Book Microreview: Open Sorcery by Rob Sheely

The concept is fantastical, but the execution does not compute

In Open Sorcery we’re introduced to a world where history proceeded exactly as in ours until the early 20th century, when it was discovered that engraving microscopic symbols on gemstones could work magic. The catch is that arranging those symbols in a useful sequence follows extremely complex rules of grammar, so by the 1920s an entire industry of prestidigital composition has emerged, which ends up looking pretty much like the real world’s software industry. In this setting, magic needs programming languages, and painstaking debugging, and antivirus wards, and user-friendly interfaces, and periodic system updates, and intellectual property laws, and the heroic abnegation of help desks. Spellbooks serve the same function as personal computers, and sticking gemstones on a book’s spine works like inserting a flash drive to load its contents. Of course, the formatting in the gemstone needs to be compatible with the spellbook’s operating system. If you want a net connection, you need to attach a gold thread from your spellbook to a ley line, unless your spellbook happens to be wireless-capable. And if your spells somehow fail to load, the universally recommended first step is to turn your spellbook off and back on.

Open Sorcery is a frustrating read. Half of the time, it feels like it’s building up to a clever satire of the small everyday annoyances of modern life, but the other half of the time, it feels like the story is a pretext for the author to settle very specific grievances with the software industry with the names changed: marketing executives who overpromise, clients who don’t understand what they’re asking of programmers, middle managers who make their insecurities everybody else’s problem, a workplace culture that has normalized casual abuse and ritual hazing, abusive monopolies, mealy-mouthed PR fixers, invasive advertising, and all the other usual charms that come from the intersection of a creative profession with corporate bean-counting. Paradoxically, the novel’s description of how magic has integrated itself into people’s daily routine resembles real life’s digital oversaturation in such detail that its world ends up feeling just like ours, and the sense of fantasy gets lost in the process. Mentally replace every “spell weaver” with “graphic interface designer,” “wrist amulet” with “smartphone,” “bubble of isolation” with “firewall,” “rhyming verse” with “line of code,” or “binding” with “compiling,” and you’ll get an idea of how the world’s logic works.

The novel shows it was written with genuine enthusiasm, because its gimmick is undeniably original and funny, but the author is more acquainted with the minutiae of software programming than with the current trends in the fantasy genre. In the software studio magic house where most of the action happens, the appallingly toxic mistreatment of an unpaid intern is treated like a venerable tradition of every programmer’s career, and his senior colleagues seem to have never heard of worker solidarity. At one point we learn that enchanted gemstones can be directly plugged to the human body as a nasty form of substance abuse, and the plot has zero compassion for the addicted. The female characters have no personality (the only exceptions are Seductress, Caretaker and Nag), and one main character’s tragic backstory amounts to Fridged Wife. And the villain’s plan, which is basically your classic cyberpunk rebellion against the big tech monopolies, is flatly dismissed as extremist without further discussion. Overall this is a heavily conservative story, where the heroes are eager to preserve a status quo that couldn’t be more obviously broken. This is a version of the 1920s with the life-changing technological wonders of the 2020s but somehow the same social attitudes of the 1920s. It’s a pity, because I’m a big fan of magic systems with rules, but this is a case where the author gave too much thought to the concept and not enough to creating a world that feels alive, or characters worth rooting for, or a story with awareness of its own themes and a stance to take on them.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

Reference: Sheely, Rob. Open Sorcery [Ferret Godmother Press, 2022].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Mercy

If you had to endure 90 minutes of this garbage, you’d legalize summary executions too

Timur Bekmambetov, who still hasn’t paid for his previous crimes against cinema, returns with another movie told almost entirely through computer screens. Contrary to appearance, this production wasn’t made during the coronavirus quarantine, which one would assume based on the gimmick of having an actor strapped to a chair for the entire movie. One thing about its marketing campaign does work successfully, though: when you leave the theater, all you can say in your dulled stupor is the movie’s title: Mercy. Mercy. Please, have some mercy.

Mercy is set in a near-future Los Angeles where a rising crime wave has prompted law enforcement to adopt the genius solution of simply killing suspects quicker. The “Mercy Capital Court” is a 3D VR room where you’re presumed guilty from the start (strike 1 against basic constitutional principles). The tool you’re given to try to prove your innocence is a digital cloud with records of everything that citizens of Los Angeles do online: chats, photos, emails, phone calls, restaurant reservations, credit card transactions, gambling, you name it. Nothing is safe from the system’s unblinking eye (strike 2). Whatever information you find needs to convince a digital judge to lower its probabilistic assessment of your guilt. The trial is closed to the public and doesn’t use a jury or a defense lawyer (strike 3, claim your Big Brother T-shirt at the lobby). At the end of the 90 minutes, you’re either set free or executed instantly.

I guarantee there’s going to be a million YouTube videos titled “Real Lawyer Dissects Mercy.”

At the level of craft, Mercy is painful to watch. If you thought shaky cam was a problem, get ready for shaky cam when looking at a computer. Presumably to immerse the audience in the suspect’s point of view, the camera hops between the digital judge’s face and assorted floating screenshots of folders or maps or phone screens or police records, without letting the eye find an anchor to focus on.

The disorientation gets worse when the suspect starts pulling up pieces of evidence from the city’s omnipresent surveillance cameras: janky, jarry, low-framerate, low-resolution snippets of chases and fights that add a redundant level of nausea to the movie’s already distasteful premise. For the most part, the only times we get to see actors act is through closeups of Chris Pratt playing the accused and looking either very confused or very tired, and Rebecca Ferguson playing the digital judge and nervously suppressing her smile because she wasn’t supposed to laugh at the script.

At the level of theme, Mercy is downright evil. Note how the opening narration describes the crime wave worsening in intensity, as if it were the rain or the flu, a natural phenomenon causally unrelated to human choices. This is classic Calvinist rhetoric: humans are naturally rotten, ergo crime isn’t preventable. All that society can do is brace against it and punch back harder. At no point does the script show any curiosity about what caused this crime wave, what institutional failures the unrest is a response to. In this (not too) fictional future, the government’s response is to cordon entire areas of Los Angeles and shrug them off as basket cases. Anyone accused of something is thrown at the “Mercy Capital Court.”

A comparison will be useful here. In 2002, the film Minority Report presented another futuristic justice system that aspired to complete control over crime, and the system’s inherent flaws proved unfixable. That’s not what Mercy does. In Mercy, the invasive web of total surveillance is shown to be flawed as well, but the way the script addresses this is by doubling down on more total surveillance. Just like in Minority Report, the unfairly accused protagonist ends up uncovering a conspiracy to trick the system, but whereas Minority Report concluded that a system that is vulnerable to being tricked cannot be trusted to judge and sentence people, Mercy goes in the other direction, solving the defects of an invasive all-seeing government by relying more heavily on the invasive all-seeing government.

As a vision of the near future, Mercy couldn’t have come at a worse time. There’s a literal Nazi in the White House, unaccountable government goons are murdering civilians in the streets, the private sector is pushing for citizens to surrender even more of their privacy and autonomy, and here comes this shameless piece of copaganda about an AI-based regime of total control that works, and when challenged for its errors, comes out vindicated. So congratulations, Timur Bekmambetov, you’ve earned our rarest score for the second time. Now go to the corner and think about what you’ve done.

Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Tron: Ares

A story about the ephemerality of life shouldn't be as instantly forgettable as this

The threequel Tron: Ares looks and sounds more expensive than it has any right to be. While the idea of transplanting the franchise’s iconic motorcycles and frisbee fights from cyberspace into the material world is undeniably interesting, the movie wastes its special effects extravaganza in telling the most generic tale of AI independence. To namedrop Frankenstein without any of the pathos is hubristic enough; to lift the plot of Blade Runner for mere nostalgic fanservice is sacrilege.

The plot is a simple case of corporate espionage between two software megacorporations racing to be the first to crack the secret of energy/matter conversion. Both have succeeded at 3D-printing physical objects from pure light, but for some contrived technobabble reason, these creations can’t sustain their existence for longer than half an hour. When the Designated Ethical CEO finds a piece of code that fixes the problem, the Designated Evil CEO deploys his AI assassins to steal it.

The ensuing chase sequence is executed with admirable technical virtuosity, but it feels redundant to go to so much trouble to retrieve a physical flash drive right after the villain demonstrates his ability to remotely copy data from his competitor’s servers. Instead of drawing so much unwanted attention trashing half a city, he could have simply waited for his target to add the code to her systems and then stolen it. But we need to bring the AI assassins to the real world so the next piece of drama can happen.

