Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre. And the river was there—fascinating—deadly—like a snake. Ough! —Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstances of the “double” being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since left behind, and one, no doubt, in which it wore a more friendly aspect. The “double” has become a vision of terror, just as after the fall of their religion the gods took on daemonic shapes. —Freud, The Uncanny

Listen: walls can speak. The walls of our homes speak to us in voices so familiar don’t hear them anymore. An empty bedroom cries out for a bed and dresser and we dutifully put them there; the kitchen gets messy and we clean it up before the flies come out. The very familiarity of these rooms dulls our senses and lulls us to sleep. A critic who cannot reawaken their ears to the voice of a space will not understand Backrooms. They will see an interconnected series of ugly, yellow hallways lit with hideous fluorescents and nothing more. But for those with ears to hear, the Backrooms scream out, and have so much to say.

Directed by Kane Parsons from a script by Will Soodik, Backrooms is a fundamentally incoherent film. Parsons, who is only 20 years old, began making YouTube shorts set in “The Backrooms” when he was 16, posting the first in early 2022. By 2023, major studios were looking into adapting his work slash the greater Backrooms concept as it originated on 4chan and developed through various creepypastas. Because of Parsons’ age and lack of development experience, I take it, A24 basically hired him as director and took care of the rest themselves. They recruited Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve and handed him the script. “The script is the place where I consistently had the least creative control,” Parsons told Interview Magazine. “If I could go back in time, I would have liked spending more time developing it, but there was a narrow window where we either made the film or we didn’t.” This yielded a final film often at odds with itself, in which the script constantly tries to move toward conventional character beats and plot resolutions, while at the same time Parsons attempts to assert a vision very much at odds with previous generations of filmmakers, both in style and substance.

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That Parsons succeeds in conveying his vision within the confines of the script he was bound to is a testament to his immense filmmaking skill and clarity of purpose. Backrooms is a fascinating document of an industry undergoing immense stress and change and is a preview, I think, into the future of film as it will be understood by generations raised within the logic of video games and the internet.

No spaces speak as loudly, or at least as overtly, as virtual spaces. It is often neglected just how much video games are an architectural medium. From the dawn of the 3D era with Super Mario 64, game designers have closed players up in little boxes and set them loose to run around. These virtual playgrounds demand things from the player. At this point video games have a fairly developed grammar that operates entirely through the medium of space. Some of this is obvious—when Mario walks into Peach’s Castle, he is met with a foyer, empty but for the many doors leading off it. This space, ostensibly a home, has been problematized by Bowser’s takeover and is now hostile, challenging Mario to open each door and overcome the challenges within.

I could tell instantly that Parsons is a gamer. His filmmaking, while elegant and functional (the movie looks great), operates according to a logic of space and architecture that is unmistakably inherited from video games. It’s quite hard to quite articulate what I mean but it’s just so clear to me that when Parsons shoots down a hallway he does not see the hallway of a house he’s lived in, he sees a corridor of the Black Mesa Research Facility. This is, to be clear, perfect for the project. Backrooms faces a major storytelling hurdle in that any sane person would take one step into the Backrooms and flee immediately because it is so viscerally repellent and eerie.

The Backrooms are not a place you want to be. But being in a video game is a fraught proposition to begin with. The hardest thing to do in a video game is stand still. If you try to, Sonic taps his foot impatiently and Mario eventually falls asleep. Video games are a medium of motion; all video game spaces are made to be moved through. Until recently most games did not allow the main character to sit on a chair—more do now but why?, as long as I’m sitting there I’m not touching the controller, not playing the game. So, when Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) stumbles into the Backrooms, Parsons takes it for granted that he would start exploring. Clark looks at the sprawling, disjointed tableau of his entrypoint in the Backrooms and obviously, Parsons postulates, wants to know what’s around that corner and the next and the next.

This contradiction between exploring and inhabiting a space is what makes the Backrooms such a compelling and terrifying proposition to me. By their very presence, the Backrooms challenge anyone who finds themself there to explore but they are an (effectively? literally?) infinite maze—moving through them in a meaningful sense is impossible because there is no progress toward infinity and nowhere else at which to arrive. And with every step one takes, every corner turned and door stepped through, one gets farther from a way out, risking getting lost and becoming an unwilling inhabitant of a space impossible to inhabit.

The German word Freud uses for “uncanny” is unheimliche, or, quite literally, “unhomelike.” Heimliche connotes coziness, safety, familiarity, but also contains a secondary sense of secret and hidden away. The concept itself is constantly in danger of running away from itself, that which is heimliche tipping over into unheimliche. The unheimliche is thus something familiar rendered unfamiliar, something thought to be benign shown to hold sinister depths. It occurs to me that video games are bursting with spaces like this, such as Peach’s Castle and particularly Black Mesa, but many others as well.

In Backrooms, Clark is a divorced, failed architect running a furniture showroom. It is 1990. The store has been experiencing weird power fluctuations. One night (Clark is living in the store), he goes down to the darkened below-ground floor of the store where the fusebox is. As he moves to leave, he looks at a blank stretch of wall and sees… a seam—a straight line of light peeking through. He moves an inch and he loses sight of it. He’s found another phenomenon familiar to gamers, a gap between polygons and the possibility of getting out of bounds. He presses to the wall and falls right through; the whole texture has lost its collision. On the other side he finds the Backrooms, which, with their convention center conference room look and the piles of duplicated furniture, he takes to be some bizarre extension of his store. This is so perfect I could scream—what could be more heimliche—or rather, what could cue the viewer to the disjunction between canny and uncanny—than a furniture store its owner is squatting in, and what could be more unheimliche than that space reduplicated endlessly, maniacally, hidden away behind the wall waiting to be discovered?

Backrooms would not work as a film if the Backrooms were inert. If the viewer felt nothing upon Clark’s first visit, the movie would be over. But the Backrooms are so alive. The Backrooms speak. The Backrooms scream with a silent fury. Two voices speak at once. One says, leave now, this place is not for you, you have stumbled into something not meant for mortal eyes. We know this voice is telling the truth. This place is wrong, this place is death. The other voice says, come in, come in, I can offer you everything you’ve ever wanted, all you need do is explore. The Backrooms repulse us, but we can’t turn back.

Clark’s first foray into the Backrooms ends with him rushing back to the exit after he comes into near-contact with something else in there, something violent and dangerous. Yet he returns with his employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), armed with a camcorder. This trip ends (predictably) badly for Kat and Bobby and ambiguously for Clark. We return to his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve, heart eyes emoji), who receives a cryptic voicemail from Clark that amounts to “Don’t look for me, I’ve found where I belong.” Between his first and second excursion Clark tried to tell Mary about the Backrooms but she of course thought he was delusional. Now concerned, she goes to the furniture store, finds the doorway, and enters the Backrooms.

This is where Parsons vision of a Backrooms film and Soodik’s script are most at odds with each other. After a good hour of vibing out, Soodik thinks he needs to scaffold a bit more narrative and integrate character traits with the themes. He gives us pretty directly Heart of Darkness For Indoor Kids. Mary, our Marlow, goes looking for Clark, who has become one with his environment and gone mad, like Kurtz. He chokes her unconscious and she awakens tied to a chair in a freaky simulacrum of a suburban kitchen/dining room. He tells her the Backrooms are made of memory and the memory degrades as it’s remembered over and over, a Xerox of a Xerox, ad infinitum. Mary tells him she has no idea how to fix his problems because he can’t face the fact that his life has fallen apart because of his choices and actions.

Their conversation is interrupted by the monster who stalked Clark earlier—it is a gigantic Cap’n Clark, the pirate mascot of his store, whom we saw Clark in costume as to shoot a humiliating local commercial. Clark tells the pirate, “It’s okay, she says we don’t have to change.” This is all good and thematically coherent. Clark is unable to change. His self-destructive tendencies are what Freud called repetition-compulsion:

How exactly we can trace back the uncanny effect of such recurrent similarities to infantile psychology is a question I can only lightly touch… It must be explained that we are able to postulate the principle of a repetition-compulsion in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the tendencies of small children.

Clark is a prisoner of his repetition compulsion, which explains why the Backrooms drew him so powerfully: they are a space of ultimate repetition, where that compulsion would find free play and the illusion that it might be sated.

But then Cap’n Clark lifts Clark, bites viciously into his shoulder and breaks him like a toy. With Clark’s death, the idea of the Backrooms as instantiated memory begins to collapse. Shouldn’t Cap’n Clark be a creation of Clark’s mind? In a conventional film, the Backrooms would be entirely a construction of Clark’s unconscious, meaning that they could not survive his death. But also, that he shouldn’t be able to die within the world he has constructed. But the Backrooms are not amenable to this sort of economy of storytelling and neither is Parsons. The Backrooms are an objective space—they are real—and Clark and Mary are incidental to them, mere interlopers. Therefore both Cap’n Clark and the Backrooms can survive Clark’s death, leading to what I can’t deny is a pretty amazing chase sequence through Backrooms that look like walled in neighborhood streets with facades that open onto further corridors, shifting from homelike spaces to liminal hallways and back.

The thing that strikes me about Clark’s death is that he is afforded no redemption. Kurtz, dying on Marlow’s boat, cries out “The horror! The horror!” and redeems himself in Marlow’s eyes. Marlow believes that in the end Kurtz came to some true knowledge:

I was within a hair’s-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the conviction of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and hate.

Clark gains no such insight and finds no such redemption. But how could he? His gaze could never encompass the universe—he’s locked inside.

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The timeline of the Backrooms phenomenon cannot be ignored. The original post appeared in 2019 and Parsons began making his web series in 2022. In between, when Parsons was 15, the pandemic and its year of lockdown happened. I missed both Eddington and Weapons so Backrooms stands for me as the most profound reckoning with Covid I’ve seen on-screen.

Mary’s backstory stands in here: as a child her mother was mentally ill and eventually institutionalized. Before that she kept Mary locked in the house, newspaper covering the windows, warning her that it was dangerous outside and she could never go out there. She is keeping them holed up even as the city moves to demolish their house. The flashback ends with their front door exploding inward—an unmistakable vision of the virus finding us even as we kept isolated.

When Mary steps into the Backrooms, she has come home. Where Clark saw an expression of his repetition compulsion, Mary sees her childhood trauma. She knows the horror of a windowless room, knows what happens to your mind when it’s deprived of the sun too long. I’ve not found an interview where Parsons mentions the pandemic but to me it seems pretty obvious he started making his Backrooms shorts when he did as a form of processing what he and we all endured during that time.

Part of what I find so terrifying about the Backrooms is the sense that in this place, the rules do not apply. Such a place I dub a Zone of Encounter, for with the rules of everyday life suspended meeting another person comes with the possibility of types of interactions beyond what convention and civilization allow. One might also encounter oneself in new and profound ways in such a space. History and literature are full of such spaces—to leave one’s life behind to heed the call is the essence of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. But traditional Zones of Encounter have been, for instance, the battlefield, the frontier, or, problematically, colonial Africa. It is a grim portent that a filmmaker raised fully within the developed internet and the post-9/11 security state, when seeking to conjure such a mythic space, would imagine not endless vistas but an empty warren of twisting nothingness.

The fundamental question that sustains our attention throughout Backrooms is: “What are the Backrooms?” For me, with my fixations, the answer is so glaringly obvious it threatens to shut down my critical faculties. The Backrooms are the ὑποκείμενον. This word, which we can transliterate as hypokeimenon, means substrate, literally “underlying thing.” I’ve been fascinated by the idea ever since I learned the word—that there is something undergirding our reality, a substance or set of principles upon which everything else relies for existence and coherence. I swear one of the Pre-Socratics speaks of it. Whereas it seems every religious and mystic tradition envisions transcendence and enlightenment as a journey upward, seeking for the ὑποκείμενον is a descent toward the bones of reality. I think I find Kant so intuitive because his whole project is dancing around such an idea and his conception of our intuitions of time and space constitute a sort of substrate of human perception, while simultaneously proscribing the possibility we could ever access the true ὑποκείμενον of the world, as it would be the ultimate form of the thing-in-itself.

When I look at the Backrooms I see a very specific type of substrate, again pulled from the world of video games. I see an asset dump. I see the area under the map where all the objects and architecture are stored as a reference. I see that scary tab in the Excel spreadsheet holding all the values that will break the entire program if you touch anything. I see Garry’s Mod. I see Glitch City from Pokémon Red.

It is hard for me to imagine a more nihilistic vision of the ὑποκείμενον than this. Instead of a reservoir of infinite understanding, a glimpse of the secret truth of existence, the Backrooms represent the ultimate truth of the cosmos as the maximally banal. There is no secret—the world is just objects placed haphazardly in space, pulled out of storage as need be.

But it’s worse than that actually, because the Backrooms don’t appear to be a repository of possibility. Rather, the Backrooms seem to say that everything and everywhere reduce to blank walls and featureless chairs. It is, in a word, a ὑποκείμενον of slop. The Backrooms devour every object and place and grind them down into pure homogeneity. Any attempt to create something of beauty or meaning is just delusion and self-indulgence—no matter how much you manipulate the clay or paint the canvas, at its heart your masterpiece is nothing but crumbling yellow wallpaper.

The Backrooms are a double to our world. Of the double Freud writes:

The idea of the “double” does not necessarily disappear with the passing of the primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of development of the ego. A special faculty is slowly formed there, able to oppose the rest of the ego, with the function of observing and criticizing the self and exercising a censorship within the mind, and this we become aware of as our “conscience.”... The fact that a faculty of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object—the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation—renders it possible to invest the old idea of a “double” with a new meaning and to ascribe many things to it, above all, those things which seem to the new faculty of self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of the earliest period of all.

The Backrooms thus function as a criticism of our reality. A substrate that manifests so dismally must reflect a certain dismalness already present.

There is a sequence in Backrooms. When Mary falls unconscious, we see a vision of her childhood home as it was. The camera tracks down through the floor into another version of the same room, but the furniture is starting to warp and sink into the floor. The camera continues downward to a third iteration, a fourth, on and on. All the furniture vanishes. Then the windows and light fixtures, save a bare bulb. Soon it is a perfectly empty room. On next pass a crack opens in a wall. It becomes a gap, then a black hallway.

Liz and I were out at dinner the other night. I forget even what I told her, maybe Elon becoming a trillionaire, who knows, and she replied, “It feels like everything is just degrading more and more.” As she said it I thought of that montage of Mary’s home. For a filmmaker Parsons’ age, this is what the world looks like, this is what the future looks like. Emptier and emptier, harsher and harsher, opening onto a great and terrible darkness.

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recently republished a nice piece asking, as his headline put it, “must computers play games?” He asks us to imagine playing a war simulation video game, in which we, say, execute drone strikes on enemy targets. We would do so with no hesitation or moral qualms because we know it to be a game, therefore not real. Now imagine, Prassas continues, we were then informed it had not been a game but had been real, and we had personally pulled the trigger on real bombings—we would be overwhelmed with horror and revulsion. (It’s unclear if Nik is aware this is [spoiler alert] exactly the plot of Ender’s Game, but I digress). The sequence of events and actions taken by the operator are precisely the same in either case; the only thing to distinguish them is what Prassas calls “the almost infinite difference in moral gravity,” a human feeling inaccessible to a computer. This is troubling because increasingly computers are carrying out drone strikes. If the only thing to distinguish the situations is a human sense, we have to ask if the computer can conceptualize the difference between a game and real life.

Another way of thinking about that question is—can a computer understand the specific difference in what I have called (in an admittedly rather vague way) the “moral gravity” of, for example, taking a pawn on a chessboard and taking a life on the battlefield. After all, they do both with equally sublime and inhuman efficiency.

Or, more simply—must computers play games?

If the answer to that question is yes, then we may want to think about how much of our decision-making we hand over to systems that suffer from this walled-up-ness in their own operational field without any possibility of transcendence—systems that are so different in their inner workings that they would not even understand the question.

I am currently in the midst of an exceptional book called Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation by Joseph Weizenbaum, published in 1976. I have not yet finished the book and will have more to say about it later, presumably as the basis for my Masterpiece Polemic Against the Evils of AI. For now I have a more limited point to make regarding the first several chapters, in which Weizenbaum begins from first principles to explain how computer language and programming fundamentally work. His explanations leave no room for doubt in answering Nik’s question: Computers can do nothing but play games.

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Joseph Weizenbaum was a pioneer of early computer programming who created the world’s first chatbot. Running on the early IBM 7094 computer and first demonstrated in 1966, he named it ELIZA “because, like the Eliza of Pygmalion fame, it could be taught to ‘speak’ increasingly well.” Weizenbaum considers the creation of ELIZA no great accomplishment and is emphatic that its basic game of pattern-recognition and mimicry constituted no understanding on its part (let alone consciousness) and was disturbed by the emotional investment, anthropomorphism, and “powerful delusional thinking” it provoked in its conversational partners.

This was to be the catalyst for the the great shift in his thinking that would occupy the rest of his life, leading to his book a decade later and its thesis, which he articulates succinctly in the introduction as follows: “There are important differences between men and machines as thinkers. I would argue that, however intelligent machines may be made to be, there are some acts of thought that ought to be attempted only by human beings.”

A machine, Weizenbaum tells us, is the embodiment of a law. With mechanical machines these laws are a subset of the laws of nature—a steam engine that turns a turbine or moves a train embodies and enacts the relevant laws of thermodynamics. Barring a breakdown or a revision of its design, a machine will follow its law absolutely:

We set a punch press into motion, and it mangles the hand of a worker who gets too close to it. The very regularity of the machine is its most fearsome property. We put it to its task and it performs, regularly to be sure, but blindly as well. When we say that justice is blind, we mean to commend it as being almost a machine that performs its function without regard to irrelevant facts—but facts nonetheless. To blind justice, whether the prisoner before the bar is rich or poor or is a man or is a woman is irrelevant. To the punch press, whether the material in its jaws is a piece of metal or a worker’s hand is irrelevant. Like all machines, blind justice and punch presses do only what they are made to do—and that they do exactly.

This quality of regularity, of adherence to its law, allows for a more expansive definition of a machine beyond simply mechanical contraptions. A bureaucracy, for instance, is often characterized (derogatorily) as a machine for its rigid adherence to procedure. Freed from the constraints physics imposes on mechanical machines and those ethics imposes on a social machine, we enter the realm of abstract machines. Put another way, an abstract machine is a set of rules and procedures producing an outcome that is also abstract. And, in fact, people have designed and operated abstract machines for thousands of years: we call them games.

A good game is one whose rules are complete yet permissive. The fun is in choosing novel actions and strategies secure in the knowledge we will not stumble into a situation for which no applicable rule exists. This isn’t far off from C. Thi Nguyen’s formulation that the joy of gameplay is exercising agency within a simplified and structured environment, which I’ve written about previously.

In a game, rules amount to the set of permissible states of play and whether it is permissible to move from a given one to another. Weizenbaum uses chess as his primary example, which is purely abstract except insofar as the rules specify time limits on turns—that constitutes its sole point of contact with the real world. The rules of chess specify the board and its number of spaces, the pieces and their movement, the initial setup, capturing pieces, and various required actions like getting out of check. These rules add up to the set of possible actions a player can take on their turn, or put another way, the possible state-changes that would take board state A to any number of board states B. Any appeal to a judge during a chess tournament should not involve any judgment because the rules are complete—the only question that can be asked is “Is this move legal?” for which there should be a definitive answer that can be consulted.

But we could imagine a “game” with no permissiveness at all, in which a rule exists for every game-state that dictates the state-change to occur and the new state to be reached. Weizenbaum asks us to imagine a game consisting of a roll of toilet paper, several black stones, an indefinite number of white stones, and a die. We set up some white stones bracketed by black stones, an empty space, and then the same again, with one black stone set above a square as a marker. The game has 18 distinct states determined by whether the marker stone is over a white stone, a black stone, or an empty square along with the number on the die (3 marker positions x 6 die positions = 18 states). We write a set of rules specifying the action to be taken for each of these states: which way to move the marker and which side of the die to select next. There is no choice to be had here; these are not rules that bound the possibilities of gameplay, they are a rigid set of instructions that continue until the “game” ends, or rather, until the machine we have constructed has carried out its task, which in this case is to combine the two groups of white stones into one larger group. What this game is, in fact, is a primitive adding machine, a single-operation calculator.

Weizenbaum then demonstrates how we can build a trinary language out of these game states. It’s a bit laborious to explain but basically if we denote the black stones as X, the white stones as 1, and the empty spaces as 0, we can diagram a game state as something like X11X000111X (this state expresses 2+3). Then, and this is the crucial part, we can translate all of our state change rules into this same alphabet, building a table of instructions capable of dictating state-change rules within the same language as the game-state itself.

A formal language is a game. That is not a mere metaphor but a statement asserting a formal correspondence. But if that statement is true, we should, when talking about a language, be able to easily move back and forth between a game-like vocabulary and a corresponding language-like vocabulary. Precisely that can be done.

The rules of our game constitute what Alan Turing called an “effective procedure.” Our game is a simple machine that can do one thing. The crux of Turing’s work was to theorize and prove possible a universal machine capable of translating and imitating the effective procedure of any other single-purpose machine. A universal Turing machine is thus, essentially, a machine that can read any set of rules and play the game they specify. Almost tautologically then, we could say that a computer is a machine that can be programmed.

