Manga Review: Before You Go Extinct

An incisive, heartfelt plea for the worth of useless actions

It's usually bad manners to make the review about the reviewer, but this time I'll ask for your indulgence, because this book has touched me on a very personal level. Because my parents had no imagination, they made me study for a business degree. Out of the options they could afford, that one sounded to me like the most dreadful. I melted in hopelessness every time I envisioned what kind of life I would have with that degree, burning my few decades of fresh vigor on this Earth for the Dark Art of transmuting money into more money. I would have given an arm and a leg to study history. Or cinema. Or psychology. Or archaeology. Gosh, how I dreamed of archaeology. But my parents' choice was incontestable, supported by their totally scientific method of reading the classified ads in the newspaper and taking note of which jobs were the most demanded. Their guiding principle, for their lives as well as mine, paid no heed to what was interesting to do, but to what stove off destitution. With a business degree, they promised, the rest of my life would be guaranteed. I tried many times to make them see that that wouldn't be a life worth living, but they didn't even have that concept. So I never let them know, because they didn't deserve to know, how much of my twenties was spent wanting to die.

All those ideas, about the seductiveness of the death drive, about the socially transmitted imperative to not do anything unproductive, about the anxiety that comes with the awareness of our finitude, about the fascinating nature of wasted time, about the tragedy of uncritically accepting a set lifepath, about our need to express a personal meaning in ways that reach beyond practicality, about the unacknowledged extortion that biological urges commit against our freedom, about the emptiness of mere survival, about time's perverse joke at our expense came cascading over me while reading Takashi Ushiroyato's collected manga Before You Go Extinct.

The plot is an extended philosophical dialogue held across six reincarnations between a soul that has bought into the game of animalistic survival, and thus eschews what seems useless, and a soul that safeguards its little private dignity by perfecting some or other pastime as a vehement yet futile protest against a universe that isn't listening. The genius element in this story is that it's told with talking animals. For us humans, the truism that we must create our own meaning has through repetition lost some of its impact. But we still think of animals as beings that exist primarily to obtain food and reproduce; to use their voices lends more impact to the message that we shouldn't feel compelled to abide by the ancestral template that prescribes birth-growth-breeding-death.

For added rhetorical effect, the animals we follow in this story belong to endangered species. These characters think of mortality in terms that exceed the dimension of the personal: every Hawaiian crow, every Japanese otter, every New Zealand kakapo that dies is a cosmic loss. The obligation to obtain food and reproduce nags at them like a ticking bomb, but the plot leads them, in each of those lives, to notice that they don't have to comply with that obligation. There's more to being alive than staying that way. Being a free person implies that you aren't required to find food and reproduce, even if your species depends on it.

We're introduced to a cute, murderous penguin who has figured out that penguins are disappearing, so he decides he may as well speed up the process. The point of this chapter isn't how a penguin manages to acquire dynamite and machine guns; it's why he doesn't kill his roommate, whose way of protesting against the future is to take care of a small rock (which is something real penguins sometimes do when they can't have an egg). In their next life, they're crows debating what's the point of honoring the dead if neither the dead nor the living get any benefit from it (spoiler: benefit is not the point). In their next life, they're otters captured by a circus who rebel against its system that assures their sustenance in exchange for obedience. In their next life, they're another species of otter, torn between fun and responsibility. In their next life, they're kakapos with a passion for music, learning that their song isn't wasted just because it doesn't attract a mate. And in their next life, they're penguins again, this time literally the last two, a parent and an adopted chick, and in their conversations they admit that parenthood isn't inherently heroic. Throughout that journey of spiritual discovery, they're accompanied by their favorite rock, a clear symbol of the useless things that nonetheless we defiantly choose to value.

