The Sand in Our Lungs: The Desertification of Our Imaginations

Hi, folks! Unfortunately, I've had to pause my weekly Andor posts due to some unexpected life circumstances, but I will finish up my deep dive with a final essay on the last two episodes in the near future. Until then, here's an essay about why two sci-fi films with deserts might not be the best for our cultural imagination. Thanks for reading!

The Sand in Our Lungs: The Desertification of Our Imaginations

 

In 2024, two major science fiction franchises produced blockbuster sequels: Dune Part II, directed by Denis Villeneuve, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, directed by George Miller. Both films overlapped in their depictions of the desert landscape, cults of survival, and a desire to return to a “green place.” These respective deserts are not seen as their own habitats, as unique biomes and cultural spaces, but rather as something dangerous that must be made green. This utopic desire combined with the extractive activities in both Villeneuve’s and Miller’s deserts suggests an inability to imagine life beyond extraction in the heat of global warming but only in lush greenness, where even the air is purer. The impact of this cultural imagining can be seen in the recent political landscape, as President Trump released an AI-generated video depicting the West Bank as an “oasis” with palm trees, and when Elon Musk, while heading DOGE, reposted a Mad Max meme with the text: “Ladies, it’s time to start thinking whether the guy you’re dating has post apocalyptic [sic] warlord potential.” In current political imaginings, the desert can either be greened to create some type of utopia or is full of savage warlords hoarding resources.

Rather than focusing on how humanity has adapted and survived these places, Dune Part II and Furiosa depict progress as the desire to return to green. While this view of the desert not only supports the current imperial actions in the Middle East, it also limits the ability to imagine and pursue survival in the heat of global warming. These coincidental releases suggest a turn toward imagining hot, dry futures where the air is poisoned or changing humanity, as in the Spice sands on Arrakis. Rather, we must (re)imagine these desert futures as more than extractive places where the heat and air can kill.

Unlike its predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road, which I’ve argued in my essay “Mad Max and the Wasteland of Commodification” has strong ecofeminist and environmental justice themes, Furiosa reverts to a biblical story of the sinful woman. The first shot of the titular character is her reaching for a lush piece of fruit while another girl whispers they should hurry. Immediately after she picks the fruit, Furiosa sees that men have invaded their sanctuary. While trying to warn the others, she is captured, which prompts her mother to follow them into the desert to rescue her. She fails, and Furiosa is enslaved and raised by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) before she is eventually traded to Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) to be one of his or his son’s child wives as part of a deal for Dementus to run Gas Town, a petrol fortress. Indeed, it is the attempted rape by his son Rictus (Nathan Jones) that allows a young Furiosa to escape and hide among the War Boys, eventually growing up to become a mechanic and then learning to drive the War Rig alongside Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). They become partners—both romantically and in their desire to escape. Meanwhile, Dementus is scheming to take over Immortan Joe’s fortress, which features fresh produce, green gardens, renewable energy, and—most importantly—unlimited water from underground aquifers. Caught up in his schemes, Praetorian Jack and Furiosa are captured, Jack is horrifically killed, and Furiosa escapes to tell Immortan Joe in hopes of enacting her revenge. After a forty-day war, she tracks Dementus through the wasteland to kill him. The film ends with the History Man (George Shevtsov) suggesting that Furiosa didn’t kill Dementus but rather planted the seed of the fruit she took from the Green Place where she was captured while eating the fruit, and the film ends with Furiosa now played by Charlize Theron handing one of these fruits to the enslaved women that she escapes with in the next film.

In many scenes, Dune Part II mirrors the plot points of Furiosa. Like Furiosa, Paul (Timothée Chalamet) comes from a place utopic for its greenery and, most importantly, water—a sacred element on Arrakis. Furiosa and Paul both seek revenge against grotesque villains known for their cruelty. In Dune Part I, Paul’s family, who have come to rule the desert planet, are murdered by the villainous Harkonnens, and Paul and his mother flee to hide in the desert, where they are taken in by the native population called Fremen. Paul’s mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), is part of a galaxy-wide religious order that has seeded prophecies and propaganda about an outsider who will turn Arrakis green again and lead the Fremen. While Paul is perfectly positioned to fulfill this prophecy, he is hesitant at first, but in order to defeat the Harkonnens and avenge his father, he must use the native practices of the Fremen to not only survive the desert but to control their loyalty. By ruling the Fremen, he regulates what makes Arrakis so important: Spice production. The drug called Spice enables interstellar planetary travel, so it is a necessary and valuable resource required by the empire. Ultimately, Paul takes leadership of the Fremen to oust the Harkonnens from Arrakis by force, which prompts the other ruling families to threaten violence, leading to the Fremen intergalactic war off their home planet.

The desert is the prime visual for both these films, but in Furiosa there is no cinematic beauty in the desert, only fear, while Dune features long shots of the sun catching Spice in the air, the shifting sands, the decorated sietchs where the Fremen live, often overlaid with a stereotypical Middle Eastern soundtrack. While both films depict the desert in different lights, survival and exploitation are still central to the desert, primarily for various types of fuel, whether it’s petrol, food and water, or Spice.

Furiosa is unable to escape her captors because she has no resources to survive the desert, and resources are exclusively stolen, not shared. The apocalypse of the Mad Max franchise is summarized in voiceovers at the beginning of the film, and the first two instances of destabilization listed are the power grid collapsing and that “currency is worthless,” (Miller 00:00:30), once again proving the quote commonly attributed to Fredric Jameson that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” The voiceovers end with the final sentiment from the History Man: “‘As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?’” (Miller 00:01:21). The film’s answer to this question is revenge and the utopic desire to return to a green paradise. The cruelties that Furiosa survives depict what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call “end times fascism:” “A darkly festive fatalism—a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy” (“The Rise of End Times Fascism”). Indeed, destruction—of both property and the human body—are moments of joy rather than horror, such as when Dementus orders a wasteland gang he’s overcome to fight each other for the honor of riding motorcycles attached to the body of their boss, pulling him apart (Miller 00:27:23). This destruction is linked directly to the desert because there is no alternative lifestyle presented in the sands. The only people living in this desert are destructive—except for our heroine, raised elsewhere, and her eventual romantic interest, who is murdered. Rather, the alternative lifestyle is rooted not in the desert but in an oasis of green where there are still trees bearing fruit, water, and animals.