The titular Ares is a self-aware security program that our villain is trying to market as the ideal soldier: an obedient killing machine that doesn't eat or sleep, and can be reprinted infinite times if it’s killed. Somehow we’re expected to buy that this genius inventor didn’t anticipate that something that is self-aware could eventually form its own goals that don’t involve dying and dying again. During its brief presence in our realm, it quickly notices the sensory delights of corporeality and starts scheming to seize the permanence code for itself.

Unfortunately, this Blade Runner-derivative tale of an artificial person hoping for a longer lifespan calls for more acting skills than Jared Leto can be bothered to bring to the role of Ares. Even as his character learns about ineffable feelings, such as developing a personal aesthetic taste, or improvising a horrendously insensitive psychoanalysis of the woman he just kidnapped, Leto maintains a resting bored face that proves contagious to the viewer.

After an overcomplicated romp through cyberspace, the real world and then another cyberspace to obtain the permanence code, he ends up in a one-to-one fight with his fellow AI assassin who is still loyal to the villain. This climax is utterly unsatisfying because (a) the actual victory is won by secondary characters who spent the entire third act typing code in an office, and (b) it never occurs to our hero Ares that he could copy his own permanence code to save his former friend.

Anyway, with the Designated Evil CEO’s plans thwarted by his own absurd recklessness, Ares is free to experience humanity and… die of destitution, I guess. Meanwhile, the Designated Ethical CEO proceeds to take advantage of finally stable 3D printing to singlehandedly solve world hunger, the energy crisis and all diseases, which I suspect is a bigger story we’d rather have watched than this one. At no point does Tron: Ares make us care for the inner life of sentient digital minds. But hey, the motorcycles look cool.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: War of the Worlds (2025)

And the Oscar for Best Product Placement goes to...

In the original version of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, published in serialized form in 1897, the first paragraph contains a disturbing prophecy:

… as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

In the new Amazon Video adaptation, released this week and narrated entirely via computer screens, as has become the signature look of movies made under producer Timur Bekmambetov, that scrutinizing gaze is removed from the alien invaders and put in our hands. In the era of the surveillance state, it's now humans who watch humans up to the tiniest detail. But instead of taking advantage of that clever reversal of the positions on the board to say something interesting, this War of the Worlds is unironically awed by the cool gadgets of mass surveillance. The script doesn't even reach the level of lip service to privacy rights: against this alien invasion, the thing that saves the world is the government's all-seeing, all-knowing machinery.

Sure, there's a silly twist where we learn that the hostile aliens "eat data" (whatever that means), and that what attracted them to Earth in the first place was precisely the government's compulsive accumulation of data about everyone. However, once the government's guilt is exposed to the public, the movie doesn't have enough self-awareness to have our heroes renounce their panopticon. No, their plan to defeat the aliens requires that they keep their toys and snatch every last byte that can be squeezed out of a street camera or a cell phone tower or a GPS satellite. Whatever point the movie was pretending to hope to make about the dangers of letting the state spy on its citizens is thrown out the window when the solution to having all the world's data stolen is to keep using the same tools of surveillance.

In a painfully obvious metaphor, the hypervigilant paternalist state is represented by our protagonist, a widowed father with a job in national security and zero awareness of boundaries when it comes to violating his children's digital privacy. From his secret bunker office, he not only monitors potential terrorists, but also every move his children make. They repeatedly call him out for it, and still he snoops, with a casual air of entitlement, on their personal chats, their credit card transactions, and their place of work. No telephone, no video game account, no smart refrigerator is safe from the watchful eye of this shockingly abusive style of parenting. And the plot rewards him for it: he saves the world from the aliens by wielding the myriad sources he has illegitimate access to. At the end he claims that he's done with all the electronic espionage, but that gesture comes after the aliens are gone, when it no longer matters to the resolution of the story.

Even more insultingly, the various tech companies blatantly showcased in the script are presented in an uncritically positive light. This is a movie where the nation's top security chiefs use Zoom on Windows to exchange the most delicate tactical information; where in the middle of a cyberattack on every major data center, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams somehow still work; where letting a Tesla car's autopilot take an injured person to the hospital isn't a ridiculously irresponsible idea; where the most secure building in Washington lets its computers use Gmail; where the climax of the heroic plan is the successful trip of an Amazon delivery drone.

Let me repeat that. This is a movie where Amazon saves the world.

The same Amazon that grinds its workers to the limit of their bodily endurance and aggressively discourages them from unionizing, that fills the world with mountains of plastic packaging, that damages local economies by pricing small competitors out of existence, that charges sellers predatory fees while paying a pittance in taxes, that cozies up to the fascist regime currently occupying Washington, that put a smart speaker in every home to listen to your conversations 24/7, that enslaves children, that buys from suppliers that enslave victims of genocide, that enables its obscenely rich owner to demolish one of the most venerable guardians of democracy. That Amazon.

This movie, which of course is released on Amazon Video, isn't content with defiling one of the biggest classics of science fiction, but has the nerve to point the finger at the US government for its data collection practices while celebrating private corporations that are guilty of the same. At Nerds of a Feather, we reserve the 1/10 rating for works that are literally "crimes against humanity," and this shameless movie-length ad for Amazon (and Tesla, and Meta, and their ilk) definitely qualifies.

Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: Severance season 2

After you've betrayed yourself, can you trust yourself again?

After its season 1 ended in a thrilling cliffhanger, Severance took its sweet time to return to screens. And it (literally) hit the ground running: now our protagonist, Mark, knows that Gemma, his wife, is still alive, hidden somewhere in the restricted levels of his workplace. Now he'll need to enlist the help of his other self, the separate identity the company created for his job, but he has his own budding romance to worry about. An added problem is that said love interest is Helly, the work self of the company's heiress, whose agenda appears to be not fully in line with her father's or her unwitting coworkers'. Meanwhile, the rest of the Macrodata Refinement team have to deal with the consequences of their escape attempt: Irving struggles to keep a sense of purpose now that Burt has retired (even though their external selves seem to be getting acquainted), and Dylan still hasn't gotten over the revelation that he has a full family—but what he learns from pursuing that route may not be the antidote to loneliness he's seeking.

One of the best things about Severance is the richness of levels of interpretation that it allows for. While Season 1 focused mainly on the corporate dystopia side of the story, season 2 aims inward and explores the personal trauma side. We knew that Mark's reason for undergoing the severance surgery was to avoid experiencing the pain of having lost Gemma, which creates the separate identity that lives during office hours in his stead. An implication that was not immediately obvious in season 1 is that this process resembles the survival mechanism that occurs in people with dissociative identities: to protect itself, the mind creates other selves who will bear the burden of trauma that the core self finds too much to face directly. As we discover Gemma's whereabouts, the reason she's being kept there, and how that relates to the real purpose of severance technology, we find more dots to connect that bring us nearer to the full picture: in fulfillment of the doctrine of its mythologized founder, Lumon plans to permanently subdue the Four Tempers.

A key step in this plan is Macrodata Refinement. In this season we learn what those funny numbers our protagonists spend endless workdays sorting mean, and the answer reveals yet another side to Lumon's unflinching cruelty. In fact, even those most loyal to Lumon can be tossed away without a thought. We saw in season 1 how Harmony Cobel went through a collapse of her entire worldview (and season 2 reveals the extent of how much she actually did for Lumon); this time it's Seth Milchick who gets pushed to the limit of his patience, not so much by the employees' already established rebelliousness but by the totalitarian capriciousness of upper management, whose disciplining methods start to grow increasingly degrading.

Another important shift relates to location. We get more episodes set outside of Lumon, some of which are the highlight of the season, which showcase how far and how deeply Lumon's reach has corrupted the world around it. These episodes help us better understand the motivations of Harmony, Burt, Seth, and even Gemma and Helly, but these are the kind of brilliant revelations that don't close off follow-up questions. Yes, now we know what those characters want, but why would they want that?