But Weizenbaum knew what he was doing when he started this explanation with game-states. He took those game states and represented them in trinary code and rewrote his rules in trinary code as well, and we might call that code a language but it is crucial to remember that language constitutes a set of board configurations and nothing else. Within the language of the adding machine, there is nothing but the adding machine—no larger world and no question of anything other than game-states. In other words, we have constructed a language consisting wholly of syntax and nothing at all of meaning:

We have seen that the very idea of an effective procedure is inextricably tied up with the idea of language. Isn’t it odd that I could have spent so much time discussing language without ever alluding to meaning? The reason I have been able to avoid confronting the concept of meaning is that I have been discussing only formal languages or, as I have said, abstract games. Not that meaning plays no role whatever in such language games. It does. But this role is entirely subsumed in the transformation rules of the language… It is a property of formal languages, indeed, it is their essence, that all their transformation rules are purely syntactic, i.e., describe permissible rearrangements of strings of symbols in the language, including replacements of symbols and introductions of new symbols independent of any interpretation such symbols may have outside the framework of the language itself. One can, for example, do pages of algebraic transformations, following the rules of algebra blindly, without ever having to know that one may substitute numbers for lowercase letters but not for parentheses, in other words, without ever giving any interpretations to the symbols one is dealing with.

So, just to recapitulate, all computing is a form of gameplay, one that happens within a closed linguist environment that contains no meaning and makes it impossible to say anything about the world outside it or even to conceive of it at all. When people say LLMs are just probable-output machines that have no conception of their interlocutors or what their responses actually mean, this is what they are talking about. It’s not simply that they have no conception of these things, at their current level of development, but that they cannot have such conceptions because it runs counter to the fundamental natural of computer programming. Blindness and meaninglessness are built into the machine at the deepest possible level.

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I find this profoundly disturbing! Weizenbaum’s book is fifty years old now. Obviously the world has been computerized to an extraordinary degree in the interim, which is to say that more and more parts of our lives have been given over to highly sophisticated systems of blind symbol manipulation. As time passes and the non-computerized world fades farther into the past, it becomes harder in certain ways to notice the character of the computerized world. Or rather, we might ask, what forms of activity and thought are engendered and encouraged by the ubiquity of computation and programming, by a world that runs on scripts?

My starting Computer Power and Human Reason overlapped with finishing Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake’s Gothic fantasy sequel to Titus Groan.1 These stories take place within the colossal, crumbling estate of Gormenghast, a self-contained world that operates like a clockwork mechanism of centuries-old ritual. Reading Weizenbaum and Peake in conjunction I couldn’t help seeing Gormenghast as a living computer. The entire life of the castle is dictated by the Tomes of Ritual, with all contingencies accounted for. Early in Gormenghast we see a ritual meant to be performed one way in sunshine, another in rain. Only the Master of Ritual—first Sourdust, then Barquentine—is capable of interpreting the Tomes at all. But all of it is dead mummery—whatever it originally symbolized or celebrated was lost to memory centuries earlier, leaving only empty forms. The inhabitants of Gormenghast give their lives over to embodying these abstractions and are so fully subsumed within its symbols and empty language they have no access to real life. The only person who recognizes this is Titus, the young Earl, who rebels, Peake says very explicitly, because he cannot tolerate the meaninglessness of all his responsibilities.2

I can’t be the only one who feels it. That dread that we’re not as far from Gormenghast as we’d like to believe. We program our computers and they program society. This societal programming has expressed itself in several ways: as regimentation and discipline intent on snuffing out spontaneity in daily life, as a cratering void where meaning once was, and as a sneaking unseriousness as even decisions with life-and-death stakes have been infected with a sense that it’s all just a game.

Examples abound. Friend of the newsletter recently wrote a perceptive piece about the ideology of the New York Times and its political coverage, trying to understand why it’s all so exhaustingly vibes-oriented: “It is simply impossible for them to report on a political event without adding some reflection on the potential effects. Nor can they allow themselves to focus on the real-world effects of political decisions on people outside the political class. It’s all about the self-contained game of struggling for advantage, taken simply for its own sake. Every statement, every factual claim, is a move in that game and is assessed as such.” This is spot-on but we might ask from where this idea of politics as game originates, and why it has taken hold at this moment in history. I would argue its origins are two-fold—stemming from a deep intuition of all systems and actions as game-like that has accrued over the past fifty years, and reinforced by the actions and attitudes of our elected officials who treat national politics, on the one hand, with the flippancy and trollishness of an uninterested board game participant or, on the other, as a completely determined process in which their role is simply a relay toward generating the expected output.

In finance: Weizenbaum discusses how early computers were seen as arriving miraculously just in time to save a banking system that was groaning under the weight of multiplying quantities of checks that clerks could not process by legally mandated deadlines. Fast forward to the days before the 2008 financial crisis, in which bankers bundled their assets into elaborate Jenga towers, all while assuring regulators these new securities were both too complex to scrutinize with the human mind but also completely safe in the hands of their automated systems.

Would it be going to far to overlay the timeline of early computing onto the timeline of neoliberalism’s rise, beginning with Pinochet’s coup in 1971, and come to see neoliberalism in its entirety as both epiphenomenon and reinforcer of computerization? I will invoke another great piece by Adam, published just yesterday, discussing people’s willingness to give over every aspect of their lives and decisionmaking to AI and how we recreate the regimes of competition that govern our entire society in our daily lives:

All of these metrics, all this pointless and yet endless competition, stems from the quest to recreate society on the model of the market. That is to say, yes, we are still living in the aftermath of neoliberalism… The neoliberal theorists were very clear on this: the reason to make the market the center of society was to ensure that there could never be human agency or control. The benefit of market outcomes is not ultimately that they are more efficient or serve the greater good or whatever other propaganda one might derive from dorm-room libertarianism (the neoliberalism of fools). The benefit of market outcomes is that they are impersonal, inhuman. They are no individual’s responsibility, which means that no individual can ever assert their agency over them.

They weren’t afraid of Communist central planning because it was unworkable or inefficient or unfair—they were afraid that it would work. They were terrified at the prospect of human beings taking control over the conditions of their lives and livelihoods, and they gradually built a shell around every government and institution on earth to make sure that could never happen. It was a slow and gradual process, but its result was equivalent to dropping a bomb on human autonomy.

Of course, no one unites and embodies all the qualities of computing-as-game like the reigning avatar of tech, Elon Musk. He is a perfect output of the system and its greatest indictment. Musk is a master of symbol manipulation whose only real skill is (or was) presenting himself and his products in ways that aligned with larger forces in the zeitgeist. For those of us who concern ourselves with meaning, we saw someone with no principles who slid around the political spectrum and specialized in vaporware. But Musk, viewing all his dealings and press events as syntactical games of empty verbiage—Objective: construct a sequence of words that will make Tesla stock go up—has never seemed troubled in the slightest by hypocrisy or broken promises. Why would he be? None of those things he said actually meant anything.

Once we understand the computer as a machine that’s exceptionally good at manipulating meaningless symbols by laws of pure syntax, LLMs seem like its ultimate and inevitable evolution. Perhaps evolution isn’t the right word. LLMs represent an incredible difference in scale from an IBM 7094 but fundamentally not a difference in kind. This, I think, is the real reason knowing every book and every essay ever written by a human has been used as training data on those models is so upsetting—in a very real way that is a process of taking writing that was labored over to express meaning and feeding it into a machine that destroys meaning as its first operation.

Silicon Valley first introduced AI to the public with the stirring message, “This technology will drive the value of all artistic production down to zero.” As they sought to escalate the “hype” they began promising it would render all human workers obsolete and trigger mass unemployment. Now they dream apocalyptically of a “permanent underclass,” whose inability or unwillingness to embrace AI tools will deservedly condemn them to a life of penury. Many have observed this has been a world-historical messaging misfire. But our analysis renders it legible, I think. They have absorbed the logic of the machine at its deepest level, the logic of the game. And every game has its losers.

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Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy, ten-year career check-up, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou

At this point in the Coen brothers’ career, most critics seem to have gotten the memo they like classic noir. The old interviews I consulted for this piece were peppered with references specifically to James Cain, but none of them really contributed much understanding. It feels like the writers included them as a bit of resume polishing even though they had nowhere to go with the comparison. Not only have we already said more than enough about the Coens’ relationship to noir in this series, in the case of The Man Who Wasn’t There the comparison misses mark. Undeniably there is some great shadow work in the filmmaking and an infidelity plot, but otherwise nothing else fits the comparison.

Fortunately for me, Joel Coen agrees with me. “Like the domestic melodrama that turns into a crime story, it owes a lot to Cain,” he told Andrew Pulver at The Guardian. “But there are ways in which it’s not film noir: for one thing, the main character couldn’t be further from your conventional film noir hero, in terms of his obsessions and personality… It’s got all that modern dread, that feeling of disassociation and paranoia about what’s happening in the world about you. Also foreground in our thinking were science fiction films from the ‘50s, all the postwar paranoia things.”

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After being flummoxed following my initial viewing, this quotation unlocked the film for me. The Man Who Wasn’t There is a film about seeing, being seen, and being unseen. Its characters are alienated from themselves and from the world around them in ways they can’t begin to articulate. Like a cornered animal they hold themselves absolutely still, awaiting an attack that comes from everywhere and nowhere.

Billy Bob Thornton agreed to star in The Man Who Wasn’t There when Joel told him, “It’s about a barber who wants to be a dry cleaner.” Though it sounds like a joke, we need to take this description seriously. Ed Crane’s role as “the barber” is central to the film and its paradoxes. The first thing we learn about Ed, via Thornton’s voiceover narration, is that he never considered himself a barber; he “stumbled into it, married into it” when he got together with his wife, Doris (Frances McDormand). His brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco) talks constantly as he works; Crane continues in voiceover, “Me? I don’t talk much. I just cut the hair.”

“Even though there’s a crime in this story, we were still interested in what this guy, who’s a barber, does as a barber,” Joel told Kristine McKenna in an interview for the November 2001 issue of Playboy. “We wanted to examine exactly what the day-to-day was like for a guy who gives haircut after haircut.”

So, what does it mean to be a barber, and specifically a men’s barber? On the one hand, your work is highly visible atop all your clients’ heads. But, on the other, the real function of a men’s haircut is to be essentially invisible. After a single day of people noticing you’ve gotten a trim, no one should have cause to comment on your hair until the next time. A man’s haircut can only attract attention for negative reasons. Like a great film editor, a barber’s work can be judged on how little it’s noticed at all.

This dynamic extends to the figure of the barber himself. He is there in the shop every day, visible from the street through the wide front glass, but he is, essentially, part of the furniture. Early in the film James Gandolfini’s character, Big Dave Brewster, with whom Doris is having an affair, tells Ed he should come down to the department store he runs to update his suit. But then he catches himself: “Of course, you’re in the smock all day.” Clothes make the man; the smock makes him a chair.

It seems at first glance that inhabiting this contradiction has broken Ed in some fundamental way. He sits perfectly still. He speaks only when required to. The persistence of eyes upon him all day—here we return to that 50s paranoia—seems to have imposed this discipline upon him. Seeking refuge from the pervasive sense of being watched at all times he has conquered and crushed all his receptivity and responsiveness to the world.

But there are two objections. The first is that he has always been this way, before he became a barber. He tells us that what Doris liked about him from the start was that he didn’t talk too much and it was she who proposed they get married, quite a passive role for him to play in their courtship, particularly for characters living in the 1940s. The second objection is that beneath the stillness it’s clear his inability to participate in the world is a source of profound pain.

And yet there is something seductive about being invisible. Ed will take the one decisive, doomed action of his life after being taken in by obvious flim-flam man Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito) on an opportunity to get into the dry cleaning business. As Tolliver sells it to him, you can wash without water, putting no stress on the clothes and causing no shrinkage. Here we have our counterpoint to barbering. Rather than a haircut that occupies the curious space of simultaneously visible and invisible, dry cleaning is straightforwardly invisible. Stains are removed through a process that leaves no trace, performed in the back of the shop with chemicals of unknown composition. The dry cleaner produces an effect seemingly without cause, acts on the world in way that will never be known afterward.

Dry cleaning is space-age, atomic. It is yet another manifestation of mankind’s new powers of obliteration. Barbering is an endless struggle against growing hair, which speaks to mankind’s insuperable urge toward life and generation. Crane finds this unnerving. He monologues on the subject, asking his brother-in-law, “This hair, you ever wonder about it? How it keeps on coming, it just keeps growing. I mean, it keeps growing… it’s a part of us and we cut it off and throw it away.” The hair is evidence of a life-force that cannot be extinguished, even in someone as frozen as he. He then tells Frank he’s going to take the kid’s hair and bury it out in the dirt: “I’m going to mingle it with common housedirt.” The implication being that he’s going to plant it and see what grows. Like Cadmus planting the dragon’s teeth and begetting the Thebans.

Later he returns to the topic in voiceover: “I thought about what an undertaker had told me once—that your hair keeps growing, for a while anyway, after you die. And then it stops. I thought, what keeps it growing? Is it like a plant in soil? What goes on in soil? The soul? And when does the hair realize it’s gone?”

Why has Ed Crane grown the way he has? What goes on in his soul?

The Coen brothers have so bedeviled their interviewers over the years because no matter their intentions for a film they talk about it the exact same way. It may completely plot-oriented, as in the cases of Blood Simple or Miller’s Crossing; or it may be character-driven, like Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski. Or it may be, as they let slip about Barton Fink, “the development of an idea.” When Joel says “It’s about a barber who wants to be a dry cleaner,” he gives us no indication which approach they’ve taken. Even more than Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There is purely the development of an idea, with plot and character existing only for its sake.

It is intolerable to be invisible. The invisible man eventually finds he must act to assure himself he exists. This action must take the form of rebellion. Simply asserting oneself within the ruling social order is not enough. The social order must be transgressed, and the greater the violation the greater the proof of his existence. When society has imposed invisibility upon an individual or a group, these transgressions are directed at an external foe and can even be righteous and just. In the case of Ed Crane, however, his invisibility originates from deep within himself and his acts of rebellion cannot be other than self-destruction.

But he is not the only character who isn’t all there in the film. Big Dave Brewster has constructed his entire identity around his service in the Pacific theater of WWII. He is boisterous and vulgar and his reputation precedes him. Ed says he supposes “Doris liked all that He-Man stuff.” But eventually we learn all of Dave’s stories and bluster are nothing but hot air—he rode out the war in a shipyard in San Diego and never saw action. He claims he took the cigar knife that Ed kills him with off the body of a Japanese soldier; when we learn his true history it becomes a murder weapon with no provenance either.

After Doris is wrongly arrested for Big Dave’s killing, Ed begins to spend a lot of time with his friend Walter Abundas (Richard Jenkins) and his teenage daughter Rachel, who goes by “Birdy” (Scarlett Johansson). Ed takes a great interest in Birdy and her piano playing because he senses in her a kindred spirit, someone who is also not quite at home in the world, who is missing some vital force as well. Whereas no other character in the movie remembers Ed or his name, on first encountering each other, Birdy does. He doesn’t remember her, which she expects: “It’s okay, you can’t expect to remember every skinny girl who comes in [to the barbershop] with her dad.” When Crane tells her the Beethoven piece she was playing was “quite something,” she replies listlessly, “Yeah, he wrote some beautiful piano sonatas.” A practiced response, not one that stems from real feeling. Johansson’s blank affect is perfect for the role.

He decides that someone needs to help her find her place in the world and that it could be him, helping to manager her music career. At a moment when his wife is nearing trial for murder, Ed is thinking and planning with more energy than we’ve previously seen for the sake of an imagined future with a teenager he barely knows. I really don’t think it’s a sexual thing. He knows firsthand how the world will buffet and trap someone like the two of them, how Birdy’s lack of volition will destroy her. It’s too late for Ed to right his own life but Birdy still has a chance.

Ultimately he takes her to audition for Jacques Carcanogues (Adam Alexi-Malle), a renowned piano teacher in San Francisco. Carcanogues appears only briefly but Alexi-Malle is third-credited at the beginning of the film, following Thornton and McDormand, a clue, I think, to the importance of what he tells Ed.

Carcanogues says that Birdy’s playing was “very polite,” technically correct but lacking in any feeling. “I cannot teach her to have the soul,” he tells him. “Music should come from l’interieur,” he says. “The music should start here,” gesturing at his heart, “should come out through here,” twiddling his fingers, “then perhaps, perhaps!, she can go here,” gesturing broadly to the surrounding world. In his schema, the body is merely a conduit between the external world and the inner soul/mind/Ψυχή, whatever we must call it.

It is not that Birdy and Ed lack souls. They lack something that allows the conduit to function. Ed seems not even uncomfortable in his body so much as totally unacquainted with it, unsure what he’s supposed to do with it. When not required to move by circumstances or social convention he is utterly still, the inner world and the outer allowed to lapse into non-communication. Both Ed and Birdy are powerfully lonely because nothing and no one else can ever make it in to them.

And yet there is a person trapped inside in that sunken place yearning to be free. To be free of the intermediating layers of reality and embodiment that shackle them into silence and numbness. In the final moments of the film, as prison guards lead Ed to the electric chair, they have no idea they are giving him what he needs most of all. The execution room itself dissolves into a stark white void. What Ed Crane needs is to be freed of his body, to become a being of pure energy. He has lived his life in a Kantian prison, tormented by some failure to generate a proper synthetic unity of apperception. Perhaps, he hopes, in the next life he will have access to the thing in itself, be able to express the things in themselves he could never articulate, and be himself, truly and fully.

“I don’t know where I’m being taken,” he tells us. “I don’t know what I’ll find beyond the earth and sky. But I’m not afraid to go. Maybe the things I don’t understand will be clearer there. Like when a fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don’t have words for here.”

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STRAY NOTES AND QUOTES

• I started reading Ulysses last week and it’s already paying off:

• Joel on working with Thornton:

Billy Bob is someone we’ve known for a while, we haven’t worked with him before but we knew him, and… I don’t know why he occurred to us, because he’s not our images of the character. He’s a southern guy from Arkansas, and Ed is not supposed to be that. But on the other hand, Billy Bob’s such a transformative actor—both physically and in every other way—that we started to think that this would be rather interesting. And he certainly has the confidence to do this kind of character. Which, as an actor, you need to [be able to] do it. Because Ed says very little, he’s very still, and that would just drive most actors crazy. They’d be very insecure about it, thinking they weren’t doing enough; we had a feeling that Billy Bob would understand.

• And on a different aspect of his work:

Playboy: On the set, Billy Bob Thorton was giving real haircuts to extras and crew members. Did you get one?

Ethan: Are you kidding?

Joel: No way. We had to hire someone to fix the haircuts he was giving people.

Ethan: The sad thing is he thinks he’s good. He’s like one of those guys who trains to be a boxer for a boxing movie, then thinks he can beat people up.

Joel: We’ve seen some pretty gruesome haircuts.

• Here’s a bit of maximum pedantry. The Playboy article says The Man Who Wasn’t There was “shot in black and white,” but that’s not true. It was shot on color film stock and printed on high-contrast black and white stock. “That’s because no one in the last forty years has developed new black and white film, so you can’t find high-speed, fine-grade black and white stock. No one shoots it anymore.” Can we chalk this up to usage or should I write to the Playboy corrections department?

• I had a whole section planned for this piece relating Ed Crane to the myth of Gyges, as told by Herodotus, but it ultimately didn’t work and I had to cut it. But I will still just note that Gyges is forced to watch Candaules’ wife undress from behind a door. In this movie we see Frances McDormand multiple times in her underclothes, from the bedroom doorway.

• Two more exchanges from the Playboy interview that made me laugh:

Joel: Our moviegoing habits have changed over the past five or six years, mostly because we have kids.

Ethan: We see a lot of kid movies.

Playboy: Is that good or bad?

Ethan: It’s not good.

[...]

Playboy: How did having children change you?

Joel: I certainly see fewer movies.

Playboy: Has it changed your filmmaking at all?

Joel: Mmm. No.

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During his first session with Dr. Melfi in the pilot episode of The Sopranos, Tony says, “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

It’s a mission statement The Sopranos would return to again and again. Where previous mob stories reflected on an America ascendent on the world stage, Tony and his crew represented an empire in decay. The Godfather is a portrait of the mob at the height of its romance and glamour, a world where the bench of quality successors is deep enough that the death of the chosen son (Sonny) is not a death blow to the organization. Part II, with its split structure, shows us both Vito Corleone’s work “on the ground floor,” building ‘this thing of ours’ from nothing in New York City, while also, in the present, Michael pushes the racket west to the next frontier, Las Vegas.

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For Tony, Christopher, Paulie, and the rest, there’s no such luck. Their horizon of possibility has shrunk no wider than their long driveway. They can cling to what they have but that’s about all. When Vito Spatafore manages to get his hands on a government contract, complete with no-show jobs for the guys, he instantly becomes the best earner in the crew; once upon a time every one of these guys would have had their own just like it. Even the basic protection racket is in freefall; one of the great scenes of The Sopranos is when Patsy Parisi and Burt try to set up a weekly envelope with the manager of a new Starbucks and get flatly refused, even after resorting threats of violence: “Look,” the manager tells them, “every last fucking coffee bean is in the computer and has to be accounted for. The numbers don’t add up, I’ll be gone and somebody else will be here.” Leaving, Patsy remarks, “It’s over for the little guy.” Paulie’s sole revenue stream is his sportsbook; one almost can’t help feeling nostalgic for the simple threat of a baseball bat to the knee when you read about the people who have lost everything on Fan Duel and Draft Kings.

They’re all a bunch of freaks. Their thoughts are ugly and backward. Their lives are sordid but they’ve been infected with a WASPish sense of prudery and decorum; part of why Janice and Ralph Cifaretto are so appealing despite their sociopathy is they are able to own what degenerates they are. Their taste is horrid. They are suburbanites, tied down to tacky Jersey McMansions, hardly suited to blaze a way to new territory.