The implied punch of this story, one comes to realize, is that it was written by a Japanese creator. Before You Go Extinct isn't just a rebuke of longtermism and its mandate to sacrifice the actual for the potential, but more specifically a response to the cultural panic over the demographic shift that is going on in Japan. Governments are treating depopulation as an existential threat that must be countered, but this book makes the case that it's fine if that happens. There's no law of the universe that says your nation has to exist. But rather than a flat "don't have kids," the book proposes that having kids (or not) is a choice that only has meaning if you make if for your own reasons, and you should be honest with yourself about having those reasons instead of pretending it's the natural or patriotic thing to do. To put it in Kantian terms, it's evil to make children exist if they're instruments of someone else's goals, like in this case state goals. And on a more individual level, it's evil to willingly turn yourself into an instrument of a system.

It's a curious feeling to read Before You Go Extinct and notice the usual devices of humorous manga in the middle of hard conversations about what's the point of living (spoiler: having a point is not the point). All the animals are adorable to look at, even while they're enduring full-body burns or driving an armored tank or rehearsing their own funeral or remembering a dead friend's love for ball juggling. That aesthetic choice is a statement by itself: the most hurtful experiences don't negate the possibility of finding beauty. Note that I didn't say finding purpose, or even finding meaning. Those are nice to have. But if you're serious about refusing to be an instrument, finding some beauty, gloriously useless beauty, shall be enough.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Ushiroyato, Takashi (author), Abiko, Kanato (illustrator), Tejima, Yuki (translator), Grandt, Eve (letterer). Before You Go Extinct [Kodansha, 2025].

Film Review: Mickey 17

The human being in the age of its mechanical reproducibility

I've already written on this blog about the questions, both abstract and practical, that emerge when you get a science-fictional gizmo that lets you cheat death. Instead, let's talk about sauce.

In the disturbingly familiar future of the film Mickey 17, a filthy rich creep leads a space colonization project whose day-to-day operations are more like those of a cult of his repulsive personality, complete with a tyrannical workplace and an unsurprising hyperfocus on eugenics (any resemblance to real life, etc.). This grimy exudate of the worst traits of the 1% has a wife to match, whose hobby is to invent sauce recipes. That, and a blatant lack of humanity, make up her entire personality. And I couldn't help but notice that the interests of this couple are complementary: he (figuratively) grinds his spaceship crew into pulp and has one special crew member to (literally) grind into pulp and xerox out a new copy every so often, while she (literally) consumes pulp, which (figuratively) completes the picture of a system where human beings are goods for the elite to consume.

This connected field of themes comes as no surprise from Bong Joon-ho, the director who made Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite, and is of a kind with the ongoing wave of South Korean critique of economic inequality via science fiction. With Mickey 17 we get more than the usual humanist protest against the cheapening of life as a result of easy reanimation; we're placed before an entire symbolic landscape where worker exploitation reflects settler colonialism reflects eugenics reflects the aesthetization of politics reflects Great Man Theory reflects corporatocracy reflects self-mythologizing reflects doomsday cultism reflects the fetishization of violence reflects sublimated sexual repression reflects the incapacity for empathy that defines your standard-issue authoritarian regime. In the colony ship where Mickey 17 is set, the founding of a new society outside Earth jurisdiction and around the whims of one lone (both figurative and literal) father of a future humankind becomes a pitch-perfect satire of how small and ridiculous every self-proclaimed savior really is.

Notably, this character's first action in the movie is to ban sex among crew members under the excuse that the ship's limited caloric budget shouldn't be wasted. The hypocrisy is made manifest not only in the banquets this leader enjoys privately, but in the considerable expense of resources involved in periodically remaking his test subject, the titular Mickey, whose job description is to be subjected to every form of biohazard the new planet has to offer so the ship doctors can learn how to keep the crew safe—and how to kill everything else. Because Mickey's body and memories have been scanned and made replicable, his human rights are for all purposes void. His death is trivial, ergo his life has no value. For the advancement of science, he can (in fact, he contractually must) be killed and killed and killed, as if his employer were in a state of war with him. A war that turns out to be the logical extension of necropolitics by other means.