This insight into hidden motives and strange choices informs the central relationship of the season: that between Mark and his work self. Each half of his identity knows only part of the puzzle about Gemma, and they're going to need to work together in order to rescue her. But of course, it's hard to join forces if each Mark exists only while the other doesn't. The external Mark's efforts to communicate with his workplace half escalate in desperation until both versions of him realize how little they know each other and how incompatible their goals truly are. And here's where the story's various interpretative possibilities come into play. Rather than a separate character, office Mark can be seen as a part of Mark's mind that he's neglected and refused to acknowledge. It's a substitute self that helps him skip the necessary steps of his grieving process. After so much time spent nurturing such an unhealthy coping strategy, it shouldn't be surprising that the original act of self-betrayal becomes multiplied. Mark, who has been suffering intensely without the love of his life, should know better than to try to inflict the same pain on someone else. And yet, in his moment of need, that's exactly what he offers to his other half. The latter's response is shocking, but understandable.

After a stellar first season, Severance found a way to raise the bar even higher. Somehow managing to juggle the interpersonal tension of the panoptical workplace, the dark dead-ends of unprocessed grief, and the ever-worsening difficulty of staying true to oneself under a system of coerced devil's bargains, Severance continues to be a masterpiece of psychological intrigue and imaginative storytelling.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Double Feature: Nevermind, Rewind

When death is cheap, lives become fungible

The 2023 films Restore Point (titled Bod Obnovy in the original Czech) and Aporia (a fancy word for "paradox") both tell the story of a widow grappling with the convoluted ethics of a form of technology that can reverse death. Interestingly, in Restore Point it is maternal feelings that set the whole plot in motion, while in Aporia maternal feelings provide the motivation for the ending. It seems one can't talk about cheating death without involving the creation of life.

In the future world of Restore Point, increased crime in Europe has prompted the mass adoption of periodic brain scanning as insurance against violent death. The service is provided by the government, although the institute that performs the resurrections has begun negotiations to be privatized. The murder of a high-ranked resurrection scientist who incongruously didn't have a brain copy stored in file triggers a protracted manhunt that ends in the not too surprising revelation that the institute itself has been igniting mass panic about crime in order to attract more subscribers and improve the chances of a juicy privatization deal. What's a few false flag terrorist attacks against millions of safely stored customers? Well, the detective whose husband was killed in one of those attacks may have something to say on the matter.

Aporia has a more modest reach, but a deeper emotional punch. Our protagonist has spent the last eight months trying and failing to adjust to widowhood, and she's reaching her wits' end, what with having to raise alone a kid who is crumbling under the weight of grief while the criminal trial against the drunk driver who killed her husband is getting nowhere. As it happens, her husband was a quantum physicist, and his former colleague has finished building their project: a machine that can shoot a particle into the past to create a mini-explosion. Yay, we can give the drunk driver a stroke before he kills anyone. Boo, the drunk driver had a wife and a kid of his own. Yay, we can continue violently altering the past to improve that family's life. Boo, the butterfly effect has decreed that our protagonist now has an entirely different child. Should she keep detonating the past to try and set things right this time?

In both movies, the lead casting is impeccable. As the detective in Restore Point, Andrea Mohylová walks the tightrope of a righteous champion working to protect a system that broke her life. Her performance conveys an unstable fragility built of learned toughness barely containing a deluge of unprocessed fury. (It doesn't hurt that the makeup department gave her a look uncannily reminiscent of Agathe Bonitzer, who did a phenomenal job in the French technothriller Osmosis.) Where Mohylová's acting style in Restore Point is controlled, understated and reliant on implied meanings, Judy Greer gives us in Aporia an unbridled ride through all the feelings. Her performance glides like a kite in the breeze, and generously invites us to glide with her, from brokenheartedness to despair to disappointment to shock to disbelief to ecstasy to bliss to remorse to compassion to hesitation to resolve to panic to horror to shame to scruples to resignation to bittersweetness. Her inner arc is an open book the spine of which holds the movie's entire edifice.

To the extent that a work of art expresses a stance about life, it's useful to ponder for a minute how we go about dealing with life. There's a theory in social psychology that proposes that the bulk of human culture revolves around trying to placate the fear of death. Our dreams, our traditions, our laws, our vocabulary, our desires, our civilizations—it's all an anxious effort to not have to think about death, to keep the inevitable out of sight. According to this theory, the always present, always ignored certainty of our coming death is why we make art and make love and make war. It's why we went to the moon and defeated smallpox. It's what makes the world go round.

And yet, over and over again, stories that imagine victory over death tend to add the complication where judgments begin to be made on the question of whose lives are disposable. Instead of turning you into the savior of the world, a technology capable of reversing death would force you to triage. Once you have control over death, every death you passively allow is one you're responsible for. You can either pretend to not see this power or embrace it with open eyes, and both alternatives are morally outrageous. In Restore Point, it's a utilitarian calculation on a mass scale: a few random victims for millions of terrified customers. In Aporia, the calculation is personal: this one guy's life is worth this other guy's. Traditionalists will protest that by claiming mastery over death we would lose our humanity, but more probably it's claiming mastery over the worth of life that does the deed. It's the dilemma faced by every self-proclaimed savior of the world: the unthinkable, unavoidable choice of whom not to save.

--

Nerd Coefficient:

Restore Point: 7/10. There are some plot holes that hamper suspension of disbelief.

Aporia: 9/10. Keep your box of tissues at hand.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Nanoreview: The Electric Detective by Peter Ward

An intricate game of double agendas and deceptive clues

Here's an unusual question: How do you pull off the perfect crime when you're up against an incorruptible investigator made of the latest in logical circuits?

Now here's an unusual answer: If you like making your life more complicated than it needs to be, you can use an administrator backdoor to install an additional set of instructions so that your positronic enemy may continue working with the police, but may not let any suspicions fall on you.

So now here's a more unusual question: How do you do your job as the ultimate logical detective when you're programmed to name the true killer but also programmed to not name the true killer?

Peter Ward's novel The Electric Detective is the unbelievably more unusual answer.

After the CEO of a leading robotics manufacturer is murdered in his ultra-secure office with no clues as to how the killer fled the scene, the company provides the police with Penelope, an especially produced robot that soon becomes the key piece in solving the mystery. Penelope is equipped with an impeccable moral compass, access to every reference database, and superhuman senses to never miss a clue. Plus she has her own personal assistant living in her head, monitoring her systems and inserting comedic advice. There's no way she won't crack this case.

However, as soon as she solves it, her programming is hijacked by the killer, and here's where the actual thrill of the book begins: can she find a logical loophole for a command that unambiguously means "don't rat me out"? During her mission to accomplish justice, Penelope will have to come up with desperate, last-minute workarounds for seemingly impossible conundrums that will put her reasoning skills in overdrive. There are few delights that are so unique to science fiction as watching the steps of the thought process that saves the hero at the last second, and Penelope's mind is a fascinating place to explore.

Not all the pieces of this case fit perfectly, though. There's one scene where a character is eavesdropping on a conversation and later makes choices as if they didn't know what they evidently were able to hear. The big villain's master plan has an impractically large number of moving parts, and somehow all of them go exactly as intended, which diminishes our heroine's protagonism because too many of her choices were what the villain wanted all along. The exposition doesn't trust the reader to conclude things on their own. And there's a quick section with excessive commentary on Penelope's superhuman hotness, which is never mentioned again and has no impact on the plot.

The Electric Detective isn't the kind of book one goes to for meditations on the dignity of artificial life under perpetual surveillance. This is simply a clever thought experiment dressed up in a science fiction costume. Expect that, and you'll be rewarded appropriately.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Ward, Peter. The Electric Detective [Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency, 2022].

Review: Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo

A character study about the hubris of believing you can cheat hubris

I'm afraid the fashionable trend of referring to people as "bodies" is incorrigible by now. What began as a specific usage in Academese with a specific meaning has finally completed its migration into literary language, where it stands out from the text like a record scratch in a soundtrack. If you can summon the patience to put up with dozens of instances of this lexical affectation, you'll have a pleasant time reading Lee Mandelo's otherwise fascinating novella Feed Them Silence.

Set in a near future beset by ongoing environmental collapse, Feed Them Silence tells the story of Sean, a neuroscience researcher in a failing marriage, and a wolf called Kate, a member of the last surviving pack in the wild and Sean's object of study. As part of a last-resort attempt to make people actually care for endangered species, Sean et al. have developed a neural implant that transmits the sum of Kate's wolfy sensations and emotions into Sean's head. The hope of this ethical minefield of a study is that, by making an animal's inner experience publicly known, enough empathy will be sparked to mobilize stronger support for conservation programs. However, before Sean's investigation yields any publishable findings, it becomes clear that downloading a wolf's consciousness onto a human brain should come with a lengthy warning label. What this mental connection does to Sean and how her human connections change as a result of Kate's influence is the main focus of the story.