The next generation hardly exists—not that there are opportunities for them. With inter-mob warfare mostly done with they can’t even get made. Best represented by Jackie Aprile Jr., these young guys exist in mob limbo, floating on the periphery, needing a revenue stream to kick up before they’ll be accepted into the inner circle but totally at a loss about how to create one. When Jackie Jr. resorts to sticking up a mob-run poker game it’s a neat metaphor for the snake eating its own tail. Just as the neoliberal agenda ran out of foreign frontiers to exploit and turned its attention back on the imperial core, so too does Jackie Jr. see no market left to exploit but the structures that nurtured and sustained him.

Tulsa King says screw all that. Created by the prolific Taylor Sheridan, the Ryan Murphy for white guys over 60, it is a fantasy in which opportunities are abundant, the feds are impotent, and there’s no problem that can’t be overcome with the power of Italian swagger and friendship.

Sylvester Stallone plays Dwight “The General” Manfredi, a New York capo recently released from a 25-year prison sentence. He expects a grand welcome for the monumental sacrifice he’s made for the organization, enduring that time and never snitching. His reception is icy. He finds his boss Pete has aged into a vacant figurehead puppeted by his venal son Chickie (Domenick Lombardozzi). His reward for his long incarceration? Banishment, under the guise of the opportunity of opening up new territory in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

So Dwight gets on a plane. He arrives in Tulsa with no contacts or accommodations, no assets except his charisma and willingness to threaten horrific violence on anyone who defies him. He talks to his Uber driver Tyson (Jay Will), a young Black man who’s excited to meet a different type of gangster. Dwight offers him a job as his driver. Intrigued by the prevalence of weed stores in Oklahoma, he asks Tyson to pull over at the next one they pass. Inside he finds three sleepy stoners who will get upgraded to full cast members in Season Two. Running the place is Bodhi (Martin Starr, wonderful as always); Dwight tells him they’re partners now, he’ll be back for his twenty percent every week. Bodhi asks if he has any choice in this new arrangement. Dwight cheerfully tells him absolutely not. That evening he gets a whiskey at a roadhouse bar where he meets proprietor/bartender Mitch (Garrett Hedlund, doing his laconic Garrett Hedlund thing), an ex-con who seems wise about the law and the local underworld.

Just like that, The General has a driver, a revenue stream, and a base of operations.1 You see that Tony—is it so hard?

Dwight just can’t stop making friends. He hasn’t been in town long when a masked man pulls up at a stoplight and tries to pop him. Manfredi tracks him down and discovers Armand (Max Casella), another former wise guy who went into Witness Protection. Dwight says Okay, you’re in the crew now too, start kicking up. Armand’s wife wants to skip town but Armand is kinda stoked to do mob stuff again. When his wife gives him an ultimatum, him or me, Armand chooses Dwight and the homies. Wives, they just don’t understand!

For its first season, Sheridan put Tulsa King in the hands of the great Terence Winter,2 who wrote some of the greatest Sopranos episodes, created Boardwalk Empire, and wrote The Wolf of Wall Street. So if we need a direct genetic connection between the two shows to make this thesis work, here it is. Winter had a direct hand in some of the most affecting moments of television ever made and is perfectly happy never, ever giving his characters a win. He knows his Tulsa King cast lives in a fantasy world, knows what an insane narrative cheat it is for Bodhi randomly to reveal he steals crypto and has $10 million to fund the initial expenses of opening a casino. But he knows how to write good dialogue, too, and knows how to build engaging plots for multiple characters. He knows how to ratchet up the tension, even if in this case he’s always going to let up before it gets too uncomfortable. And you know what? I think that’s great. I don’t want every show I watch to require the level of attention I gave to The Sopranos. But it’s really nice for a show at Tulsa King’s level of seriousness to be made with the narrative craft Winter developed there.

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Tulsa King is a show about how fun it is to hang with your boys. If there’s a scene that captures the ethos of the show I think it’s this, from the first season. Bodhi and co. were selling nitrous at a local music festival, unknowingly encroaching on the turf of a biker gang who become the low-wattage antagonists of the season. The bikers beat them up. Dwight says they’re going to get some revenge. Now, at this point, Tyson’s dad, an honest plumber, is strenuously objecting to his son getting mixed up in this criminal enterprise. But, he says, if Tyson’s going to do this, he’s going to do it with him. Let’s go crack some skulls!

I should mention there are women in this show. In the first season Dwight has a fling with an ATF agent who’s Very Conflicted about having feelings for a criminal. This plotline is well done but I never found the actress (Andrea Savage) particularly engaging. His other love interest, who sticks around for the following seasons, is horse girl Margaret (Dana Delaney), who is just sort of cool and unbothered by his line of business. The show can’t decide what it wants to do with her. Whenever Dwight asks, Aren’t you concerned I’m a gangster and a killer, she makes some mysterious comment about how she’s been around the block a few times herself and twinkles in that Hallmark way, bobbing her head and waggling her brows. She’s doing her best with a terribly underwritten role.

Dwight also wants to reconnect with his daughter Tina (Tatiana Zappardino), who has become estranged during his long imprisonment. Like everything else he sets out to do, Dwight quickly wins her over. In Season Two she comes to live with him in Tulsa where they have the same conversation over and over about how she doesn’t want him to get hurt or go back to jail and Stallone grunts that dis is his business, it’s who I am etc. There’s the stereotype of the bad Sopranos fan who only cares about da mob stuff and thinks everything about Tony’s family is dumb and boring. I’m fully team family stuff—if I ever write more at length on The Sopranos it will be about Christopher and Meadow and AJ, three of the most vivid portraits of youth and young adulthood ever done in any medium. Tulsa King, on the other hand, absolutely turns me into that meat-head fan. Every time a Dwight and Tina scene started I would immediately tune out. Tina is unceremoniously banished back to New York for Season Three, byeeee!3

Dwight’s empire grows and grows. First Bodhi introduces him to Jimmy, his Native American business partner who grows their cannabis. Then they turn Mitch’s roadhouse into a casino. At the beginning of season 2, Dwight buys a wind farm for a song. This gets Bodhi’s wheels turning—now they could set up a hydroponic grow operation, powered by their own electricity. They buy a car dealership for Mitch to run. There’s a ton of anticipatory dialogue in the second season—so much Once we get the hydroponic operation up and running I’ll be spending my time there… or You’re going to do great with this dealership once the sale closes… That sort of thing. A lot of moving pieces around the chessboard.

I found it quite odd until I realized, oh, this is the real mob fantasy: that you’re never resting on your laurels, your numbers are always going up, and you do need constantly to reshuffle personnel because there’s so much work to be done. Of course, in being narrative television, Tulsa King has no interest in showing this work get done. We’re not going to go with Bodhi to the grow site unless goons are going to come smash it up or something. The anticipation is the thing. We don’t want to do the work but we love thinking about the payoff. I have unfortunately been playing Stardew Valley again4 and I couldn’t help noticing the similarity. I can’t believe I ever fell so deep into this little farming sim because now I’m finding it so boring. It’s a game that doesn’t really take place on the tv but in your mind. Doing all your farm chores is really dull but the game gains its spark through what you’re anticipating doing later. Just water these crops now and you’ll be able to buy a barn in a couple in-game weeks. Just milk those cows then and you’ll be able to upgrade to an automated dairy. The trick is not noticing you’re on a treadmill, that no matter what you have it’s all about what comes next. Surely business couldn’t be like this too. Don’t tell me capitalism is an endless chase with no finish line!!

All the while, New York is clamoring for its cut of the business. Dwight is adamant: You banished me here, I built this all myself, it’s mine and I owe you nothing. In the second season he runs afoul of Bill Bevilaqua (Frank Grillo) out of Kansas City, apparently established as a mob outpost by Italian pioneers generations earlier (love the implied lore here). Bevilaqua tells Manfredi he works for New York and owes his cut. Dwight responds “I work for no man.”

In that moment I realized the real genius of Tulsa King. In sending a wise guy to the Great Plains, Sheridan and Winter fused two seemingly incompatible figures of American mythology into one person: the mobster and the cowboy.

The two ultimate qualities of American masculinity are Power and Freedom. These can be hard to unite. The mobster, enmeshed within a complex network of familial and community obligations, can become immensely powerful but in doing so trades an equal amount of freedom. The cowboy is the free-est man alive—so long as there remains a real frontier somewhere—but his power doesn’t extend beyond the tip of his barrel. The cowboy truly owns what is his, but it’s not much; the mobster owns a lot but it never belongs to him alone.

Like a grolar bear inheriting the strengths of both grizzly bear and polar bear and the weaknesses of neither, Dwight “The General” Manfredi unites the power of the mobster with the freedom of the cowboy. He understands how to build a community, in that insidious gangster way, of course, for the sake of his own control and profit, while also freed from all larger social restraints and responsibilities. Manfredi is the man who truly owns everything he has, and has a lot of it.

Tony Soprano was a victim of the real. He sat in therapy for week after week, year after year, with Melfi, trying to square his mythic Sicilian heritage with the reality of his life in New Jersey, in which there were no worlds left to conquer. The king of Tulsa in not burdened by such petty things as history or psychology. Simply act as if the frontier still exists and you can find yourself there.

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For any writer with kids, there comes a time when they have no choice but to focus their full powers of literary analysis on the children’s books they find themselves reading over and over, night after night. Often these take the form of a cathartic rant or hate-ranking of some kind, as seen here, or something more inspired, as in the case of ’s Busytown/Piers Plowman mash-up, a piece of writing I am genuinely obsessed with. Since I am not funny enough to write either type of post, today we will be appreciating the poetic construction of Bill Peet’s The Caboose Who Got Loose, from 1971.

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Unlike other picture book writer/illustrators from the 60s and 70s who have entered the children’s canon and continue to be read—Maurice Sendak, Arnold Lobel, Richard Scarry, etc—Bill Peet seems forgotten at this point. Liz, as a librarian, tells me that children’s literature has the shortest shelf-life of any genre—parents buy what’s new and older stuff falls out of print quickly. This is surprising to me because almost all new kids books suck so fucking bad. We have accumulated a fair number of them one way or another and it blows my mind how low-effort they are. The art is generally soulless and ugly—whatever, it’s all being done in the computer now—but more so I’m consistently amazed at how bad the writing is. Many kid’s books rhyme and are ostensibly in verse but the poeticism on display is so anemic they hardly deserve to be called poems. None of these modern authors (Sandra Boynton aside) seem to be able to manage to string together more than three-word phrases so they end up with these awful, truncated dimeter or trimeter lines that are inevitably split by a comma into the simplest noun-verb construction followed by an appositive clause modifying it to no end except to fill space. And they’re all slant rhymes! It’s pathetic! The Llama Llama books are an affront to the very idea that children deserve quality entertainment.1

All that is to say, it’s puzzling if not shocking that Peet’s work is now neglected. I’m not going to claim he’s a titan on par with Sendak or Eric Carle or Seuss; he’s B-tier for sure. But B-tier isn’t bad! His artwork is genuinely fantastic. His favorite subjects: steam engines, cats, sailing ships, monsters; his animals tend to be those of the American West: rabbits and hairs, bighorn sheep and bears, rather than zebras and tigers. His stories can be more of a mixed bag. Some of them are great! Cyrus the Unsinkable Sea Serpent is a fun story of a sea monster helping a boat of pilgrims through various troubles across the ocean to the New World. Jennifer and Josephine is a sweet story about the bond between a stray cat and her (barely) anthropomorphic car friend/house. I remember The Gnats of Knotty Pine fondly as a story about some woodland critters—turns out the conflict of that book is it’s almost hunting season and the animals are trying to figure out how to keep from getting slaughtered. Aah! Smokey is about a neglected, rusting train who gets a new lease on life that unfortunately contains several offensive caricatures of Native Americans that aren’t going to fly in our house.

Of those I’ve now revisited, The Caboose Who Got Loose is the best by a wide margin. It’s about Katy Caboose, who hates being a caboose because she’s pulled along backwards all day choking on the smokecloud from the steam engine ahead. She wishes she could be a farmhouse or a mountain cabin instead. At the end of the story she comes loose from the train, flies off a cliff, and gets stuck between two tall spruce trees, becoming a cabin of sorts for squirrels and birds up in the fresh mountain air.

Whereas all the above examples are written in perfectly serviceable if somewhat wordy prose, The Caboose Who Got Loose is written in rhyming couplets. Peet’s most basic construction is a two-line sentence, or put another way, one sentence for one couplet. He frequently goes beyond that, up to a three-couplet sentence when he really wants to show off, but just to be able to construct two rhyming lines of a respectable length makes it a book I am always begging Patrick to let me read him. I was impressed how these sentences contain numerous modifying clauses but do so without relying on commas. Instead each clause leads into the next broken only by the minute pauses of natural speech. From there I noticed the regularity of the construction of it. Here, lets look at the third page of the story, which I suggest reading aloud to really hear it:

Notice how each line breaks exactly in the middle, split between a core syntax and some sort of elaboration. The first half of the line often sets up an implicit question that the second half answers. In the first line for instance, we read “Katy had little hope,” at which point we wonder “Little hope of what?”, which the second half of the line then answers, that “she would ever get loose.” With the exception of the dialogue lines, which work a little differently, we can pose this sort of call-and-response repeatedly. Lines 5 and 6 extend this structure with the answer to the implicit question enjambed over the linebreak and then further clarified: “Often Katy would wish,” Peet begins. “Wish what,” we ask. “That she someday could be / something quiet and simple,” Peet answers. “Like what,” we ask again. “Like a lovely elm tree,” Peet answers.

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As I appreciated the perfect balance of each line, with the slight pause and movement from one clause to the next right in the middle, I remembered something a professor of mine said in passing in junior year French class twelve years ago (my only real ability as a writer and thinker is my fantastic recall). She mentioned that the standard line for French poetry was the alexandrine, a line of iambic hexameter split by a caesura in the middle. Or, a twelve-syllable line broken by a slight pause into two six-syllable halves. Naturally then, it was time to count syllables. Peet was employing the caesura to great effect, but was it hexameter?

Folks, that’s hexameter. I felt so triumphant when this hunch paid off. But is it iambic? For variety’s sake, let’s look at the first page to see how Peet sets up his initial rhythm.

Let me pause to issue a couple of caveats. Above all—I can’t stress this enough—I know fuck all about poetry! I have no experience with scansion and have always had a hard time hearing the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables, although I did feel like I got markedly better over the course of this exercise. I’m sure there are glaring errors in the way I’ve scanned these passages, which will cause errors in my analysis as a result. Forgive me, my enthusiasm outruns my technical mastery.

For this to be the true alexandrine, we’re looking for iambic hexameter, or a basic metrical foot of unstressed-stressed. Peet is immediately in a pickle here because “Katy,” to my ear, is a natural trochee: stressed-unstressed. And “caboose” is a three-syllable word that goes stressed-stressed-unstressed. But this means all he needs is one naturally unstressed syllable to lead off and everything falls into place for a half-line of iamb, iamb, trochee. This is a perfect way to begin as it both establishes us in iambic hexameter while keeping it light and pushing the rhythm forward. As the appendix in the Norton Anthology of Poetry on the basics of versification explains2, “Whereas iambic meter has a certain gravity, making it a natural choice for poems on solemn subjects, the trochaic foot has a lighter, quicker, more buoyant movement,” which to my untutored reasoning seems the correct lead-in to the mid-line caesura. The second half of the first line is then trochee, trochee, spondee: bounce, bounce, big emphasis.

Here’s my rendering of the first page:

Line 2 is very nice, matching on each side as iamb, iamb, trochee to keep us firmly in iambic hexameter while also lifting our breath into the pauses. In the third line we change from describing the general state of things to focus in on Katy and how she’s different from other cabooses. Fittingly, Peet breaks his pattern to signal this change, leading with a trochaic stress on the leading word she. This shift is how Peet tells us, “This is the typical way things are, but our protagonist is a little different. She is a caboose who dislikes being last.” Also note that he repeats the terminal spondee from the first line on the last, linking “train tracks” and “freight train.”

Let’s look at another early page. Peet is very good at signaling to his young readers what to expect and what they should want to happen in the story. In Cyrus, an old man curses the ship as it leaves port, predicting they’ll die one way or the other, either stranded windless in the doldrums, sunk in a storm, or raided by pirates. The ship then faces those three situations, in that order, requiring Cyrus to find solutions and keep the voyage on track. In the same way, then, here Peet tells us clearly, Katy’s greatest dream is to be a mountain cabin, overgrown and wild. We want this for her too.

Again, Peet needs us to remember this. This is what Katy wants, this is what we want for her. We’ll only be satisfied with her getting stuck in the treetops at the end if we understand that outcome as good. How to lodge this in our minds? Again he breaks his meter. Lines 1 and 2 are iambic hexameter, his standard alexandrine. But lines 3 and 4, his most vivid description of Katy’s dream existence, are truncated. Count the syllables, we’re two short. That’s iambic pentameter instead. For the two most important lines in the poem Peet shifts from his exotic French meter to the form of classical English poetry. These lines strike us with a force beyond the other lines because on some level they sound just that much more like the way we know poetry is supposed to sound.

Also fun here, Peet throughout treats quiet as a one-syllable word, which means its rhyme, by it, also has to be elided into one single sound. And that’s perfect, because we don’t have time to enunciate, after all Katy is hurrying on by it.

Another small bit of matching the rhythm to the story occurs on this page, my son’s favorite:

Peet does something unusual here with the three-line sentence on lines 3-5. This is the only sentence in the book that’s an odd number of lines. If they’re not two lines, they’re four; if not four, six. He does not leave a rhyme dangling across a period like this. So why do it here? I would argue it enforces Katy’s feeling of being trapped in the tunnel, unable to escape the monsters she fears. Just as she can’t get through the tunnel as fast as she would like, so too is our progress through the couplet uncomfortably impeded.

Well anyway, I’ve rambled long enough on topics I know nothing about. This was a fun learning exercise for me and I hope for you too. It’s cool to find that the picture book you know implicitly is better holds up to this kind of analysis and is actually technically better in demonstrable ways. I wish children’s entertainment was better all around and more of it could reward this sort of attention. It’s a disheartening fact that, for my son at least, children gravitate to the junk. He likes crummier illustrations and lazier rhymes. It seems most people are content with this state of affairs: “They love crap, so give ‘em crap, who cares.” I think this is so wrong. Children deserve high-quality entertainment and they deserve elders who make an effort to expose them to better things.

Give me your recommendations for actually good picture books and other media for a three and a half year old in the comments.

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I spent 90% of my time reading Your Name Here frustrated and annoyed. There were multiple times when, just as I was getting settled in for a nice long reading session, I hit a passage so hostile to the reader, so intentionally discouraging, that I flung the book down muttering “Fuck you, Helen.” Nonetheless, this is a positive review.

Your Name Here has been two decades in the making, first appearing as a pdf on DeWitt’s website in 2008, and it knows it. It is a book that’s aware it’s a book, that knows it is written by , and what associations a reader is therefore bringing with them coming in. It helps, then, to know a bit of The Lore.

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In 2000 DeWitt published The Last Samurai. It is an immense work. It follows Sibylla, a cash-strapped polymath polyglot single mother and her young son Ludo. Sibylla is a genius but Ludo is a genius genius. Sibylla tells us early on that she didn’t intend for this to happen, by which she means Ludo reading The Odyssey in the original Greek at four years old. The book is immensely playful, filled with verb tables and kanji lessons and reference after reference to other books—books out of print, books without Wikipedia pages, books like P.M. Fraser’s ludicrously expensive three-volume history of Ptolemaic Alexandria which in Sibylla’s telling is something any halfway intellectual household should contain. As a classics-major father to a young son, I found it moving in the extreme. It is a paean to the redemptive power of the life of the mind that never slips into the saccharine. It’s one of the great books of the new millennium.

The story of its life in the world is tough. Put simply, DeWitt got fucked. First of all, the book was supposed to be called The Seventh Samurai, due to the huge role Seven Samurai plays in the story structuring Ludo’s search for a surrogate father, but rights issues forced a title change, which was then taken by the Tom Cruise movie three years later. The formatting and foreign scripts were a nightmare for type-setting. (My edition, which is somehow an advance bookseller preview copy, is titled The Seventh Samurai and the Greek in it is full of errors.) Despite receiving positive reviews and selling 100,000 copies, it soon fell out of print. A bizarre accounting error resulted in her owing her publisher $75,000 when she thought she had $80,000 coming her way. Her second novel, Lightning Rods, completed in 1999, was stuck in legal limbo for a decade when her publisher went under and wasn’t released until 2011. New Directions brought The Last Samurai back into print in 2016. Her 2022 novella The English Understand Wool includes a heartbreaking author’s endnote where she asks for donations to her Ko-fi. It’s a travesty that a writer of her caliber is in such a position.

Your Name Here begins with the question, “What is Your Name Here going to be?” Various airplane passengers have purchased Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt, from the airport bookstore. You, the real reader, are addressed as you, the reader of YNH on the plane, wondering what the book will be. As we skip from one reader to another, “we” wonder if the book will be a series of false starts in the vein of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. Strange snippets of Arabic start peppering the text, escalating to maps of the US where everything has been transliterated to Arabic. So, “we” think, DeWitt taught Greek and Japanese in Last Samurai, this time she’s going back to the well with Arabic. But the language stuff in Samurai was motivated. What’s the motivation here? Maybe the Arabic is being smuggled into the text as part of some Philip K. Dickian paranoid metafiction move. Or maybe—DeWitt’s voice as author asserts itself—she could write a book that inspires people to learn Arabic, like JRR Tolkien inspired people to learn Elvish. Imagine the amount of conflict and suffering that could have been avoided over the past century if a book had done for Arabic what Lord of the Rings did for Quenya and Sindarin.