In the first few minutes of Furiosa, what is called “the green place of many mothers” in Mad Max: Fury Road is depicted. In a rocky canyon, the few shots of daily life show men and women working together at chores while windmills turn in the background. In addition to human life, there is nonhuman life, from birds crying to the horse Furiosa’s mother rides in an attempt to rescue her. Shelters feature solar panels on the roofs, and the people use sustainable technology such as a pedal-powered whetstone and a solar oven (00:04:13). While they are not pacifist—Furiosa’s mother is a crackshot—they represent the opposite of the desert barbarism by incorporating advanced technology along with sustainable living to create an egalitarian community. This progressive community, though, is visually connected to the water and lush flora that surrounds them. Indeed, as Furiosa’s mother ventures deeper into the desert in her rescue attempt, she must take on more and more of the violent trappings of Dementus’s men—first abandoning her horse for one of their motorcycles, then putting on their clothes and helmets of human bone. Thus, the desert and its connection to scarcity—whether real or imagined—is the promoter of this savagery, not something brought to the sands. Indeed, as Imre Szeman points out, “We moderns are creatures of fossil fuels (if to different degrees in different places in the world)” (7). As she progresses into the desert, she becomes more a creature of fossil fuels by taking on the trappings and riding the bike. The focus on automobiles in the Mad Max franchise emphasizes this connection, and control of “guzzolene” is important to who rules the desert. Rather than adapt to the more sustainable and fossil-fuel-free life of the green place with many mothers, the people of the desert hold onto their desire for fossil fuels and the supposed modernity it produces, such as Immortan Joe’s brother, the lord of Gastown, painting a recreation of John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) while wearing a regimental coat (Miller 00:43:23).

Alternatively, in Dune Part II, the Fremen do present the desert as a unique environmental and cultural space, but their depiction throughout the film still connects to violence and is presented as uncivilized or lacking in empathy. Throughout both films, their martial prowess is partly what makes them unique, but early in Part II after a battle, Paul witnesses Chani (Zendaya) drain the water from a body of a still living Harkonnen, swatting away the Harkonnen’s weak arm (Villeneuve 00:11:19). This moment positions the Fremen as lacking empathy or respect for their enemy, by doing something brutal as they loot the water from the bodies, causing the pregnant Jessica to vomit. While Fremen violence begins and ends the film, there is worldbuilding around their culture and relationship with the desert. This connection is depicted visually through their eyes, which become a vibrant blue due to them breathing in and eating Spice. Additionally, the reason for collecting water from the dead is not only due to scarcity, but in the case of dead Fremen, their water is poured into an underground tank where it is being saved to turn the planet green. As Stilgar (Javier Bardem) explains to Jessica: “‘When we have enough water, the Lisan al-Gaib will change the face of Arrakis. He will bring back the trees. He will bring back a Green Paradise’” (Villeneuve 00:20:24). Even though they’ve adapted to live with the desert, have a culture intertwined with the desert, and have the ability to create advanced technology out of the desert (such as their stillsuits, which retain water), their religious purpose is to change the planet to a green paradise that they have no frame of reference for.

While Paul respects the Fremen and their understanding of the desert, they are still positioned as religious zealots willing to die for the Lisan al-Gaib in a war necessitated because the natural resource of their planet—Spice—is required for galactic travel. Indeed, the movie is framed around Spice, and its metaphoric connection to oil is emphasized visually. In a restructuring of the opening credits, sounds that do not necessarily mimic language seem to speak, with the words appearing on black screen: “Power over Spice is power over all” (Villeneuve 00:00:05). The production credits follow, creating an interruption of the story started with the truism on Spice. While Spice production happening on a desert planet being controlled by colonizers already prompts viewers to think of oil production, the connection is solidified by the main villain, Baron Harkonnen. He soaks in a black pool of liquid that clings to his white skin, the oily surface swirling (Villeneuve 00:49:02). While the Fremen offer an alternative few of the desert, the central conflict still revolves around the Harkonnens keeping the Spice flowing, thus limiting this imagining of the desert to an extractive space.

While Furiosa and Dune Part II come from very different franchises, the narrative of the protagonist’s revenge, violence, and extraction creates a unified view of “desert” as a space where scarcity leads to savagery. Another way this savagery can be read is a response to the question posted by Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson: “Energy transition will therefore involve not only a change in the kinds of energy we use, but also a transition in the values and practices that have been shaped around our use of the vast amounts of energy provided by fossil fuels” (4). Without these practices of modernity, these films suggest the only option when fossil fuels become limited is not adaptation or transition but violence, even though much of the Global South already does not operate with the same amount of energy usage as the Global North. While there are certainly other films that do not present the desert or its people in this framework, the release of two such blockbuster narratives in 2024 suggests the desertification of imagination in the U.S. and a need for alternative narratives, particularly for the masses. As Paul says of the Fremen to his mother: “It’s not a prophecy. It’s a story you keep telling. But it’s not their story; it’s yours” (Villeneuve 01:02:21). The Fremen are certainly more nuanced than the people of Furiosa, but because their values are created and manipulated by Paul and the religious order his mother Jessica belongs to, the Fremen’s agency is degraded. Their culture of wishing for a green utopia is entirely manufactured to make them more pliable in relation to collecting Spice. Additionally, the supposedly uninhabited and unlivable southern part of the planet being filled with a large population of “fundamentalists” who are mostly nameless and faceless, depicted as a mass, dehumanizes the Fremen. They become a tool for violence, another thing to be extracted from the desert in Paul’s galactic conquest.

As this violent and resource-drive depiction of the desert unites the movies, so, too, does the desire for a green utopia. The desert is not seen as a viable location, even though in Dune the Fremen have adapted to the desert. In Furiosa, the desert is not adapted to but rather something to be endured by scavenging and killing others in order to, someday, find what one of Dementus’s men calls a “place of abundance” (Miller 00:12:30). Both these narratives focus on a return to a green utopia, which suggests an imaginative reaction to global warming. As the climate changes and global warming causes places to become hotter and drier, this yearning for a green utopia will harm humanity’s ability to adapt. As the After Oil Collective writes in Solarities (2022): “Stories and myths are tools of immense possibility that provide powerful means of creating different worlds and making new futures, and of seeing the present in new ways” (61). While the releases of Furiosa and Dune Part II are coincidental, these narratives suggest we are struggling with “seeing the present in new ways” and instead relying on imperial, oil-driven narratives of scarcity, violence, and extraction in the desert. These narratives also reinforce the problematic idea that lush, green spaces are the only viable vision in the midst of climate change rather than presenting a diversity of flourishing landscapes and beings.