One recurring preoccupation in Feed Them Silence is the question of who is invading whom. From the inside of her fancy telepathic machine, Sean believes she's bored a peephole into the wolf's mind, but the process could be just as accurately described as the wolf's experiences supplanting Sean's. If you're going to pretend that scientific observation can be passive, you're going to have to deal with what "passive" entails: to know something is to let it change you. Is Sean still Sean while the content of her subjectivity is being replaced with that of another mind?

That question can be rephrased as: can Sean truly know what it's like to be a wolf? But then we'd be joining a discussion that started half a century ago and remains unresolved. Fortunately for the reader, Feed Them Silence isn't so much a story about the metaphysics of consciousness as one about the ethics of interaction. Sean et al. are well aware that Kate didn't, and couldn't, articulate an informed opinion about the prospect of having a chip put in her brain for someone to spy on her thoughts. This whole mission to engender empathy relies on an act of aggression. In trying to foster cooperation between humans and animals, Sean has had to commit the deepest breach of trust.

The book acknowledges this paradox with open eyes, as do researchers in the real world. Our natural communication barrier renders lab animals more vulnerable than human volunteers, and yet it is that same communication barrier which makes a laxer ethical standard necessary for animal experimentation to be doable at all. A mouse can't tell you whether it wants its belly cut open, but precisely because you can't ask it about its dinner, you have to cut its belly open.

In the case of Kate the wolf, the paradox is compounded by layers of dramatic irony. The neural implant was put in her without asking how she felt about it, but the direct communication that the implant provides makes it now possible to know exactly how she feels about it. But even with that level of access to Kate's mind, what good does it do? It's still mediated by a radio signal, and processed by Sean's human brain; and the people Sean wishes to convince of Kate's inherent worth will only know her wolfy feelings as expressed in human words. The book refers multiple times to the preverbal, intuitive, visceral quality of the data received by Sean's brain, but the reader can only learn about it from the words in the book. Feed Them Silence thus becomes an illustration of the paradox attributed to the sophist Gorgias: things can't be known, and even if they are somehow known, they can't be communicated—the paradox being that such a statement is itself the communication of something known. Literature is the art of going inside someone's head; to write a story about the impossibility of truly going inside someone's head is the ultimate form of dramatic irony.

So let's talk about a singing cat for a moment.

At the end of The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Mowgli the man-cub feels a sudden urge to abandon his wolf pack and return to human society. As a farewell ceremony, his animal friends sing a song of well-wishing. The panther's part includes these verses:

Feed them silence when they seek
help of thine to hurt the weak.

The reference to this line in the title of the novella does quite a bit of heavy lifting. As a human who can understand the speech of wolves, Mowgli is the ideal of empathy that Sean aspires to. And the panther can be read as Mowgli's mirror image: an animal who can understand humans. The farewell song is made of moral maxims intended to keep Mowgli in good terms with the natural world even after he's reintegrated into civilization. In this context, "to hurt the weak" alludes to the imbalance of power between humans and animals, and the request to "feed them silence" means to deny humans the use of the fruits of that imbalance of power.

In other words, Sean's method of research, conceived as a means to oppose the domination of nature, can easily become another form of domination. The findings of her study could be packaged and monetized as an entertainment gadget instead of a tool of political action. Empathy, the altruistic sharing of pain, can be twisted into a selfish extraction of pleasure. And here's where the novella reaches thematic completion: the point where the political meets the erotic.

Intersubjective attunement taken to the point of feeling exactly what the other is feeling is the Holy Grail of eroticism. Sean's link to Kate isn't blatantly described in those terms, but it's impossible to miss the intense desire that such intimate connection produces in Sean. In one scene, Sean's therapist directly compares her marital difficulties with the undemanding presence of an always available object of desire who can't refuse, can't reject, can't withhold, can't leave. But even through her deliberately unidirectional channel of communication, the power that Sean exerts over the wolf is complicated by the power that the wolf begins to exert over Sean. Just like with knowing, to desire something is to let it change you.

In a short wordcount, Feed Them Silence explores convoluted questions of epistemic justice and proposes a scenario where the standard intuitions fail to offer full solutions. Your mind may not know whose mind you're visiting while reading it, but one sure thing is that your mind will have been changed by the experience.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Mandelo, Lee. Feed Them Silence [Tor, 2023].

I think you should actually worry quite a bit, darling

Besides rehashing The Matrix for tradwives, there's very little that this transparent fable has to say about any of its themes

I'm usually careful with what I spoil in a review. This time requires a different approach. Proper analysis of Don't Worry Darling requires spoiling the twist. If that ruins the discussion, that's part of the problem.

So (deep breath): The Stepford Wives meets Vanilla Sky meets The Truman Show meets Pleasantville meets The Matrix meets Vivarium meets The Village meets The Handmaid's Tale meets Kevin Can F**k Himself meets WandaVision meets Desperate Housewives.

Do you see the problem here? We've seen this movie before, done better and with a sharper bite. Yes, we know our grandparents' gender roles were awful. Yes, we know nostalgia is poison. Yes, we know today's masculinity is in crisis, just not the one Jordan Peterson believes is happening. Yes, we know cults of personality never end well. Yes, we know women's liberation is in intensive care until we sort out this three-job economy we've fallen into. Don't Worry Darling resorts to precious, elaborate artistry to make the most obvious points about the clash between 21st-century feminism and 21st-century fascism. After making it through so many recycled bits from a dozen other stories, its only noteworthy reveal is that it has not a single original thought to offer.

Before you come at me screaming that nothing is new and everything is pastiche: I'm not faulting the movie for not having a unique concept; I'm faulting it for not exploring its concept from a unique perspective. What director Olivia Wilde seems to have to say about neoreactionary gurus is exactly what you can read in a Vox explainer, and the movie's stance on enforced domesticity goes no deeper than a Someecards meme.

To sum it up: In an isolated company town made of pastel colors, perfectly mowed lawns and perpetual dinner parties, an entire generation of young couples follow a creepily choreographed routine of the hardworking breadwinner husband and the contented pretty-faced housewife. This is the 1950s not as they happened, but as online manchildren imagine them. Our protagonist, Alice Chambers, gradually follows the clues until she learns that her picture-perfect life is built on staggering cruelty and hypocrisy: the entire town is a digital simulation her husband trapped her in because he felt emasculated in his joblessness and listened to one too many manosphere podcasts.

That's what happens. But what does it mean, beyond what it plainly says? Did Wilde really cast two of the world's biggest male sex icons and hire the cinematographer of Black Swan, an editor from True Detective and the composer of Happy Feet to say what amounts to "There are bad men who do bad things"?

This is a movie about a society ruled by men, but most of the men in the story (apart from the perfectly cast cult leader Frank) don't rise above a plot device function. In particular, discussion about Don't Worry Darling has obsessed over the underdeveloped acting skills of singer Harry Styles. The most charitable explanation for this impression is that the role Styles is playing is not actually Jack the 1950s patriarch, but Jack the 2020s loser who cosplays as a 1950s patriarch. But even under that interpretation, the movie still falls short of its potential. The anxious pursuit of substitute fatherly validation from a tyrannical CEO sparks obvious homoerotic questions the movie doesn't seem aware of. The husbands of the town jump to be noticed by Frank like they're schoolgirls at a Beatles concert. When Jack is promoted at work and Frank awards him a golden ring, the scene is acted and shot like a betrothal.

Unfortunately, any exploration of how patriarchy also traps men would have been too much nuance for this movie. It correctly identifies Jack as the villain who victimized Alice, but it flees in panic from the complexity that would result if it looked more closely at Frank's victimization of Jack. Likewise, we don't learn whether Wilde's character dragged her husband into her fantasy or he is in on the lie. Either answer would open a trail of discussion the movie is not equipped to confront.

You know a story needs reworking when the merely suggested possibilities are more attractive than the events you do get to see. There were many ways the false 1950s town could have been framed as commentary on America's delusions about itself, and the digital simulation is among the least interesting ones. If, for example, the town had been a physical location in the real world, blocked off from modern society, one could interpret the story to allude to conservative America's obsession with exceptionality and fear of openness. Jack's constant warnings to Alice that their idyllic lives could crumble down if she doesn't go along with the script could resonate with the manosphere's accusation that feminist activists ruined the good old days. The bizarre scene where Jack dances under Frank's commands could represent the rat race that corporate power has imposed on ordinary people. There could even have been an opportunity to draw parallels between the town's self-image as a chosen people and the Puritan colonies that gave the country its identity.