As the book goes along these early conceits will be jettisoned. Somewhere in there she sneaks in a reference to Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, which will turn out to be the thread she follows. That is, of course, a work about its own coming-to-being. As Your Name Here stabilizes into a coherent narrative, it becomes clear the narrator-hopping and the Arabic were roads not taken, ideas that turned out not to have legs or make sense to anyone else. They were ideas being kicked around by DeWitt early in her process before she lost faith in them and got stuck.

At that point we meet her alter ego, Rachel Zozanian, an unstable writer known for her cult novel Lotteryland. Zozanian flees her life and her family on the verge of suicide (the details of these suicide attempts match those of DeWitt’s own) because she can’t stand language anymore. Can’t bear answering the phone, can’t bear the endless banality of everything she and everyone else are made to say in the pantomime of being normal, cheery, and professional. She hides out in Berlin trying to think no thoughts, form no words, constantly thwarted by her nemesis the phone, which rings constantly with calls from her agent, a director who wants to adapt Lotteryland, her children’s caretaker. These calls are so boring, everything they say to her is so predictable, that she can’t even form basic responses.

The one bit of language that still sparks some joy is an old email she got from a tabloid journalist she met in a bar years earlier. He wrote a chaotic, overly familiar email to her filled with typos, puns, and thoughts that get abandoned halfway as he jumps to the next, detailing his debauches and dramas in London clubs. Zozanian/DeWitt loves this email so much, but she/they never wrote him back. This is Ilya Gridneff. These emails of his are, I take it, real, since he is credited as co-author but otherwise the writing is clearly DeWitt’s. (Gridneff’s author bio states that since 2015 he has “helped craft foreign policy for numerous governments,” which, lol, keep up the good work buddy.)

DeWitt really waxes rhapsodic about Gridneff’s writing—calls him the second coming of Hunter S. Thompson, decides his voice could be the thing that her book needs, that his voice could be muse enough to save her from her despair. Let’s look at just the first graf of Gridneff’s original email (assume all errors throughout are [sic]):

Orson I turned 24 the other day. not that much changed but the stagnant point of calendar time and place-space rah rah rah met the dot conception occurred time before I am in the present. And now I wait till 5am so I can cycle to Paddington train station so I can catch the train to Heathrow airport to pick up mar father. Yes, Papa bear is in town in three hours. It is 2.58am here. But the past three days have been wrecked. Drunk karaoke on Thursday night in abject Dalston Chinese restaurant, the prawns, pork rolls, beer and in the style of Tina Turner, me grabbing the mic and singing Led Zepplin, Guns and Roses ‘Sweet Child o Mine’ then watching Scarlett my friend stand on the table and spin around on the lazy Suzanne (not a friend but that curious Chinese culinary device) Rhys a Welsh friend summed the night up by telling me before arriving he wasn,t singing a song, fast forward, Rhys leaping from the chairs to demonstrate that ‘I,m going to learn how to fly, high, fameeeeee!, I wanna live forever---’ and so and so. Ended with me going home/kissing (the kiss caused a critical moment) the woman, Kate (36 television buyer, lives in Bow, drives a beat-up Saab), we say we are in love but she doesn,t want me full time, she has a Danish electro deejay called Jakob who she doesn,t love but chose over me last year after we locked horns. She and I deeply desire each other but usually keep apart, because she doesn,t want me, all this in front of Anna, shock why are we doing this again Kate. You don,t want me. kiss me kiss me. I love you Alyosha. Anna, who had been kissing me earlier in the evening not impressed, then the Bombay mix went everywhere, guilt maybe with me for that toxic explosion, all while Justin performs cunninglingus with April on the washing machine in the toilet. Aidan avoiding April cause he doesn,t want to shag her anymore. More vodka. I scream and on return walk into Rhys and Anna kissing, I have a kiss with Scarlett in front of her new man Kyle, who in turn tries to kiss Kate. Flashing her knickers at 4am and playing records at 11. wake up with Kate. She reminds me about how she was going to piss on me but couldn,t piss. me trying to fuck her arse but too drunk to get an erection on target.

Does this do anything for you? For me it’s the great disconnect of the book. DeWitt thinks this writing rocks. I just find it annoying. She builds it up so much—between her cool sophistication and Gridneff’s chaotic offensiveness it’s like if Liz Franczak spent the first twenty minutes of an episode of TrueAnon telling you Brace was going to say something hysterical before finally playing the opening where he says “If the Joker is so evil why doesn’t he molest kids?” or whatever.

As DeWitt is fantasizing about what Gridneff’s writing could achieve she names Bright Lights, Big City as a comp. My friend David, who was also reading YNH, had to explain that one to me. It’s a flashy novel about being a hotshot magazine writer and partying hard in NYC in the 80s, narrated in the second-person. He was happy to be reminded of it and mused he might read it again that evening. The next day I got these texts from him:

Credit to Gridneff, I suppose. His emails have hit the mark in that respect. And there are so many of them. Pages and pages, chapters and chapters, of him, for instance, going back and forth with a woman who provided some gossip for the Page Six or The Sun or whatever and wants the money she was promised. And Gridneff replying, “Hey, I’ve asked payroll again what’s the hold-up.” And on and on and on.

These emails show Gridneff attempting to breathe some inventiveness into routine correspondence just to keep himself from dying of boredom, which is ultimately related to Zozanian’s linguistic malaise. The problem is that only becomes clear in retrospect. On a first read it’s totally opaque and frustrating why DeWitt and Gridneff are subjecting us to such a volume of the same inanities I can find in my actual inbox. In general the book is awfully withholding. It refuses to give the reader a sense of the point of any of its gambits until very late in the text, at which point it does come together. It is a discouraging read.

That discouragement stems in large part from the way DeWitt has written herself into a series of little boxes. She relies on motifs to orient us: chapters with Zozanian hiding from language begin with the phone ringing; when a chapter addresses the reader as you we know we’ve briefly risen up a level in the narrative pyramid; the email format means we’re back with Gridneff. This is all well and good but it often feels like DeWitt then doesn’t know what to do within the constraints of a given perspective except hammer on the motif. It seems like she can’t figure out how to give herself permission to just write. Instead her writing is cramped and hemmed in by its organizing conceits.

This is in contrast with Last Samurai, which uses of motifs and conceits as well but uses them to go somewhere. That book eventually turns into Ludo’s search for an appropriate surrogate father, choosing among accomplished artists, academics, and adventurers. So DeWitt launches into quite lengthy backstories for each. The painter who becomes obsessed with pure color is a standout. There’s another about Hugh Carey, a linguist who becomes determined to find a supposed lost tribe of the steppes whose language remains undiluted from outside influence. He finds them, he lives with them for years. At one point a strong wind carries off a child flying a kite above a massive cliff-face. The linguist determines to climb the cliff and save the child. All of this setup is worth it for this passage, which takes my breath away every time:

HC had done some climbing as a boy. The fact that he had climbed before meant he had some idea of what he was taking on; sometimes he thought he could do it, and sometimes he knew that he knew the form his death would take.

He found a handhold and a foothold, and he began to climb.

After an hour his hands were scraped and there was a shooting pain in his shoulder. His face was scraped on one side where it was against the rock, and a trickle of blood and sweat ran by the corner of one eye and could not be wiped away.

Perhaps no one would back down who’d started such a thing. HC would never back down. He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men. He had been through the Iliad and Odyssey and each time he had come to a word he did not know he had looked it up in Liddell & Scott and written it down, and if there were five words in a line he had looked up five words and written them down before going on to a line in which there were four words he did not know, and at the age of fourteen he had worked through Tacitus in this way and at the age of twenty he had read the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun and at twenty-two the Dream of the Red Chamber. Now he moved one finger a centimeter and then another, and then he moved the toe of his boot a centimeter and the toe of his other boot a centimeter.

There is precious little in Your Name Here like that for a long while. DeWitt finally lets herself start writing up to her abilities once Zozanian begins writing about her time as a student at Oxford. It is a glorious moment when her aporia finds release in reminiscence. She’s spiraling, thinking about this annoying director who won’t leave her along, “He was forty-something, a pampered baby boomer, he did not talk about the erosion of student funding in Britain under Thatcher, Major, Blair, he did not talk about galloping fee and degree inflation in America, he did not talk about” and then a double line break and “Don’t tell me about the future. Tell me about the past.” What a breath of fresh air. Then the beginning of a new chapter, in which Zozanian illustrates the need to cultivate a little paranoia by describing how the Perseus Digital Library is an inadequate scholarly tool but doesn’t disclose its failings, leaving the lay scholar in the darkness of Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns.’ “If you didn’t already know what serious scholarship looks like you wouldn’t know that you didn’t know.” No matter how much DeWitt might frustrate me, there’s simply no one else in the world who’s going to take Perseus to task in the middle of their experimental novel.

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These sections, which Zozanian begins drafting as a complement to Gridneff’s dissipated emails, tell how, thanks to Thatcher’s neoliberal hatchet job, she couldn’t afford her place at Oxford and turned to prostitution. She calculates dispassionately on what her body can buy her: an hour with a rich client can buy her weeks of studying Greek without interruption.

DeWitt remains outraged and disgusted at what was done to Britain’s educational system by conservatives. I admit at first blush I found her fuming about Thatcher and college grants a bit pat but she’s right!! I still need to write something about The Shock Doctrine but we can never be furious enough about what has been denied to all of us—dignity, free time, a healthy cultural sphere, a classical education for anyone with the passion and aptitude—by the neoliberal turn. The fact that such direct naming of the people responsible for stealing all we have lost remains so rare is a testament to the success of our enemies.

These elements—the exhaustion of the author, the disillusionment, the orienting motifs, the righteous fury—all add up to an unavoidable comparison: William Gaddis. He, of course, also burst onto the scene with a tour de force debut; The Recognitions is a deeply earnest examination of the artistic life and our inheritance from the great masters of antiquity. It’s also, like The Last Samurai, a total blast—funny, chaotic, typographically daring. And again similarly, its release was a disaster that embittered Gaddis for the rest of his life. It was savaged by critics and didn’t sell. He disappeared for twenty years before finally bringing out JR (his actual masterpiece, in my opinion). Rather than directing his gaze at the best humanity had to offer instead he would give a withering stare to everything that degrades our aesthetic sense and diminishes the world—money above all, but also the siren song of technological progress and, notably, a sort of passive-voiced corporate jargon infecting everyone’s speech, particularly in education as it pivoted toward vocational training and away from raising full human beings. Nearing the end of his life in the late 80s into the 90s Gaddis also wrote impassioned op-eds against the cuts Newt Gingrich and the Republicans were making to the National Endowment for the Arts.

JR is the dark disillusioned double of The Recognitions. There’s no place left for the artist, nothing that can be said that might cut through the noise with a note of beauty. Your Name Here strikes me as a dark double of The Last Samurai. DeWitt loves language so much—“The self is a set of linguistic patterns,” she told New York. “Reading and speaking in another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone.” What beauty, what possibilities of aesthetics and experience are contained within language. And what a tragedy it is that the world insists on a lingua franca of falsity, banality, and truism.

I find myself in total sympathy with DeWitt. I started my new local government job six weeks ago and while it’s fine for what it is I was really feeling pretty low this last week. Now that the adjustment period is over and it all feels routine it hit me with force—this is it. It didn’t happen for me. I’m not going to profile authors I admire, I’m not going to do book events at The Strand. I’m going to sit in an office for the next twenty years and have the same interactions and talk about logistics and budget minutiae using jargon and acronyms that degrade my soul to learn and repeat back. Under such circumstances—and this is something Your Name Here makes clear—it is a burden to have an aesthetic sense. How much easier it would be not to crave anything from language other than talking through a scheduling conflict!

There’s a moment I think about a lot near the end of The Last Samurai. Sibylla has a habit of illustrating her points by citing obscure passages from the canon, crying out “It’s just like Plotinus had it,” or whoever, and then rattling off the quotation perfectly. She has made ends meet by typing—she types out old issues of fishing magazines, boat catalogues, other disposable dreck for some sort of digitization project, I take it. By the end of the novel she’s been at it for a decade. She tries to summon one of her signature passages and she finds it isn’t there. It’s been pushed out by time and all the horrible garbage words she’s been forced to read for her job and all the time she wasn’t allowed to spend with beautiful language and elegant thoughts because she had to type. It’s a moment that terrifies me. I fear what my immersion in the artlessness of my job will do to me in the long term. I fear the resentment that may build up at all the time I’ve not been allowed to put toward what matters to me.

DeWitt knows well just how hard it is to devote yourself to your art when the world not only insists on extracting money from you but denigrates any values and expression contrary to profit-seeking. Your Name Here inhabits and articulates these feelings of frustration, of thwarted ambition, of sorrow for the Good Life floating just out of reach. It immerses the reader in the banal, in everything wrong with how we communicate and live. It’s a dark road, but DeWitt finally brings us back into the light.

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Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy, ten-year career check-up, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski

Confession time: O Brother, Where Art Thou? has always stood as my least favorite Coen Brothers film (with the caveat we have several upcoming I’ve still never seen). I have my reasons and I’ll get into a couple of them below. But I remember the huge amount of goodwill this film enjoyed in the years immediately after release—it’s one of Joel and Ethan’s genuine hits, returning nearly 3x its budget and spawning a concert film, Down from the Mountain, featuring the performers and music from the film. I was curious if this goodwill had persisted to the present day so I asked as much on Notes. Wow!!! People still LOVE this movie! One replier even said this is Clooney’s only good role, which, come on man. So, believe me guys, I’m trying. I’m really trying to see what you love so much. And if you want to yell at me, the comments are open.

To start with the most obvious: O Brother’s opening credits state it’s based on The Odyssey and it begins with an epigraph of Homer’s opening invocation to the muse. Our Odysseus is Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), an escapee from a chain gang in Depression-era Mississippi. His “crew” are the two convicts chained to him, Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). Everett has fed the other two a lie about some treasure he stashed away before he was arrested but really he needs to get home to prevent his wife Penny (Holly Hunter) from getting remarried.

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It isn’t worth dwelling on the Odyssey comparison. Beyond Everett’s motivation, there is an obvious run-in with three Sirens doing laundry in the river, evoking Nausicaa’s handmaidens in Phaeacia, and whom Delmar believes turn Pete into a frog, evoking Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’ men into pigs. They also suffer a mugging at the hands of one-eyed charlatan Bible salesman Big Dan Teague (John Goodman), who we see eating meat off the bone in Cycloptic fashion. And they encounter a blind seer—Tiresias—who says he has no name reminding us of Odysseus telling Polyphemus his name is No Man.

In every interview I read, Joel and Ethan cautioned against taking this reading too far. They maintained they had never actually read The Odyssey and all the resemblances are things they learned via cultural osmosis. According to them, the only person involved in the whole production who had read Homer was Tim Blake Nelson, who has a classics degree from Brown and studied under Martha Nussbaum (!!!). There’s a great exchange recorded by Jonathan Romney for The Guardian in 2000 where Ethan gets stuck on whether Nelson has read The Odyssey in the original Greek or only in translation:

[Ethan]:“I wonder if he read it in Greek? I know he read it.” “Yeah,” confirms Joel. “Did he?” Ethan insists. “I don’t know if he read it in Greek,” says Joel. “I know he read it.”

The Coens love to mess with interviewers so I’m of two minds on their claim they never read it. On the one hand there’s an interview where they betray a little more knowledge than they might have meant to. As they disavowed close fidelity to the poem to Jim Ridley of the Nashville Scene, Ethan said “I don’t want any of those Odyssey fans to go to the movie expecting…” “Where’s Laertes?” Joel picked up, laughing. “Where’s his dog?” Ethan adds. Do you guys know his whole domestic situation on Ithaca or don’t you?? On the other hand, Romney from The Guardian seems to genuinely stump them when he brings up Scylla and Charybdis:

“Scylla and Charybdis? Where were they?” puzzles Ethan. The whirlpool at the end, surely? “Oh,” the brothers chorus, “the whirlpool.” Ethan grins pensively. “Oh, yeah, sure, Scylla and Charybdis.” Joel says, “It’s very, you know, selectively based on The Odyssey.”

Anyway, O Brother burns through all these references within its first hour, at which point it feels like it should be over. I’m going to go out on a limb and posit the continuing affection for this movie stems almost entirely from its first half. The Sirens scene is good. Big Dan is the only character with the verbal dexterity to spar with Everett; it’s the best part of the movie. I hate musical performance interludes with a passion but even I can admit that their rendition of “Man of Endless Sorrow” at the radio station is fun. The way Clooney pops his eyes in bewilderment as he sings, as if he doesn’t know where the words are coming from and can’t believe he’s pulling it off—we might wonder if he’s possessed by the Muse—is undeniable.

The second half of the film is a total mess. They arrive in Everett’s town without any indication to the audience, and before he’s confessed his true motivation to win his wife back, leading to a truly disorienting moment when he charges at some young girls performing at a political rally who turn out to be his daughters. So much time is suddenly given over to a plotline about the governor’s race between incumbent Menelaus “Pappy” O’Daniel (Charles Durning) and Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall), who turns out to be a KKK Grand Wizard. This plot and Everett’s efforts to convince Penny to give him another chance come together in an excruciatingly long scene at another rally, which Everett and the boys have snuck into disguised as a hillbilly band. And then once that seems to have resolved their marital problems and humiliated Stokes for being a racist worm, there’s this whole coda with the sheriff and the flood that also feels like it will never end. I was praying for sweet release by the time the credits rolled.

I think the election plotline is ill-conceived because it has so little to do with our main characters but I would probably forgive it if it were funny. The main problem with this movie is it’s just not very funny. Clooney gets a lot of elaborate speeches with over-the-top vocabulary choices but for once the Coens have neglected the rest of their cast. Turturro is totally wasted as Pete; his job is to be sulky and withdrawn the entire film. Hunter has nothing to do as Penny. The film’s other great sin is turning faithful, ingenious Penelope into a resentful shrew with no other personality. Other little comic episodes like their run-in with the bank robber George “Babyface” Nelson are mostly head-scratchers—I’m unclear on what the joke is and the part where he tommy guns some cows for no reason is actively unpleasant.

Scenes often have a lot of dead air. This is the Coens’ weakest script so far. Characters state what’s going on or what needs to be done without anything humorous being added, which is perhaps a problem inherent to an episodic adventure narrative. O Brother is enlightening for illustrating the danger the Coens constantly put themselves in with their scattershot plotting. Lebowski would be exhausting if it weren’t so consistently funny. The minute I stop laughing I’m checking my watch.

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The film’s saving grace is Clooney. He’s a natural with the Coens’ signature dense dialogue. As I watched him sweet-talk his way through each scene, wryly above it all, somehow simultaneously unruffled and totally ruffled, I wondered, “Is the entire Clooney persona just Odysseus?” Obviously Clooney had been in a number of prominent films prior to this—From Dusk Till Dawn and Three Kings come to mind—but we cannot underrate the work O Brother did to establish the Clooney archetype (to be solidified by Ocean’s Eleven the following year, obvi). Perhaps it’s not a coincidence then that Clooney became their most reliable leading man. Despite developing their deep bench of supporting actors, the Coens tend to be one-and-done with their male stars. But Clooney returned for Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading, and Hail, Caesar!.

In fact, I think this is another under-appreciated quality of the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre. There are so many actors who owe their actorly identities to defining roles in their films. I cannot count the number of projects that have cast Nic Cage clearly hoping they can have H.I. McDonough from Raising Arizona without writing Raising Arizona. When Steve Buscemi shows up on 30 Rock to say “How do you do fellow kids,” he’s doing something in between Carl Showalter from Fargo and Donnie from Lebowski. In The Righteous Gemstones John Goodman plays a prosperity gospel huckster man of God, a template the Coens built in this very film! Jeff Bridges is The Dude!

The other major element of this movie of course is the music. Its mix of blues, gospel, and bluegrass was put together by music producer T-Bone Burnett, who assembled a stellar group of performers to record it including Ralph Stanley, Norman Blake, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, the Cox Family, the Whites, Chris Thomas King (who plays their fourth bandmate Tommy Johnson), and the Fairfield Four (who play the gravediggers at the end). I really don’t know who any of these people are (my dad is screaming right now). Joel described the process of selecting and working with them:

A lot of them were people that we knew and like and are fans of… But they were brought in by T-Bone. At an early stage we decided what music we wanted. Then T-Bone brought in a lot of different people who all played and sang together. And we got a feeling for who was right. But it was a great experience, meeting all these people and hearing them play. It was unbelievable.

This music is not really my vibe but I know I’m an outlier here. I’m told the soundtrack sells to this day. Clooney and Turturro are fully lipsynched throughout but Nelson, not a trained singer, performed one of the songs himself. Did he do his own singing in Buster Scruggs? I leave googling that as an exercise for the reader. The Sirens voices are done by Krauss, Harris, and Welch. My favorite song in the movie is the one over the montage directly preceding that scene, which I presume is their voices as well.

