Oddball media crit--laying siege to academia's ivory tower from pop culture's gutter
Nightbitch, a film about a frustrated housewife who starts turning into a were-dog, actually resonated a lot with me as a trans woman... until it defanged itself and got weirdly domesticated. Sometimes I feel like the only way I know how to be a woman is to be hysterical. Winter in Seattle. Each drizzly day the cloud cover sinks down and twilight descends somewhere around 3:30 in the afternoon. My…
If elevated horror films are so desperate to give us "deep" metaphor about drug use, why do all their drugs suck? Sometimes Hellraiser 2022 gets the allure of its Cenobites, but I feel like it's constantly trying to scare me straight. The opening of Hellraiser 2022 is dark. Visually, I mean. It's even drab. It's pretty well trodden ground at this point to criticize the poor lighting of…
The protagonists of anime My Dress Up Darling occupy a kinder world, more free to explore their identities and passions. Our world has more dangers, but have we given up on treating causes of harm when kids have latitude to express themselves, in favor of treating the symptoms with crude amputation? I love the anime My Dress Up Darling, which might come as a surprise if you haven't braved past the…
Timekeepers of Eternity rips and tears the material of classic Stephen King serial the Langoliers to shreds. It might just accidentally be the greatest motion comic ever made, and it's made of photocopies. What's the deal with this strange fan edit? Motion comics were a bit of a bust huh? Oh, there's examples here and there, especially when talking about independent weirdo hypercomics, of works…
Zenshu, one of the standout animes of last season, positions itself as a love letter to animation. But under all the smooth movement and beautiful effects, what does it think animation really means? Zenshu feels like a throwback among the endless flood of isekai shows that come out each season. Sure, its main character Natsuko dies and is transported to the generically mandated Another World, but…
Most modern criticism agrees, audiences have a lot of interpretive say. So why do people still talk about media like it's being inflicted on them? Sink your teeth into the difficult films No Country for Old Men and Nosferatu and learn to get your agency back as an audience. Art, any art, has its subject, and then it has what it thinks about that subject, but "what it thinks" doesn't sit in the…
There Is No Antimemetics Division reminded me why I keep coming back to speculative fiction. Here's a short excerpt from qntm's novel There Is No Antimemetics Division : Kim is so deeply buried in work at his terminal and the airlock is so quiet that he almost doesn't notice when it starts to cycle open again. "We need to check you for notes," he begins, but then he sees that Marion Wheeler is…
Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone reboot is a bizarre time capsule of issues liberals said they cared about in 2019. Just five years on, many of them seem unspeakable at the highest level of politics. What insights into this rapid about-face can we glean from its first season? I watched the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone--the original Twilight Zone I mean--entirely by accident. The sketchy…
Hey, you see the recent output from Jon McNaughton, painter of all values traditional and all aesthetics that uphold the Western Tradition? Yeah, is it just me or is it starting to look a little... you know... degenerate? Jon McNaughton! Painter of melodramatic christian nationalist right wing agitprop! He perplexes me because he seems to misunderstand his own aesthetic process, his art gets more…
Isn't it weird how many stories lately feature villains trying to tap into alternate or simulated realities to reunite with loved ones? Let's take a tour of this multiverse full of dead relatives and what they have to say about our cultural moment. There's a weird proliferation of media about the specific desire to travel to an alternate timeline or simulated reality to retrieve a dead loved one.…
Our culture is saturated with superhero stories, but as those stories turn towards action adventure narratives it's up to a detective story and an epic vampire horror serial to ask "just what is a hero?" For all that superhero media dominates our cultural moment, little of it feels interested in heroism as a concept to interrogate. I can sort of understand the turn away from heroism as a subject…
The Auteur as a figure in entertainment is dead. Grown strong on digital production, a more artistically bankrupt creature emerges in their place. It is the Executive Auteur, and it's coming soon to a theater near you, whether you like it or not. Scrolling twitter, avoiding thinking too hard about the deadline for this article, I come across a promotion for an AI "reshooting" technology that…
