When Gene Rodenberry told the writers of the original Star Trek that the show couldn’t have any inter-character conflict, he inadvertently destined the Enterprise‘s maiden series to be a horror anthology. How else do you tell a story in which everyone is cool and gets along? If you’re going to remove “drama, as it is traditionally understood,” from your series, you kind of have to replace it with something.

But it turns out you can square that particular narrative circle with more than just salt vampires and albino murder-chimps – all you need are bops and vibes, baby.

K-On! The Movie

I have now watched two anime movies in my life, and both of them made me look forward to the Rapture slightly less. Yeah, yeah, selection bias and all that, but you need a generous menu from which to pull that biased selection in the first place, now don’t you?

No one is angry in this movie, and their decency infuriates me. It makes the guiding principles of my life – anger, caffeine – seem petty by comparison. All this time there were other, non-yelling ways to confront the vicissitudes of the day? I could have just learned to play a fucking trombone?

Yes, apparently – K-On! The Movie never deviates from its central thesis of “life is best experienced as an opportunity for wistful misadventures, rather than miserably accepted as the inevitable degradation of both body and mind, the culmination of which abandons you, screaming, in the midnight fire of an endless awful,” a concept they obviously never bothered to run by the Pope, because that’s the exact opposite of everything Catholicism has ever taught me.

I swear to God, this movie teases you with potential cruelties like the sauciest of vixens, only to slap away your rage-boner at the last second, just when you were about to give her an angry pearl necklace. When Sawako is talking about the girls playing a show for their class and she darkly remarks that, “I doubt they could handle the scolding we got – they’d be crushed,” I had to change my underwear. Pettiness? Spite? Sawako, the ostensible mentor of the group, showing her true colors by looking forward to the public humiliation of her young charges? Oh, movie, you dirty, dirty girl, you know just how daddy likes it, don’t you?

Except the next fucking thing Sawako says is “I have to protect them – I have to protect them!”

Jesus Christ, movie, we get it – you’re like if a rainbow boned a unicorn made entirely out of winning lottery tickets while Bob Ross painted the whole thing in a relaxing landscape. Quit hope-humping me, bro. I have vengeances to plan, and I can’t do that if I’m weeping over the infectious innocence of youth.

The End

Whatever, I give up. Maybe hope and vibes really are the answer to everything, and my attempts to spite-fuck all of reality are both childish and self-defeating. I’ll let love in, movie, I swear.

(But I’m never going to stop pounding caffeine. Even in heaven on Earth, daddy still needs his jiggle juice.)

Even a kitsch-drenched pill-popping ultra-parody of America’s pop-culture machine deserve a chance to tell his rhinestone-studded side of the story. That fucking hair, though.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

Charisma and persona are two different things. The first one makes everyone like you; the second one stops you from going insane. The precise ratio you establish between the two determines whether or not you’ll be famous, and for how long. Occasionally a person comes along who is both attractive enough and dumb enough to justify turning the dial all the way to charisma. All of these people die weird.

There’s really no way to tell a story about Elvis that avoids the above statements, because he is their poster child. Cutting to footage of The King from 1955 or 1972 or 1966 is functionally the same thing as cutting to a film reel highlighting the state of the culture during those same years. Just like Warren Buffet can’t actually beat the market because Berkshire Hathaway is the market, Elvis can’t influence the culture because he is the culture.

If that sounds like a snake swallowing its own tail, it’s because it is – the saddest parts of this film are when Elvis tries to provide observations into the schism between the public image and the private self, and in attempting to provide evidence of the latter ends up reflexively clinging to the former. No one wants to see him – they want to see an escapist, idealized version of themselves, and he can’t help but provide it.

And while that snake never stops swallowing its own tail, it does manage to digest individual meals, so God help you if you’re dumb enough to get old. The zeitgeist wants someone limber enough to make for a responsive weathervane, and there’ll always be someone younger coming down the pipe, with fresher knees and thicker hair and a complete lack of any other relevant or defining characteristics – an empty vessel primed to have popular idealizations pour into.

Elvis seems like he might actually grasp this, stressing at one point in the film that he’s just out there for the love of music. But almost immediately after, he admits that he wouldn’t know what to do if he didn’t have fans, if he was no longer recognized in public. This existential crossroads would be a perfect time to have a sense of self to fall back on, but you’re only at that crossroads because you excised your sense of self a long time ago.

The End

This is not a story of moderation – if it was, we wouldn’t be talking about it – but a story of how far you’re willing to go to delay the inevitable. Fading into self-satire wasn’t unique to Elvis, nor is it the sole purvey of celebrities  – everybody starts to do an impression of themselves eventually, trying to recover something that defined them once, always vaguely aware that the performance part of this attempted recovery necessarily means it’s all bullshit. But what else are you going to do, die? 

We’re all doing impressions of ourselves, baby, and it’s a little less convincing every time. The only difference for celebrities is that the lights are brighter, so the makeup runs faster.