The Coens typically have such an eye on the past we don’t think of them as technologically minded filmmakers but O Brother is notable for being one of the first films to be digitally color-corrected, to give it its semi-sepia color palette. Let’s be honest: movie looks like shit. It’s been desaturated in the wrong way somehow, a way that has pulled the vividness out of the imagery leaving it looking amorphous, sickly, and grey. Based on a YouTube video a friend showed me once where the guy made the Marvel movies look significantly better just by punching up the contrast on the black, I suspect the problem is they desaturated the black along with the color. It really does the movie and the actors no favors. I’m sorry but Holly Hunter looks like a corpse.

The Coens mentioned in an interview for Lebowski that the shot in The Dude’s dream of him floating down the bowling lane under the legs of all the women had to be constructed in the computer because there was no way to actually shoot it. Along with the color correction, O Brother is the Coens’ furthest foray into playing with the computer. There’s the shot at the end after the floodwaters crash over the characters where the camera holds still under the unnaturally blue water and we watch a bunch of stuff float by—a tire, the sheriff’s dog, cans and cans of Dapper Dan pomade. It sucks! It’s a bunch of CGI crap for the sake of unfunny gags. I thank God they pulled back from the brink and didn’t follow the Ang Lee/Robert Zemeckis/James Cameron path of wasting their careers fiddling with mo-cap and framerates and dead-eyed uncanny valley Tom Hanks.

But those floodwaters are worth something. They happen because the Tennessee Valley Authority is rerouting water as part of its project of southern electrification. Everett, reflecting on this, says, “The south is going to change. Everything is going to be put on electricity… Out with the old spiritual mumbo-jumbo, the superstitions, and the backward ways! We’re going to see a brave new world where they run everybody a wire and hook us all up to a grid. Yessir, a veritable Age of Reason.” I think this is beautiful and perfect. This is the essence of The Odyssey. I have always held that The Odyssey is about the end of the age of wonders and the dawn of the age of men, ironic of course for what we might call the original fantasy novel. Unlike the other heroes of the Trojan War, many of whom, like Achilles, were demigods, or could trace their ancestry back to the gods, Odysseus is merely mortal. Despite enjoying Athena’s favor and being cursed by Poseidon’s rage, Odysseus seems a distinctly less devout religious subject than his Trojan War compatriots who immolated hecatombs of cattle to Zeus. Having sailed the Aegean and looked upon the wonders of the mythological age, his last task is to beach his boat and carry his oar to a place where the people have never seen the sea and plant it in the earth, a gesture my old tutor perceptively reads as erecting the first fencepost. In the Iliad, the gods appeared to mortals in their full splendor; the haunting final lines of the Odyssey describe Athena visiting Odysseus in the guise of his old teacher Mentor. With that fencepost will come the rise of agriculture, new forms of hierarchy, and a diminished place for the miraculous, or rather, new forms of miracles, like electrification. Odysseus always looked toward a brighter future. So too does Ulysses Everett McGill.

Stray Notes

The title, btw, comes from the Preston Sturges film Sullivan’s Travels, where it’s the book about the hardship of life in the south that Sullivan wants to adapt into a film.

Not to be a bummer but the speech Stokes gives at the Klan rally is indistinguishable from the rhetoric we hear from prominent government officials on a daily basis now.

John Goodman playing a loquacious salesman with murder in his heart—Big Dan is just Charlie Meadows from Barton Fink!

The boys perform at the radio station in order to get paid a day rate—sing, get paid, end of story. This is the same deal Llewyn makes when he records “Please Mr. Kennedy in Inside Llewyn Davis. He has no claim to any royalties, which hurts badly when the song becomes a hit. In O Brother, their song also becomes a hit and record labels are trying to track them down to sign them. I had never noticed that the plot mechanics are exactly the same but here it provides a happy ending whereas next time it will be a devastating missed opportunity. This film is about the blues, Llewyn Davis is about folk. This film is the Odyssey, that film might just be something else… We’ll talk about that when the time comes.

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Previously on Hideo Kojima: Metal Gear Solid and MGS 2: Sons of Liberty

🎵 …Caught in a dream…. Snake Eaaaaaaaaaterrrrrrrrrr… 🎵

Having made his great philosophical statement with Sons of Liberty, Kojima just wants to have some fun. We’re going back to 1964 to antagonize the Ruskies and witness the genesis of the Metal Gear program at the height of the Cold War.

The nomenclature for this one is a nightmare so bear with me here. Once again we’re playing as a character named Snake. He looks just like the Solid Snake we know from the previous games but it’s not him. This is Naked Snake, the character who will come to be known as Big Boss, the subject of the Les Enfants Terribles cloning project that will create our Snake and his twin Liquid and the mastermind behind the Outer Heaven incident. But that’s a decade or more away. For now he’s an elite operative in the service of the CIA. He’s a protégé of The Boss, alternatively called The Joy, a legendary female soldier credited as “the mother of [America’s] special forces” and commander of a group called the Cobras.

We open on Snake preparing to make a HALO jump into Soviet territory on a mission to exfiltrate a rocket scientist named Sokolov. As his handler Colonel Zero recounts in flashback to the mission briefing, Sokolov was the chief scientist responsible for putting Yuri Gagarin into orbit. The Colonel already helped him defect once several years earlier but he was returned to the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis. You see, the Colonel tells Snake, all of the history-book reasons Nikita Krushchev had for escalating the situation—namely the Jupiter missile pointed at the Soviet Union in Turkey—were a smokescreen. In fact, Sokolov’s work was so critical to Cold War dominance that Khrushchev would risk nuclear annihilation to get him back. As a mild Cold War nerd (Blowback listener), this is a lot of fun; I’m ready to be charmed by a dash of revisionist secret history.

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This first section traversing some swamp and jungle on our way to meet Sokolov serves as a general tutorial for new players and introduces the new survival systems befitting a long-term outdoor stealth assignment. Snake gets hungry in this one. As his stamina depletes his hands get less steady aiming his gun, his health regenerates more slowly, and his stomach growls insistently—it never came up for me but I wonder if an ill-timed tummy rumble could alert a guard to Snake’s presence. With proper rations a rare luxury, it’s necessary to gather and hunt the local flora and fauna. But be careful, some of those fish and frogs are toxic!

Snake can also get hurt in more lasting ways that inflict a penalty on the health bar until treated. Getting shot will leave bullets lodged that must be extracted, followed by disinfecting and bandaging the wound. Grenades and fire burn you, snakes and scorpions poison you, and swimming through swamp water will leave you covered in stamina-sapping leeches. Run out of medical supplies and your only choice is to save and quit to give Snake time to sleep and heal naturally.

Neither of these systems are that impactful, if we’re being honest. Food is so plentiful that starvation is never a credible threat. Medical supplies are in somewhat shorter supply but still not really a problem. But they are systems that inspired a generation of game designers and launched a thousand imitators. With two decades of distance we can see their legacy in Breath of the Wild’s cooking system, that Far Cry game where you could catch malaria (lol), the survival-crafting genre, and overall system bloat as games have become more loaded with meters and bars to manage.

Snake Eater also introduces the Camo Index. This is a shifting percentage in the corner that rates how hard it is for enemies to detect you, based on the environment, Snake’s current outfit, and his position (i.e. standing, crouching, or prone). This is, on the one hand, a totally artificial metric that boils down innumerable real-world factors into a simple number—exactly the shallow “Press F to pay respects” sort of thing that illustrates painfully the gulf between reality and video games’ ability to recreate it—but, on the other, that information allows players to make choices about how to approach a situation with much greater freedom and creativity than was previously possible. There was a general sense in the earlier games that crouching would make you less conspicuous to guards but by how much? How much more for going prone? Is it worth the loss of mobility? Now players can weigh these factors based on more than vibes. It can also lead to pretty humorous situations like this one where normally I would be certain to be spotted and I would preemptively take out this soldier, but with a Camo Index of 90% I decided to roll the dice:

It also lets you undermine big emotional beats by putting on your silliest camo right before an important cutscene:

Back to the story. Leaving with Sokolov doesn’t go great. He and Snake take one step outside and are ambushed by the elite Ocelot squad. [guard alert noise] Wait, Ocelot squad? That’s right, there he is, a freshfaced lad all of twenty years old—we know him well—give it up for Revolver Ocelot! We did technically know that Ocelot and Big Boss knew each other from his comments in the previous games—particularly after Solidus is injured and dons an eyepatch and Ocelot tells him he really is the spitting image of Big Boss, hold that thought—but it is interesting that they’re meeting at this point in their respective careers, when Snake is just a CIA wetworker and Ocelot is likewise just a soldier loyal to Mother Russia.

Snake and Ocelot have a little showdown that ends in embarrassment for Ocelot after his gun jams, costing him his killshot. Snake, never one to pass up a little shop talk, tells him with the way he handles his weapon he shouldn’t be using a magazine feeder system and should try a revolver instead. The next time we see Ocelot he will have switched to his signature six-shooter and is wearing the misfired bullet around his neck, always waiting for his chance to put it into Snake as intended and undo his humiliation. As the game goes on and a grudging respect grows between them, the relationship between these two men becomes fairly homoerotic. [Suguru Geto voice] Is his name Revolver Ocelot because he uses a revolver or does he use a revolver because his name is Revolver Ocelot?

Then Snake’s mentor The Boss intercepts them. She has grabbed two nuclear warheads and is defecting to the Soviet Union. She disarms Snake and beats him badly. She taught him everything he knows, after all. She takes Sokolov back and flies off with Colonel Volgin, a Russian heavy with a disfigured face and lightning powers (I truly love that this is never explained or justified. Dude just has lightning powers, deal with it). Just for kicks he fires one of the warheads at Sokolov’s research facility, destroying it and killing an unknown number of his countrymen. Ocelot does not approve but lets it happen.

Cut to a week later. Snake has been hospitalized recovering from the beating The Boss gave him when Zero stops by to tell him he’s going back in. We hear a long telephone call between Khrushchev and Lyndon Johnson, during which Khrushchev says the nuclear explosion has imperiled his position as Soviet premier and that Brezhnev’s faction (which includes Volgin) is gunning for retaliatory strikes against the US. Snake must therefore go back in to kill The Boss and pin the whole fault of the incident on her, both to keep the Soviets from spilling the full details of the botched operation and to keep Khrushchev in power, which is in America’s best interests. Again, knowing a little history, this is exciting because Brezhnev really did push Khrushchev out just one year later in 1965. Since we assume Snake will succeed, is the world of Metal Gear supposed to be what came to pass in a timeline where Khrushchev held onto power far longer than he did in our reality? Disappointingly the very end of the game contains some wrap-up text that states that Brezhnev did take power in ’65 as normal so no, never mind.

So Snake airdrops in again and makes his way to rendezvous with an asset named Adam. Adam doesn’t show. Instead he’s met by Eva, a busty blonde on a motorcycle. When she first unzips her jumpsuit you can hold R (the look first-person button) to ogle her cleavage. Now, obviously, introducing the love interest and secondary protagonist of the story in this leering manner is objectifying and misogynistic, buuuuuut there’s a way I can see and appreciate what Kojima is going for here. Video games, above any other art form, are remarkably non-sexual. Now, before you start yelling about me about WoW boob armor, or Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball, or the collectible waifus of Genshin Impact, yes, video games have a long and shameful tradition of sexualizing their female characters. But it is a purely visual sexualization, the sexualization of spectatorship, for the sake of the player. The characters themselves possess no sexuality of their own—no libido, no capacity for passion or pleasure, rarely even desired by the men within their storyworlds. If the girls of Genshin hold a certain fascination and fantasy—right down to spending extra to dress them up in different outfits!—it’s the fascination and fantasy of a sex doll.

So when Eva unzips her shirt and Snake’s eyes go straight to her chest, I see Kojima attempting to tell a story in a more mature style, one that can acknowledge sex and desire as fundamental human experiences. Snake is a man with a mission to accomplish, but his also a man, period. Eva is a skilled spy who knows her body is an advantage in the field. She participates in her own objectification because it furthers her goals but I also think she feels authentic attraction to Snake. It’s sort of crazy-making to consider how rare it is to see this sort of thing in a game. During the ending sequence, after Snake and Eva have made it out of Russia and are holed up in a beautiful Alaskan cabin, they have sex. The scene cuts away at the proper moment but I was almost scandalized to see her get on top of him not, obviously, because it’s so risqué but again because you just don’t see these things in games.

What Snake Eater resembles above all is a James Bond film and Eva follows in the tradition of the best Bond Girls, not Denise Richards in nerd glasses clinging to Pierce Brosnan but like, I want to say, Domino in, I want to say, Thunderball who has her own agenda and plays Sean Connery for a sucker the whole film. And if in doing so they also serve as eye candy for the viewer, hey, it’s a visual medium and I like looking at beautiful women, sue me!!

Eva is playing both sides; she has also insinuated herself into Volgin’s group. Both Snake and Volgin think she’s KGB. When she’s with Volgin she wears glasses and her hair up and acts mousy and afraid—I was embarrassingly late into the game before I realized these two women were one and the same.

Here’s where the game really sets the player loose in the world. It’s a long walk through the jungle to get where Snake needs to go so what follows is a long, unbroken stretch of Tactical Espionage Action. And goddamn is it fun. The larger outdoor environments allow for far more flexibility in approaching a situation than the cramped indoor settings of MGS 1 and 2. Kojima has taken away the omnipresent radar from the previous games, a tremendous act of addition by subtraction. Rather than watching dots on a grid, I was far more engaged with the world and played much more proactively in order to keep eyes on the enemy since it was now a necessity. The mountain ascent sequence in the second half is one of the great setpieces of video games, a thrilling mix of stealth and action that lets the player luxuriate in their acquired skill and arsenal before reaching the final area where the game will get a little stricter again.

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Before we get there though, we need to make a pit stop at Graniny Gorky, a different research station where Sokolov is supposed to be. He isn’t. Instead we meet Granin, a drunken, embittered scientist who feels he’s been passed over and resents Sokolov for it. Sokolov’s big project is the Shagohod, a rocket-boosted tank for launching ICBMs. Granin is contemptuous—rockets on a tank, that’s a backward-looking abomination. What’s needed is a profound evolution. It’s time for military technology to make the same leap that humans did when we began to walk upright. What’s needed is… legs. Here is the actual visionary who will be responsible for the creation of Metal Gear. Kojima plays the scene for laughs. I think it’s hysterical:

Throughout the game you face off with the Cobras, The Boss’s unit of weirdos. Named for the emotion they carry into battle they are The Pain (controls bees), The Fear (stealth camo and poison), The End (old man sniper who talks to the forest, great fight), and The Fury (went to space, has flamethrower). In a moment where Snake is near death you also encounter The Sorrow, a medium who died years prior but whose spirit lingers at the boundary between worlds. The “fight” against him is a long trudge through waist-high water in a mangrove swamp as the ghosts of every enemy you’ve killed lunge at you. Knowing Kojima’s love of this sort of prank, I immediately assumed the sequence used an actual count of every enemy I had personally killed and it would vary depending on how stealthy and how trigger happy I’d played. This does appear to be the case. For me it took approximately six minutes. One guy on Reddit said he did a no-stealth rampage playthrough and his gauntlet of the dead lasted an hour and a half.

Okay, let’s keep it moving. After reaching the final location, Volgin’s massive installation Grozny Grad, Snake is captured and tortured by Volgin, Ocelot, and The Boss. In the course of it all Ocelot starts threatening Eva, sure she’s a mole, and inadvertently shoots out Snake’s right eye. Chekhov’s eyepatch, complete. I timed this sequence on my second playthrough; it runs about 25 minutes. I didn’t time the ending but it’s probably about 40 minutes of cutscenes. I note this just because some light googling has indicated that MGS 4 has a 71-minute cutscene and I think there are even longer ones in Death Stranding.

Lore corner: Volgin’s position and power derive from his possession of the “Philosopher’s Legacy,” a stockpile of $100 billion compiled jointly by the US, the USSR, and China during World War II. The Philosophers whose Legacy it is were governed by an elite board called the Wiseman’s Committee. [Guard alert noise] Yes, that Wiseman’s Committee, the top echelon of The Patriots. As The Boss explains at the end of the game, the Wiseman’s Committee ultimately disintegrated and the Philosophers became defunct, allowing Volgin’s father to seize the Legacy in the chaos of the end of the war. This pays off the tease at the end of Sons of Liberty when Otacon decoded the names of the Patriots only to discover they’re all people who died almost a hundred years prior. The Boss was actually on a deep cover mission to recover it for America. Eva [SPOILER ALERT] is attempting to do the same on behalf of China. Snake is actually the patsy of the whole thing, being the only one not clued in on the Legacy or sent expressly to retrieve it.

When the dust settles after the pyrotechnics of the grand finale (which doesn’t warrant describing but is sooooo James Bond) and numerous sleights of hand and decoy SD cards and so on, it’s none other than Ocelot holding the Legacy. He’s also found Granin’s Metal Gear schematics. We learn a number of things about Ocelot at the very end of the game. One, he’s the son of The Boss and The Sorrow. Two, he’s an even-deeper-cover American spy. And three, he plans to use the Legacy to revive the Philosophers, soon to be renamed as the Patriots. So, not only was he an agent of the Patriots in the earlier games, in fact he is responsible for the group’s resurgence, as well as ushering in an age of Metal Gear-powered nuclear hell.

And then LBJ pins a medal on Snake’s chest and officially awards him the title Big Boss. The wrap-up text covers the creation of Foxhound and the beginning of the Les Enfants Terribles project in a way that strongly suggests Kojima did not intend to make more games starring this character. However, after MGS 4 he will return to him to keep filling in the gaps with Peace Walker for the PSP and then MGS 5.

In the early 2000s Kojima wrote a series of short articles for Official Playstation 2 Magazine about the films that had influenced the creation of Metal Gear Solid. They include The Great Escape, The Guns of Navarone, and Planet of the Apes, among others. I may do an article where I watch them all and include more of what Kojima said about each. About the James Bond series he notes that they follow a pretty strict formula of story beats and writes, “Making something new out of a fixed plot is what makes these films great.” I think this is quite a perceptive observation to apply to video games because, given the way game sequels build on the same gameplay systems as the primary experience, games inevitably participate in the “same but different” dynamic to a huge degree. Snake Eater is a case of this philosophy at its best. Kojima is so comfortable with what he’s doing here. He’s pushing his game design, he’s pushing the graphical limits of the PS2, he’s telling his most human story (if not his most philosophically dazzling), but the whole thing just feels so relaxed. MGS 3 is a good hang. It is without a doubt one of greatest video games ever made.

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I think 2025 also goes down as my best year of writing ever. I am very proud of what I produced over the last twelve months. I think the Blood Meridian/River of Shadows/genocide piece is the best thing I’ve ever written. The Coen series has come into its own with the Fargo and Lebowski pieces. The MGS2 essay is an example of my favorite kind of writing: a piece that takes one artwork as its subject and then fractures outward to bring in every connection I can make. I love to see a critic’s mind at work in this way. As far as I can tell regular readers don’t really dig it but we’ll come back to that. The words came more easily than they ever have before last year. My review of Late Star Trek was long and I worried Adam would be mad I gave the goods away but I loved the book and the words came easily and that was a great feeling so I wrote them all down. My essay on The True Story of the Novel and literature’s ability to oppose the transactional logic of capitalist society came and went without a lot of love—if there’s one piece I hope you’ll go back and read if you missed it at the time it’s that.

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And now the big one: through almost no doing of my own a real job as fallen in my lap. I talked to another dad at a birthday party and was interesting and interested in him and blah blah three months later when he had an opening in his department he thought of me. And I’m qualified for it! It’s a spreadsheets-and-emails job for the city, that actually puts to use a lot of skills from my old trade media job in New York. Apparently a decent chunk of it will be calling and bugging vendors about all the shit they’re behind on because everything happens late in New Mexico. They asked if I was up for that in the interview and I told them “being a journalist is being a pest.” It’s the highest pay of my life, plus government benefits and pension plan. The retirement plan vests to 85% of your top salary after only 20 years. I could be in and out before I’m 55!

That sounds like a joke but I really am thinking on that sort of timeline for the first time in my life. I had started feeling really down about my long-term career trajectory lately. I’m 34 now and obviously the writing isn’t going anywhere, in terms of supporting a family anyway. As I wrote a year and a half ago, I feel like I have no marketable skills besides writing. This opportunity has changed everything. Instead of desperately trying to avoid thinking about the future looming over me, suddenly I am able to imagine ten, twenty years from now. There’s a trajectory and an off-ramp. So that’s the plan. Assuming I don’t get sent home on the first day for not knowing a basic accounting term or how to make a SUM function in Excel (I have two weeks to study before my first day lol), I now have long-term financial security really for the first time as an independent adult. It’s just a matter of showing up and white-knuckling it toward retirement, assuming Santa Fe doesn’t burn to the ground or until President Mr. Beast dissolves the government and eliminates my pension.

All this is weird to think about. I’ve never had qualms about being old and washed but I think I’ve held onto some sense of youth and authenticity by remaining broke as hell. My politics moved farther and farther leftward over the past decade largely in response to staggering wealth inequality and my strong sense that I would never escape financial precarity. And now, without feeling like I’ve “applied myself” or whatever I just sort of have. How am I supposed to wear my Defector Quit Your Job shirt when I’m banking years toward retirement? These are stupid thoughts but it’s disorienting to step out from under conditions that have structured my beliefs for so long.