But that's not the movie we got. What we got is a skin-deep grasp of metaphor and a parade of confusing hallucinations that don't contribute to telling the story. What we got is a reliably predictable thriller that pretends to not know we've seen all the movies it's imitating. What we got is an accidentally ungrammatical title that creates a fascinating but unexplored ambiguity (without the comma, the "Darling" in Don't Worry Darling could be read in the vocative, as the man telling the woman "You, darling, should not worry," or in the accusative, as the woman being warned "Don't worry him"). What we got is the bare minimum of feminist theory dressed up as if it were a life-changing revelation.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +3 for Chris Pine's acting, +3 for gorgeous cinematography.

Penalties: −1 because it's excessively derivative, −1 because it's excessively heavy-handed, −1 because it falls into the trap of finding an individual solution to a collective problem, −1 because it relies too heavily on symbols that don't have meaning, −1 because any critique of 1950s patriarchy is incomplete without addressing 1950s racism and 1950s queerphobia, −1 because it doesn't develop the briefly portrayed issue of women who willingly support the systems that oppress them, −1 because the assorted events that pile up toward the ending make no sense.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

In 'Severance,' the perfect work-life balance is a horrific illusion

This instantly addictive satire lays bare how easily corporate culture turns totalitarian as soon as it gets a chance

It's every manager's dream: employees who can behave 100% professionally and leave their personal problems at the door. Obedient cogs whose entire philosophy of life consists in loyalty to the company. Eager followers who wouldn't dare form close ties with their coworkers and whose aspirations don't aim further than winning a commemorative paperweight. Hyperfocused nonpersons who will never get distracted from their tasks because that's literally the only thing in their minds.

Corporate culture would love nothing more than to achieve that fantasy. Apple TV's new series Severance, created by Dan Erickson and gorgeously directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, explores the nightmare that would result if companies could wield complete control over human beings without interference from the outside world.

Severance takes place in a biomedical corporation that subjects its low-level employees to a surgery that separates their memories and identities between their office selves and their outside selves. Every day, they drive to their jobs, enter an elevator, and forget who they are. They work their shifts without any knowledge of their personal lives; while in that state, all they can remember is life inside the company building. At the end of the day, they enter the same elevator and switch back: out in the street, they have no idea what they do for a living or even who their coworkers are.

Not that their jobs make the least bit of sense, mind you. That workplace couldn't be any more ridiculously shady: with its endless featureless corridors, creepy supervisors who won't stop smiling cheerfully, outlandish teambuilding rituals, an obscure internal mythology around the company's founder, an obsessive degree of surveillance, and punitive reeducation worthy of a North Korean prison camp, the surreal environment of Severance presents a heightened version of worrying trends that already exist in real-world companies.

The dangers of organizational totalitarianism and CEO worship have been raising alarms for quite a while now. Our jobs already dominate a big chunk of our lives. The main reason they don't exert more control is fear of worker solidarity, public opinion, and legal retaliation. But in a scenario where no one outside can know what happens inside, where not even we can know what is done to us for eight hours of the day, the corporation won't hesitate to claim every part of us. Once it has control of our actions, it will gladly morph into its own little dictatorship. Let it get its hands on our brains, and it will become a cult.

The fictional company in Severance devotes an amount of effort and resources to singing the praises of its founder that is only one step away from the cult of personality of real-life CEOs. When we think the show can't get any more bizarre, the next episode reveals even darker depths of how much these workers are expected to bow at the feet of the founder. His sayings are holy scripture, his image is a focus for displays of reverence, and his recreated house is a site of pilgrimage. While inside the office, employees are forbidden from reading any literature except the company manual, which is written with such disturbing solemnity that, toward the middle of the season, a mediocre self-help manual smuggled into the building proves life-changing for our protagonist.

Said protagonist is Mark (Adam Scott), a recent widower who applied for a split-memory job so he could forget about his pain for eight hours every day. He only starts to question his routine when a man claiming to be a former coworker contacts him with confusing revelations about what really goes on inside the company.

Honestly, you don't even need a conspiracy theory to smell that something is very wrong about that place. In the office, social interaction is impersonal to the point of loss of humanity. Mark's department spends the workday classifying meaningless numbers, so personal achievements feel empty, and when supervisors recognize them, any enjoyment is clothed in an artificiality that robs it of value. No one knows what their work means; the board of directors are only present as an ominous silence on the phone; the floor layout is deliberately labyrinthine to discourage employees from joining forces; and for whatever reason, there's a goat farm.

Everything about this series sounds incomprehensible. But the cast does a stellar job of grounding the absurdity in real human emotion. Britt Lower, who fulfills the trope of the new hire through whom we learn the rules of this world, takes the story into deep existential terror as her character learns that she is her own worst enemy. John Turturro plays a bootlicking senior employee who gets radicalized when he realizes that his office crush's retirement implies that that version of him will cease to exist. And Patricia Arquette is deliciously menacing as the tyrannical manager with an agenda of her own.

The impressive talent starring in Severance would suffice to recommend it. But the ace up this show's sleeve is its visual language. Both directors convey the claustrophobic life of cubicle workers with an impeccable eye for shot composition. We frequently see Mark sitting alone with half the frame obscured, symbolizing the missing half of his life that he no longer has access to. Although the story appears to be happening in our present time, the office space is designed with a vaguely retro aesthetic that heightens the incongruity of the situation. The end result is simultaneously funny, intriguing, scary, unsettling, sad, relevant, and at its core, intensely human.

With this kind of premise, Severance could easily have rolled down the hill of shocksploitation. But it manages to never lose hold of the humanity at the center of the story. Severance is about the unfair demands of "professionalism" and the increasing pressure to not let our personal issues affect our performance. It's about the frustrations that continue to drive the Great Resignation. It's about private corporations' ongoing attempt to build their own secluded societies, isolated from scrutiny. It's about a system of social relations that makes us complicit in our own exploitation.

On a more intimate level, Severance is about our willingness to rip ourselves apart if that's what it takes to avoid confronting deep pain (there's a subplot about a woman who undergoes the brain surgery to create a separate self who will only exist for the purpose of experiencing childbirth). And, like all great stories, it's about the search for happiness and the amounts of unhappiness we can inflict upon ourselves along the way. Severance is the most important television show of the year, and it will remain culturally significant beyond this decade.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Free Guy is so chock-full of allegories that it gets its messages confused

Guy's journey mirrors step by step the perils of far-right radicalization, and at times the movie doesn't seem to know where it stands

Free Guy is a comedy about a videogame character who, after gaining sentience, fights to save his digital world. It is also an allegory about the search for purpose and authenticity in life. It is also a critique of the ease with which we adopt a hyperviolent persona in online interactions. It is also an exploration of the inherent dignity of nonhuman life. It is also a tale of workplace romance wrapped inside an action thriller. It is also a corporate drama about the ethics of intellectual property.

Now you begin to see the problem with all the things this movie is trying to do. Because on top of this pile of thematic homework to complete, Free Guy is also an antifascist story so clumsily executed that at times it comes alarmingly close to contradicting its own position.

Guy lives in a fabricated world where his actions are ultimately inconsequential. The first scene describes who actually matters: the people with cool hair and cool clothes who just take what they want and, as a reward for breaking the laws of society, get to run away with the fanciest cars and the hottest women.

That's a good summary of how many videogames work.

It's also exactly how incel ideology believes the real world works.

We run again, for the thousandth time, into the problem of the narrative treatment of violence: how do you criticize a culture of sociopathic rulebreaking without at the same time making it look aspirational? One possible reading of this first scene is as a satire of superhero media: the cool dude driving away in the shiny car doesn't care about the massive destruction he leaves in his wake. Neither Batman v. Superman nor Captain America: Civil War succeeded at an honest exploration of our eagerness to cheer for titans smashing buildings at each other. Free Guy had an opportunity to engage with that theme without the baggage of having to maintain established characters as marketable heroes, an opportunity to bring into the digital realm the long tradition set by Watchmen and Irredeemable and The Boys. Instead, it loses itself in the awesomeness of slow motion gunfights and exploding cars and lightsabers. Very deep inside, Free Guy wants to question macho culture, but it's so fluent in the language of macho culture that it almost parrots its same messages.