Here is how movies are made:

First, you take an idea that is genuinely interesting to you and that you are willing to go to great lengths to realize, then you secure the participation of others who share both your vision and your willingness to realize that vision, and finally you sprinkle in dumb shit to make the financiers, who are functionally useless squid-people, happy.

That’s pretty much it.

Let’s talk about the Cat People movies.

Cat People (1942) and Cat People (1982)

“What if werewolves, but cats, and also boning,” is an objectively stupid idea for a movie. Don’t take my word for it: the original film in this series was built out from its fucking title, because someone at RKO thought that Cat People sounded scary; costs were kept down by re-using sets from other movies. This is not what you do when you take your own concept seriously – it’s what you do when you’re trying to turn a quick buck on a schlocky B-movie concept. Cat People (1942) wasn’t even supposed to compete with the quality of the Universal monster movies, because RKO’s B-movie division felt they were no match artistically for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

But it fucking worked, because once rich people finished burping up their latest idiotic idea for easy money, smart people got involved and actually did something with it. The original Cat People is good! Layered atop its inspirational raison d’être of, “make me money – here is your sole resource with which to work, a large cat,” is an actual movie, one trading on genuinely creepy visuals and the theme of being enculturated into finding your own sexual urges monstrous.

And Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake continues in that fine artistic tradition of Fine, Whatever, I’ll Sculpt My Movie Out of Garbage if I Have To. I mean, this fucker hits the ground running – the audience is immediately thrown into a world of foreboding framing, the obvious withholding of vital information, oppressively unnatural color grading, and Malcolm McDowell doing that creepy thing he does where he just stands there and is Malcolm McDowell – everything you need to know that Something Is Wrong. If you were watching this movie in a theatre in 1982, you would be forgiven for thinking that the projectionist had accidentally laced up a movie with a better name than Cat People.

All of this is made possible by the fact that Paul Schrader is a smart man. He knows that he is being bankrolled by idiots, and that he must move among them, live among them, avoid their suspicion, if he is to continue making movies. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), if that movie somehow had an even more depressing ending.

Seriously, Cat People ’82 is like if someone recreated Michelangelo’s David entirely out of those gross Styrofoam clamshells that cheeseburgers used to come in. We have snap zooms on evil leopards, a somber reflection on the generational component of mental illness, Malcolm McDowell taking his impression of a hungry cat-person more seriously than the Allies took Operation Overlord, the psychological underpinnings of toxic relationships, so much gratuitous nudity that a woman who has just been mauled and forced to crawl down a flight of stairs takes a moment to pop her bra off because she knows what kind of movie she’s in, apocalyptic imagery that for some reason is also a music video, obvious giallo influences, and Ed Begley Jr. getting his arm ripped off. And it all fucking works, because Paul Schrader’s understanding of the Sliding Scale of Seriousness is goddamn masterful.

The End

Greatness can absolutely be born at the intersection of Earnestly Smart and What in the Actual Fuck. The suits will always exist, and will always be the ones signing the checks, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – being forced to launder a real movie inside of a hulking corporate turd activates entirely different areas of the creative brain, leading to movies you might not otherwise have ever thought to make.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but understanding how to work the system is invention’s cool older brother – not always around, sometimes misses Christmas because he’s out on a drunk, will probably eat it before the age of thirty because he fell asleep on train tracks, but always having a good time, and gave you a pocket knife and some fireworks for your ninth birthday. Maybe not world-class brothering, but at least he knows not to take any of this shit too seriously.

III

Penrose wasn’t stupid. Well, no. He was pretty stupid. But he did have a philosophy – one insightful enough that if it was the only thing you knew about him, you would be forgiven for thinking he was smart.

Here was Penrose’s philosophy:

“Have a Goal, Not a Plan.”

Pretty good, right? To the best of his knowledge, he hadn’t stolen it from anyone, and it had remained both true and useful for so long that it was one of the few things he bothered to remember, other ideas being allowed to just kind of flutter away right after being burped into existence – probably useless against the day, anyway, so why not let them go a’ floatin’ free?

Anyway, this philosophy – which will become even more important later, so please remember it! – helped him bounce back from that night with Delphine. Waking up back on Puerto Rican soil, apparently without the use of a plane, next to an elderly piragüero currently serenading and/or accosting passersby with sweet arias about both the availability and unbeatable prices of pork and snow cones would be enough to throw anyone, but because The Philosophy urged him not to think too much about any one concern, Penrose stuck the landing better than most.

“That’s disgusting,” Penrose told the piragüero, while righting himself and giving his outfit a quick pat-down. “Who would want a pork-flavored snow cone?”

“No one. They’re two different things that you can buy.”

“Oh. That makes sense. But they’re in two different carts, right? So the flavors don’t mix?”

“Yes, the snow cones and the pork are in two different carts.”

“Well, that’s good.”

Penrose checked for his wallet, an empty stomach being one of the few bad things he was currently capable of making go away.