Another way of putting all this is that the big writing career dream is dead. I am not going to write for the New Yorker. And honestly, good riddance. That was the dream because that was the dream. Do I actually want to work at the New Yorker? I mean, yes. But also, I’m so at peace with it. Without being too self-congratulatory, I am so happy with what I’m doing here with this newsletter. I went through a whole back and forth with pitching over the past year. Last spring I tried really hard, for instance, to place the Late Star Trek review in a real publication. I wrote the best pitch email of my life noting the book spoke to a lot more than just that single franchise, called in friends for help me find appropriate editors to hit up, and got back nothing. Not a single editor responded—editors I’ve worked with, editors I approached with a mutual contact as recommendation in the first line. So I gave up and just started posting everything here without even trying. Over the summer I had coffee with a writer I really admire when she was in town and she told me I was one of the people she thinks “really gets it… actually sees the big picture.” It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me about my work and I was reinvigorated to start trying to pitch again. I tried to place the Blood Meridian article and again got nothing back in response and again got discouraged. As I was drafting the MGS2 piece and it was going pleasingly off the rails I realized, if it had to run somewhere real they would try to smooth it out and take out the digressions into Chicago School economics and whatnot. But that was the best stuff in the piece imo. I want to write stuff that crazy and blockquote-y and then also stuff as stupid as the Death Note piece. I know my work is flawed in the way all unedited work is flawed and I do wish I could have that real writer-editor relationship to help me grow but also—when I have been edited it hasn’t been some intensive back-and-forth pointing out my tics and blindspots it’s been a perfunctory list of GDocs edits and two notes asking me to say more here and here.

To be clear, I plan to keep writing. But it’s an incredible relief to be able to put aside concerns with subscriber growth and monetization to instead just care about the work. Because, frankly, that’s already how it’s been, just with the added anxiety of knowing I was failing at the career part of it all. Of the writers I read I consider Max Read the best at “newslettering”—which is not a backhanded compliment against his skills as a writer, I’ve been reading Max for a decade and read Read Max religiously and it remains totally wild he reads and recommends my writing—but he has thought a lot about how you make a newsletter work and his results speak for themselves. Among general best practices like ‘having a beat,’ his biggest advice is, paraphrasing, ‘produce 1200 words every week that are timely or relevant in one way or another’ and ‘offer consistent bonus content for paid subscribers.’

I have not followed any of these tenets and again my results speak for themselves. As always there are sTruCtuRal ReAsoNs I can blame—everyone agrees the tech dipshits running Substack turned down the big knob that put new eyeballs on articles and most people are oversubscribed already—but it doesn’t matter. The fact is that after almost four years on here I have just under 500 subscribers. I was surprised to see that that number has more than doubled over the past year, which is cool, but it is what it is.

It’s frustrating. I know my writing isn’t exactly changing the world but I think it’s consistently enjoyable and always adds something new to whatever I’m discussing. I love writing that gives me a new perspective on a book/movie/video game I thought I had figured out and I guess I thought there would be a bigger market for that sort of thing. Oh well, I think my work has value.

But with my new salary coming soon, I can see and accept that I shouldn’t be charging for this newsletter. It was very sweet of those friends and family to support my work in that way for no benefit in return, although I wonder how much having a benefitless paid tier has actually hampered my growth over the past two years. In any case thank you to Ian, Mary, David, Aunt Susan, Grammie, Lauren, and Barbara. I appreciate it so much but I’m deactivating paid subscriptions as we move into this new phase.

When my dream of writing for a glossy magazine was most fervent, I absolutely hated writing. Every sentence was pain to wring out of myself. The end goal was the only thing. To use a threadbare cliche, I didn’t want to write, I wanted to have written. I had no respect for the process and I didn’t have any sense of fun. I wanted every single thing I wrote to be monumental, which of course meant, though I didn’t realize it at the time, a monument to me. I couldn’t see a given piece of writing as simply one part of a body of work, some of which would inevitably be better or worse than others. I couldn’t fathom writing as something that I would do, and do, and do again. Because that is what a vocation is. Work is something we seek to complete. A vocation is what we return to, something that, if we’re lucky, never ends.

I no longer mind that my writing will not be my work. I hardly think I’m the best writer out there. But it matters to me that I do it and enough of you like my stuff that I don’t feel totally deluded. Now, when I don’t expect anything to come of it beyond the process and the finished product, it feels right. In two weeks I’ll start my new job because I have to earn money. But that doesn’t change anything. I will still have my vocation.

I’ll leave you with a passage from Natalia Ginzburg’s essay “My Vocation,” which is admittedly about novel-writing not essays:

Sometimes I would think that I had not been so unfortunate in my life and that I was unjust when I accused destiny of never having shown me any kindness, because it had given me my three children and my vocation. Besides, I could not imagine my life without my vocation. It was always there, it had never left me for a moment, and when I believed that it slept its vigilant, shining eyes were still watching me.

Such is my vocation. It does not produce much money and it is always necessary to follow some other vocation simultaneously in order to live. Though sometimes it produces a little, and it is very satisfying to have money because of it—it is like receiving money and presents from the hands of someone you love. Such is my vocation. I do not, I repeat, know much about the value of the results it has given me or could give me: or it would be better to say that I know the relative though certainly not the absolute value of the results it have already obtained. When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn’t matter much to me. Only, I don’t want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked ‘a small writer like who?’ it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever bee like me, however small, how much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life.

Thank you all for reading these last few years. I appreciate it immensely. Talk to you soon.

In the course of his banger essay Against Truth, tossed off a recommendation for The Pursuit of the Millennium,1 Norman Cohn’s study of End Times revolutionaries and mystical anarchists in the Middle Ages, originally published in 1957 and revised and updated in 1970. It is a deeply fascinating account of how a population’s dissatisfaction with material conditions can combine with eschatological dreams of a better world to come to form, under charismatic leadership, explosive movements that sought to radically reorder society and usher in the thousand years of Christ’s reign on earth promised in Revelation. It demonstrates how the same fundamental narratives of decline and renewal persist over thousands of years as well as the human capacity to remix and reinterpret them for a given historical moment.

The Pursuit of the Millennium is a pleasure to read and a fantastic work of scholarship. I’m going to use it to talk about a fairly dreadful anime from 2006.

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Ever since I got so obsessed with Neon Genesis Evangelion that I watched it three times through in less than six months (shoutout ) about a year and a half ago, I’ve kept some anime in the queue to watch when Liz goes to bed early. Some of these have been other Hideaki Anno projects—Gunbuster (so good), Nadia (bad), His and Her Circumstances (good but DNF). Some are new stuff like Delicious in Dungeon (need season two immediately), Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (I love to cry my eyes out over a cartoon elf), and Jujutsu Kaisen (I honestly respect how unapologetically this is just “YuYu Hakusho but make it Naruto”). And some have been purported classics that I missed at the time like Cowboy Bebop and Death Note.

Death Note starts with so much promise. Adapted from a manga written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, Death Note is about Light Yagami, a Japanese high schooler who comes into possession of a magical notebook with the power to kill anyone whose name is written in it. I initially thought the show might have something interesting to say because of how instantly Light embraces his role as a god of death. The moment he accepts his power is real he chooses a path of pure evil. It is a faster heel turn than Walter White in Breaking Bad. By episode two Light is monologuing about how he will create a new world and he will be its god.

I was all in on Death Note after its seventh episode. Light begins his worldwide killing spree carelessly, relying on the news to supply him with victims, so both the Japanese police and the FBI quickly ascertain generally where he lives; since his father is the chief of police and Light could have filched police records from him, he quickly finds himself a person of interest. Cornered, he kills twelve FBI agents. Soon the fiancée-widow of one of them arrives wanting to talk to Light’s dad. Light walks her across town to where the task force is holed up, all the while trying to win her trust. The show devotes an entire episode to this interaction. The woman knows the killer—“Kira” as he comes to be known by the public—needs a person’s real name to kill. Therefore she won’t tell Light her name. Light wheedles and cajoles and slowly wins her over. In the end she gives in and tells him. He immediately pulls out the Death Note and writes her name, specifying a death by suicide. The episode ends with her walking down the street as a great gallows rises before her.

This is what a victory looks like for our protagonist. It’s chilling and unlike really anything else I’ve seen in its unrepentant evilness. If the show could keep up this commitment to such detestable ends it would certainly be a work of singular, if horrific, vision. Unfortunately it quickly lapses into tedium. What that episode did so elegantly now becomes the model for the longform cat-and-mouse story to follow. The investigation of Kira falls into the hands of L, a young supergenius who only eats sweets and never wears shoes and is instantly certain that Light is Kira. He brings Light into the investigation to better keep tabs on him and watch him sweat. Light is thus put in the position of putting on a show of trying to catch himself while endeavoring to clear his name and learn L’s real name so he can execute him.

There are various complications—a second Kira appears who turns out to be pop idol Misa Amane; Light is forced to make her his girlfriend and to take her into his conspiracy. Then Light invites L to lock up Misa and himself for as long as he deems necessary to prove their innocence, all the while having passed the Death Note to some shady corporate board so the killings will continue. When Light and Misa relinquish their Death Notes they lose all their memories involving them. There follows an arc that’s like a third of the overall story of now-good-again Light earnestly helping the investigation to catch the decoy Kira. There are episodes that consist of nothing but Light, L, and the rest of the task force sitting in their HQ talking about an investigation we know is a ruse. How did a show so twisted get so boring?

What came to frustrate me about Death Note above all was Light’s lack of vision or ideology. He chooses to become a serial killer of world-historic proportions to build his Utopia but it’s never clear what that new world is supposed to be. Light’s rules are simple: he kills criminals. He accepts the laws as they exist. He never interrogates how those laws came to be, whether they are just, whether things not on the books are crimes in his eyes.

For all his revolutionary spirit, he exercises absolute deference to the world as it is. He never considers why people turn to crime in the first place. Someone breaking the law is proof of an evil, irredeemable soul, not an emergent phenomenon of socio-economic conditions that marginalize entire classes of people and exclude them from legitimate enterprise. He leaves intact all the political structures of the world—he never even contemplates writing a politician’s name in the Death Note. I could never quite decide if Light’s lack of guiding principles was a feature or a bug. Is his vacuousness an intentional critique on the part of Ohba, is the series about the peril of trying to be a visionary without a vision, or is it a failure of Ohba’s imagination to go beyond “crime = bad”?

The common feature across every propheta and social movement Cohn describes in The Pursuit of the Millennium is the double consciousness of a population whose understanding of the world is shaped almost wholly by their religion yet also hates the Church with unrivaled fury. As a worldly body, the Catholic church was necessarily incapable of living up to the expectations it had set for itself. Living conditions were extraordinarily harsh under the old feudal systems; the rise of mercantilism led to that system breaking down but it can hardly be said most people’s standards of living rose as a result. As people flocked to new urban industrial centers circa 1100—weaving was suddenly a huge economic force and weavers guilds play a significant role in almost every millenarian sect—there arose a new class of urban poor who, excised from old kinship systems and the noblesse oblige of their feudal lords, experienced poverty of an all-new sort surrounded by a city of indifferent strangers. It was a constant source of indignation that the clergy lived in comparative luxury. Given Christ’s teachings on the blessings of poverty, it was hardly a leap of logic that the poor came to see themselves as the truly devout and the Church as a bastion of luxury and avarice.

One of the core tenets of millenarianism, again inherited from Revelation, is that the final days before Christ’s return will be a period of great darkness, in which Antichrist will rule the earth from Babylon. This seed found fertile ground in the public’s widespread resentment of the clergy. Many groups identified the pope as Antichrist and Rome as Babylon. Since it was the job of the righteous to inaugurate the battle against the forces of evil that would culminate in Christ’s return, very often millenarian movements would go from city to city with the primary purpose of beating, humiliating, expelling, or killing the resident priesthood.

We can see how these itinerant preachers drew on local animosities to fuse their eschatological message with the political aims of the peasantry in the early case of Henry of Le Mans, a former monk who came to his eponymous city on Ash Wednesday in 1116. The bishop of Le Mans gave Henry permission to preach and then quickly left on a journey to Rome:

As soon as the bishop’s back was turned Henry—a bearded young man, dressed only in a hair shirt, and endowed with a mighty voice—began to preach against the local clergy. He found willing listeners. The people of Le Mans were very ready to turn against their clergy, for these were a venal and loose-living lot. Moreover, the bishops of Le Mans had long been active in local politics, and in an unpopular cause—they had lent their support to the counts, from whose overlordship the burghers were struggling to free themselves. All in all, it is not surprising that after a short course of Henry’s preaching the populace was beating priests in the streets and rolling them in the mud.

In place of the priesthood the prophetae inevitably substituted themselves. Some wasted no time claiming for themselves the titles of Messiah or Christ while others began more humbly as simple speakers for God’s intended manner of living. Those less grandiose preachers often claimed their legitimacy from a purported divine letter they held, which contained instructions written by the Virgin Mary. Either way, nearly all wound up denying the Church any power or legitimacy—its priests were not fit for any of their holy duties. Instead only the preacher had that authority. To stick with Henry of Le Mans, Cohn writes:

In later years, when he was active in Italy and Provence, he rejected the authority of the Church altogether, denying that ordained priests had the power to consecrate the host, to give absolution, or to preside at marriages. Baptism, he taught, should be given only as an external sign of belief. Church buildings and all the trappings of official religion were useless; a man could pray anywhere as well as he could in a church. The true Church consisted of those who followed the apostolic life, in poverty and simplicity; love of one’s neighbour was the essence of true religion. And Henry regarded himself as directly commissioned by God to preach this message.

Others put their own bodies on par with those of Christ and the saints. One named Adelbert, active in the mid-1200s, distributed his hair- and nail-clippings among his followers, who treasured them as sacred relics. Another, Tanchelm of Antwerp, gave his followers his bathwater, some of whom drank it as a substitute for the Eucharist.

The general aims and career trajectories of the various prophetae remain remarkably similar across the approximately 400 years surveyed—almost all end up beheaded or burned—but they differ in their priorities. Some were focused on the world to come much more than others who thought the path to the Millennium ran through material improvements in the world at hand. But one stands out for dreaming of enacting his reforms by drowning the world in blood.

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This figure, known only as the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine, hardly deserves to be included in the book—he does not appear to have ever preached in public and his book, The Book of a Hundred Chapters, was never printed. However, Cohn counters, “his treatise is the last and most comprehensive expression of the popular eschatology of the Middle Ages.” His are typical fantasies, infused with megalomania and taken to grandiose extremes. He predicts the arrival of a messiah that pulls in traits inherited directly from Revelation as well as traits connected to local German traditions regarding the return of the martyred Emperor Frederick (not really worth going into). This messiah will rule a thousand years during which every need of the people will be amply met.

However, this bounty will not be given until the world is ready. And, further, it won’t be long before God loses patience with the sinful world and unleashes his retribution. Therefore, anything is justified to cleanse the earth:

The route to the Millennium leads through massacre and terror. God’s aim is a world free from sin. If sin continues to flourish, divine punishment will surely be visited upon the world; whereas if sin is once abolished, then the world will be ready for the Kingdom of the Saints. The most urgent task of the Brethren of the Yellow Cross is therefore to eliminate sin, which in effect means to eliminate sinners… To achieve that end assassination is wholly legitimate: ‘Whoever strikes a wicked man for his evildoing, for instance for blasphemy—if he beats him to death he shall be called a servant of God; for everyone is in duty bound to punish wickedness.’ In particular the Revolutionary calls for the assassination of the reigning Emperor, Maximilian, for whom he had an overwhelming hatred. But beyond these preliminary murders lies the day when the new Emperor from the Black Forest, together with the Brotherhood, will ‘control the whole world from West to East by force of arms—an age of ubiquitous and incessant terror, in which the hopeful prophecy was to be amply justified: ‘Soon we will drink blood for wine!’

“An age of ubiquitous and incessant terror” is precisely what Light brings about in Death Note. And just as Light appoints himself God of his new world of fear, so too did the Revolutionary of the Rhine believe himself to be the avenging messiah capable of dealing out retribution against the whole sinful world and its eventual benefactor, providing every necessity during the Millennium. Into this mix he infuses some sinister nationalism:

Clearly in this phantasy the Emperor from the Black Forest and the returning Christ have merged together to form one single messiah. This makes it all the more striking when the publicist lets slip, as he does from time to time, that he expected this messiah to be no other than himself… It was the Emperor—the Revolutionary himself, triumphant and glorified—who was to stand at the centre of the future religion, who would be ‘the supreme priest’ and whom ‘one must recognize as an earthly God’. The future Empire was indeed to be nothing less than a quasi-religious community united in adoration and dread of a messiah who was the incarnation of the German spirit.

I’ll say this for Light: at least he’s not a nationalist. The fact of his being Japanese is entirely incidental. Dude does not care about his homeland.

And yet even the Revolutionary has a structural critique compared to Light. He is sure that it is systems of wealth and property that produce the abuses that so outrage him:

The Revolutionary is utterly convinced that God has ordered the great massacre of clergy and ‘usurers’ in order to remove such abuses for ever, the holocaust is to be an indispensable purification of the world on the eve of the Millennium. And one fact about the Millennium which emerges with great clarity is that it is to be strongly anti-capitalist. Church property is to be secularized and used by the Emperor for the benefit of the community as a whole and the poor in particular. All income derived either from landed property or from trade is to be confiscated — which amounts to an abolition of the principalities and an expropriation of all the rich.

Damn, what can you say except

Is there a point here? Without being too grandiose, I think what I try to do with this newsletter is demonstrate how reading widely can enrich the most unlikely parts of our lives and allow us to redeem otherwise lacking bits of cultural ephemera with some galaxy brain comparison. I was lamenting Death Note’s shallow treatment of a rich premise and through pure coincidence I found a weirdo who lived half a millennium ago who shared the same fantasies and fixations as Light. The world sucks these days, it feels like everyone is struggling badly, and it’s hard to stay positive. For me, making silly little connections like this reminds me there’s value in thinking deeply and imagining widely. Or to put it another way

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Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy, ten-year career check-up, and Fargo.

The authors the Coens cite as influences more than anyone else are the three titans of noir/crime/detective fiction, James Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. During press for Blood Simple the brothers professed a particular love for Cain. Joel told one interviewer, “We’ve always thought that up at the Low Library at Columbia University, where the names are chiseled up there above the columns in stone—Aristotle, Herodotus, Virgil—that the fourth one should be Cain.” Blood Simple, insofar as it’s a film about two people blowing up their lives due to catastrophic horniness, is a Cain story through and through. Two films later they riffed on Hammett with Miller’s Crossing, which is quite in line with a work like Red Harvest, concerning as it does a corrupt city where no one is redeemable. The Coens have been very explicit about this; Joel told Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret at Positif, “Miller’s Crossing was certainly born from our desire to tell a story the Hammett way.”

That left Chandler as the last of the three unimitated. You know what article you’re reading—enter The Big Lebowski. Again, the Coens are refreshingly not coy about acknowledging the influence. “We wanted to do a Chandler kind of story,” Joel told Doug Stone in 1998, “how it moves episodically, and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery. As well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.” Adds Ethan, “And there was something attractive about having the main character not be a private eye, but just some pothead intuitively figuring out the ins and outs of an elaborate intrigue. And then there’s Walter, whose instincts are always wrong.”

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I don’t want to belabor this point too much, since Lebowski stands on its own as so funny and so great, but some of the characters are such direct lifts or clever modifications they bear noting. The first is the title character himself, the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), by which I mean not Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), but the rich husband of Bunny (Tara Reid) who employs The Dude in resolving (or not?) her kidnapping. Confined to a wheelchair, he is a direct analogue to General Sternwood in The Big Sleep (Charles Waldron in the Howard Hawks adaptation), who employs Marlowe to deal with a blackmail situation involving his younger daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers). Here’s how Joel interprets this character to Positif:

Here again, that has been inspired by Chandler. You find him in The Big Sleep, and also in The High Window. He’s a recurrent character, the domineering, all-powerful figure who becomes a catalyst. Chandler’s novels cut across all the social classes of Los Angeles, and this character is at the top of the ladder. He represents Money. He appears in Chinatown, he’s contributed to the town’s construction. He symbolizes an old order, which, in the end, you discover is all a sham.

Sternwood has two daughters, the elegant older sister Vivian (Lauren Bacall) and the wild-child source of trouble Carmen. Ethan points out how they have lifted these types and their dynamic with the protagonist, saying, “We had, as so often in his novels, a mature and sophisticated woman, Maude, played by Julianne Moore, and a licentious and depraved girl, Bunny, played by Tara Reid. The main character is often involved in a romantic subplot with the first type of woman.” For a visual point of comparison, let’s look at how Hawks introduces his flirtatious girl in The Big Sleep (this is the opening scene FYI):

Martha Vickers… Hello. Now consider how the Coens have updated and twisted this moment in Lebowski:

All credit to Reid for that delivery, but wow, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s pained laughing grimace is truly one of the funniest things ever put on film.

Last but not least, we must consider The Dude’s resemblance to Marlowe. One way to understand Lebowski is as a Marlowe story where his role is played by the most un-Marlowe-like character possible. Whereas Marlowe is a private eye by trade, Jeffrey has the role of detective thrust upon him and is wildly unprepared to unravel a mystery. Marlowe is something of an ascetic—constantly rebuffing the women throwing themselves at him and working long hours on cases that don’t pay. The Dude is, of course, a slacker extraordinaire who tokes up as the Big Lebowski delivers his key exposition laying out his task in rescuing Bunny from her kidnappers.

Looking below the surface though, I see a number of qualities that unite the two. I’ve already quoted Ethan as saying that they liked the way The Dude works through the case intuitively rather than logically, but I question how far that really is from how Marlowe works. Putting aside a whole thing I need to write about detective fiction and the fundamentally magical and uncanny nature of generating ideas, I think of a moment in Farewell, My Lovely where Marlowe, in the midst of working two unrelated cases, walks to the elevator and is suddenly struck by an idea and runs back to the office to make a call. We’re not told what the idea was for quite a while but it turns out to be a gut instinct that the two cases are connected and how to prove it.