Mickey remembers all his deaths, by test crash and by alien virus and by poison gas and by space radiation and by furnace and by gunshot. He remembers every gruesome detail. This ought to be a horror story, but Bong knows what he's doing when he frames those scenes as comedy. He knows we won't fear for Mickey, so we can afford to ignore the moral atrocity we're watching. And to highlight the game he's playing with us, he adds a secondary villain to the story, a voyeurist whose kink is to watch people die—and to make movies about it. This character helps Bong make his case that our amusement makes us complicit.

(In an odd instance of synchronicity, this month we also have the release of Novocaine, another movie about a character intentionally designed for us to laugh at his torture without feeling guilt.)

When essayist Walter Benjamin wrote about the mechanical reproducibility of works of art, he singled out cinema as a form of art that isn't meant to be experienced in its original form: when we enter the theater, we're always watching a mass-produced copy. The material uniqueness of the recording made by the director's very hands is beside the question. That first recording may as well be destroyed as soon as a copy exists. And even that first recording is itself a copy of the actors' real movements and words.

So what I suspect Bong is doing when he pairs the reproducibility of human life with the inherently reproducible medium of cinema is reflect on how dreadfully easy it could be to reduce a person to a source of fun. This is no small matter: when the boss of the ship forbids sex, while maintaining his own banquets and his endlessly killable test subject, he's essentially telling his crew: you don't exist for your own fun, only for mine. Authoritarian rationing of fun goes hand in hand with dehumanization. Benjamin wrote that art's response to the age of machines was the movement known as art for art's sake. Perhaps, in a world where human life is mechanically reproducible, the appropriate response would be life for life's sake. In other words, fun.

That's why it matters that Mickey 17 is a fun movie to watch. The act of watching has key significance to its plot: the doctors watch Mickey to learn how he dies; the secondary villain enjoys his macabre videos of prolonged executions; the inventor of human replication only got caught for his secret crimes because he had a witness. More importantly, the megalomaniac at the center of the colonization mission is very aware of the importance of managing his image. The two possible futures open before him are linked to the two characters who spend the film's runtime filming him: the lackey, who curates a narrative of this man as a visionary hero; and the whistleblower, who secretly collects the visual proof that will expose his crimes. Both record the same events but assign them opposite valences. And we, who are watching the same events as them, are given the version intended for laughs.

At one key plot moment, one of Mickey's old friends explains that the voyeurist will kill him unless he sends a video of Mickey's next death. Would Mickey be willing to turn his death into a performance? The betrayal implied in that request is applicable to the entire movie: when you have someone in Mickey's situation, the worst thing you can do to him isn't even to keep killing and reviving him; it's to make a spectacle of his suffering. It doesn't take too big a stretch of imagination to realize that such profanation is exactly the movie we've paid a ticket to watch. This explains why it's important, in the final moments of the confrontation between the spaceship crew and an intelligent alien species, that the aliens demand to see one human die in retribution for the death of one of their own. And the character who ends up volunteering for that sacrifice illustrates the basic dignity that Mickey has so far been denied, the basic dignity we could all aspire to: a death that means something.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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.

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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.

Film Review: Tuesday

Death comes for us all ... in bird form?

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, says the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer. As my seventh-grade history teacher (a man who, in retrospect, influenced me perhaps the most of any teacher I had) memorably said, you have a one hundred percent chance of dying. We are so afraid of death that we want to anthropomorphize it, in any number of ways so we can feel like we are hating an entity and not a process, not an inevitability. Such is the core anxiety of the film Tuesday, released in 2024 in American cinemas, co-produced by A24, the British Film Institute, and the BBC, and directed and written by Daina O. Pusić.

