radios as she argues with her boyfriend Jimmy (Reece Dinsdale). The disconnect between Ruth’s daily life and the unknowable totality of the global crisis is played out in sharp detail during the first half of the film. A television update on the situation is quickly turned off lest it upset the patrons of a local pub, Ruth and her boyfriend included. A trip to the corner grocer takes Ruth past an anti-nuclear protest in which a woman shouts, “You cannot win a nuclear war!” – Ruth just needs a loaf of bread.

Suddenly, in the middle of the day, the bomb drops. In the irradiated wake, Ruth manages to survive while watching her family, child’s father, and community either evaporate in the cloud or slowly succumb to its effects. She eventually gives birth to a daughter, Jane, during a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter in which Britain has been turned into a hollowed-out, grey island of mud. The on-screen text tells us diseases are rife, either from fallout or through the UV radiation bleeding through the depleted ozone layer, and life has given way to localized subsistence farming in order to ensure human survival; what the film describes as a return to medieval Britain. As the film reaches its conclusion, its narrative jumps ahead decades in time back to a perpetual present of misery as the memory of the bomb begins to give way to a state of nature in which violence over resources and sexual reproduction migrate from the realm of State control to survival of the fittest. But while this effectively shows the future for Ruth’s child, Jane, to be little different than the immediate post-bomb nightmare that fell so many years ago, it suggests that temporal development and enlightenment era progress will only fail to materialize through a backsliding into a familiar prior stage in history, a future state shot backwards and frozen in time in direct contrast to the rapid speed of the technological modernity leading up to the dropping of the bomb that makes it possible.

As Sean O’Sullivan notes in an edited collection on British cinema of the 1980s, Threads’ vision of this future post-apocalyptic society echoes in a perverse way Margaret Thatcher’s vision for Britain, one which “rejects the general (society) in favor of the specific (individual men and women, and families), eschewing collectivism in favor of the personal.” Whether or not this vision can be mapped onto the philosophical effects of Thatcher’s neoliberal vision for a world in which “there is no such thing as society,” I argue the film narrates precisely the immediate rupture of the bomb into history as a temporal figuration that instantly completes the project of privatization that neoliberalism took years to accomplish. Here the crisis emerges not merely in mass death, but rather by returning civilization “back” to a prior stage of development that inverts modernization theory and reinforces the structure of liberalism’s concept of historical progress as inevitable in either direction. The only possible hope for narrative continuity, then, emerges in Threads through the logics of biological reproduction, which comes to stand in the film’s narrative for progress—or its failure—itself.

The film’s horrifying final image—a denied reverse shot of Jane’s child (conceived through rape) possibly succumbing to radiation during childbirth—suggests the real problem is all the progress lost: damning human civilization to pick up the pieces and start over again in a world that while miserable, nevertheless still echoes the logics of capitalism and further entrapping History in a determined cycle of development that determines the future. Here liberalism faces its ultimate contradiction, one which resists Marxism’s account of structural causality with an insistence that nature is contingent, but one which arrives at this conclusion based on its own eschatological proposition of progress as the inevitable horizon of history.

Children of Men

Children of Men features something like the inverse of this plot. Set also in Britain but in the future of 2027, the film figures a world in which childbirth inexplicably becomes impossible in the narrative’s past (we are made unaware of its causes), depicting the collapsing world caught in the fallout of extinction and the social and epistemic crisis arising in the its wake. Unlike the immediacy of the bomb, which suggests a sharp break in history’s temporal progression, Children of Men outlines a world in which slow decay threatens to undo civilization into an unknowable future.

As Slavoj Žižek has argued, the film’s infertility metaphor serves as a canvas upon which to paint any number of current-global crises as they play out to their possible endpoint, and the film does, in its narrative logic, follow those crises to their logical, but by no means inevitable, conclusions: rising xenophobia and border logics in response to migration, the consolidation of State power to control the racialized makeup and flow of populations, the retreat of the wealthy into guarded enclaves, even the rise of armed Schmittian partisan groups in the vacuum of the State’s monopoly on violence. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis described the film as a “nervously plausible future” in a 2006 review, and in a piece revisiting the film in the wake of Brexit and the Trump election, J. Hoberman argues it feels like the present day, “only moreso.”

To Mark Fisher, Children of Men is a dystopia particular to late capitalism, a decaying perpetual present in which the future is not imagined by new aesthetic forms, but rather extrapolated from our own. As he writes,

“The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn't end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart…it is evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. I want to argue this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new?”

Fisher continues this analysis echoing Jameson’s observations from his famous text on Postmodernism: that is, the manner by which what we today might call neoliberal capitalism evacuates historicity from its cultural forms through pastiche’s endless recycling or prior forms rather than modernity’s aesthetic insistence on the new. What Children of Men exposes is our entrapment within a vestigial culture, doomed to infinitely recycle the old in the face of the new’s impossibility—both in our aesthetic representations and in the political realities we attempt to call into being.