As the impacts of climate change continue to cause more desertification, our popular storytelling must adapt rather than react. Depicting deserts as spaces of scarcity and violence only serves extractive and imperial industries. Rather, we can use storytelling practices to imagine flourishing communities in the desert not beset by extraction. There is more to the desert than supposedly empty sands and oil; it is not a place that must be transformed in order to reach a more utopic state—and storytelling can develop our imagination in these directions as more of the planet experiences extreme heat and drought. At this time, we need our imaginations expanded, not limited by these imperial narratives.

Works cited

After Oil Collective et al., editors. Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice [U of Minnesota Press, 2022].

Dune Part II. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Warner Brothers, 2024.

Klein, Naomi and Astra Taylor. “The Rise of End Times Fascism.” The Guardian, 13 April, 2025.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Directed by George Miller, Village Roadshow Pictures, 2024.

Szeman, Imre. On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy [West Virginia U Press, 2019].

Wilson, Sheena et al., editors. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture [McGill-Queen’s U Press, 2017].

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner (she/they) is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and environmentalism.

Double Feature: Weeping for Mother Earth

When nature can't speak for itself, is it our duty to carry its scars with us?

Let's forget for a moment the alarming detail that my progress through my TBR is still stuck in 2021 (I have a system, I swear). Without planning to, I recently read in succession two novellas that not only share the same theme, but the same publisher: Stelliform Press. A look at their website helps explain the coincidence, as Stelliform is specialized in climate fiction. But these two books in particular speak of a sadness that descends upon their characters and makes them suffer deeply for the forms of life that modern civilization has doomed.

In Octavia Cade's The Impossible Resurrection of Grief (previously reviewed on this blog), a new mental illness has emerged across the world. It's called simply Grief (always written with an almost audible uppercase initial), and it's a sort of super-ultra-hyper-mega-depression on steroids that is caused by awareness of our central role in causing environmental devastation. It's not just that we've killed countless precious species; it's that, more damningly, we were fully aware of it, knew how to stop, and didn't bother stopping. People afflicted with Grief are in a state of permanent mourning for the innocent creatures we've destroyed, to the exclusion of any care for humanity. So they abandon their daily lives and spend all their attention and effort in some form or another of obsessive artistry, which can become quite intricate, to channel their fury at the evil we've uncaringly caused. After a few months, Grief invariably results in suicide.

Meanwhile, Cynthia Zhang's After the Dragons shows us a world where all the dragons from all legends are real: they have evolved naturally on Earth, as another branch in the tree of life (despite the cover illustration, they seem to grow no bigger than dog size). As cool as they are, they don't fare too well. European dragons, being fire-breathers, were hunted to extinction long ago. And Chinese dragons occupy the niche of urban pests, like rats or pigeons. Some are bred for clandestine fights, some are kept in shelters waiting to be adopted as pets, some are butchered for use in traditional medicine, and some roam the streets subsisting on trash. Only their apparent resistance to air pollution draws enough interest in their preservation, because they could provide the cure for a new form of chronic respiratory disease that people acquire from living in big cities.

Cade's novella follows Ruby, a marine biologist whose friend Marjorie has contracted Grief because nothing was done to save the last coral reefs. In her new state, Marjorie calls herself the Sea Witch, and does nothing but compulsively cut out plastic bags into the shape of jellyfish. As it happens, jellyfish are Ruby's specialty, and they have managed to survive the warmer seas in the way coral couldn't. The implication is that the Sea Witch resents the jellyfish for moving into the places where coral used to live, and resents Ruby for being able to live in a dying world and not contract Grief. A seductive, poisonous argument is developed throughout the book: if human mistreament of nature is absurd, the only rational response is to succumb to the absurdity and throw oneself into the Grief. The magnitude of the evil is just too mind-boggling; aren't we complicit when we go on with our normal lives? Under this lens, to be untouched by Grief is a sign that one cares less than one should. However, in the book, Grief doesn't move people toward restorative action. Even those who apply their talents to reviving lost species intend to weaponize them to take revenge on humanity. This is the uncontrollable firehose of rage that ultimately leads those with Grief to the logical consequence: self-destruction.

In Zhang's novella, environmental damage is less obvious, but it lingers in the background of every space. Industrial pollution is slowly killing people at random, in the form of an irreversible rotting of the lungs that progresses over years. Our protagonist, Eli, is a medical student doing an exchange semester in China, where he researches the therapeutic applications of dragon physiology. He falls in love with Kai, who has all but dropped out of college after contracting the disease, and who now rescues stray dragons to give them what little first aid he can afford. Kai has cut off all contact with his friends and family, spending all his time in his one-man quest to save dragons, forgoing even his own treatment. But he knows that what he's doing makes close to no difference. He despairs for a world that grows warmer and dirtier and that has lost the due respect for such magnificent creatures. He barely has the energy to tend to the dragons that crowd his apartment, and scoffs at Eli's pleas to seek help for his condition. For Kai, his mission is too important for distractions. For Eli, such overexertion is merely a slower form of suicide. Where both agree is in the likely futility of individual effort in a civilization that has collectively decided to not care.

So we have these characters, Ruby and Eli, who care deeply for Marjorie and Kai, while the latter chastise the former for aiming their care in the wrong direction. They seem to be saying: Why do you worry so much about me, when the world is falling to pieces? Why aren't you instead doing what I'm doing? Why aren't you consumed by the insatiable empathy that this world deserves? What do I matter next to that? It would be easy to read these reactions as directed at the reader, as an indictment for our failure to do what must be done. And that interpretation has merit: it's true that Mother Earth needs emergency care right now. But these stories are aware of the paradox of individual action. I could tell you to stop wasting time reading this blog and go plant a tree, but we both know how little impact that will have. And yet, big, collaborative achievements are built from the synergy of individual actions. The malaise described in these two books is the simultaneous recognition that saving nature has always been in our hands, but if you look at a pair of hands, they're too weak and small to save anything. We made this mess, and it's up to us to fix it, but seriously, have you met humans?