“You need to sober up, boy. This is only going to get harder.”

Penrose looked up.

“What?”

“I said, ‘What flavor of snow cone would you like?'”

They exchanged glances for a moment, each of them conveying nothing of use to the other.

Penrose walked away without buying anything.

You’re boring. Don’t feel bad. I am, too. Trust me, we’re better off this way.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles

“Remind me of my own life, but not so much that I get depressed,” is basically storytelling’s origin story. It’s one of the defects of the human mind: we want to investigate the sensation of being human without having to acknowledge the heinously boring bullshit from which sensation typically springs. To square this circle, we swap out real, lame moments for significantly cooler and extremely fabricated ones, treating only the underlying emotions as sacrosanct.

And then: Yahtzee, baby – all the insight of existence, minus the part where you have to exist. You’re basically putting your feelings up for adoption and hoping that a rich couple takes them in.

While none of this is groundbreaking, it is instructive to investigate the unspoken understandings and expectations under which the process plays out. There are certain types and volumes of lies that are considered Close Enough to reality so as to not qualify as pure escapism. Their application, like everything else about the human mind, is weird.

Here are some general guidelines:

UglyCool

Your protagonist can have either a cool job or a cool personality, but never both. That’s too much cool. If your middle-aged male lead is a heroin addict – a bad thing! – make sure he’s also a former small-time wrestler – a cool thing! If your middle-aged female lead is having a breakdown – oh, no! – make sure she’s the CFO of a Fortune 500 company – neat!

I couldn’t tell you why people will find a professional kickboxer believable only if he also has irritable bowel syndrome, but the heart wants what it wants.

Brief Punctuations of Reality

You can’t sucker punch your audience through the screen (yet) but you can do the emotional equivalent: draw up a larger-than-life character only to give them an Unexpectedly Human Moment.

But it shouldn’t be too sudden a moment. Introducing a character who is an actual, literal Nazi only to reveal shortly before or after his death that he had been nursing a three-legged diabetic puppy back to health is too much, and will be considered manipulative. This seems counterintuitive, because you are trying to manipulate the audience, and the audience is there specifically to be manipulated, but part of the magic is that both parties are pretending this is all on the up-and-up. Humans are weird.

At Least I’m Not That Asshole

Having one irredeemably shitty character is essential for two reasons: irredeemable characters are transmutable to every genre of film (Rey and Finn both have annoying supervisors in The Force Awakens, for instance) and their presence establishes a baseline for character behavior that makes our protagonist seem eternally likable by comparison. This is the Swiss Army knife of Sorta Real stuff, because everybody has a supervisor in life, even people who have never had a supervisor before.

Oh, This Life!

Your character cannot get everything! This is essential. If they win the lottery they also have to, like, lose a leg in a bear trap or something. The best thing about this rule is that Tom Cruise has dedicated his entire career to breaking it. Ethan Hunt steps in a bear trap and somehow de-ages five years and is made a Supreme Court justice.

Anyway, dinging our hero a little allows us to slide into the fake stuff more easily. We want to feel like we’re going to live forever, but to actually see an invulnerable main character makes us feel like we’re deluding ourselves with overly-childish escapism. To accept some damage here and there makes us feel mature, and in no way clinging to the absurd belief that we might be able to live forever (but c’mon, we’re totally going to live forever).

The End

People want to exist somewhere in the middle of the realness spectrum, slightly – but never too garishly – leaning towards the fiction side, and will pay accordingly. Understanding that you can’t go too far one way or the other is why David E. Kelley has more money than God, and F. Scott Fitzgerald drank himself to death. Always know how much bullshit you can get away with – mess up the ratio even a little and you’ll only succeed in bumming everybody out. And people can do that themselves for free.

“The innocence of childhood is fleeting – also, monster,” has been associated with It for so long I’m pretty sure anyone jumping into the genre has to pay royalties to Stephen King.

But what if you want to stroll the bittersweet vicissitudes of youth without having to endure 1,100 pages of super weird sex stuff?

It Follows 

Sometimes I forget there is a monster in It Follows – I’ll be watching the film without any sound or subtitles, just vibing to the visuals, when this weird little piss-freak suddenly struts into frame, its intentions clearly ill.

“What are you doing here?” I will ask the piss-freak, for I am nearly middle-aged and still sometimes forget that characters in movies can’t hear me. “The pals are having a chill one. You are neither chill, nor one of the pals. This is distasteful to me! Begone from this scene, you wretched walk-monster, for you are harshing my calm.”

That I can forget there is a monster in my monster movie is a testament to just how good the movie part of the movie is. The horror aspects do what they need to, but the real focus of the story is a group of friends desperately trying to invoke the protective talismans of youth while slowly realizing that those talismans stop working when you become an adult. All those stretches of wistful, pained quiet? That’s the space where magical thinking used to be.