Tuesday is set in contemporary London, starring an exhausted mother named Zora (Jula Louis-Dreyfus) caring for her teenage daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), the latter of whom is disabled, requires a wheelchair and spends much of her day in bed, dying of an unspecified terminal illness. There has been a widening gulf between the two, as Zora spends more and more time outside of the house working (or so she says), leaving Tuesday to her own devices and to the care of Nurse Billie (Leah Harvey). Tuesday, understandably, has begun to grow resentful, wishing to spend more time with her mother. This is the situation that has come to pass when Tuesday meets a talking macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene), capable of growing and shrinking at will, that is essentially an avian grim reaper. Perhaps a bigger cause of concern is that he brings bad news: Tuesday’s time has come.

What ensues is a deeply weird but nevertheless enthralling examination of how people cope with death (or, more often than not, try to defy it, all for naught), and also that of family. When I tell you that the grim reaper is literally a bird, I assure you that is not even the most bizarre thing in this film. I am uncertain, while I write this, how much of this weirdness I should reveal, but take my word that it is goddamn bizarre, and I say that in the most complimentary way possible. Wikipedia calls this film a ‘fantasy drama,’ but I think there’s a good argument for horror; many scenes are deeply unsettling, and may be too intense for those who are averse to some things. There is some gore, albeit relatively tame, and something that could be called body horror if you tilt your head to the side, and overall that horror is more existential, more about reminding you that your day, too, will come.

On one level, this is a story about family, and how families can become deeply toxic. Tuesday is a teenage girl who, through no fault of her own, cannot be independent, at least in her current state. Her mother brings in the house’s income, prepares her food, and even helps her bathe. As has happened with many caretakers of children who are disabled (including those such as autism, like myself), Zora has something of a martyr complex, an overweening sense that she possesses her daughter, and has elevated that possession into a core of her identity. This becomes problematic whenever she has to confront the fact that her daughter is a human being with her own wants and needs and view of the world. This is what renders the arrival of Death, in bird form, so stark: Tuesday has accepted her fate, more or less, the sort of acceptance that comes with living with a disability day in and day out. It is Zora, not Tuesday, who has to rage against Death incarnate, with very strange results.

I appreciated how Tuesday, the film’s disabled character, was never reduced to a stereotype. She is not turned into inspiration porn; indeed, she is at her end, as so often comes early with disabilities, and she has the sort of wry exhaustion that comes with living with disability that doesn’t get portrayed in the media much. Yes, we know that our lives are often miserable, but we want to live through them on our terms, not the able-bodied, neurotypical world’s standards. She has a mischievous streak, and a clear resentment towards her mother that I found her to be totally justified in having. She is a victim of circumstance and of parental abuse, but she has found a way to be fully human in spite of all it.

There’s something about making Death a macaw that is so effective and so eerie, in a way I can’t quite place. It is also the source of so much of the film’s awkward, vaguely surreal humor, such as when we discover Death’s musical tastes. There are a number of amusing moments (and some more unsettling moments) involving how Death can change its size, a metaphor perhaps for the myriad ways death can come for us. It can be gradual, or it can be sudden, or it can be bit by bit and then all at once, but it comes all the same.

There’s a truly sterling bit in the middle of the film that I don’t want to spoil, but it comes after Zora has tried to do away with Death. It is a very high-concept sequence that brings out the theme of death and its importance in humanity’s entire set of worldviews. It is a sequence about how everything ends, and how we need to accept that, as the alternative leads to all sorts of pain. It is hands down the most unsettling part of the film, with a particular unmoored sensation to it that reminded me of the best SCP articles, particularly the reality benders. My desire to let the viewer find out for themselves at complete odds with me as a critic here. Perhaps that’s a good sign.