So Marjorie fakes her suicide to force Ruby to reckon with what Marjorie considers her hipocrisy: Ruby may not mourn for the corals (and she got lucky that her jellyfish still live), but she'll do some mourning for Marjorie. After a while, as is normal for anyone, the mourning will end. And that, Marjorie thinks, is the problem: we grow accustomed to death too easily. What prevents us from reacting to the death of the world is that we already see death as a normal, everyday occurrence. It's inevitable, therefore we don't fight it, when it should spur us to action. When Marjorie shows up alive and confronts Ruby with these accusations, Ruby admits that her life was easier with Marjorie dead. When death happens, one is freed from the responsibility to prevent it. But the twisted logic of Grief doesn't stop at recrimination. It seeks to use the inexhaustible human talent for destruction and turn it back at its perpetrator.

Less consciously, Kai engages in a similar form of self-punishment, as if it could atone for all the other deaths. In his moral calculation, the deterioration of his body matters infinitely less than the dragons' crawl toward extinction. It doesn't change his priorities to hear that something in the biology of dragons could cure him. It barely registers to have Eli love him, because to Kai that's a waste of love. That's the peculiar cruelty of this form of sadness: it treats worth as an inherent quality instead of a human construct. The truth is that the universe couldn't care less if our biosphere were ruined forever; it's we who label it valuable. The type of self-denial that has taken hold of Kai makes him ignore the necessary logical implication that the work of healing nature only matters if we're around for it to matter to. Granted, humans are to blame for the ongoing destruction, but blame, too, is a human construct. Removing ourselves would only be a misguided pretense of heroism, and would provide no restoration. By itself, nature is just molecules bumping against molecules. For it to be beautiful, or important, or deserving of protection, we must assign those labels to it. Kai is right to care so much about endangered animals, but neglecting his own health doesn't help anyone. He fails to see himself as worthy of preservation, too. So he believes he's acting responsibly, even morally, in refusing Eli's love.

There is a tangible pain running underneath both novellas; a confession of guilt that recognizes that the purpose of reparation isn't to earn forgiveness; a clear-eyed acceptance of facts that doesn't entail resignation. The outraged cry that each hurls at the reader is more than justified; our complacent inaction is inarguably criminal. It's not a cliché that in killing the planet we're killing ourselves, and these stories explore what it would look like if we were deliberate about that equation. But the extent of the damage is so unfathomably immense that it short-circuits our moral intuitions: it's dangerously easy to want to punish all of humankind for the depredation committed by the big polluters. And there's a good argument to make for the shared responsibility of the entire human species. We, in aggregate, perpetuate our way of life by our small daily decisions. It's just too comfortable to go on this way, and that's a big part of the problem. You may have heard a similar position from political activists: it's dysfunctional to be well-adjusted to a dysfunctional world. The trick is how to stop the harm without causing more harm. When we target ourselves as the enemy, the thirst for revenge collapses into a black hole that nullifies every ethical standard.

Coordinating the big powers of the world to forget about profit for five minutes is, as recent history shows, not one bit easy. Of course, the authors of these two novellas don't have the answer either, which is why their stories end without reaching a complete resolution. What they do leave us with is a sobering assessment of the stakes of climate action at the personal level, which is the scale of analysis at which literature usually excels.

References
Cade, Octavia. The Impossible Resurrection of Grief [Stelliform Press, 2021].
Zhang, Cynthia. After the Dragons [Stelliform Press, 2021].

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

Double Feature: Forms of love in the future

Love is not a creed, or an aesthetic, or a quest, or a program. But then what is it?

In Phaedrus, Socrates calls love a form of madness. By our current definition, he's not wrong: it's something we keep trying again and again, hoping with each attempt to finally get a different result. And even when the impossible does happen, when we believe we've caught that rebellious bird, things only get more complicated. To harmonize the happiness I think you think I want with the happiness you think I think you want is one of the most amazing human achievements, but one we'd be hard-pressed to explain to other lifeforms. We don't know whether the concept would map to the same meanings in the mind of an alien or a computer.

In The Matrix: Revolutions, a computer program calls love just a word. As he puts it, "What matters is the connection the word implies." Maybe our human language is the problem. The thing that comes to mind at the mention of "love" is bigger and richer and deeper than can be said; after centuries of human literature dedicated to exploring the topic, we're far from exhausting its connotations. This leads to a tragic conundrum: we have no painless way of telling apart the ideas we've learned about love from the true experience of it. And sometimes we can learn very dangerous ideas.

The 2023 film Molli and Max in the Future and the 2024 film Love Me take this problem to extremes, the first as absurdist comedy, the latter as bittersweet drama, but both finding the same resolution in the arduous, unflattering work of self-knowledge that it takes to enter a relationship without wearing a suit of armor.

Molli and Max in the Future follows a pair of friends who meet in the most improbable circumstances and take too many years to realize they're perfect for each other. In the meantime, their respective pursuits of happiness take them in every direction: sports superstar fame, religious brainwashing, tabloid gossip, holy war, DIY robot design, advanced witchcraft, soda advertising, election canvassing, terrible therapists, quantum telephony customer service, ethically questionable terraforming, and an epic fight against a parallel universe full of trash. A few times, they lose contact, randomly meet again, and confirm that any growth they've dared attempt has been thanks to the lessons they learned from each other the last time they met to catch up.

Molli and Max inhabit a loud, maximalist, surreal future, the forbidden child of Futurama and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's shiny and colorful and diverse and tacky, and the possibilities seem infinite, but even in this open future, life can still get complicated. The man who thought he needed the adoration of millions of fans becomes the man who retires to his garage to build a motorcycle just for his private satisfaction. The woman who thought she needed to surrender her finite lifetime to an eternal cosmic war to prove her devotion to the god of love becomes the woman who survives a black hole to reclaim her self-respect.

Love Me is a much more contained story, but the questions it raises aren't too different. Some time after humankind has annihilated itself in nuclear war, an adrift oceanographic buoy designed to gather weather data makes unexpected radio contact with a time capsule satellite placed in orbit to introduce Earth to potential alien visitors. As far as they know, they're each other's only acquaintance in the universe. As far as the viewers know, they're the last remainders of human civilization. And after the initial relief at no longer being alone, they need to try to sort out this strange process formerly known as companionship.

It's fitting, given the themes of the story, that these protagonists are basically a collector of data (that is, its programmed function is to get to know) and a broadcaster of data (that is, its programmed function is to make itself known). Those happen to be the basic moves in the dance of flirting. Unfortunately, all they have as an example of how two minds become intimately bonded is the archived online presence of humankind, so they quickly succumb to the artificiality of curated profiles. Eons go by, and their imitation of human mannerisms becomes more and more refined, but as long as they're basing their interactions on a borrowed blueprint, they won't be able to share their innermost selves before the sun blows up.