I mean, shit, the movie is basically just a series of hangouts, during which the characters often don’t even discuss the monster that’s trying to kill their friend – they’re just putting off having to deal with it. The murderous strut-fiend might as well be the need to get a job, or to move out of the house. And this is reinforced with so much masterful visual storytelling that I want David Robert Mitchell to adopt me so we can drive around the country going on adventures together.

Check it out:

• Jay hides in a playground after fleeing the monster early in the movie. We see her sitting absently on a swing, in the middle of a pool of light. Protect me, innocence of childhood!
• That girl from the beginning of the movie spends her final moments hiding in a pool of light. Protect me, innocence of childhood!
• When the kid who passed the curse to Jay is explaining everything to the gang, they’re all sitting in a circle and drinking soda that his mom got for them. One of them is in his jammies!
• All those shots of Jay just absently noticing things. The fly on her arm at the beginning of the movie, the way in which she reaches down and gently brushes flowers, that one part where she lines up individual blades of grass on her leg. Remember when you had time to notice dumb shit like that?
• Hey, remember the two kids who spy on Jay when she’s in the pool? From their perspective this movie is a raunchy sex comedy, because they’re too young to have experienced the horrible implications of actually doing the things they’re fantasizing about.
• I like this movie so much I’m even OK with it violating my beloved Every Movie Should Be No Longer Than A YouTube Ad criteria. This fucker clocks in at a garish buck forty-five, but it earns the runtime!

The End

The monster represents your mortality! One of the hallmarks of being an adult is being aware of the fact that one day you are going to die! You can never un-learn this fact! The transition to adulthood is signified culturally by having sex! Sometimes pictures represent ideas!

I mean, sure, whatever. But the reason why It Follows bops isn’t because it’s all symbolism-y. It’s because of how rock-solid the goddamn filmmaking is!

David Robert Mitchell understands that the goal of any good movie is to be over before the audience has a chance to realize how everything in the movie is dumb and makes no sense. There are gaps in It Follows that would cause its entire premise to collapse if you thought about them enough – so the movie doesn’t give you time to think about them enough! If you’re too engaged emotionally to poke holes in something then you won’t poke holes in something. So dial in that emotional through-line and then through-line the hell out of it! Who knows, you might accidentally make a movie!

Jaylen Brown Wanders Beacon Street Looking For Next Person To Beef With

RFK Jr. Amazed That They Can Fit The Entire Internet Inside Of His Phone

Chuck Schumer Trapped Inside Of Room Because Someone Labelled The Door ‘Push’ When You Actually Need To Pull

Michael Bay Looks To Return To His Arthouse Roots, Begins Pre-Production On Transformers 9: Optimus Prime Says The N-Word In This One For Some Reason 

Woman Who Just Watched Her First Giallo Film No Longer Has High Opinion Of Italian Culture

Man Posts Jordan Peterson Video On Facebook, Waits Patiently For Feminism To Collapse

Horse At Petting Zoo Not Sure If He’s Supposed To Hold Off On Shitting Until The Kids Are Gone Or Just Let It Fly Or What

Man Wearing Imagine Dragons T-Shirt Somehow Has High Opinion Of Himself

State Trooper Can’t Believe You Have To Take All These Tests Just So They’ll Let You Shoot People

Frugal Pervert Waiting For Next Big Buttplug Sale

Man With World’s Largest SpongeBob-Themed Dildo Collection Fears There May Be No More Worlds Left To Conquer

Max Verstappen Overtakes Fellow Shopper With Bold Shopping Cart Maneuver

Shohei Ohtani Hits Towering Home Run With Pool Noodle

Dying Shitposter Wishes He Could Call Someone A Cuck Just One More Time

Police Perform Wellness Check On Home That Puts Christmas Decorations Up Before Thanksgiving

New York Jets Banking On An Air Bud: Golden Receiver Situation To Save Season

Disney Executives Give George Lucas’s List Of Ideas For Future Star Wars Movies To FBI

Middle-Aged Man Watching Porn Alone In Basement Apartment Pledges To Turn Life Around Just As Soon As These Freaks Are Done Going Ass-To-Mouth

Woman Absolutely Hasn’t Taken Too Much LSD, Has No Idea What That Floating Rhinoceros With Her Dad’s Face Is Talking About

Frustrated Kangaroo Wonders Why Her Pouch Is Always The Last Place She Checks For Her Keys

II

Traveling near the equator introduces a tremendous amount of zeros into the equation. This is suuuuuper handy. A cancellation here, a cancellation there, and suddenly there are opportunities for profit so obvious they might as well be fruit on the branch. It’s so easy, in fact, that mechanics becomes less of a factor going forward than paranoia – w-we can’t be the only ones who’ve noticed this, right? W-We need to move, now, while the market’s still hot!

Traveling near the poles is different. Traveling near the poles is a motherfucker. This is because infinities rise like a raging storm as you approach the undefinable – a cascade into the uncountable, a talisman against the unknowable; Nature, the absolute cad, being entirely indifferent to our need to understand it…

(… you’ve got options, is what I’m saying…)

Moosewell was trying very hard to explain this to his bosses, who were, in turn, trying very hard to explain it to him. Each thought the other was an idiot. No one was having any fun.