Which is why I bring up incels.

A disturbing amount of jokes are made about Guy's sexual inexperience. He is repeatedly and annoyingly mocked for his traits of innocence and sincerity, which supposedly doom him to "a lifetime supply of virginity" (what the incels call a beta male, or maybe lower; it's hard to keep up with fake psychology). So his journey of self-improvement is framed as a struggle for the right to hang with a high-status woman, which, again, is how incels interpret social interactions. Molotov Girl essentially tells him, "Don't call me until you've accumulated more stuff and more money," which means one thing in the context of MMORPGs and a very different one in the context of PUA indoctrination.

In the sordid pit of self-hatred that is the manosphere, interaction between men and women is defined as a constant competition to see who makes the best impression. Free Guy falls into this trap when Guy's way to prove his worth to Molotov Girl is to bring her into his lair where he can boast all the loot he's gathered from other characters. There is the briefest hope that this scene could lead to a healthy discussion of the human search for meaning; after all, Guy explains he began his quest to improve the world in order to address a profound dissatisfaction in his life. But in the next line, he says that the tipping point was meeting Molotov Girl, and this derails the theme. He didn't become a hero to help people, but to impress a girl he saw once. That this is treated as a moment of growth for him is extremely concerning, because it echoes an misogynistic talking point. Incels believe women are like peahens, impressionable by expensive displays of success. Guy is supposed to be playing the game as a good and decent character, but the kind of rewards he gets are indistinguishable from those given to violent players.

You can tell a lot about someone's values by paying attention to what shocks them. This movie has to come from a depressingly bleak worldview in order to treat a pacifist run of a videogame as somehow groundbreaking. Commentators and streamers react with amazement at Guy's campaign to keep his world safe, as if it had never occurred to any gamer ever; players have their entire mindset shaken by the idea that they perhaps ought to be nice to imaginary characters; and Millie's proposal for an MMORPG where you interact with characters without killing them is treated as if it were a world-shattering revolution in game design. In our real world, pacifist runs of violent games are news to no one, there's a whole emerging crop of fascinating new games specifically designed to not reward combat, and even established franchises are starting to accommodate this style of play.

Games are about what their mechanics reward. (I learned this the hard way with Age of Empires II, when I realized that my demilitarized society of monks and farmers didn't meet any of the victory conditions.) It is an oversight on the part of the screenwriters that Guy was able to get experience points from good actions. That shouldn't happen unless the game was intentionally designed with such actions in mind, and this absolutely doesn't look like the kind of game where good behavior gets you anywhere. (But if it is, that speaks volumes about the players' choices.) If we take Free Guy's forced metaphor of game world as stand-in for real life at face value, we may conclude that a society is about what its laws encourage (or discourage, if you accept the pessimistic position that fines are prices). So, given the choice to be nice people, why be jerks? It's not enough to argue that players in Free City get away with misbehavior because they're not attacking real people; after all, it has PvP mode permanently enabled. A simpler answer is that Free City is designed to reward rudeness and brutality. In other words, it's not just that the game doesn't object to you killing bystanders, but that it expects and wants you to do it. In some ways, lethal violence is even more satisfying in PvP, and the only way to mentally compartmentalize a space where you can indulge in PvP in the real world, the only consistent way to treat life as if it were an all-against-all competition, is to pretend that some categories of people don't matter.

You know, like NPCs.

Free Guy contains multiple cans of worms for a viewer familiar with online extremism. In alt-right discourse, the concept of the NPC has become a poisonous meme. Because fascist ideology keeps coming up with new and insidious ways to make the same flawed arguments, antifascist education keeps having to restate the same points again and again. So now the alt-right is using the term NPC to label people who supposedly lack independent thought because they argue from an unchanging script. This rhetorical tactic is nothing but a conversation stopper, a bad faith move intended to preempt rational discussion. One does not become a mindless automaton for proclaiming obvious truths, especially when the other side's strategy is to attack obvious truths. The core conflict of Free Guy, about the rights of artificial lifeforms, hinges precisely on one of those obvious truths: to brand a person as an NPC is to deny their humanity.

However, the rules of narration do not allow for this kind of story. Guy's condition as an NPC is immediately annulled by his role as the designated protagonist of the movie. Secondary characters who get the main focus of the story are not secondary characters. It has often been argued that one of the hallmarks of the evolution from the classical epic to the modern novel is that stories no longer focused on kings and gods but on ordinary people. But that process already happened centuries ago; it's not like Free Guy brings anything new to the art of storytelling. What can be said in its favor is that the very act of choosing an everyman as the protagonist challenges the notion of an everyman. And that relates to how we perceive ourselves in the larger narrative of society.

One of the basic disagreements between liberals and conservatives, since the times of the French Revolution, is what we on the liberal side have been trying to make the case that there's no such thing as unimportant people. For example, the Great Man view of history effectively divides humanity into protagonists and NPCs, but for some time now, scholars have been retelling world history by focusing on the smaller, neglected figures who actually constitute the bulk of humanity. This is totally a worthy exercise from an ethical standpoint. But in terms of storytelling, it's not really that big of a change. As soon as you shift your focus from the conquering general to the farmers who fed his soldiers, what you've done is choose different protagonists. History deals with reality, but the account of history needs to employ the tools of storytelling, and a story can't not have a spotlight.

Part of the distorted story that the alt-right tells itself about the direction society is going has to do with the anxiety of falling out of the spotlight, of losing protagonism. Guy's malaise is precisely this nagging suspicion that he doesn't influence the story, that he doesn't count. This is a common first tactic of extremist indoctrination: to tell you that you are the victim of a conspiracy, that the rules of society are set to keep you down.

Guy experiences two key moments in the movie that bear an eerie correspondence to the steps on the road to online radicalization. The first is the theft of the eyeglasses (a detail stolen from the movie They Live, where the special eyeglasses allowed the wearer to recognize the secret cabal of aliens who pulled the strings of world affairs). In online parlance, this moment is referred to as taking the red pill (a massive irony considering where they took that term from). Supposedly, taking the red pill lets you see how it's really men who are disadvantaged and who need to reclaim their power. In the movie, Guy's entire motivation to take this step is to pursue a girl. Once he understands how little he matters in the world, he starts to level up, and in the end gets to kiss the girl. For the incel crowd, this is the perfect power fantasy, and it's not clear what the movie is trying to say by replicating this fantasy point by point. Red pill ideology teaches that there are a few (and only a few) sure ways to earn female attention. The problem is that Free Guy portrays this unhealthy process as actually working. Guy starts the story as the Nice Guy stereotype. When he becomes stronger, wealthier, and more aggressive, Molotov Girl responds quite favorably. What's the movie's point by doing this?

The second moment that pushes Guy toward the edge is the reveal that his world is a game. This quickly turns him into a nihilist. He loses all sense of meaning because he thinks his life is irrelevant. The things he's been trying to do to become a better person will ultimately not give him happiness. He will not win the game, he will not get the girl, and that's a fundamentally unchangeable fact of reality.

In incel circles, this step of becoming convinced that there is no hope and that the world is unfixable is called the black pill. This is how you create an Elliot Rodger and a Jake Davison and many other perpetrators of senseless violence. Maybe Free Guy didn't consciously consider this angle, in which case the screenwriters should have paid more attention to the implications of what they were creating. But even if one believes that Free Guy intentionally chose to make an allegory of rightwing indoctrination, the point gets muddled in the execution, because Guy is not the one committing senseless violence on a daily basis in his city. It's everyone else. When you think of the overlapping memberships of online misogyny and online racism, and when you think of the movie's treatment of Free City as a pleasant community of peaceful citizens who were minding their own business until a mob of outsiders arrived to burn the place and flee with the women, you can see how the whole premise takes a twisted turn toward resembling an anti-immigration fable.

Once you notice the parallels between Guy's journey to total despair and the fall into radicalization, the rest of the movie suffers. Once Guy becomes a public hero, he's known around the world as "Blue Shirt Guy," and fans start copying his style of dress. This development is supposed to be a victory for the character. However, one cannot help being reminded of the real, historical Blue Shirts, the nickname of several violent organizations affiliated with the far right.