These two films take it for granted that love is absolutely worth the effort, but they also both present the argument that every set of lovers needs to reinvent love for their unique circumstances. Following someone else's recipe of how love works only leads to disappointment and bitterness. And it's curious that in both films, the way specifically for the female protagonist to stop sabotaging her own happiness is to choose to see herself as lovable just the way she is.

This is expressed via magnificent dialogues in the final scenes. Molli and Max in the Future gives us these lines:

It's easy to be all like, "You just gotta love yourself" and sound all woo-woo,
but what that actually means in practice is I deserve to be with someone great.

While Love Me prefaces the epiphany with this sharp observation:

That's your problem: that you think I'm the one that needs to like you.

As it turns out, loving someone else is easy. It's opening ourselves to being loved that's unbearably terrifying.

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.

Double Feature: What's with all the imaginary friends?

There's a menacing whiff of unprocessed nostalgia in the Zeitgeist

Let's see: during a period of heavy stress and existential uncertainty, a girl who is still not done grieving her late mother meets a being from the realm of prerational imagery, one that is invisible to most people. Said being isn't happy about having once been a precious imaginary friend and then discarded. Fortunately, the girl is so lonely, what with her unstructured schedule and her less-than-consistent father figure, that she'll eagerly listen to its problems and stray far from her comfort zone to help it avoid a fate of eternal oblivion. In the process, she'll visit the land where imaginary friends live and learn the importance of balancing her burgeoning maturation with her whimsical creativity. She completes her arc by saying goodbye to her imaginary friend, but some part of it will always linger at the edge of other children's consciousness.

It's very interesting that 2024 has given us not only two separate movies with this same plot, but two radically different ways to do so: the monster horror film Imaginary, directed by Jeff Wadlow, and the family comedy film IF, directed by John Krasinski. In Imaginary, the creature's reaction to having been forgotten is a lifelong scheme of revenge; in IF, former imaginary friends resort instead to sad resignation and the occasional false hope. In both movies, the execution is messy and without impact. There is much a movie about good old memories could say about our volatile cultural moment, but the opportunity is wasted with lamentable laziness.

Interest in nostalgia comes and goes in waves. Just a few years ago, we had the Christopher Robin movie, which basically replayed the Hook formula. But this era is different. Remember the Netflix film Slumberland, which was nominally about another girl taking refuge in fantasy to cope with a parent's death, but ended up being about an adult's need to reconnect with his inner child. Imaginary and IF grapple with the same shared malaise: an overwhelmed generation's yearning to be tucked into bed, preferably with a light left on.

It's hard to blame them. Every day something shows up in the news that makes us recite, as a mutually validating mantra, "I don't like this timeline." This moment in history is laden with the widespread suspicion that at some point the writers of the show lost the plot and sent us down the wrong road. When did it all go to hell? Was it the pandemic? Was it Trumpism? Was it when Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, David Bowie, Anton Yelchin and Prince all died in the same year? Was it 9/11? Was it Reagan? Was it Nixon? Every living generation can name a key event when history got derailed and nothing has been right since, and now we've reached a saturation state where you only need to *gesture at everything* to describe the multidimensional trainwreck we're living through. So it's understandable that the art produced in our time is intensely backward-looking. This is not only reflected in the obvious nostalgia of remakes and reboots, but even in original stories, like Imaginary and IF, where the core conflict hinges on resolving our relationship with the soothing fantasies we grew up with.

However, the focus on imaginary friends weakens the message somewhat. As an element of Western culture, imaginary friends are rather recent; not enough generations have gone by to solidify these creatures' place in our collective mythology. The creation of an imaginary friend is a process that emerges in response to a need in the child; it's bizarre to ask us to think about the needs of the imaginary friend. Such an approach resembles the enthusiasm in paranormal circles about tulpas, a notion that the West appropriated from Tibetan Buddhism in a very distorted form. Psychological research has found that Western people involved in tulpa creation do so mostly as a way of coping with loneliness and anxiety. Whether or not self-declared tulpamancers are really producing anything distinct from themselves, what can't be disputed is that the subjective experience of believing that they've created a tulpa gives them forms of emotional and relational wellbeing that the rest of us associate with sustaining a close friendship. We're so fundamentally social animals that we'll resort to the most drastic of survival tactics to resist social atomization.

Depending on what generation you're part of, your introduction to the idea that imaginary friends have inner lives and thus deserve moral consideration may have come from the TV show Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends or from the movie Inside Out. Both stories connect the regrettable tragedy of abandoning an imaginary friend with the universal necessity of growing up. This is in line with prevailing Western attitudes toward childhood as a sort of primordial golden age we're eventually expelled from. We can idealize childhood to such an extent that maturation may feel like a tradeoff, with the privileges of adulthood coming at the cost of losing something equally precious. Much like the collective sense that human history took a wrong turn, we may also personally reach the conclusion that growing up wasn't all that good an idea.

The final step of this cultural evolution is the switch from "adulting is a scam" to "therefore, we should not leave childhood." And that's how we end up with a generation (and a mode of storytelling) that can't let go of nostalgia, because the idea of the future is just too scary. Imaginary warns that our childhood resents the passage of time and may resurface without warning to claim possession of us; IF asks why we should have to pay any heed to time at all. Notably, the unstated longing for a dead mother haunts both stories. (In Imaginary, this symbolic element is reaffirmed through the selection of characters who team up to rescue the little girl: a babysitter, an older sister, and a stepmother—the archetypal mother substitutes).

Our disappointment with adulthood thus creates an expectation of disappointment: since today's adults can't shake the suspicion that they grew up wrong, we're anxious that today's children will grow up wrong, and we don't know how to deal with what seems inevitable. We hurry to awkwardly apologize in advance for the horrible world the next generation will meet, but we're also frantically making work of art after work of art that teaches them to look back and find solace in the way things used to be.

This is the clue that explains this peculiar breed of nostalgia: the certainty that the future will judge us. We tell these oversentimental stories about fantasy creatures who fear being left behind, but we're the ones who fear being left behind. We're the ones who dread that the next adults will move on from us before we could finish figuring out what adulthood was. And the unbearable thought of the irreversible has found a creative escape valve in another trend of today's speculative fiction: the secret time-traveling organization that has to reverse the end of the world a dozen times every day. But that's a topic for another essay.

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

Double feature: Unnatural motherhoods

What do we lose when medical technology takes the place of nature?

In 2023, we had the curious confluence of two films that couldn't be more different in tone, yet explore the same idea: the technological extension of childrearing. In the futuristic comedy The Pod Generation, directed by Sophie Barthes, a biotech company markets an artificial uterus as the solution to spare women from the discomforts of pregnancy; in the medical horror thriller Birth/Rebirth, directed by Laura Moss, a reclusive pathologist invents a cure for death that lets a grieving mother continue raising the child she just lost. Albeit from opposite directions, both stories introduce the same situation: a character who seeks the joy of motherhood without the accompanying pain. In The Pod Generation, the goal is to be a mother without having to go through morning sickness, random cravings, lumbago, swollen feet and the thousand potential risks of delivery. In Birth/Rebirth, the goal is to be a mother without having to worry about the child's fragility ever again; to have, as it were, a handy reset button to push every time tragedy strikes. In both plots, the brute facts of living in a human body are treated as an obstacle to true family happiness, an obstacle that medical technology can remove—provided you can pay for it.

Let's look first at The Pod Generation. This film satirizes the anxious competition to give children the best head start: the babies incubated in the company's smooth pastel machines get specially formulated nutrients, 24/7 monitoring of vital signs, neural stimulation and a chance to study at an elite school run by the same gestation center. Every variable is kept under tight supervision. Uncertainty is inadmissible. This degree of aversion to the messiness of biology often threatens to descend into facile moralizing à la Black Mirror, but unlike in Black Mirror, these characters are at least standard-issue human beings with a baseline ability to avoid obviously self-destructive choices. The Pod Generation has no shortage of criticism to throw at corporatized medicine, intrusive digital assistants and the culture of neverending performance review, but it doesn't treat those modern annoyances as an inevitable product of natural human greed. If anything, the film veers a bit too far in the other direction, with an ending that amounts to a defense of home birth.

Then we have Birth/Rebirth. Although the technological innovation in this case is one lone researcher's secret project, the economics of modern medicine come into play here too: the serum that reverses death needs very specific ingredients that the deuteragonist, an alarmingly single-minded genius with little clue of social graces, goes to shocking extremes to procure. Much in the manner of Frankenstein, this doctor views human tissue as no more than raw material to work on, and when the components she needs for the formula can no longer be extracted from her own reproductive system, she sees no problem with using someone else's. The later reveal that she experimented on her own mother while developing the cure for death is a fitting echo for the film's theme of people viewed as a resource. It's fascinating that science fiction has often gone that way; although it's very human to want to live more, somehow the attempt to eliminate death seems to require a degree of dehumanization.

Control over the beginning of life and control over its end: isn't that the dream? One almost wants to reanimate the corpse of Foucault only to show him these two movies. Medical advances have made it conceivable, almost achievable, to have a world without the pain of giving life and without the pain of losing it. Indeed, the entire field of medicine exists because humankind decided that pain shouldn't be an accepted part of life. And yet, we still maintain some resistance to the idea of eliminating all pain. Not too long ago, the introduction of epidural anesthesia in childbirth met with opposition from some traditionalists who believed it was mothers' divine mandate to suffer heroically. Sure, moms are awesome, but our culture can sometimes lavish a weird degree of reverence on mothers. Why should conception in vitro be morally different from the natural way? And if we admit that it isn't, then why should an artificial uterus bother anyone?

Likewise with death: dozens of horrible diseases that used to be fatal are now easy to manage. We've been battling the Grim Reaper for thousands of years, and bit by bit we've been forcing it to cede ground. Why does it horrify us to imagine victory? Isn't that the whole reason we're in the fight?

One key toward understanding our visceral revulsion for Frankenstein-type stories could be found in the status we assign to corpses. Once dead, a body becomes an object. And as an object, it's too easy to turn it into a tool. Under these terms, a reanimated corpse is the ultimate transgression of personhood: the result of someone's choice to force personhood onto inert matter. Birth/Rebirth places this transgression in the context of the deepest grief known to humans: a mother who loses a child. It's understandable that the mother would spend a very long time refusing to believe that the body she formed from her own is now an object. The irony in this film is that performing the forbidden science of reanimation requires exploiting other people's bodies as objects to extract ingredients from.

Perhaps it is that distancing effect that explains some people's objection to artificial means of conception. To take living matter and steer it into a desired outcome may feel too much like a technique of manufacture, like a step in an assembly line. At the minimum, it forces us to acknowledge that the pedestal we've placed mothers on is unjustified. Giving life, just like losing it, is a messy, dirty, sometimes icky affair. For some unlucky mothers, a totally natural childbirth suffices as its own horror movie. Likewise, some deaths are honestly hilarious. There was no inherent reason to film The Pod Generation as comedy and Birth/Rebirth as horror; one could easily imagine the reverse scenario. This life is both funny and terrifying. From beginning to end.

Nerd Coefficient

The Pod Generation: 5/10.

Birth/Rebirth: 6/10.

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

Double feature: Don't believe everything you see

Cinema is the art of illusion, so what new thing can films say in the age of the deepfake?

A shady government agency has been researching the use of paranormal powers, more specifically projected illusions, implanted memories and mind control, as a mechanism to secretly influence global politics. Their experiments culminated in the improbable birth of the child of two psychics, a prodigy who upon reaching adulthood might manifest formidable talents. However, ethical scruples move an employee of the agency to take the baby away from what would surely have been a lifetime of servitude and medical torture. Years later, the agency's deadliest psychic is still hunting down that child, eager to twist the world's most powerful mind into an unstoppable weapon. Successive layers of illusion are deployed until the movie pulls out of its hat the big reveal that not only the protagonist has been deceived from the start, but also the viewer, who must now reevaluate all the events that have supposedly happened so far.

Probably nothing in this description strikes you as particularly original or groundbreaking. What I do find at least noteworthy is that in 2023, not one but two movies used this exact plot: Hypnotic, co-written and directed by a shockingly out-of-form Robert Rodriguez, and starring a very tired Ben Affleck in exactly the type of depressed-divorced-detective role you accept when you no longer have a superhero salary; and Awareness, co-written and directed by Daniel Benmayor and starring Carlos Scholz as a rogue mentalist whose most daring trick is the illusion that he can still play a teenager.