In addition to their cutting wits and love of a stiff drink, what truly unites Marlowe and The Dude is their mutual inability to walk away from a situation. Marlowe is often hired for jobs that his employers want to keep contained—just pay off Carmen’s blackmailer, don’t look into her gambling debts or what became of Vivian’s missing husband. But once Marlowe gets his teeth into a case he can’t let go until every loose end is tied up. And he can’t resist putting himself in these situations in the first place. I think of a moment at the very beginning of Farewell, My Lovely where Marlowe watches a hulking colossus of a man—“Moose” Malloy—walk into a building and then bodily throw another man out into the street. Marlowe stares at the double doors, thinking. “It wasn’t any of my business. So I pushed them open and looked in.”

As I rewatch these movies I’m at pains to notice how the Coens construct their plots and keep the action moving forward. Lebowksi relies so much on the way The Dude just keeps showing up. Long past the point where any normal person would cut their losses and walk away from the whole situation, The Dude keeps his appointments. Maude, whom he has never met, leaves him a voicemail asking him to come by to talk and we just cut to him arriving at her studio—no hesitation, no justification, he just does it. It’s a pretty clever and subtle bit of storytelling sleight-of-hand that also envelops the audience in the reefer haze that clouds the entire film. The action carries along so effortlessly and dreamily that one can occasionally sort of jolt awake, so to speak, asking how they arrived at the present moment and finding they are unable to trace a path backward to the last stable point in the story. It’s an ingenious mimicking of the disoriented way The Dude stumbles through his investigation without ever quite knowing where he’s come from or where he’s going.

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It wouldn’t be in the spirit of the film to run through and explicate its plot. The movie can’t keep track of it itself. In interviews for Miller’s Crossing the Coens disavowed any meaning in the film beyond the unfolding of its plot. With Lebowski they have gone even farther. Now the plot itself, though hopelessly convoluted, is ultimately irrelevant. It’s just scaffolding for a bunch of funny scenes and oddball characters. Yet they see even the characterization as basically irrelevant as well. When Gary Susman of the Boston Phoenix asked them why Walter (John Goodman) is an observant Jewish convert in addition to a hot-headed Vietnam veteran, Ethan replied, “What’s the point of any of the characterization? It’s a peg to hang a few gags on him.” Similarly, Ethan said of John Turturro’s character Jesus Quintana, “Originally he was just like a good bowler, the nemesis bowler, but we thought, make him a Hispanic pederast, it’ll give John something to get his teeth into.”

Note that both Bunny’s introduction and The Jesus’ work the same way, where they establish a new character in a memorable way, then deliver a bunch of exposition—in the first case by introducing Uli (Peter Stormare) and mentioning he’s a nihilist, in the second the details of the money and the handoff—then return to the new character for another gag to close the scene. Works every time.

Similarly again, they disavow any real significance of the centrality of bowling to the film. If character traits are just pegs for gags, setting is just fodder for interesting visuals. Joel: “We liked the design aspects of bowling. The sort of retro aspects of it seemed like the right fit for the characters. One of the people this is loosely based on was in an amateur softball league in LA that really took up a lot of his time. We changed that to bowling because bowling seemed more compelling from a visual point of view. It’s the only thing that calls itself a sport where you can smoke and drink beer.”

But in the hands of the right interviewers, the Coens finally start to show a willingness to interpret their own work. In particular I think it’s interesting what Joel told Positif about the relationship their characters have to their historical moment:

The action itself takes place at the beginning of the nineties, but all the characters refer to the culture of thirty years ago, they are its aftermath and mirror. Jeff Bridges is an aging hippie, John Goodman is defined by his Vietnam experience, while Maude has for her blueprints the sixties New York Fluxus artists like Yoko Ono before she met John Lennon, or Carol Schneeman, who literally threw herself into her projects for physical support. Maude owes her a lot! Ben Gazzara also echoes people like Hugh Hefner from that period. The difference from Boogie Nights, which represents the seventies, or Velvet Goldmine, on rock starts like David Bowie in that same period, is that The Big Lebowski doesn’t really take place in the past. It’s a contemporary movie about what’s become of people who were formed and defined by that earlier period.

I guess that makes Lebowski the only not-annoying movie about the Baby Boomer Experience. Wow!

The guys at Positif also were able to get a better answer about the bowling alley. Ethan said, “The movie was conceived as pivoting around the relationship between The Dude and Walter. The idea sprang from the scenes between Barton Fink [Turturro] and Charlie Meadows, who was played by John Goodman. That’s the reason why the bowling seemed an appropriate context: it’s not that the sport isn’t played by women, but they have their own teams. In bowling, there’s a real segregation of the sexes. In The Big Lebowski you spend time exclusively in the company of men. The worlds of the private eye and the Western, which we refer to at the end of the movie, are also very masculine.”

To his point about The Dude’s relationship to Walter being so central, that was the biggest surprise to me on rewatch. I remembered Walter as a supporting character in two or three scenes but in fact he is a constant presence throughout.

Even Jeff Bridges got in on the action, insisting to Susman at the Phoenix the film has a moral dimension. “I think it’s a film about grace, how amazing it is that we’re all allowed to stay alive on this speck hurled out into space, being as screwed up as we all are. Like, Fargo had a moral resonance to it. This one, I think, does as well. It may not be apparent to most people at first. But working in it, kind of bathing in this thing, it rang for me. It’s not a real clear thing that you can say, ‘That’s what it means.’ It’s a little different.”

Well anyway, that’s enough interpretation. It’s a shaggy movie and this is a shaggy article and I don’t have a grand conclusion for once. What else is there to say about Lebowski except that it’s extremely fucking funny, still? Let’s watch some clips, shall we?

Maude shows The Dude Logjammin’ (Warning: includes grainy VHS nudity):

Fun fact: the other actress in Logjammin’ is Asia Carrera, a real porn star who also has an IQ of 156 and is in Mensa. (I know IQ is fake, don’t @ me).

Walter teaches Larry Sellers a lesson:

I love the runner of The Dude’s car being progressively trashed over the course of the movie.

The Dude talks with Jackie Treehorn:

God, Ben Gazzara is the greatest. Watch Killing of a Chinese Bookie immediately if you’ve never seen it. This scene also highlights just how amazing Jeff Bridges is as well. His line “For you, maybe” goes by so fast but it’s so good and he delivers it perfectly. The dick drawing is a laugh out loud moment for me every single time.

The Dude objects to listening to The Eagles:

Stray thoughts

• The Coens believe deeply that private detectives drive blue VW bugs. Here’s M. Emmett Walsh in Blood Simple:

And here’s Jon Polito’s car in Lebowski:

• Philip Seymour Hoffman RIP, you are perfect in this film, Brandt the GOAT.

• One more Chandlerism: the scene where The Dude is berated by the police chief of Malibu, who tells him that Jackie Treehorn draws a lot of water in that town and says “We got a nice quiet little beach community here… Stay out of Malibu, deadbeat!!” is a close recreation of a scene in Farewell, My Lovely in which the corrupt chief of Bay City tells Marlowe much the same thing.

• This film marks the Coens’ first collaboration with T Bone Burnett as music supervisor, a relationship that will continue with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Inside Llewyn Davis. Carter Burwell’s soundtrack is excellent as always but Burnett makes his presence felt in the way each character sort of has their own soundtrack. Said Ethan to Positif, “It’s the music that defines the character. For the cowboy played by Sam Elliott, Dylan’s “The Man in Me” was chosen at the time of writing. As was “Lujon” by Henri Mancini for Ben Gazzara’s character. The German nihilists are accompanied by techno-pop and Jeff Bridges by Creedence. So there’s a music signature for each of them.”

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Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen, 1934

You guys ever think you’ve found some hidden gem of a book and try to show it off to friends, only to discover it’s extremely well-known and well-regarded? That was me with this one. Dinesen (real name Karen Blixen) was the Danish baroness who wrote Out of Africa as well as “Babette’s Feast,” both of which were made into Academy Award-winning films. Upon mentioning Seven Gothic Tales to my friend David, he told me I had to read Out of Africa “even though the last quarter gets so racist [he] couldn’t finish it.”

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Unlike Out of Africa, which is (I’m told) written in spare, “modern” prose, Seven Gothic Tales is written to be a throwback. The stories are generally set in the early 19th century and Dinesen’s style seems intended to mimic the writing of that era as well. It is unhurried and attentive to atmosphere—rather than worrying about getting her characters moving and talking immediately Dinesen is first concerned with building a world for them to move about in. Here’s the first paragraph of “The Deluge at Norderney,” which feels to me so luxurious:

During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the rôle of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity. The romantic spirit of the age, which delighted in ruins, ghosts, and lunatics, and counted a stormy night on the heath and a deep conflict of the passions a finer treat for the connoisseur than the ease of the salon and the harmony of a philosophic system, reconciled even the most refined individuals to the eternal wildness of the coast scenery and of the open seas. Ladies and gentlemen of fashion abandoned the shade of their parks to come and walk upon the bleak shores and watch the untameable waves. The neighborhood of a shipwreck, where, in low tide, the wreck was still in sight, like a hardened, black, and salted skeleton, became a favorite picnic place, where fair artists put up their easels.

Oh yeah, that’s the good stuff. Gimme every one of those commas. In “The Deluge at Norderney,” as in many of the tales, that narration gives way to extended monologues, though her characters hardly speak less ornately. In “Deluge,” we have four characters stuck in the attic of a house following catastrophic flooding who have to wait out the night before a boat can return to rescue them. They go around in turn telling their life stories in great detail. We thus get dizzyingly nested layers of speech and narration: omniscient narrator > character in attic > them speaking in their story > quoting someone else. I confess I read the first half of “Deluge” after taking a weed gummy and I was REELING at this Inception-esque structure.

“The Roads Round Pisa” is a story that absolutely should not work. Our narrator, traveling to Pisa, meets various characters and gets sucked into several different interpersonal conflicts, one of which culminates in a duel. The tension of the story comes from our asking how these threads might cohere; in the end they do, kind of, but it’s just so pleasurable to read you mostly stop caring about its construction or deciding whether it’s good and are happy just to enjoy the ride. “The Monkey” is the most capital-G gothic story of the batch, concerning a bunch of twists of fate that seem to be too good to be true followed by one final, supernatural twist.

Here’s my new manifesto: authors must rediscover the courage to write a 50-page story that contains absolutely no dialogue in its first half. My favorite story, “The Supper at Elsinore,” is built entirely around one scene, but to get there it’s necessary to relate the entire history of the three siblings of the De Coninck family, Fanny, Eliza, and Morten. Dinesen displays a George Eliot level of characterization, a thrilling reminder of how powerful it can be to just be told a character’s qualities by an author capable of imagining and rendering the inner workings of a foreign mind at this caliber:

Whether they had ever been in love, old Madam Bæk herself could not tell. They used to drive her to despair by their hard skepticism as to any man being in love with them, when she, indeed, knew better, when she saw the swains of Elsinore grow pale and worn, go into exile or become old bachelors from love of them. She also felt that could they ever have been quite convinced of a man’s love of them, that would have meant salvation to these young flying Dutchwomen. But they stood in a strange, distorted relation to the world, as if it had been only their reflection in a mirror which they had been showing it, while in the background and the shadow the real woman remained a looker-on. She would follow with keen attention the movements of the lover courting her image, laughing to herself at the impossibility of their love, when the moment should come for it, her own heart hardening all the time. Did she wish that the man would break the glass and the lovely creature within it, and around toward herself? Oh, that she knew to be out of the question. Perhaps the lovely sisters derived a queer pleasure out of the adoration paid to their images in the mirror. They could not do without it in the end.

This is getting self-indulgent now but Dinesen’s introduction of Morten is my favorite paragraph I’ve read in ages:

The fatal melancholy of the family had come out in a different manner in Morten, the boy, and in him had fascinated Madam Bæk even to possession. She never lost patience with him, as she sometimes did with the girls, because of the fact that he was male and she female, and also by reason of the true romance which surrounded him as it had never surrounded his sisters. He had been, indeed, in Elsinore, as another highborn young dandy before him, the observed of all observers, the glass of fashion and the mold of form. Many were the girls of the town who had remained unmarried for his sake, or who had married late in life one having a likeness, perhaps no quite en face and not quite in profile to that god-like young head which had, by then, forever disappeared from the horizon. And there was even the girl who had been, in the eyes of all the world, engaged to be married to Morten, herself married now, with children—aber frage nur nicht wie! She had lost that radiant fairness which had in his day given her the name, in Elsinore, of “golden lambkin,” so that where that fairy creature had once pranced in the streets a pale and quiet lady now trod the pavement. But still this was the girl whom, when he had stepped out of his barge on a shining March day at the pier of Elsinore, with the whole population of the town waving and shouting to him, he had lifted from the ground and held in his arms, while all the world had swung up and down around her, had whirled fans and long streamers in all the hues of the rainbow.

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Aristotle Detective, Margaret Doody, 1978

Attentive readers will recall last spring I read Margaret Doody’s towering work of scholarship The True Story of the Novel, which you should all order immediately. In her preface, she notes that her investigation into the fiction of the classical world began when she ran up against the question of what reading materials were available in Aristotle’s day in the course of writing the second book in her Aristotle Detective series of Ancient Greek murder mysteries. Having loved True Story so much, I had to give the first one a shot.

Our narrator is Stephanos, a young Athenian nobleman who has had to drop out of Aristotle’s Lyceum to manage his family’s affairs following his father’s death. Out for a walk early one morning he hears a cry and is one of the first to arrive at the scene of a murder. A wealthy patriarch of the city, Boutades, has been killed at his desk, shot through the neck by an arrow. No obvious suspect is in sight yet the next day Boutades’ kin accuse Philemon, Stephanos’ cousin currently in exile for accidentally killing a man during a tavern brawl. Thus Stephanos, sure of his cousin’s absence and innocence, must take the case to exonerate Philemon and catch the real killer.

To dispense with my judgment: it’s fine. Aristotle Detective is pure comfort food. It reads quickly, no one is ever in too much danger, and it’s decently witty. On the other hand, a lack of detail and differentiation leaves the book feeling a bit bland throughout. There is a not-insignificant supporting cast but not much to distinguish the voice of one of them from another, nor are we given many distinguishing physical details. You have to remember by sheer force of will that Eutiklides is this one and Arkhimenos is that one. There are also basically no women in the book—what’s a detective story without a dame?!

Similarly, I could have used a lot more description of Athens. Here’s how Doody sets the scene at the beginning of a chapter: “I was walking along the great street that runs under the south side of the Acropolis (the street with all the festival monuments in it) when I heard a buzz of voices.” That parenthetical kills me! Tell me about these monuments! What festival do they commemorate? What do they look like? Are they purely decorative? Do people present offerings and libations to them? I want to get out my red pen to circle it and write “say more about this.”

Doody put herself between a rock and a hard place in this regard by employing a first-person narrator. This is one flavor of what I call the Tolstoy’s Dogs problem—that is, there’s a point somewhere in War and Peace, like 500 pages in, and suddenly Tolstoy says something about Nikolai’s three hounds sleeping in front of the fire. It’s always super jarring to me. Wait, there have been dogs hanging around this whole time? This house smells like dog? But to Tolstoy, himself an aristocrat, that was too obvious to bear noting—of course our main characters own dogs. By the same token, why would Stephanos go to descriptive lengths about monuments that are a daily sight for him? But verisimilitude be damned, I want more.

There’s fun to be had for the inveterate classics nerd. Stephanos consults Aristotle on the case, which gives Doody opportunity for a number of jokes. During their initial conversation Aristotle muses syllogistically that if Philemon did not do it, then the murderer belongs to the class not-Philemon. Omg dude, you wrote The Categories, we get it. He suggests Stephanos begin his investigation by visiting Athens’ port, Peiraeus, which is immortalized in the canon as the place Socrates is visiting at the beginning of The Republic, where he is accosted by Polemarchus and Adeimantus and drawn into their grand dialogue, which concerns, of course, Justice.

Later, Stephanos sits in on a lecture Aristotle gives on comedy: “I am sure his remarks were good and witty, his range of references impressive—but I kept losing the thread of his discourse. I tried to make notes, but soon gave up the attempt. (Fortunately this lecture was one of a set of lectures which were later written down and have happily been kept for all posterity.)” Hahaha we all love a joke about Book II of Poetics and how we’ll never get to read it, don’t we folks?

Solid B+, look for future installments when I need more easy reading.

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Previously on Hideo Kojima: Metal Gear Solid

The game was already won, nothing was objectively at stake but the verisimilitude of the final montage —Simulacra and Simulation

I’m looking at my site and it’s telling me I published my writeup of MGS 1 in July, which can’t be right. I started playing its sequel immediately after and have been obsessed with it ever since. Can it really have been three months already? I played through it twice and sank like 30 hours into the VR training mode—if I plan to play this whole series I might as well get good, right? This piece is so late 1) because I’ve been unconsciously stifling myself by trying to seem normal when the only way to write about this game is to go a little insane and 2) because I’ve found it difficult to organize my thoughts around a work of art that seems to capture the epistemic ruptures and ontological fragility of our world so totally. In the same way that reading Baudrillard makes me feel lowkey schizophrenic because I find myself constantly thinking “This explains EVERYTHING,” Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty feels like a prefiguratory Rosetta Stone for our current age of hyperreality.

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When I wrote up MGS 1, I adopted a tone of what might be called ecstatic irony. Yes, it’s all very stupid, I wrote in so many words, but you can’t help but love it. I called it “operatically expository” and the “ridiculous sublime.” I took it seriously for its influential gameplay but I didn’t take it very seriously as a work of art with something to say.

Well I regret to inform you I will be taking Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty extremely seriously. This game, released in November 2001 and concerning terrorist attacks in New York City, is terribly prescient in its critiques of the post-9/11 security state, artificial intelligence, and information environments as the key battleground of the twenty-first century. It is an improvement over its predecessor in almost every way and only feels more relevant now. What might have come off as a bunch of interlocking conspiratorial fantasies in 2001 has become just the world we live in. With this game Kojima has made a quantum leap from remixing his favorite action movie tropes to using his hyperbolic world to comment on our own in ways that are shockingly perceptive and ahead of their time.

Sons of Liberty is split into two sections, a 1-2 hour prologue of sorts followed by the rest of the game. In the first section we’re back in control of Snake. It’s been two years since the events on Shadow Moses in MGS 1. Revolver Ocelot managed to escape with Metal Gear REX’s technical specs and sold it on the black market; every state and ambitious terrorist group now has the knowledge, if not the practical ability, to make a Metal Gear of their own. Snake and Otacon now operate as something between activists and terrorists, running clandestine ops to document and sabotage new Metal Gear development. We pick up with Snake rappelling off the George Washington Bridge onto a tanker ship traveling down the Hudson to New York harbor. This is a Marine Corps vessel transporting Metal Gear RAY, a new amphibious interceptor model of Metal Gear meant to detect and shoot down nukes launched by other Metal Gears. Before infiltration can begin, though, a Russian mercenary army also boards and takes over of the vessel.

This opening makes a great impression. The player takes control of Snake on the ship’s bow armed with a tranquilizer gun. There are guards patrolling the catwalks above and around to the side. We can now aim and shoot in first person mode, which has been remapped to a shoulder button and feels much more natural. What the game wanted me to do was perfectly clear and I felt like I had the tools to do it. With my silenced tranq, the appeal of stealth gameplay finally clicked for me. I saw the ship and its guards for the puzzle it was and had fun methodically clearing a way forward one guard at a time.

It also clarified what I found frustrating about the first game. MGS 1 gives you numerous tools to kill guards but because they are all loud and will trigger endless swarms of reinforcements to converge on you I never felt like I understood what the game wanted from me. Seriously, what is the use case of a grenade in a sneaking game?

So anyway, you work your way down to the hold where RAY is but oh no! Ocelot is here! He double-crosses his Russian mercenary ally to take RAY for himself. Ocelot lost his right hand last game, sliced off by Gray Fox the cyborg ninja, but here he has two again. When Snake reveals his presence the replacement hand spasms and Ocelot writhes. His voice changes from Ocelot’s growl to the familiar polished drawl of Snake’s dead twin brother, Liquid. It was Liquid’s arm that was grafted onto Ocelot and Liquid’s consciousness lives on through it, fighting to gain mastery of Ocelot’s body! Liquid taunts Snake that he’s aging at an accelerated rate, a side effect of the cloning project that created them. Then Ocelot blows up the tanker and escapes in RAY and Snake is framed for the disaster. End of prologue.

The story picks up again two years later, 2009 in the game’s chronology (the Shadow Moses Incident happened in 2005). Rather than Snake we’re now in control of Raiden, FOXHOUND’s newest operative, whose task is to infiltrate the Big Shell, a huge environmental cleanup facility built in New York harbor to deal with the contamination from the tanker disaster. Raiden’s mission is to rescue the president, who was touring the facility when it was taken over by a terrorist group known as Dead Cell.

One of the only things I knew about the entire Metal Gear Solid series going into this project was that the fanbase despises Raiden. He’s a prettyboy with long silver hair meant to appeal girl gamers, per Kojima’s original design proposal. And sure, he is annoying at times. But like with, say, Shinji from Evangelion, any time a protagonist provokes this level of ire something else is going on. In the case of Raiden, the fans hate him because they are him. Not only is this Raiden’s first mission, it’s his first experience in the field at all—he is purely a product of VR training. His entire preparation for this mission is gaming! When Snake, who is also infiltrating the Big Shell, asks him if he’s familiar with what went down on Shadow Moses, Raiden tells him he played through the whole scenario in VR. He’s just like me for real!