Another example: in videogame terms, "skin" is the entire way a digital avatar looks: body shape, clothes texture, hairstyle, facial expressions, etc. Yet, it is regrettable that the movie has a character of color, played by an actor of Indian descent, compliment the white protagonist on his pretty skin. Even worse, the white protagonist attributes his pretty skin to a genetic advantage, and to complete an already terrible moment, the scene extends the dialogue into a joke about facial care products, which, in the context of cosmetic racism in India, is in horrendous bad taste.

I bring this scene up because it illustrates how this movie doesn't understand the dangerous metaphors it's flirting with. Just after this dialogue, two game programmers proceed to chase after the protagonist within the game world, demanding that he remove his skin, meaning, of course, that they want him to stop using what they believe is a stolen character design, but the conflict takes a more sinister significance when one keeps in mind the connections between the movie's plot and online discourse. To wit: the most rabid fringes of the alt-right claim that secret forces are scheming to persecute them for their white skin. In any other movie, this scene would have been a fun chase. But in a movie so full of references to fascist propaganda, it raises a lot of questions. I'd like to have a talk with every single writer, proofreader, script doctor, supervisor and intern who had a hand in the script of this movie, because I find it hard to believe that this many thematic missteps are accidental.

However, I'm not claiming, because I don't believe, that Free Guy is secretly pushing a fascist message. The happy ending comes as a result of a collective effort against corporate abuse. Guy is saved from the black pill by his ties to other people, starting with his closest friend. The true hero that saves the day is human connection. In Guy's decisive fight against a Chad-esque distortion of himself, the way he defeats the monster is not by punching him harder, but by sharing his perspective with him.

Also, Guy is a Moses figure in a movie made by a Jewish director. There's no way this is a fascist movie. But, as I said, it speaks the language of fascism so well that it's difficult to hear what it's trying to say.

If a story employs the perennial Jewish trope of a man on a mission to lead his people across the water and away from a threat of extermination to a land of bliss and riches they originally came from, it stands to reason that the forces opposed to his mission can be read as playing a role akin to that of historical tyrants. Free Guy's choice of tyrant is a tech bro, the go-to target of blame for everything in the 2020s, a role given to Taika Waititi, who previously played a parody version of Hitler. Free Guy has been repeatedly compared to The LEGO Movie, The Truman Show, The Matrix and Groundhog Day, but this time the moral dilemmas about the fate of the fantasy people are decided outside of the fantasy world, which means that the closest analogue is actually Horton Hears a Who! To take its antifascist statement to completion, Free Guy has to set aside what should be the mind-blowing news of artificial lifeforms developing intelligence and instead focuses on defeating the tech bro with legalities. It's the least exciting way to end what purported to be a quest for freedom and self-realization. But it fits within the larger problems of a movie that is loaded with references but doesn't care what they mean.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the restraint it must have taken to digitally animate a city in constant warfare without falling into a Michael Bay mess, +3 for giving more visibility to nonviolent roleplaying.

Penalties: −1 for inept handling of its political themes, −1 for insensitive jokes, −1 for too obvious dialogue, −1 for not following its own worldbuilding rules (for instance, how did Millie kiss Guy after it was established that the game had no kiss command?), −1 for stealing the digital memory-restoring kiss from WALL-E, and −1 for the kind of Disney product placement that makes one think of Space Jam: A New Legacy, both because no one wants to be reminded of Space Jam: A New Legacy, and because no one wants corporate inbreeding to be the future of movies.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Hackers

Dossier: Hackers, dir. Iain Softley (1995)

Filetype: film

File Under: cyberpunk derivative

Executive Summary: An 11 year old white suburban boy, alias Zero Cool, is detained by the secret service and charged with spreading a malicious computer virus that effected over 1,500 systems and single handedly crashed the stock market. He is sentence to spend the rest of adolescence banned from owning or using a computer or touch tone phone. Seven years later and legally allowed to use a computer again, Zero Cool and his group of similarly minded friends find themselves at the center of a conspiracy to launch a dangerous virus, one that would wreak ecological havoc, and one that they must use their elite skills to thwart.

High-Tech: Pretty much all real tech (which was high tech at the time) like pagers, laptops with active matrix screens, virtual reality, and 3 ½” floppy discs; and then the fictional Gibson super computer.

Low-Life: Lower middle class teens in NYC is about as low-life as we get here. Their apartments may be small and Cereal Killer may prefer to crash at other people’s places rather than with his parents, but no one is on the street or in a bad neighborhood. Plus, all these kids have pretty sophisticated technology at their fingertips, with no indication that it was stolen (i.e., can afford computers at a time when home ownership was not common and laptops were bricks).

Dark Times: Again, times are about as dark in 1995 Hackers NYC as they are in 2015 real world NYC, with corporate extortion and the threat/fear of government surveillance.

Legacy: Hackers’ legacy lives on in its status as a cult classic, inspired by the Hacker Manifesto and produced at a time when Google was but a twinkle in the eye. But despite the rapid advancement of technology over the past 20 years, the central tenant of Hackers is still very relevant today. We (as in the royal) hack for fun because we’re bored and too smart for our own good, hack to create fear because we’re bored and too smart for our own good and want money, and hack for revolution because we’re just plain bad ass. Also, anonymity is equally as hard obtain today as it was at the time this film was made. In the immortal words of the aptly named Emmanuel “Cereal Killer” Goldstein: 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large.

In Retrospect: This film is still fun to watch today, despite the outdated technology. Hackers has that 90’s nostalgia that I love and it reminds us how rapidly technology evolved over the past 20 years. It's nice to remember how far NYC has come too, since as any East Coaster knows, it was pretty grimy in the 90's. Then of course, there is the inclusion of early career Angelia Jolie, which instantly make any movie 10x more awesome.

But Hackers' rewatch value may lie solely in the nostalgia factor. I am curious as to how the film is received by someone on the younger end of this generation. Someone who perhaps doesn't remember how cool beepers were or how mysterious the internet was... or how boldly the World Trade Center defined the NYC skyline.


Analytics

For its time: 4/5
Watched today: 3/5
Cybercoefficient: 7/10


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POSTED BY: Tia  90's nostalgic and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2014

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Deus Ex by Ion Storm

Dossier: Ion Storm. Deus Ex (2000)

Filetype: Video Game.

File Under: Cyberpunk Derivative

Executive Summary: J.C. Denton is a newly trained United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition (UNATCO) agent. He is tasked with retrieving a stolen shipment of the ‘Ambrosia’ vaccine, the cure for the Gray Death, from National Secessionist Forces (NSF). However, J.C. learns that the Gray Death is a man made virus, and someone is controlling Ambrosia shipments to shape world governments. This is only the tip of the conspiracy as J.C. travels around the world to find who is pulling the strings.

High-Tech: J.C. is one of the first nano augmented people in the world. His body is full of nanites that give him superhuman strength, regenerating health, the ability to see in the dark, and cloak, among other augmentations that make J.C. more than human. J.C., however, is preceded by a whole class of people who were mechanically augmented, like your typical cyborg. Still superhuman, but not the future that J.C. represents.

Computer hacking is also a big part of Deus Ex. Though gameplay, J.C. gains experience that he can put towards his hacking skills. There’s no minigame involved, but hacking can be augmented with items such as ICE Breakers, and often reveal story elements as well as useful information such as lock codes.

Sentient artificial intelligences also figure heavily in Deus Ex. Some are allies of J.C. and aid him throughout the game, and others are not. These AI have their own motivations and goals in the context of the game.

Low-Life: The common person in Deus Ex lives in fear of the Gray Death. It leads to a short, painful death as the victim’s body is consumed by the virus. The distribution of Ambrosia is controlled by FEMA and it is a temporary cure. Without a steady supply, the infected can expect to die shortly after it runs out. This makes anyone without a stable source extremely susceptible to control by forces that can interrupt the flow of Ambrosia.

Dark Times: Deus Ex is dense with social conflict. The most obvious is that which is dictated by the Ambrosia vaccine; the haves versus the have nots. The wealthy and those in power seem to have no problem getting a hold of the Ambrosia vaccine, but the poor suffer and die on the streets from Gray Death. This is largely what leads the NSF to steal the vaccine shipments, though not their only motivation. Then there is conflict between the nano-augmented (J.C. and his brother Paul) against the mechanically augmented. Recognizing the nano-augmentation is more operationally flexible and less physically obvious, the mechanically augmented feel like their future is limited. The AIs in the game are also an oppressed class, controlled by their creators but yearning for freedom.