But despite Fisher and Žižek’s insistence that the sterility theme be read as mere metaphor, the film and novel upon which it is loosely based both conceive of futurity precisely as a kind of birthing emerging out of reproduction’s absence, suggesting that the ‘new’s “inability to be borne” is less about the undoing of a current order than the absent cause of progress itself.

As Jayna Brown has argued, Children of Men’s figuring of the re-emergence of fertility in the body of a working class Black British woman named Kee, standing in for “all of humanity,” refigures a kind of liberal humanism that treats representations of Blackness as a narrative device which so often only serves to lead white protagonists’ narrative journey to self-discovery. “Kee’s value is defined by her bio-logical worth and sexual function,” Brown notes, “that is, her ability to reproduce. By natural inclination Kee is the biological force to counteract the sterilizing effect of a contaminated world. Kee operates within a familiar primitivist notion of black femininity, as the link to both the past and the rejuvenated future. She is, by tired cliché, ‘Africa, mother of civilization.” But as Brown notes, the film nevertheless offers a “salient political critique of globalization, and specifically, anti-immigrant xenophobia.” What it depicts is a world in which “old tactics are dead; resistance movements must admit that the new horizon is not centered in British or Western hegemony, or its powers of reform, but in a radical transformation of the world system.”

Why then, I ask, must such a critique only become representable through this very same temporal notion of progressive history, albeit one with a functionally different relationship to the past than that of Threads? This is not to say Children of Men need inherently be read as ‘about’ reproduction per se, but the question emerges as to why the imagined end of ‘progress’ as a historical project must be what prefigures the collapse of the film’s retrenched Britain, why the borders close when the children literally stop coming, why capitalism buckles under its own contradictions only when it can no longer literally produce something new: as if these aren’t already underway as we speak today. In short: are the crises these films depict epistemological or material contradictions? And can the answer to this question help us understand anything the ways in which liberalism is facing up go its unfolding crisis of legitimacy in our present moment?

But where Threads offers up its post-apocalyptic “return” to the dark ages through the logics of television coverage—placing its subjects within a world that looks like the past, spatially mediated through shot/reverse shot (or its refusal)—Children of Men instead figures its world through the aesthetic of the long take. The long take is a cinematic style that Bruce Isaacs places within a film-theoretical lineage of Bazinian realism, a kind of punctum in which reality “breaks through” the frame through the art-cinema logics of an auteur like Cuarón on the global art cinema market in opposition to Hollywood’s continuity system, structured as it is by an imperative to unify time and space in the mind of the spectator rather than in a given reality itself. In other words—the crisis is merely epistemological.

This, perhaps, is where the film gets interesting. Rather than reading Children of Men’s long takes either as the culmination of Bazin’s neorealist dream or as borrowing documentary aesthetics from handheld cellphone footage on the nightly news, I want to argue, following Isaacs, that the long takes in the film can be read as offering a more complex relationship to temporality and history itself in conscious opposition to Hollywood continuity’s modernist construction of a rigid and linear temporality structured by coherence and design. This is a “progress” seen not merely at the level of narrative but out of liberalism’s theory of history itself, one which collapses in the wake of contingency as the camera moves free from design to pick up what happens to run in front of it, unplanned, swerving the narrative in a new direction. In short: a challenge to the inevitability of progress liberalism demands in its theory of history.

To the realist film theorist, Children of Men’s long takes might offer something like the shock of reality breaking through the construction of the film’s diegesis, a rupture in time here cutting off not so much a past from a future but from a predetermined outcome scripted either by a screenwriter or a liberal political theorist casting the present into the future. But taken alongside the film’s own contradictory account of the trajectory of History, it might be possible to read these long takes not through the immediacy of the violence they depict but rather within the notion of historicity itself as something which cannot be stopped or embedded in a deeper temporality, the suddenness of the ‘event’ always already at work in the banality of the moments which occur from the violent imposition of blood on the lens, to the unthinkable crises in offers as accidents amidst seeming inevitability.

Take for instance the surprise coffee shop bombing in the film’s opening scene, ir the shocking death of Julianne Moore’s character in the film’s famed car sequence. Above I screenshotted the famous splattering of blood on the lens resulting from a misfired squib during the film’s final sequence, suggesting an indexical “mark” of the real (even though it was all Hollywood trickery). Shocking as these moments may be, they are formally embedded in the film’s temporal flow alongside moments of banality: Clive Owen’s Theo ordering a coffee, an intimate conversation in the car reminiscing about the past, or everything around the corner not in the direct contact of the battle marching down the street which comes to stand in for every street across the global capitalist totality. Here the violence depicted in the film is both historical and contingent—a resolving of this precise contradiction within liberalism itself, and one which can only be figured within a much deeper temporality that has always already begun before a bomb or fertility crisis is even triggered.

Children of Men, then, stages its horror not as something which sends progress back to a prior stage, but through a slow progression into a decay countered by moments of possibility. The film offers a critique to liberalism’s epistemology of progress by presenting to us a temporality that provides no ultimate end in sight, but one which can be interrupted through chance and error akin to Benjamin’s notion of the “narrow gate through which the Messiah might enter.” While the film seems to fit what I argue is the shift in the narrative of progress occurring sometime around 1989, this insistence on history—history as that which is simultaneously in the past and yet tangibly still surrounding us—suggests a possible way out of liberalism’s epistemological double bind if we can only scale this metaphor up to our own understandings of our place within the “diegesis” of history itself.

Conclusion

To conclude, what I have suggested above is an attempt to point towards a shift in aesthetic representations of historical progress opened up on either side of the Cold War as expressed in films such as Threads and Children of Men. I argued this period produced the discursive and ideological conditions upon which our current political situation finds itself able to critique historical progress in a new way. I suggested that what changes with capitalism’s “final” victory in 1989 is the definition of “progress” as conceived of in the West’s cultural and political imaginary from one in which civilization’s continued existence is threatened by irrational individual agents through the logics of total nuclear war, to one which sees the emergence of an inescapable structural failure of global neoliberal capitalism when the ‘crisis’ comes home to roost. This shift, I argued illustrates the epistemological failures of the project of liberalism to deal with the unfolding crises of capitalism.

What is left for us, then, is the question of to which ends these notion of ‘progress’ are mobilized within our current crises, and to which projects such an understanding can serve in an era mostly governed by the temporality of algorithmically designed social media timelines, television miniseries, and streaming libraries (there is clearly further work to do here). Most importantly, I pointed towards the possibility of building a political project grounded on a different notion of futurity, one grounded not in untenable notions of progress but rather a reclamation of the past, asking what this might offer for our own precarious interregnum, caught as it is between an unknowable future and symptomatic returns to a past the contradictions of which have already proven irresolvable.

Next week's episode will be about either 'Unrest' or 'Don't Look Back,' depending on like six things. Sorry for the break, It was New Year's. 

When I started this movie I imagined writing this whole thing about how this is my dad's "favorite movie," where by "favorite movie," I mean that it's the only movie I have ever heard him bring up on his own, in an excited way, in fact, it's the only work of art I have ever heard him be aware of as art, instead of a product its creator was trying to sell on the market, and when I was about an hour in, I felt paradoxically closer to my dad than ever before, despite being far away from him in the moment, realizing that what must have lit a fire under that twelve-year-old's creaky-ass wooden seat inside the Conrad, Montana Orpheum in 1965 was a sense of History, the scale of witnessing real actors, sometimes hundreds, in the streets of Moscow, being chased by Tsarist dragoons, a shocking and primal scream from seasons past from a part of the world so wholly removed from the vagaries of the planting season that structured the farming economy of the family farm, giving rise to an early awareness that the world he lived in once had great heroes and adventures, events which began decades earlier and led to the nuclear silos that surrounded the town of 2,000 he drove past on the way to school every day, asking his librarian for a book on Russian history, which he would read on the bus ride home, driving past those snow-clad fields just like the ones Omar Sharif stared at after breaking the glass in the window of his hideout, all of which, perhaps, lodged in his brain a memory that all his eventual years of Banking and Businessing were never enough to fully erase, a memory of that moment he first realized that the lives of human beings living tens of thousands of miles away could be so vastly different than his own, set in a country that, at first glance, felt to him like the virgin fields of the American West, full of possibility, which he had heretofore taken for the extent of his his world and the life he had lived, until that single day which lingered still, inside the mind of a 70 year old man, with an ever-accumulating set of years propelling him forward into an unknown Ahead, telling this story again and again to his son, first as a child, and again as a 38 year old man as if for the first time, him seeing in that first hour a different movie than the one his father experienced, a tragic story about revolutionary hopes by heroes living a life of adventure, when the world felt open for the taking and so far away from nuclear silos in Montana or dashed hopes for a life he thought would be in the waiting, but now just a moment both of them share before a future the weight of which feels crushing, whether it be measured in the time that is still left, or in the decades of despair and suffering looming in the wings on a heating planet facing crises few alive seem to have any plan to solve, short of the solutions that open this film, but which ultimately led to just a movie, projected on a screen, suggesting to two men that the world could be different than the way it is. But then the second half of the movie basically ran out of gas and I decided to do this instead.