Happy Friday 13th! In the middle of January, we have to face the facts. Halloween indeed... ends. Send the season out at last with my top horror movies of all time. At long last, the Ghostwatch horror marathon comes down to my top 35 films. 34. The Lost Boys (1987) 33. Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) 32. The Lighthouse (2019) 31. Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972) 30. Scream, Queen! My…
The seasonal countdown of horror movies continues, with werewolves as romantic metaphor, the horror of adolescence, and a bunch of films whose place on this list is real unstable. Where were we? Oh yes : 58. Kwaidan (1964) 55. Tragedy Girls (2017) 54. The Blob (1988) 53. Gojira (1954) 52. Cure (1997) 51. NOPE (2022) Nope is the first Jordan Peele film I've ever seen, and objectively it should be…
Over the last few years, I've watched close to 100 horror movies. Now, to escape the nightmare of the holidays, I'm ranking them. All of them. The waning part of the year, with its compounding stressors, layers of psychic damage, and reduced sunlight, broadly sees my mental health take a nosedive. I'll take the autumn over early winter anytime you like, though. In autumn I can at least be…
A single joke tweet dropped pharma giant Eli Lilly's stock value by $15,000,000,000. Inside the aesthetics and strategies of Parafiction: the hoax as activist art. Content warnings for: discussion of anti-queer violence, chemical spills, medical oppression, corporate malevolence. Earlier this month, a verified account for pharma giant Eli Lilly tweeted, simply, "We are excited to announce insulin…
Prometheus was supposed to be Ridley Scott's triumphant return to making films about Aliens. Instead, we got a film full of necromancers, ghosts, and zombies. What can we make of this frustrating, tantalizing film? "This is the worst kind of movie, really," Sarah sighed to me the other night, "one that begs you to imagine another, better movie." We've encountered a lot of films like that lately,…
The anime Dance Dance Danseur dwells on the angst of conforming to standards of performance--of art, and of gender. Why does its protagonist seek out the pain of classical ballet training? "I want you to look at me... I'll dance, so please, give Rothbart--give *me*--wings." Dance Dance Danseur opens with a young boy, bored in a dance recital, suddenly transfixed by a male classical ballet dancer's…
As generations age out of our youth valorizing culture, but find no purchase in our political gerontocracy, what form does the art of those too old to rock and roll and too young to die take? Let me quickly sketch a picture of culture. We have in many ways a profoundly youth-oriented culture of young beautiful action stars and young beautiful pop stars. I'm painting with a broad brush here, so…
AI art is here. How the hell are artists actually supposed to respond? If proposed answers all feel like dead ends, maybe it's time to look beyond art: to politics. Honestly though what more could I say? AI art emerges from the chrysalis slowly but determinedly whether or not there's a stable critical platform to receive it, and after three articles I'm starting to feel a bit like I'm muttering to…
As AI advances, the hype machine advances faster. Its boosters and detractors agree: AI Art can grant all your wishes. This hyperbolic discourse hides the truth about our tech-mediated culture: we're being sold cheap knockoffs of our desires. In the twitter replies to one of my earlier AI and Art articles, someone enthusiastically touted the ability of DALL-E to produce imaginary product designs.…
Throw out the science fictions about intelligent robots. To understand AI art we don't need to get lost in press release fantasies, we need to understand the century-old art that paved the way for Dall-E. If GAN and other procedural forms of art seem to demand new forms of criticism, we might have to give up on them coming from the arts press. They're busy and distracted imagining they're in a…
AI art programs are taking the internet by storm. But can the products of GANs like DALL-E or Midjourney ever be more than a cool tech demo? Where is the art in AI art? God, it's hard to write about being bored. It's boring to write about boredom. It's boring to read boring writing about boredom. Definitions are boring. Citing how Webster's Dictionary defines art would bore me to tears. I might…
The Batman tries to find stark moral black and whites in a world of muddy greys. Why is the film's script so frightened of the ambiguity its cinematography creates? I kind of hate the closing monologue in The Batman. The titular Batman explains the very important lesson he's learned during the movie: that just being "Vengeance" is not enough, that he has "to give people hope". After a terrorist…
NFT boosters try to claim the Blockchain is for every kind of artist. But what practices lie off the edge of the cryptoart map? Having a map, even a rough, personal one of the aesthetic space of cryptoart , can help make conflicts clearer, but it can also create a false picture of unity. A big dense chart acts like an impressive net, a dramatic atlas. There's so much stuff on this map, after all,…