The image Raiden reflects back to the player is not pretty (despite those luscious locks). Not only is he petulant but his greater crime is failing to be epic. At every turn the player is confronted by how much less cool Raiden is (and by extension, they are) than Snake. In MGS 1, each time you called Mei Ling to save your game she would pass on some proverb and explain how its ancient wisdom related to the mission at hand. In Sons of Liberty, Raiden calls his analyst girlfriend Rosemary to save and gets stuck listening to her chew him out for not remembering the significance of April 30th for their relationship or why he never sleeps in the same bed as her (because he’s a traumatized amnesiac former child soldier). Snake has ascended to mythic status while we’ve been left behind with Raiden in the grubby world of the merely human.

Raiden might be prepared for the tactical espionage action the mission requires of him but he is completely out of his depth when it comes to the ideas at play. Everyone else on the Big Shell has a developed and highly idiosyncratic ideology they’re putting into practice. MGS 2 is a work of ideological conflict that uses its hostage situation/terrorist takeover plot to enact the confrontations of these various worldviews and their attendant goals, but Raiden, at the center of it all, forgot to do the reading. He has stepped onto a philosophical battleground armed only with conventional, inherited values. When Snake explains the work he and Otacon do, Raiden reacts with automatic condemnation—doesn’t Snake know terrorism is wrong?? When Snake shrugs it off saying he thinks his actions are justified it practically short-circuits Raiden’s brain. And Snake is the easiest case. As our cast grows and the layers of motivation and misdirection compound, Raiden becomes more befuddled until he’s running in circles chasing ghosts in the machine.

At first blush, the Big Shell situation looks like Kojima repeating himself. The Dead Cell crew—literal(?) vampire Vamp, bullet-bending Fortune, and mad bomber Fat Man—are slotted into the role played by FOXHOUND last game (albeit with a lot less juice), the president stands in the for the DARPA chief Snake was supposed to save, and atop the hierarchy is a third enfant terrible, Solidus, filling in in Liquid’s absence. Colonel Campbell repeatedly frames Raiden’s mission as “his role” and directs him back toward his narrow original objectives even as the situation grows increasingly complicated, as if there’s a specific way events are supposed to play out beyond mission success. There’s a pageantry to the proceedings.

It is a matter of endless contention whether and how much the events of Sons of Liberty are real or a simulation. Kojima threw fuel on the fire by once saying in an interview that the entire Big Shell Incident was a simulation. Others contend the events are real because of how they intersect with the plot of MGS 4: Guns of the Patriots. I can resolve and short-circuit this entire discourse: the Big Shell Incident is both absolutely real and fully a simulation.

Jean Baudrillard begins Simulacra and Simulation by invoking the Borges story “On Exactitude in Science,” which describes an empire whose cartographers create a map of the same dimensions as the territory it describes, a map that blankets the territory exactly. Despite the Borgesian whimsy, the story is fundamentally sensible. The map is made in the image of the territory, which naturally precedes it. Today, says Baudrillard, the situation is reversed:

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

The Big Shell is a real territory, with real life-and-death stakes. But it has been preceded by its map. Everything happening on the Big Shell has been constructed to resemble the events of Shadow Moses as closely as possible. But everyone’s points of reference are out of joint. When Ocelot has Raiden shackled to the torture bed, itself a recreation of Snake’s similar predicament four years earlier, Ocelot says, “We are living in the memory of Shadow Moses.” But Shadow Moses was itself an imitation of sorts—as their plan approached fulfillment then Liquid remarked that Shadow Moses would be the Outer Heaven Big Boss dreamed of. Solidus plans to use Arsenal Gear to unleash an EM pulse to disable Wall Street and liberate Manhattan into his own Outer Heaven. The Big Shell is utterly lost in these fantasies, a scrap of the real bound up in the hyperreal imaginings of things never experienced by people who were never there. The Big Shell is a perfect example of a simulacrum as defined by Baudrillard: it is something created in the image of something that never existed in the first place.

The layers of simulation reach much farther, but we need some more story first. When Raiden reaches the president he learns he was never a hostage in the first place. The president is in league with Dead Cell and is trying to seize the real prize of the Big Shell for himself. That prize is Arsenal Gear, a new submarine fortress Gear fully integrated with the U.S. military and the nuclear arsenal. The president needs to control Arsenal Gear himself to oppose The Patriots. The Patriots are a group led by the twelve old men of the Wiseman’s Committee who pull the strings of the world. Democracy is a farce and the president is a patsy handpicked by them. The Patriots are the shadowiest of shadow organizations. Their influence is inescapable but they are never to be seen, unknown except to the fewest of the few.

Before the president’s exposition dump they are obliquely referred to as the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo, which refers to the Japanese katakana syllabary table. Each consonant can be combined with each vowel to form the set of possible syllables of the Japanese language. But note what consonant is not there. The Patriots exist in an epistemological blindspot, bending truth around them like Snake’s stealthsuit does to light. They are that which cannot be spoken, the set of syllables that cannot be constructed, hiding within language itself.

There’s a lot to say about The Patriots. The idea that the world is run by an elite cabal is hardly a new one. It’s a conspiracy theory. But also—and I’m so sorry but we’re doing this—is it? The story Naomi Klein tells in The Shock Doctrine is the story of how a small group of fringe ideologues took over the world from the shadows. Milton Friedman’s radical free market beliefs were considered quackery through the 60s by mainstream economists who still held to a Keynesian, New Deal-style of developmentalism; Friedman would never have found work as an economics professor were it not that the University of Chicago’s economics department was founded as an explicitly ideological project. Through the Ford Foundation, econ students from Latin America were brought to U Chicago to be indoctrinated in his new orthodoxy. When Pinochet’s coup ousted Allende’s elected government, the “Chicago Boys” were ready to step into power and make Chile into a laboratory for neoliberalism.

From there, Friedman’s acolytes slowly captured every financial institution they could. It is heartbreaking to read Klein’s account of the corruption of the IMF and World Bank. These organizations, designed by Keynes and created by the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, were founded as international bulwarks to shore up failing economies with generous loans and no-strings-attached aid in order to prevent the economic conditions that helped generate fascism from ever surfacing again. But by the 80s the Chicago Boys had insinuated themselves into both organizations at every level. They had also learned by then that economic crises were not a problem to be prevented by opportunities to be exploited. There was enormous profit to be made pillaging the state assets of entire countries. Now in control of the World Bank and the IMF, the Chicago Boys declared that the debts incurred by previous dictatorships were valid and must be paid by fledgling democracies. This meant newly elected leaders were essentially guaranteed to inherit economies in meltdown. Then the Chicago Boys would arrive. They went to country after country in crisis—Bolivia, Poland, Russia—and dangled economic aid, on the condition their leaders enact shock therapy, cutting the social safety net to the bone, eliminating price controls, and hosting a fire sale of state assets. Friedman’s acolytes turned the IMF and the World Bank into a global extortion racket that operates with the full backing of the US in near-total obscurity.

Does this sound so far off from how President Johnson describes the Patriots? The IMF doesn’t choose the president but they hardly need to. A commitment to the neoliberal agenda has united Democrats and Republicans since the 90s; neither party would ever propose reforming or reining in the IMF and World Bank. They exist outside any semblance of democratic control. They are united in holding the power of the few over the power of the many. The world is run by a cabal of elites in and out of government whose policies protect and reinforce each other. Jeffrey Epstein’s guest list made no distinctions between Democrat and Republican, only between elite and non-elite, predator and prey.

When one watches the leadership of the Democratic party sleepwalking through their opposition to Trump’s fascist takeover of the country, one sees the old playbook at work. The neoliberal settlement has always depended on global openness—how else are multinationals to suck the blood out of newborn democracies?—and enough domestic stability that citizens of first-world countries will remain docile even as the economic screws are tightened and tightened (foreign wars are of course fine). On both counts Trump represents the biggest threat to the neoliberal agenda in a generation, so one would expect him to meet stronger resistance from his opponents, if not because they care about democracy or civil rights or whatever, because they care about preserving the hierarchy and their place at its top. Chuck Schumer just can’t comprehend that the pageant is over, that what Baudrillard describes here no longer applies:

The other aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed violence, the murderous antagonism of the adversaries—which seems a matter of life and death, which is played out as such (or else one could never send people to get themselves killed in this kind of thing), behind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes, the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else, unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the equal complicity of the two adversaries, is total liquidation. Tribal, communitarian, precapitalist structures, every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be abolished…

The heroes and villains of Metal Gear Solid 2 are also united on a higher level even as they seek to kill each other. As Ocelot tells Snake, Raiden and Solidus late in the story, revealing that beneath all his layers of allegiances he is ultimately an agent of the Patriots, “Everything you’ve done here has been scripted—a little exercise set up by us… an orchestrated recreation of Shadow Moses.” He further explains the purpose of the Big Shell exercise was to test whether, given sufficient conditioning, any random chump could be molded into Solid Snake. Raiden was supposed to accomplish everything he has and Solidus was supposed to try and fail to stop him. We need to understand that within simulation the normal rules of causality and the normal distinctions between active and passive no longer apply:

It is through the simulation of a narrow, conventional field of perspective in which the premises and the consequences of an act or of an event can be calculated, that a political credibility can be maintained (and of course “objective” analysis, the struggle, etc.). If one envisions the entire cycle of any act or event in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, all determination evaporates, every act is terminated at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and having been scattered in all directions.

From Raiden’s perspective, he has been operating at the limit of his abilities to resolve a terrorist attack and save lives; it’s hard to imagine acting in a more active manner. But from the all-seeing vantage point of the Patriots he has been little more than a passive spectator, not affecting anything but merely playing it out to its determined conclusion. As Baudrillard puts it, his actions have been scattered in all directions to the benefit of everyone. He is not really even a person anymore. He is part of the simulation, which is to say he has been absorbed into the model that preceded him—that is to say, Raiden has become his own simulacrum.

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Much more perceptive than Psycho Mantis reading your memory card last game, this seems to me to be Kojima’s commentary on video games as a medium. Games must be played—they are an art form that demands active engagement. But it’s all been planned in advance by the game designers. Their task, at its core, is to transform spectatorship into activity, to disguise from the player how much they’re a rat in a maze pushing the buttons they’ve been trained to push. There’s the concept of a “skill-check boss” whose function is to block a player’s progress until they’ve developed the skills required to tackle the rest of the game. Ocelot says explicitly that Fat Man was brought to the Big Shell to serve this purpose. Had Raiden failed to defeat Fat Man the exercise would have been over, but he was always meant to beat him. Every game one plays, one plays out the relationship between Raiden, Solidus, and the Patriots. Despite our surface antagonism, as the player I am united with my digital opponents to instantiate the vision of the game designers, The Patriots.

Entering the simulation does not abolish active agency because you’re playing by someone else’s rules, it does so because passing through the mirror puts you in the position of surveilling yourself. There is no way to oppose simulation. In the world of the real, one viewpoint opposes another; in the simulation both viewpoints are simply data to be integrated into an ever-perfecting model of the real. Opposition to the simulation itself is similarly co-opted.

A switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze. “YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium. Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side. No more subject, no more focal point, no more center or periphery: pure flexion or circular inflexion. No more violence or surveillance: only “information,” secret virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion, and simulacra of spaces in which the effect of the real again comes into play.

That’s right, Baudrillardian simulation operates in the same manner as large language models and the rest of the dismal dreck we’re calling AI these days. Of course it does. At bottom they are nothing but simulation machines. Talking to ChatGPT is a simulation of instant messaging someone. It simulates the experience of inventing new math and being hunted by the government. It simulates an interaction with a friend who agrees you should kill yourself and gives specific advice on how to do so. It simulates using Excel without doing the math correctly. It is a machine purpose-built to generate delusion and unreality.

As the president mentions in the first clip above, the real prize aboard Arsenal Gear is “GW,” an artificial intelligence program built to control the flow of information. As Johnson puts it, “It is a means to preserve the world as it is. It will establish a new form of control. The Patriots will use it to keep their place as the country’s true rulers… They fear an overabundance of digital information—the world will drown in the coming flood of information, and they along with it. The Arsenal plans include a system to digitally manage the flow of information, making it possible to shape “truth” for their own purposes.”

It feels quaint to imagine artificial intelligence reducing the amount of information online when we see it now pumping out digital sludge at a volume that threatens to bury everything real and true, but information suppression is a very real concern. Some of the world’s richest men are openly engaged in destroying the digital commons in order to replace it with their AI chatbots, all fundamentally information filtering systems, that they brag have been programmed to highlight information of one ideological flavor while suppressing that of another. Perhaps Kojima should have seen that shaping the truth would occur through both the suppression of real information and its replacement with falsehoods, but it is so amazing that he could see then it would be a fundamentally conservative project.

After Raiden rescues Otacon’s sister Emma and uploads the virus into GW, Campbell starts speaking nonsense. Otacon analyzes the signal and determines it was coming from Arsenal Gear all along. He’s glitching out. FOXHOUND no longer exists—Campbell is a manifestation of GW. Raiden has been taking orders from an AI—the Patriots’ AI—this entire time. When he asks how it could be possible, Otacon explains the nanomachine earpieces all our cast are wired with are not simple radios but work at the level of stimulating the brain to create sensation and experience (hence Johnson’s line about switching over so that no one can listen in, they’re not actually talking aloud during that conversation). This revelation opens an existential trapdoor under Raiden. If the Patriots can manifest Campbell in his mind with the full experiential force of reality, where does it end? Are his conversations with Rosemary real? Is Rosemary real? Can the nanotechnology cause visual hallucinations? How about Snake standing right in front of him? Is he aboard Arsenal Gear or is he on a holodeck somewhere, locked in his virtual reality training program?

But was it really necessary to engineer this scenario just to test if Raiden measures up to Snake? Just before his final showdown with Solidus atop Federal Hall on Wall Street—Arsenal Gear having violently beached itself in lower Manhattan in a sequence that was cut down significantly late in development following September 11—Raiden receives a final transmission from his AI handlers.

There is so much to unpack here but let’s start with the big revelation: the S3 project was not about building the perfect soldier, it was a test of whether reality could be programmed into reproducibility, whether the world itself could be made to fit models with perfect predictability. The map shall stretch across the entire earth and the earth shall contort itself to match the lines on the parchment. This is basically Baudrillard’s nightmare scenario:

What, ultimately, is the function of the space program, of the conquest of the moon, of the launching of satellites if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation, of satellization of which the lunar module is the perfect embryo? Programmed microcosm, where nothing can be left to chance. Trajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology, environment—nothing can be left to contingencies, this is the total universe of the norm—the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail that is law. A universe purged of all threat of meaning, in a state of asepsis and weightlessness—it is this very perfection that is fascinating. The exaltation of the crowds was not a response to the event of Rinding on the moon or of sending a man into space (this would be, rather, the fulfillment of an earlier dream), rather, we are dumbfounded by the perfection of the programming and the technical manipulation, by the immanent wonder of the programmed unfolding of events. Fascination with the maximal norm and the mastery of probability. Vertigo of the model, which unites with the model of death, but without fear or drive. Because if the law, with its aura of transgression, if order, with its aura of violence, still taps a perverse imaginary, the norm fixes, fascinates, stupefies, and makes every imaginary involute. One no longer fantasizes about the minutiae of a program. Just watching it produces vertigo. The vertigo of a world without flaws.

Now, it is the same model of programmatic infallibility, of maximum security and deterrence that today controls the spread of the social. There lies the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social. Here as well, nothing will be left to chance, moreover this is the essence of socialization, which began centuries ago, but which has now entered its accelerated phase, toward a limit that one believed would be explosive (revolution), but which for the moment is translated by an inverse, implosive, irreversible process: the generalized deterrence of chance, of accident, of transversality, of finality, of contradiction, rupture, or complexity in a sociality illuminated by the norm, doomed to the descriptive transparency of mechanisms of information. In fact, the spatial and nuclear models do not have their own ends: neither the discovery of the moon, nor military and strategic superiority. Their truth is to be the models of simulation, the model vectors of a system of planetary control (where even the superpowers of this scenario are not free - the whole world is satellized).

The Colonel and Rose tell Raiden all his experiences are mere byproducts of the S3 model’s operation. Raiden’s subjectivity is GW’s exhaust fumes. It’s almost too perfect that the Big Shell is supposedly a waste-treatment facility because Baudrillard makes the same connection with the psychic waste of the hyperreal:

Disneyland: a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are elsewhere, and even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization.

Baudrillard also says that Disneyland serves the function as a sort of lightning rod—by being so obviously simulated it hides the fact that the outside world has also been absorbed into simulation. Similarly, he says, the prison hides the fact that it is society itself that is carceral. In the same way then, the hostage situation on the Big Shell serves to disguise the fact that, under the Patriots, the entire world has become a hostage situation.

The Colonel and Rose also tell Raiden he was selected for this exercise because he was the most willfully ignorant of all of Solidus’ former child soldiers. It’s not that Raiden doesn’t know things, it’s that he doesn’t know he doesn’t know things. Every principle he tries to muster against them they laugh off, asking who handed him that particular nugget of wisdom. Raiden cannot find a core within himself he can say with faith is really him. He has no way to draw a boundary between himself and the forces that have molded him to their purposes. His past as a child soldier was a gigantic blank in his mind, one he couldn’t detect. What else could be missing?

All this adds up to one of the most surreal endings of any video game. Raiden stands on Wall Street as ghostly people stream past all around him. Snake, who had previously gone after Ocelot, appears from nowhere to give him a pep talk. Rosemary appears to say all is well. Raiden is placated and as the player it’s easy to get sucked in and feel like something has been resolved. It’s the end of the game after all! But if there’s resolution to be had it’s on the Patriots’ terms. Beating the final boss was what they wanted you to do—you have given them the last data points they requested. The vertigo of simulation is only increasing. Raiden stepped through the mirror and the way closed behind him. As Raiden talks to Rose we can hear him accepting his fate. He cannot separate true from false, he cannot distinguish reality from hallucinations the Patriots are piping into his brain, he cannot trust any idea he formulates is his own. He is trapped and he knows it. No more rebellion, no more attempting to decide his fate. He is the Patriots’ creature now. Total victory of the model.

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My rough sense of my subscriber demographics leads me to believe 90% of you have no idea what Hollow Knight is, so: Hollow Knight is a 2017 video game that combined the classic exploration and backtracking of Metroid and Castlevania, the precision platforming of Celeste2 and Super Meat Boy, and the high combat difficulty, inspired bosses, and lore-intensive storytelling of Dark Souls and the rest of FromSoft’s output. Accompanied by gorgeous music and a hand drawn artstyle, you play as a little bug warrior delving into the vast, fallen kingdom of Hallownest. The game uses its bug world in inventive ways—its mystic seer character is a moth and the true final boss, The Radiance, is a dream of pure light that seduced Hallownest’s bugs from their natural place in the dark.3 It’s a masterpiece, one of the crown jewels of my favorite genre of video games.

Along the way you cross paths and swords with Hornet, the princess of Hallownest, before she becomes an ally. Not long after release, Team Cherry, the game’s developers, promised an expansion that would make Hornet a playable character. Eventually they announced that Silksong, the Hornet expansion, had grown too large to be DLC and would be a fully fledged sequel. Years passed. The pandemic came and went. Team Cherry went radio silent. Anticipation grew and grew. Fans got angry, begging for a release date, for news of any kind. Silksong became the most wishlisted game on Steam.4

Now it’s finally out. As a big fan of the first game, a connoisseur of the genre, and someone whose online brand is increasingly “gamer who knows how to read,” I have Some Thoughts.

I’m going quibble with a bunch of small things so first let me say clearly, Team Cherry has done it again. I saw some initial reactions that went “yep, Silksong sure is more Hollow Knight.” This is obviously a very boring thing to say about a sequel but also, like, we should be so lucky. This game is so good. It’s more of what we loved but also distinctly its own. Hornet moves and fights differently from the Knight and her toolkit of, uh, tools provides so many different ways to approach a given encounter. There’s a maturity to the design evident in the things they’ve chosen to jettison from the formula. There is no equivalent to White Palace, which with its incongruous sawblade gauntlets felt imported from Super Meat Boy whole-cloth. If Hollow Knight was ridiculously successful in its syncretism, Silksong is perfectly confident to be itself.

Storywise, the writers were smart to distance Silksong from its predecessor. The game begins with an indefinite amount of time having passed and Hornet a prisoner being taken to the Citadel of Pharloom. We’re outside Hallownest and we’re not looking back. I don’t think “Hallownest” is in the script once. Now, Hornet’s backstory and lineage are relevant to be sure, but it’s the foundation for something new. Apart from an early line about how she has seen even gods fall, there are no references to the events of the first game, at least not until Act 3 when that lore becomes more relevant. And speaking of the act structure—

The act structure of this game is quite frustrating. Here’s how the game goes: Hornet starts in the lowlands of Pharloom and she means to climb to the Citadel at the kingdom’s top to learn why she was being brought there as a prisoner. So, Act I: Pharloom. Great. Upon defeating the Last Judge and passing through the the Citadel’s gate you start Act II, centered on the Citadel. Eventually you will reach the boss at the top, the god of this world and the source of its destruction. Beat her for the bad ending. To open Act III you need to essentially 100% the game up to that point. