It’s weird watching old, august things just kind of sit there while newer, more embarrassing things replace them. I imagine it’s what it must feel like if you were introduced to someone at a party – maybe a work thing, business casual, jackets encouraged but not required – and as you turn to shake your new friend’s hand you can’t help but notice that they have a massive head wound. Just this absolutely vile gash, right above the left temple, that’s positively pissing blood all over the place, ruining the charcuterie board, distracting the band, causing party-goers to lose their footing and slide, Looney Tunes-style, through open windows, doors. A Troy-Aikman-grade-level head trauma if you’ve ever seen one. Grim, grim stuff.

But even though you have several reasonable questions re: the head wound situation, the air seems to fall out of all your protestations before you can give them voice. This is because, near as you can tell, no one else in the room seems to notice, or possibly just not care, that Glenn from accounting has a statistically improbable amount of blood coming out from a location on his head where a reasonable person would expect more skull to be. Glenn also seems strangely cool with this. In fact, the indifference of everybody else in the room to this obviously sub-optimal cranium situation contrasts so heavily with your own anxieties and misgivings that you start to think that something is wrong with you, that you’re the weird one for wanting to make public what everybody else in the room has apparently decided is a deeply personal matter.

“No… no, it’s a head wound,” you reassure yourself, as Glenn’s still-warm brain goo seeps in through your shoes and begins ruining your argyle socks. “My concerns are valid.”

—

Play Dirty is a movie in the same way that puréeing a KFC Famous Bowl and then shotgunning the whole thing while simultaneously stalking every one of your exes on separate Facebook tabs technically qualifies as having dinner with friends. I am not going to analyze it, because that would be like analyzing the quality of microwave that Applebee’s uses to defrost your potato skins. These things are not meant to be thought about. They are meant to approximate sensation, not create it, to slide in just underneath your threshold for conscious awareness so that the more primal parts of your brain might be tricked into initiating a pleasure response. Amazon movies, potato skins, the Cleveland Browns, et cetera can better be understood as members of the reality-adjacent community – a catalogue of doofy and embarrassing gestures whose true threat to reality lies not in being convincing enough to replace it – they are super, extremely not that – but in being shameless and relentless enough to just kind of wear down, if not the public’s better judgment, then at least its resolve.

It’s a process informed by greed, powered by laziness, and administered eternally at maximum volume – to crowd out all of the familiar and contextualizing signposts of reality until your brain, exhausted from being plunged into one moist and clammy Uncanny Valley after another, finally relents and starts accepting as truth things that it previously would have rejected out of hand as having no place on this or any other respectable plane of existence – CGI horses, procedurally-generated credit sequences, most of the Wahlberg family, whatever kind of sick joke The Summer I Turned Pretty is supposed to be, and so on.

No, the best use we can put a non-movie/film slurry like Play Dirty to is as a case study in just how far our nation’s leading barf-merchants feel they can take this existential pruning process before the public starts to notice things getting all Cronenberg-y. We can deduce what is no longer considered necessary – or even tolerable – to Big Storytelling by looking at what studio executives feel they can safely pare away from our normative daily lives while still leaving behind something human-ish enough to trigger all the necessary neural pathways needed to send a hand reaching for a credit card. And if the new class of movies that Play Dirty belongs to is any indication, the latest market inefficiency that our grim overlords have decided must be imagineered out of people’s lives is people themselves.

There aren’t actors in these movies, assuming you define an actor as something along the lines of “a professional make-believer who puts audiences at ease with the sincerity and vulnerability of their performance, until those watching feel comfortable enough to accompany them on an emotional journey,” or even a more modest, “I would fuck Cillian Murphy on his worst day.” It’s more accurate to say that humans are present in these movies. They’re just kind of there. They’re in the frame the same way that a plant is placed on a stage so the audience knows the scene takes place in a forest. Everybody is just kind of floating around in this brown-grey oatmeal slop-space, so detached from everyone and everything else that you start waiting for wide shots just to see if anybody was actually in the same room as anyone else when these lines were recorded. They were not.

And the scripts! Sweet shit, the scripts! This is where things get even darker, because I’m pretty sure that, unlike actors, who don’t even attempt to establish any kind of emotional rapport with the fucking tennis ball they’ve been told to film the scene with (I cannot imagine why), screenplay writers still make earnest, doomed attempts to launder actual passion into the algorithmic world of modern movies. Hearing a Shane Black-ism punctuate a conversation that was otherwise generated by a poorly-written computer program doesn’t momentarily deliver me from the drudgery of what I’m watching, it’s just a terrible reminder that there is a person in there, somewhere, being slowly denatured and digested by the oppressively-basic gastric juices of the modern filmmaking process. Please don’t show me the remaining chunks of Shane Black that the Monster is currently grinding on its molars. Have the Monster keep its mouth closed while it does that. It’s rude, and it makes me sad.

—

I won’t waste pages trying to expound on how this growing mentality in filmmaking connects to the larger economy and zeitgeist (it is bad). I just feel like I’m not actually watching what can fairly be described as a movie anymore. It’s more akin to watching footage of people riding a roller coaster, except everybody is asleep. This superficially wild ride is going on all around them, and they’re a million miles away. Sure, they’re doing all the things you’d expect satisfied people to be doing on a roller coaster – arms are flailing behind bodies, and the wind is doing that funny thing to their cheeks like waves on the surface of a lake – but this is all happening because of inertia, not passion. The people aren’t even aware of what’s going on. The incongruity makes the scene impossible take as real, let alone interesting. And not only can you not connect to the people on the ride, but, in spite of all the generically slick stuff you’re being shown (or maybe because of it) you can’t help but come back to the same conclusion, time and time again: if people are able to sleep on this ride, imagine just how fucking boring it must be.