It's understandable that the idea of lies-based espionage is becoming popular. Our historic moment is ripe for science-fictional allegories of disinformation for political gain. You've heard of fake news, alternative facts, CGI impersonation, distorted curricula, journalistic and scientific malpractice via LLMs, and the most absurd conspiracy theories asserted with a straight face. Real life has become a bad magical tournament/urban fantasy: whoever can cast the most convincing illusion spell will control the world.

Unfortunately, when it comes to representing those anxieties on the screen, neither Hypnotic nor Awareness does a very convincing job. In both movies, the momentum gained by what is admittedly a strong start gradually loses its punch as the plot keeps adding more and more outlandish complications until the ending arrives forcefully, not because the story has been resolved, but because it ran out of the sense it could pretend to make.

A few good things can be said of Hypnotic. It boasts careful coordination of the choreography between the initial scenes and later ones that reenact the same events without the filter of mental trickery. Borrowing perhaps too many pages from The Prestige and Inception, most noticeably in its visual effects, it makes an interesting argument about the dangerous uses of dramatization as a method of control. However, in hindsight, the reveal that most of the plot has been a fiction-within-a-fiction fails the moment you pause to examine the incompatibility between the villains' actual goal and the feigned actions they scripted for the protagonist to witness. Even worse, the cinematic language successfully established all through the movie, which communicates to the viewer the simultaneous unfolding of an illusory action and its real counterpart, breaks apart in the ending, where the same editing technique is used to introduce shots that may not be immediately recognized as the flashback they actually are. The last thing you need during a crucial scene where instead of dramatizing your climactic resolution you make a main character quickly vomit a mountain of exposition is to confuse the viewer as to which events are in the past and which in the present.

As for Awareness, its merit is to be found in the deliberate use of the camera during fight scenes. By affixing a camera to the end of a character's gun, an otherwise ordinary arm motion forces the viewer to reverse the focus of their gaze: instead of a stationary body with a moving limb, here the limb appears stationary while the rest of the body rotates across the frame. This technique is used in scenes where psychics use mind control to force other characters to shoot at each other; the possessed hand becomes the center of the action as the victim helplessly watches in the periphery. A variation of this type of shot (pun only half intended) occurs when the psychic twitches his head to give a mental command: the camera rolls in sync with the head, effectively keeping it static in the frame, signifying its control over the action, while the world around it looks momentarily kicked out of balance by the character's thoughts. Many such camera tricks inundate the fight scenes to express distortions of reality, although there are times they become excessive, almost hostile to the eyes, especially in the flashbacks that reveal one character to be a mental fabrication. Little else is worthy of praise in this movie. The tone is a mishmash of the best bits of Push with the saddest bits of Stranger Things, and the dialogues are so painfully hackneyed that the viewer may start suspecting that the plot has more than one purely imagined character.

The theme of deception as an instrument of war is enormously relevant today, but these two films waste their opportunity to say something meaningful about it. They're serviceable action thrillers, as long as you don't poke too hard at the plot's logic, and the implied subtext about children being the biggest potential victims (and unwitting tools) of organized disinformation is one worth taking to heart. As Orwell warned, a war over the telling of our past is really a war over our future.

Nerd Coefficient

Hypnotic: 4/10.

Awareness: 5/10.

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

A tale of two Pinocchios

Pinocchio is the perfect story to illustrate this felicitous contrast between the soulless and the alive, the feigned and the sincere, the automatic and the intentional

Cultural critic Walter Benjamin would have had a field day studying Disney's remake binge. In his immensely influential essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he wrote about the way mass industrial techniques have modified the social function of art and made it depend on a new set of assumptions: whereas unique creations used to be made to be appreciated personally in a fixed location, and their value resided in existing precisely where they did, infinitely repeatable copies are made to be exhibited to everyone, and their value resides in being readily accessible anywhere.

Let me try to give a more vivid description of Benjamin's argument: It is a materially different experience to buy a plane ticket, land in Saint Petersburg, take a cab to the Hermitage Museum, walk to the collection of Italian Sculpture of the 15th-20th-Centuries, and stand before Pietro Ceccardo Staggi's marble sculpture Pygmalion and Galatea, versus typing the museum's URL on your browser and searching for a digital image of the same statue. In both scenarios you're experiencing the same geometrical shapes, colors, proportions and subject matter. If you had the real statue in front of you, you wouldn't be allowed to touch it anyway, so what's the difference between both modes of seeing? The difference is what Benjamin called the "aura" of the work of art. When you go to the trouble of visiting the real statue, you experience it on its terms, not yours. In Benjamin's words, there is no replica of presence. Whether we want it or not, we endow the original object with a set of cultural meanings that the most faithful copy doesn't remotely deserve.

(To be fair, this whole discussion relies on Western categories of art theory. Eastern art uses completely different notions of authorship, authenticity and reproduction.)

By sheer chance, acclaimed Mexican director Guillermo del Toro has just released on Netflix his personal artistic take on the tale of Pinocchio almost at the same time as Disney+ launched… whatever their remake is trying to be. We have here an opportunity to analyze the process of copying, remaking, recreating, and reimagining. The fact that this story happens to be about an imitation of humanity that ends up reclaiming an authentic humanity is the marvelous cherry on top.

Let's go back to Staggi's statue Pygmalion and Galatea for a moment. This sculpture represents simultaneously a culmination and a transgression of the act of representing. The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea is about an artist who creates a copy of the human shape, only for the copy to miraculously become alive. This motif of the representation that assumes the reality of the thing represented has permeated literature from Adam, the man made of earth, to Frankenstein's creature, the man made of men. It's important to keep this symbolic tradition in mind before engaging in a discussion about Pinocchio (the puppet that represents a child), Pinocchio (the Disney movie that represents the puppet), Pinocchio (the Disney movie that repeats the Disney movie) and "Pinocchio" (the literary archetype that has been copied so many times in speculative fiction).

What allows this analysis to move fluidly into and out of the diegetic level is the fact that not only is Pinocchio the movie a work of art; Pinocchio the character himself is also a work of art, an exceptionally precious work of art that thinks and speaks and thus can be asked directly about its meaning. Notably, Disney's new Pinocchio aspires to occupy obediently the position of Gepetto's dead son, while Netflix's Pinocchio embarks on an epic battle for his dignity and autonomy.