Tuesday is a heavy film, a peculiar film, an odd film, an unsettling film. It’s fittingly so, as death is all those things. It is a film that I found to be absolutely worth the money, but it is one that may be overwhelming for some people. But perhaps that is also fitting, as death is, in some ways, an overwhelming of the bodily systems that keep us alive, by time or by chemicals or physical force or by whatever else befalls us.That’s what made Tuesday such a captivating film. If you have the stomach for it, I highly recommend it.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish' comes to terms with death

Existential anguish has never been this funny

Your favorite fearless hero is back, and he's going through a crisis. After eight feline lifetimes cultivating fame and glory as a daring bandit/swashbuckler/adventurer, Puss in Boots is suddenly confronted with the hard reality of death. He's down to just one life, and for the first time, he's terrified.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a surprising entry in the Shrek franchise. After the end of a century of fantasy dominated by Disney, the first Shrek's acerbic irony made it feel fresh—even if it soon became its own type of stale. Fortunately, The Last Wish doesn't follow that formula. Snark and detachment are thrown out the window (and good riddance!), because this is a movie about death, and to deal with death, you can't do less than open sincerity. With commendable transparency, the movie shows us a hero confronted with his vulnerability, stripped of the pretense that his popularity can keep saving him. The invincible monster slayer is finally afraid, and that makes him feel more real.

Of course, the fact that you're making a movie that takes its theme seriously doesn't mean you can't also make a gut-burstingly funny movie. And here too, the writing deviates from Shrek's juvenile style. The Last Wish goes through the usual repertoire of slapstick violence, but at key moments, it uses its comedy to enhance the point it's making. Unusually for this franchise, in this movie the jokes do a big part of the telling of the story.

In the first act, once our protagonist has been forced to acknowledge his mortality and admit that his hedonistic lifestyle was nothing more than a denial mechanism, his first choice is to hide in a cat shelter. Everything is provided for him: he has a roof, abundant food, warm mittens. But, as he soon realizes, that's no life worthy of the name. The answer to the dread of mortality cannot be to give up agency and let all your choices be made for you. In a joke that tells more than it seems on the first hearing, he's forced to stop using the human toilet and promptly shown the litter box. His line at that moment is, "So this is where dignity goes to die."

Dignity is the key idea here. When we're faced with our state of cosmic abandonment, we may feel what Søren Kierkegaard called the dizziness of freedom, and owning it takes a degree of moral fortitude we're not usually taught to build. When Puss in Boots retreats to the cat shelter, he's taking one of the easy ways out: the abdication of choice. But you cannot cease to make your own choices without also ceasing to respect yourself. The prohibition of using the human toilet can be read as a snapshot of a bigger truth: if you renounce responsibility for your life, you're also renouncing your humanity. An ideal place where you don't have to make any effort is not a place suitable for humans. The safe, comforting refuge will not satisfy you.

This takes us to another key theme of the movie: satisfaction. The writers made the perfect choice of villains for this story: Goldilocks and Jack Horner, archetypes of perpetual insatisfaction. Goldilocks has enough, but she always finds something to criticize. Jack Horner has everything, but he's always greedy for more. Both represent anomalous strategies for coping with the irresolvable insatisfaction of finite life. And both fall into the same mistake when they decide to chase after the wishing star. For Puss in Boots, this is an attempt to replace mundane hedonism with transcendent hedonism—to pray to the heavens for more chances. But it's not a solution: there's no magical fix that will make everything just right. The problem is not that you haven't found your wishing star. Goldilocks is unsatisfied because she has impossible standards. Jack Horner is unsatisfied because he's never needed to make an effort. Puss in Boots is unsatisfied because he can no longer keep telling himself that he'll always have more time. The three of them are looking for the wrong remedy to a nonexistent problem.

I call it nonexistent because the finitude of life is not a new calamity that suddenly befell us; it is the way reality is. It is the normal. It is what is. As existentialist philosophers pointed out, mortality only becomes a problem if we delude ourselves into thinking we can change it. Try as you might, you can't outrun the icy hand of death.

In his essay Summer in Algiers, Albert Camus spoke about the finitude of human life in these terms: "if there is a sin against life, it lies perhaps less in despairing of it than in hoping for another life and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have." Our protagonist's quest to regain his nine lives with a miracle is a Quixotic impossible, a desperate last recourse to regain the ability to delude himself. But having his gaze fixed on a star has distracted him from the mundane beauty he already has. He has allowed his legend to supplant his facticity, and now he's unhappy because he can't live up to an idealized self-image that he knows is false.