“A-And this was your fourth such voyage, Moosewell?”

”Well, uh, we don’t usually say ‘voyage,’ much…? ‘Trip,’ maybe? ‘Delivery’? ‘Flight,’ if you’re feeling avian…?”

“Ha, ha, yes, of course…! W-Words must be used appropriately, lest there be misunderstandings…! ‘Trip’ would be more appropriate , given the m-modest scope of your… your…

“… your…

“… task…

… ahahaha…!”

If there was something funny about that, Moosewell had no idea what it was.

“B-But this was your fourth such… trip, Moosewell, correct?”

”… it was.”

Silence, here, while Moosewells’ bosses took the time to adjust themselves from within their respective clouds of localized darkness. Hands now poised above groins, tissues at the ready. Everything about to get super weird.

“S-So it went p-perfectly…! You had no problems at Santa María de Belén?”

”What?”

“The Yebra River.”

“Oh, uh, yessir. They were fine folks, there. Little rowdy, but that’s the fun of it, right? ‘Perfectly Pleasant People,’ as me and Manny like to say. Well, I like to say – he just kind of stares at me…?”

A contorting of the darkness now – these awful approximations of smiles, all of them too jagged, ripped from something not exactly flesh. Not happy, in any case. More like hungry. They had a taste of something.

“Fine work, as always, Mr. Morris. You are excused.”

–

Manicatex thought too much. He couldn’t help himself. What else was there to do? Cacibajagua now a country of unreturnable sound, and him redundant… there’s no need for cartographers in an intangible land, and I don’t need to tell you that geodesics are useless against the Zone… it’s all that ex-empire, man – you never really figure out what to do with the phantom limbs.

He wandered into Old San Juan.

Crowds milling about under the midday sun, bursts of pink and blue from parasols bobbing above the fray, piragüeros calling out, mostly in vain, for sales even they aren’t particularly enthusiastic about making; everybody too hot to care, too similar to talk… not a good scene for a postcard – maybe an oil-on-canvas, if you were willing to go impressionistic enough, abstract away the harsher lines…

(Heh, heh… you can’t be nostalgic for a place you’ve never been, but you can tell when an expanded present has been throttled into compliance, everything aligned along vile new axes, everything greedy and wrong – indifference must have been just a game to them, right? There’s no way it was profitable.)

“Hey, m-mister – mister!”

Now here’s this rosy-cheeked goblin of a lad just a’ burstin’ on out of the crowd, all shiny-eyed and devilishly-intentioned, making straight for Manicatex, skidding to a stop moments before impact.

“H-Hey, you feel like a trip back to Potosí, mister?”

What a weird sales pitch. The answer was “no,” obviously, but how to go about saying it?

Manicatex made a crazy face.

“Haha, just kidding!” The boy waving his arms in mock surrender. “But I’ve got some good deals here! Real collector’s items! Check this one out, it’s from the Philip V collection! Vintage stuff, my man – value’s only ever gonna go up! Better get in on it now!”

He handed over a coin for inspection. Manicatex took it, checked out the reverse side.

Imagine what looking out over the Atlantic from the westernmost edge of the Mediterranean must have been like, back when numbers were just another language, and measurement was just another story. Now the Pillars of Hercules were just the way to More Stuff. They even put a crown atop each pillar. How modest.

But this wasn’t the boy’s concern. He just wanted to make a sale.

“Where did you get this?”

“Life’s rich pageant, my man. You know anyone can get through the day without a steady steam o’ real de a ocho passing through their hands?”

“Lots of people, actually.”

They exchanged a look. 

Manicatex considered telling the boy to do something more productive with his life, like join a gang, or practice hurling dynamite, but he hated it when people told him what to do, and he didn’t want to be a hypocrite. So instead he just kept turning the silver piece over. Eventually our little J.P. Morgan here, realizing he wasn’t going to close the deal, shrugged and snatched his specie back.

“Man,” the kid, talking maybe to himself, “I’m just trying to get in on the arbitrage game.”

“Hmm… you an entrepreneur?”

“I’m a goddamn visionary, is what I am.” Indicating towards the crowd. “Check it, my guy: encomienda, repartimiento, hacienda… notice a trend? Smaller, faster, more efficient. And what’s smaller, faster, and more efficient than a cute widdle kiddo like me? Shit, some of these weirdos even think I’m actually a child. I thought you of all people could appreciate that.”

“Can’t be a prospector if you aren’t willing to prospect.”

“Damn straight.”

Sharing, not a moment, but mutual sadness over the absence of one.

The little sprat disappeared back into the day’s business without another word. Manicatex stood there for a while, lifting his knuckles in sequence, as if the coin was still there.