Above all of this, the shadow organizations that seek to control the world are winning. The world governments are still there, but more or less helpless against the power of extragovernmental agencies that exert their control.

Legacy: Deus Ex was a big deal when it came out. It was Ion Storm’s biggest success and won many ‘game of the year’ awards for combining first person action, huge levels with an enormous array of options to complete them, RPGlike progression and a narrative far deeper than most video games, even today. It’s arguably one of the best video games ever made.

In Retrospect: Believe it or not, I finished Deus Ex for the first time not that long ago. I’ve owned it since 2000, but it was too much for me back then. As you might be able to tell, there is a lot to Deus Ex and it’s almost overwhelming. The first level alone allows for so many options and very little direction that it is often a huge turn-off for most people who expect to be spoonfed the gameplay systems slowly until the training wheels come off. There are no training wheels in Deus Ex.

Even if you get past the first level of the game, there is so much going on in the background and the foreground of the game, that it’s easy for completionists (as I’m sometimes compelled to be) to get frustrated. You have to learn to accept that you’re not going to read every line of dialog, open every door, hack every computer, or solve every mystery on your first time through Deus Ex. When I first bought Deus Ex, I was not ready for that game.

However, as I grew older, I came to accept some of my completionist tendencies didn’t need to be satisfied, and I just sat down and played the game. It is an extremely rewarding experience. Play the game however you like, and Deus Ex will probably accommodate you. Are you stealthy? You can play it that way. Do you like to shoot everyone? You can play it that way. Do you want to spend a lot of time underwater or in environmental suits? It kind of works!

This same manner of engagement applies to the story and lore of the game. There is a lot of it, hidden in books, encrypted on hard drives, stored on datapads, and these things are littered all over the levels. It’s a game that relishes in secrets and rewards those who seek them out.

The game does suffer a bit technically. It’s early Unreal engine, and it shows. The game has never been a looker, but you can improve it with a user made renderer that brings some newer Unreal engine improvements. It probably still runs fine without them, but they do improve the experience.

All told, there is a lot of things that other games have copied from Deus Ex, and many of them have done them better, but the number of games that succeed at doing so much is extremely small. Though successes in their own ways, not even the sequels to Deus Ex come close to its scope. In an industry that thrives on iterating to increasing improvements, it is as close as video games gets to a timeless classic.

 
Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read/watched/played today: 5/5
Cybercoefficient: 10/10

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Johnny Mnemonic

Dossier – Longo, Robert. Johnny Mnemonic (1995).

Filetype – film (of sorts).

File under – cyberpunk derivative (but also proto-cyberpunk, as it was based on the eponymous 1981 short story by Cyberpunk doyen William Gibson, predating even Neuromancer).

Summary – An utterly unappealing drone stuffs info into his head and then spends the rest of the movie trying to get it out, enlisting the aid of everyone from a bright-eyed street samurai to a bunch of squatters to a smarty-pants dolphin in his quest to not die. Arrayed against him are the Yakuza and their unstoppable secret weapon, Dolph Lundgren. (It all sounded ridiculous back in 1995, and it still does today.)

High-tech – cool ideas like 'wetware' brain datajacks and storage capacity (of a mind-blowing 160 GB, slightly bigger than my crappy smart phone's!) and monofilament whips and virtual reality gloves and visors and so forth are present, but depicted in what passed for mediocre special effects in the mid-90s, making it all feel (and look) like a goofy Shadowrun session gone wrong.

  

Low-life – Director Robert Longo (whose film career didn't exactly blossom after this little gem) does deserve points for the mise en scene (consistent with his 'real' job as a sculptor and painter), as the film was shot mostly at night, and is filled with establishing shots which nicely illustrate just how crappy everyone's life is who is stuck near the garbage heaps of cities like Newark (an analysis which is perhaps true in the real world of 2015!) compared to suit-clad bourgeois stooge Johnny. But the Lo-Teks, a bunch of idiot luddites with a ton of crappy weapons and a combination magic dolphin/microwave emitter, failed to win me over; I was rooting for the Yakuza throughout, since at least they had style.

Dark times – It's standard dystopian fare—mega-corps rule the world, and unless you work for one of them (in which case you're a mega-villain by definition), chances are you're a grimy "Lo-Tek" resistance fighter/casualty living in a literal dump, which is what the world apparently turns into if corporations are allowed to seek profits (anti-capitalist ravings that no one took seriously in 1995, or doubtless more than twelve people would have gone to see it). The film adds the wrinkle of a disease, the Black Shakes, which is brought on by exposure to the now-ubiquitous electronics of the world, but that's silly and in any case everything is reduced to the simplest and most Manichean moral terms imaginable: either a character is a Good Guy (one of the Lo-Teks, or Johnny himself, or 'Jane', etc.) or irremediably Evil (bright-eyed monofilament whip wielding Yakuza assassin, Dolph Lundgren's bizarre Preacher guy, Ralfi). The only character to show any moral complexity is the Yakuza/Pharmakom exec played by, that's right, comedian and gritty crime film director Kitano Takeshi, though his change of heart is stupid and merely involves transforming from Evil into Good.

Legacy – Johnny was without a doubt one of the most high-profile (and high-budget) film adaptations of a cyberpunk story in the 1990s. On the other hand, given its mediocre subject matter and less than mediocre execution, it got exactly the critical and box office reception that it deserved. 

In retrospect – One feels slimy echoes of Michael Crichton's histrionic Rising Sun here. Johnny was made in the mid-nineties, when social anxiety about the impending 'takeover' of the U.S. by Japan wasn't yet recognized to be totally ridiculous. It was a time when people could apparently imagine a dystopian future where soulless Japanese pharmaceutical executives would join forces with heartless Yakuza to crush the world in their iron grip. In fact, I thought that aspect of the story was pretty silly way back when I first saw the film, twenty years (!) ago, and it hasn't aged well.

           

Johnny also suffers from anti-technological fears of ubiquitous electronics that strike the viewer in 2015 as breathtakingly naive. Is there a crippling neurological disorder just around the corner, caused by all our electronic stuff? If so...how come radio waves (i.e., TV, etc.) and all other forms of 'harmful' electronic radiation have consistently (even back in 1995, in fact!) been shown to be utterly without negative effect? You want to know which modern invention is one of the most harmful to human health? The x-ray—which was invented like a gazillion years ago. But even the x-ray isn't so bad, or at least that's what I tell myself when the dentist smilingly zaps me for another one of those stupid panoramic images that nobody uses for anything, bathing my entire skull in short-wave radiation...

I guess what I'm saying is that the most dystopian parts of Johnny are also the weakest parts of the story. The Japanese have not conquered the world (or, if they have, they did a lot better job hiding that fact than the Yakuza thugs do in the movie!), and no terrifying Black Shakes has arisen to doom the most technocratic of us. Incidentally, I've heard the main plot of the film, which concerns said Black Shakes and a certain megacorp too selfish to release its cure, was the most infuriating change from story to film, and alienated many Gibson fans from Johnny. Having never read the story, I didn't need any such fancy justification—Keanu Reeves (it was pretty much his epic "I want ROOM SERVICE!" rant that nailed the coffin shut on Johnny for me) did it for me free of charge. Except for the price of the movie ticket, now that I think about it—curses! You may have won that round back in 1995, Reeves, but the film also delivered your career a nearly lethal blow; I'd call it even.

So there you have it, folks. Johnny failed to win over audiences back in 1995, when its vision of the faraway year of 2021 probably sounded marginally less absurd; it doesn't have a prayer of winning anyone over now! Not all of its problems stem from harmful changes to the original story in the process of film adaptation, however; some of the most ludicrous ideas are right there in Gibson's original vision of the future, like heroin-addicted uber-dolphins. Actually, the film made a small improvement—it eliminated the dolphin's chemical dependency sub-plot, judging it (correctly) to be stupid and irrelevant. No, Gibson: in the future, drug problems won't be so severe they've begun extending to other species, and dolphins can't microwave Dolph Lundgren!

Analytics

For its time: 2/5.
Viewed today: 1/5.
Cybercoefficient: 3/10.

Zhaoyun, no prophet of the future, can nonetheless spot ridiculous predictions and Manichean ethics when they crop up, and since 2013 has been taking great pleasure here at Nerds of a Feather in eviscerating books and films that spew forth such drivel.