A brilliant way Puss in Boots: The Last Wish integrates existentialism into humor for children is in the device of the map to the star. Each character sees a different map, with a different emotional tone. This is an effective way of symbolizing how, even if we have similar ideals of happiness, the road to get there is unique to each of us.

What our hero learns at the end of his personal journey is that the quest for perfect satisfaction cannot be completed in a finite world. Death only stops being an adversary when you stop trying to deny it. That's the key to contentment when all you have is one life. And that's how you speak to children about death: with the maturity and honesty that the topic demands.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 because we should celebrate every time a story targeted at children is unafraid to talk openly about death, +1 for the beautiful art style, designed with a resemblance to expressionist brushstrokes that enhance the emotion of each battle by making it feel intensely personal.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Camus, Albert; Kennedy, Ellen Conroy [Translator]. Lyrical and Critical Essays [Vintage Books, 1970].

'Chariot' is, plainly, a mess

It takes deliberate effort to make absurdist art. Chariot is just absurd.

The promotional tagline for the movie Chariot says, in an ominous tone, "Witness the end of an error." But the advertising executives undersold what they were promoting. This movie is all error, from beginning to end.

The story opens with a silent prologue set in 1840. A lonely man who lives in a cabin and has the obvious cinematic symptom of upcoming death sees in the distance a strange building with blinking lights. He goes out on his horse to investigate, but suddenly he's lying on his deathbed, and that's it. This sequence is unrelated to the rest of the movie, which is a pity, because visually it's the best executed part. The opening shot alone boasts a degree of filmmaking expertise that is painfully lacking from everything that follows.

We jump to the present day and meet Harrison, a troubled young man who has just moved to another city to begin a new psychiatric treatment for his sleep disorder. Every day since childhood, he's had the same dream, a boring domestic scene, except that the dream adds a nonexistent attic to his childhood house.

Meanwhile, he starts a romance with the Designated Girlfriend for this Movie, a Manic Pixie Acid Tripper who explains the rules of the apartment building he's moved into. Apparently, everyone there has something weird about them. There's a guy who floats, whose entire deal is that he floats. There's a masked singer cursed with irresistible beauty. There's a guy who works at a nature preserve trying to coax endangered turtles to reproduce. There's a receptionist possessed by an old Brit. None of them has anything to do with the story. They're just there to act weird and say weird stuff. They're there for our protagonist to have something to react to with a stoic nod.

Making a surreal movie requires more artistry than just finding strange things to throw in the viewer's face. As Freud famously discovered about Dalí, an effective work of surrealist art does not come from the automatic unconscious; it's a very deliberate, very intentional procedure. It takes a conscious act of thought to communicate the irrational. That's where Chariot fails: its random cast of characters and unfinished worldbuilding do not help convey a concrete state of mind, which is what irrational art needs to evoke in place of making a statement. The closest Chariot gets to having something to say is a disjointed scene where the protagonist complains that human life is too short, but if that's the message of the story, it's spelled out too explicitly, which defeats the point of surrealism, and what it says is not particularly original.

The plot takes too long to treat as a big reveal what the promotional material said upfront: this is a movie about reincarnation. There's some shady organization that supervises the reincarnation process, and our protagonist has broken the system by remembering a past lover. That's all. The movie promptly ends once the system punishes the outlier, but there's an obvious implication that these lovers will meet again in their next lives.

What we get is a confusing not-quite-story that gestures vaguely at questions about the absurdity of the human condition and the search for purpose, but it's more interested in the occasional cheap surprise than in any real engagement with its themes. Chariot doesn't have a point to make, and maybe that's the whole point, but it's a bad sign when your attempt at pointlessness turns out, well, pointless.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 4/10.