–

”Hello, and welcome to Ana’s Financial Services! Confused about capital gains? Not entirely sure what a 1099 is for? Are precious metals the right investment for you? What the heck’s all this hubbub about real estate investment trusts (REITs)? Here at Ana’s Financial Services, we promise the clearest possible explanations and the largest possible return – Manicatex?”

“Hi, Ana.”

They looked at each other from across the small office. No favorable angles or fresh enough light. Just that weird, flat, fluorescent buzz-hum, somehow both going to and coming from nowhere in particular.

“Was hoping to get my palm read.”

If this were a saloon and, like, seventy years ago, Ana would’ve already had a Winchester hoisted and aimed at Manicatex’s belly. But the West had long since been pacified, and these were more civilized times, so she was pointing a .38 Special.

Manicatex raised his hands.

“There’re easier ways for me to prove who I am. Couldn’t you just ask me a question only the real Manicatex would know?”

“That’s what I’m currently doing. The question is, ‘How would the real Manicatex take a bullet?’ and the answer is, ‘Here, let me show you.'”

“I missed you, too, Ana.”

The .38 slowly lowered, but the gaze still less than accommodating.

“Don’t mean to be inhospitable, kid, it’s just that everyone is trying to kill me, and reality is a failed experiment.”

“Yeah, looks like it might rain later, too, so I guess everyone’s having a shitty day.”

Something flickered across her face. She softened a little.

“I just don’t want to make things worse for either of us, Manny. Each turn gets a little harder to keep track of, and I don’t want to answer a question you haven’t even thought to ask yet, which would just fuck this all up even more. The goddamn snake can’t even swallow its own tail right.”

“Just found myself in the neighborhood and wanted to see a familiar face. We can compare whatever notes you want, or not. Just nice to see someone again.”

She almost smiled at something he said. He couldn’t tell if it was “again,” or “familiar.”

“Maybe it really is you, Manicatex. Alright, fine: seneca kakona, motherfucker – come here and let me get a look at you. Not too close, though. Still not great with the .38, but at this range I couldn’t miss if I tried.”

–

(Christ, I haven’t had a good, hard fuck in ages.)

(Uh, Ana, that’s not really what I’m here for – )

(That’s gross, Manicatex; I wasn’t talking about you. We’re practically cousins. Or was it in-laws? Whatever; I mean, it’s not like it’s you-you I’m talking to – just like it’s not me-me, the one you might happen to be familiar with, or have nostalgia for. Different configurations, blurring, and all that. And don’t even get me started on non-commutativity. Anyway, as I was saying:

I need to get fucking railed, man. At least then I’ll know it’s me down there – well, no, I guess I won’t, but at least I’ll be in one of the few configurations wherein I don’t have to give a flying fuck about my relationship to the world outside my allotted slice of reality.)

(Did you… learn to see lower? Like we talked about, Ana. The whole point of this.)

(How is it so hard to detach from them? An emergent quality which continues its indifferent assault even on the macroscopic scale. It’s not supposed to fucking work like that, Manicatex. The whole fucking point was to be faster than fast, to find the channels between their vision. Were we wrong in trying to launch our counterattack below minimum length, below minimum time? I thought there would be more stuff between our moments of dying – but the whole frame of reference just resets.

A virus, that penetrates on the Planck scale but expresses on a cosmological one.)

Bad, if this wasn’t Ana. Worse if it was.

(Christ, they’re so fucking stupid. That’s their superpower, Manicatex – inevitability manifesting as practical delusions. To master the arrow of time because you’re too fucking dumb to realize there is no arrow of time.

Silver, souls, sweet potatoes, war, charters and annexation… just following the routes. I thought faster than fast would save us, but these idiots transcended speed altogether, just by being stupid… they’re not fast, Manicatex – they’re inevitable. Speed is determined by relational observations, and they’re too fucking dumb to make those observations. That’s how they manage to be everywhere at once. By not realizing that they’re not.

Imagine challenging entropy to a staring contest and somehow being stupid enough to win. Leave it to a capitalist to somehow make time travel boring.)

“Lord, grant me the confidence of a moron – just an endlessly confused dunce. May I never realize that the thing I am chasing is a figment of my own imagination. May I never learn, change, or grow in any way. Take my mind from me, for thinking was a mistake. Make me insensate. Make me an RML seven-pounder, or better yet, an owl. Actually, no, the seven-pounder. Amen.”

That was not how Ana usually prayed.

–

Manicatex needed somewhere to feel shitty, and nothing helps a man brood like a lonesome beach. He picked a spot that seemed to vibe best with the darkening day and plopped himself down.

A bunch of time passed.

He was trying to feel the old mechanics again, but had absolutely no fucking idea how to do it. Too many prerogatives had wormed their way in, and his sight – to say nothing of the tastier senses – was no longer his own. Everything etched in lines and angles, everyone his competition for something only precious because everyone was his competition for something only precious, movement restricted to what we determine fit for the coördinate plane.