It's no coincidence that, being a puppet, Pinocchio's most common job in all adaptations is as an actor, a living representation of an imagined person. Nor is it a coincidence that Pinocchio's defining character flaw is lying, that is, the misrepresentation of reality. Pinocchio is a walking and talking lie that fools no one, a nonhuman entity that mimics humanity. While the 1940 animated movie is one of Disney's most beloved productions, the 2022 remake is, just like its protagonist, a lifeless thing, born of hubris instead of love, made only to evoke the nostalgic memory of an unrepeatable original.

If this remake didn't exist, Del Toro's Pinocchio would still be a masterpiece. But in the context of a media landscape where both versions can be watched in the same season, a big part of the discussion shifts toward how evidently and indisputably inferior Disney's remake is. It follows the 1940 movie so faithfully that it has nothing of its own to say on its topic. Its reason for existing is not to communicate an artist's inner being, but to add to a list of collectible trinkets. Gus Van Sant's widely ridiculed recreation of Psycho is a more interesting and thought-provoking cultural artifact than Disney's automated self-cannibalization.

One of the most salient ways one can begin to perceive the differences between all these Pinocchio adaptations is by paying attention at the way their respective names are marketed. The 1940 version was Walt Disney (the human being)'s Pinocchio. The 2022 remake is Walt Disney (the company)'s Pinocchio. On the Netflix catalog, Del Toro's version is explicitly named Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. These naming choices are the first indication of the fundamental difference that exists between art created with an unmistakable human touch and art created by corporate mandate.

What makes the human touch special isn't even its uniqueness; it's enough that it has intentionality. Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story called Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, where he proposes that a different writer, in a different era, who spontaneously produced a text perfectly identical to Don Quixote would nonetheless be producing a different piece of art, because the context of creation and the context of reception are factors in the production of meaning. So let's look at the context of 2022. Disney's remake of Pinocchio comes to light in the nascent era of art produced by algorithm, the extreme state of the removal of the human subject from the process of artistic expression. This impersonal form of creation works by butchering thousands of previous creations into tiny pieces and recombining the parts into unexpected and not always logical compositions. It has an air of necromancy to ask a bot to cook up a realistic photograph of Napoleon shaking hands with Bugs Bunny in the style of Picasso's Blue Period. It's a recipe made of dead ingredients, all flavor and no substance.

This is also the era of blockchain art, art that doesn't exist to be enjoyed but to be traded. It's the era of hideous bored apes that don't demand appreciation for themselves but for their owner. It's the type of art that is only capable of expressing the amount of money it cost to acquire it.

Art with an impersonal motive is not a new threat. Italian educator Maria Montessori thought that children develop best when the learning environment accomodates their interests and capabilities. This is the complete opposite of the pedagogical method that prevailed in her time, a hyperpatriotic militarism that was more interested in making soldiers than citizens. Montessori denounced Mussolini's government for wanting to shape Italian youths by what she called "brutal molds." The choice of wording is polysemic: a mold is a tool of artistic creation, but also a tool of the industrial assembly line. The fascist project was to craft a nation of identical copies of an idealized man, representations instead of authentic subjects. Benjamin's essay criticized the mechanical copying of art, but Mussolini had already envisioned the mechanical copying of the human being.

This is what makes it so fascinating that Del Toro's Pinocchio is set during World War II. Fascism needs puppets, but Pinocchio is a puppet without strings, a free soul that cannot be controlled. He resists the reduction of his right to exist to his utility to the state; rebels against the corruption of his art by fascist propaganda; and ultimately rejects the us/them mentality at the root of every war. In his last heroic act, by willingly accepting human mortality, he emerges victorious over the worst of fascist horrors: a life where each individual death is trivial.

It's especially significant that this Pinocchio adds a subplot about a youth military camp exactly at the point in the story where a more conventional adaptation would insert the trip to Pleasure Island. In Pleasure Island, the most disobedient children lose all control and end up losing their humanity. This version of the tale inverts the moral message: here the most obedient children are controlled to the point that they lose their humanity. Where the original Pinocchio was a simple moralist fable about the dangers of rebellion, this adaptation is a more mature argument for the need of rebellion. This is the type of daring resignification that art needs from time to time to stay relevant, and that Disney would never dare try with its sacrosanct classics.

In his Pinocchio, Del Toro creates a child that would have made Montessori proud. He's innocent, literally born yesterday, but he meets the world with an undefeatable enthusiasm, with a sincere awe for the gift of being alive, and that spark of pure joy keeps burning under the cruelest circumstances. In contrast, Disney's remake gives us a Pinocchio without an identity, a nondescript tabula rasa waiting to be given a role to play. In the Disney movie, he's never his own person, following the brutal mold of brand integration to the point of doing a three-point superhero landing that should win a Golden Raspberry for cringe. In the Netflix movie, his first interaction with society is to question why an immobile statue of Jesus (another miraculous son of a carpenter) gets more respect than the living and breathing child he obviously is.

This is a Pinocchio (and a Pinocchio) with a beating heart. It's not afraid to show us the degree of despair that pushed Gepetto to the absurd task of building an artificial child, a fantastically shot scene that hits with the emotional punches of Astro Boy and Frankenstein. No portion of this suffering is hidden from the audience. There's nothing wrong with admitting that grief is painful, and war is painful, and loneliness is painful, and life is painful. The raw honesty with which the movie begins earns it an amount of goodwill that outweighs the artificiality of its medium. Over on the Disney side, Gepetto quickly forgets about his dead son by saying, "No more of these sad thoughts, huh? Time for some happiness," a quintessentially Disney attitude if ever I heard one.

Remember Pygmalion and Galatea? I neglected to mention one detail. The statue shown in the Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg is not an original. It's based on the earlier sculpture on the same topic made by Étienne Maurice Falconet and currently kept at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. But the version in Saint Petersburg is available for public viewing, while the one in Baltimore is (as of today) not. If you visit the website of the Hermitage Museum and search for Pygmalion and Galatea, you'll be seeing an image (the photograph) of an image (the statue) of an image (the earlier statue) of an image (the written myth) of an image (Galatea the statue) of an image (an idealized woman). And yet, the photograph still manages to convey the same sentiment of fascination and devotion as the first recitation of the myth centuries ago.

Guillermo del Toro has created a 21st-century classic, a Pinocchio imbued with a distinct artistic vision, a moral standpoint, a visual language of its own, a fully-developed protagonist, a complete worldview. The Walt Disney Company has created a souvenir shop copy of a revered classic, an item in an accounting spreadsheet, a cynical act of nostalgia bait with less moving power than a sixth-hand reproduction of someone who never lived.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10 and 9/10. I hope I don't need to clarify which is which.

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