Bonuses: +1 for skillful execution of a deadpan style of comedy that filmmakers sometimes appear to have forgotten how to pull off.

Penalties: −1 for clumsy editing, −1 for using only the trappings of surrealism without any meaning under the surface.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Microreview [Book]: Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune

Fans of The House in the Cerulean Sea are in for a treat that's both somewhat familiar in tone to what came before, but with more than enough deviations to feel fresh.

In Under the Whispering Door, the protagonist is dead almost from the novel's start. His body is buried, unable to scramble out of the ground. His life was not a life well lived. It was one of bitterness and heartless misdeeds. And now death has robbed his body of any opportunity for redemption. It's an image of hopelessness, of being tamped down by earthly forces out of your control without any recourse of getting out. But while his living body's journey is complete, he has a new one in ghostly form. That ghost, as it leaves his body, is a form of a second chance. Just because his life was a lost cause doesn't mean his death has to be, too.

Following Wallace's death, he is situated in a place where people with fantastical gifts, including Mei, a reaper, and Hugo, a ferryman, work to acclimate Wallace to his death with eventual plans of him transitioning to what lies beyond. His rehabilitation and preparation is done at a tea shop owned by Hugo. Warring with Wallace's protestations are feelings of affection beginning to form for those in the tea shop. Feelings that he never felt before, even when he was alive.

While the premise doesn't exactly break new ground in fantasy, the character interactions are where the novel is at its best. Whether its friendship between the protagonist and other the other ghosts he meets,  budding, believable romance that had its hooks in me until I was tensed and engaged, along with heartbreak and grief that is native to deathly situations--everything is handled with sincerity and emotional intelligence. The bits of wisdom might be parceled with a couple anodyne platitudes, but that adds to the cozy feeling that covers Under the Whispering Door like a warm blanket.

Don't go into the novel expecting rollicking, action-packed chapters. The roiling is more within the characters than pyrotechnic spectacles. The settings aren't varied, with most of the interactions confined to the tea shop--which sometimes have conversations extended to superfluity. But often it feels like a crucible for character growth with all the epiphanies, realizations, and disillusionments that comes with it. Just because the setting is relatively static doesn't mean that characters are taking steps of their own, even if they're metaphorical rather than literal.

Wallace might have been stuck in a rut in life, but in death the novel showcases him finding a pathway of ascending. In the year I'm writing this (2021), in which I am confined, often static, and sometimes pathless, Under the Whispering Door has come at a perfect time to offer a roadmap forward in literary form. Its pages might not be literal steps, but as the characters evolve internally, the novel's words made my heart warm and molded it into something sweeter, something that I think is more capable of approaching the world's clinical processes and rampant rage with more grace.

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: + 1 For having so much heart that even the grinchiest people will be moved. +1 For expertly vibrant banter.

Penalties: - 1 For a middle-third that is a little too slow and long.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Klune, T.J. Under the Whispering Door (Tor, 2021)

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, editor, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!”

PERSPECTIVES IV: Death and Video Games

Welcome to Perspectives IV, in which we do something completely different. Okay, a little different. 

Here’s how it works: an editoral, opinion piece or critical essay written by an external blogger, critic, journalist or creative person is presented by a regular contributor to nerds of a feather, flock together; it is then answered by other regular 'nerds of a feather, flock together' contributors. Crucially, each respondent will also respond to each preceding respondent. This episode's cast o' characters:


brian

brian is a contributor at Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together. He loves video games, maybe too much.


Dean

Dean is the author of the 3024AD series of science fiction stories. You can read his other ramblings and musings on a variety of topics (mostly writing) on his blog. When not holed up in his office
tweeting obnoxiously writing, he can be found watching or playing sports, or in his natural habitat of a bookstore.

EPISODE 4: In which we contemplate death, video games, and death in video games...