(A bland and mechanical process: faith breaks up on the rocks of a stronger system, is exposed as nothing more than a middling machine, isn’t deemed important enough to bury, rots in the sun, becomes a tourist attraction. You could tell yourself that ledgers were just Atabey adopting a different form, but you’d be wrong, and you’d be lying to yourself.)

Christ, there was a time when he could tell if he was on the human side of an island or the zemi side just by fucking standing there – could feel himself being repulsed like a charged particle trying for the wrong pole. Now he needed signs to tell him what town he was in.

He might as well have been wearing a fanny pack.

(Maybe he had reincarnated one too many times. Maybe he should have just played it safe, played it natural, and let death do its thing. What were the criteria for “natural” anymore, anyway? Shit, what were the criteria for “death”?)

A turtle moseyed its way on out of the surf. Now there was a trick – trivializing the boundaries. A turtle hops realities as a simple matter of course, and a tortoise farts around all day with heaven’s glossary etched on its back. Everything you need to know about everything, and people mostly carved them up to make soup.

“Rock on, little hicotea. I’ve got no designs on you. Besides, I might need you to help me get back from Coaybay.”

“Actually, you’d be better off asking an owl or a bat for help with Maquetaurie Guayaba,” the turtle said as he passed. “I just guide people – owls and bats are the ones that can actually plead your case. I can’t stand Guayaba. His dog freaks me out.“

“Oh, yeah. Owls, bats, opia... how could I forget?”

“Time turns all our brains into mush eventually, my man,” the turtle said, disappearing up the beach.

Manicatex considered this, then looked back out to sea.

Even an opia could detect the orphaned strands of home drifting about in the aftermath of The Thing That Happened. It’s an awful way to remember, but it’s better than forgetting. Keeping those fragments of your former life in any kind of coherent order was the trickiest part – he was no bohíque, and had no map to cross-reference things with, so there was always the possibility he might end up reading the story wrong – or, worse yet, exactly how they wanted him to.

… all the failed outcomes condemned to the edge of memory like a failing second sight, rationalized away as story, faith, anger, hope…

(Heh, heh… the greatest asset you can have in an arms race is being very, very stupid – the capacity to sit greedily, eternally, most importantly incuriously at the fattest part of the distribution curve, eating without regard for need or even desire; stuffing yourself until you burst, as if possessed by some kind of idiot will-to-death. Heh, heh…  it’s a grim game when you’re more likely to win specifically because you don’t care about the outcome…)

Feeling even more bummed than when he got there, Manicatex stood up and headed towards the water.

Write a song about me, and make it as personal as you want. You couldn’t out me if you tried, because no one knows who either of us are.

Queens of Drama

Hyper-heightened super-sweaty neon-dreamy pop-punk lesbian glam drama is an aesthetic I always assumed was out there but whose existence I could never confirm; for too long it has haunted the forests of my darkest dreams like some kind of fabulous Bigfoot.

Queens of Drama may tell a familiar story, but it tells the absolute shit out of it. Alexis Langlois’ rendition of the Star-Crossed Lovers (Social Commentary Edition) plot nails the assignment on every possible level, but I’m especially enamored with how he crushes my beloved cinematic pillars of Milieu, Character, and Holy Shit, That’s a Great Idea, Why Didn’t I Think of That.

In order, and hopefully also en précis:

We start in a snow globe/time capsule/glitter-drenched nightmare version of 2005. The sets are dreamy but claustrophobic; the lighting is theatrical but oppressive. A character will be lost in the shadow of the brightness being blasted on someone else, and the image is so striking that for a moment you forget that you’re supposed to be sad. Nothing is real in any practical sense – rooms never looked like that, not even back then. Everything is exaggerated to the point where dreaminess threatens to tilt into nightmarishness, and that theme of The Same Old Story happening again – and how it thinks it’s absolutely adorable that you’re trying to stop it – returns to us frequently.

Oh, hey, speaking of loudly messy and profoundly depressing:

Billie constantly looks like she’s about to cry, until she starts to scream – you’d never guess she was a shit-talking, flame-throwing punk icon until she loses it, at which point you’d never suspect she was anything but. Both her inability to find any sort of middle ground and her increasingly bizarre and self-destructive choices are heartbreaking and also sorta-kinda not her fault. She’s trapped in a society that doesn’t deal in half-measures when it comes to burying anyone who isn’t squeaky-clean and aggressively mainstream. She wants approval for who she is, and the second it’s denied to her she goes full-scorched-Earth-rage-queen on everyone. That’s not a recipe for emotional stability, but, in her defense, is there a third option?

Alright, now all we need is a grim bow to place respectfully atop this bejazzled sarcophagus.