 

Death is a nearly unavoidable aspect of video gaming, and yet exceptionally rarely given any weight. In this episode of PERSPECTIVES, the Nerd of a Feather, Flock Together respondents take a whack at it in response to "I'm afraid to die in games" by Gita Jackson.

brian’s response

I am a sore loser. My first gaming experience, like many children of the 80’s, was Super Mario Bros., played on the neighbor’s Nintendo. It wasn’t mine, so I never got to spend a lot of dedicated time with it. I’d play it for a life or two, but then I’d have to hand it over. Dying in Mario was never a big deal because I never got very far in it. Not much loss of effort or time.

As I got older, my favorite games were Wolfenstein 3D, Mechwarrior 2, and Doom 2. But by this time my sore loserness was setting in. I couldn’t stand dying in these games, and I wasn’t about to take death lightly. I could defeat these games; I had cheat codes. For several young, impressionable years, my method of gaming was to search for cheat codes on Yahoo, apply cheat codes, play the game on the lowest difficulty, and metaphorically walk from beginning to end. Of course, I’d still participate in the game. I’d shoot the thing that should be shot. Collect the items. Finish the level. Feel like a winner.

When I was much younger, I had almost the opposite reaction of the author. Death in games held no meaning for me. I can’t die. I have all the weapons. I can walk through walls. I can skip levels. I’ve beaten this game because I’ve circumvented the challenge.

I eventually realized that these were hollow victories. I didn’t really accomplish anything. I started to play games on “normal” difficulty, and really enjoy them for the challenge they provided. I had to learn how to actually play video games because I’d been doing it wrong for so long. Nowadays, I forget that cheat codes exist sometimes, not only because they are a thing of the past in the world of video game achievements, but because I don’t want to win that way. I want to earn my victories and accept my defeats.

The lesson death in video games taught me was not that I was a failure when I died, but that time is short. I’m going to die eventually, so I should be happy with what I can accomplish, always try to do better, but never beat myself up for past failures. That’s a metaphor, by the way.

Dean’s Response

Woof, there is a lot to unpack in that article, not the least of which is there are a lot of people who take videogames far more seriously than I do. In fact, I rarely play them. There are several reasons for this, usually that things which are not books, or the creation thereof, rarely manage to hold my attention very long.

There is also the violence/death... thing.

This I find interesting, because in a book with which you may or may not be familiar, one character basically... guts another. This doesn't bother me in the least. Writing it didn't, nor did a very strongly implied torture scene later in the book (I will not include literal depictions of torture in my writing). But during Super Bowl week, two football players played the new Mortal Kombat, and I was out of the room, wondering what kind of monster was entertained by that.

I'm not going to say violence in video games causes violence in real life, but damn if it isn't obvious that is desensitizes people to it (just look at the GamerGate crowd- more than willing to threaten people with despicable acts for little or no reason). There is a lot of carry over from what we are entertained by to the real world, but interestingly in Gita's case, it goes both ways.

Usually we look at video games and say "it makes life cheap, since you kill- and die- over and over and over". But the potential lesson of failure=finality is very interesting. But at the same time, what's to stop you from going back over and over and over until you get it? That's not a good lesson, either, as far as life goes. It's not like you get to screw up infinitely at work and keep your job- nor does one C in a subject the vast majority of humanity despises doom you to minimum wage for eternity.

Now for the Freudian aspect. My dad loves to hunt, and man, would he love for me to hunt. But the whole thing is completely repulsive to me (even though the birds ARE delicious)- I hate killing things, I hate violence, save apparently, for in my own writing.

Besides all of that, what really fascinates (and confuses me) is that I have never understood the point of video games to keep my avatar alive. Death is an accepted part of the journey, and maybe it hurts but (worst analogy ever in 3...2...1…) it’s kind of like working out. Maybe it hurts, but that’s how you’re getting stronger. Your character dies, you learn not to do that and you go back and start at the last save.

I hate failure as much (probably more) than anyone, but living in fear of failure will make for few successes. 

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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014.