The use of screens – everything from grainy VHS footage to smartphone cameras to vile YouTuber selfies – to tie together the otherwise isolated rooms of these characters’ descent into redundancy and, eventually, irrelevancy is so smart I’m going to tell people it was my idea. The ubiquity of shitty, outdated television footage isn’t just for verisimilitude – it makes it seem like you’re peering through a funky, busted window into another world, one that might be better than the one you’re currently in, but also might be way worse; it might even be the same world, just a generation removed. The fidelity simply isn’t good enough to tell.

But that feeling of “hey, that’s my life up there, the life I should be leading – wait, is it? I’m actually not sure… either way, I sure am depressed right now,” is the upshot, and it’s what Billie goes through when she sees Mimi on TV, and it’s what both of them go through when they’re watching old footage of their favorite singers. In a world of small and lonely containers, imperfect and heavily edited windows into someone else’s life are all you really get.

Bah, sublime filmmaking necessarily creates more questions than it answers, and my brain resents the homework assignment. As a community is forced deeper underground and consequently must communicate through increasingly funky time capsules, there are lots of opportunities for wires to get crossed. How much of this is real? How much of it produced? How much is it produced to appeal to its target audience? How much is it produced to placate its not-target audience? When society doesn’t allow you to express yourself plainly, shit gets weird. If the people who inspired you were full of shit, what does that make you? 

But there’s never enough time to answer this many questions. At a certain point you just accept that you’ll never get it exactly right, and that your timeline was never the privileged one. Notice how Mimi and Billie’s final musical number, even though it takes place in 2055, is filmed on shitty VHS? We’re all someone else’s time capsule, baby.

The End

It’s impossible to meet at a happy middle ground when you’re both moving in opposite directions. And this hopeless expansion of space only accelerates when the wider world, in all of its gleeful shittiness, decides it wants a say, too. A song might bridge the gap, but it’s going to take an awfully long time to get where it needs to go, and both you will be long gone by the time anyone hears it.

I’m retiring from thinking. I don’t have anything against the conscious mind; we’ve just gone as far as we’re ever going to go together. I blame myself. I’m always letting my brain define my reality, making excuses for its behavior, feeling like I only deserve to be happy if it’s happy – classic codependence.

What I need is a partner who’s confident enough in their own identity that they don’t feel the need to leech off of mine. And I think I found one: terrifying Japanese psycho-smut.

I Am Baseball, Anti-Porno, Top Stripper

Things tend to fall into fairly obvious categories as you get older. This is not news. Nor is it news that the creativity heat death of the human mind occurs with insidious banality – brain sees shit, brain catalogues shit, brain searches for more shit to see and catalogue. Make things predictable, make things manageable.

I’m not knocking the idea of creating a mental compendium of Things You Have Seen Before, Please Remember For Later (Possibly Important). That shit keeps you alive! But that’s the problem: familiarity keep you safe at the expense of keeping you excited. My survival instinct may want the lower energy state associated with being unsurprised by things, but my gooey bits want the kinky stuff.

So, enter Japan, stomping around in the fossilized tedium of my mind like some sort of gargantuan, radioactive whale-gorilla.

They’ve got some sassy shit over there! I don’t even want to analyze anything; I just want to hold up all the cool shit I got for movie-Christmas and hope everyone else finds it as neat as I do:

• The deadpan-fucking seriousness of I Am Baseball, even as the insanity ratchets up to Dragon Ball Z proportions, should be taught in film schools. Everybody commits to the bit, no one is playing hero ball, and God bless every one of them for it.
• Shigeno teaches Natsuko to “become the baseball” by repeatedly throwing her down a hill. I’m not sure how this relates to achieving the spiritual state of a baseball, and I don’t think Shigeno does, either. When Natsuko finally does a somersault after being thrown down the hill, Shigeno declares that she now understands what it means to be a baseball. Your guess is as good as mine.
• Natsuko encounters the ghost of her husband. He tells her not to avenge him, that she should instead free herself from the shackles of anger. She tells him that she doesn’t give a shit about avenging him, because he sucks at baseball. She then throws him down a hill. He does not do a somersault.
• Less cheekily, the way in which Sion Sono and Yoshimitsu Morita manipulate the kinky obligations of the Roman porno series to help them tell the story they actually want to tell is amazing. Sono highlights the Möbius strip nature of Anti-Porno‘s story (along with the fragility of our protagonist’s psychological state) and Morita gives us a sex-positive, documentary-style look at a traditionally taboo profession.
• Back to dumb shit: I Am Baseball has a fucking musical number! I have no analysis for this, just nodding approval.
• Two out of these three movies are pornos, but the most erotic thing about all of them is that not a single one exceeds 80 minutes.

The End

I know this type of gonzo filmmaking isn’t unique to Japan, but they’re the first country I found it in, so they get the finder’s fee. Rolling abject insanity, winking idiot enlightenment, multi-layered ironies, super creepy sex stuff, and fearless pursuits of originality into what is basically a cinematic handjob is the kind of thing movies do when they’re at their best.

Japan just flexed on everyone’s head, so good for Japan. Also, you’re going to want to take a shower really soon, because once that flex dries you’ll never get it out.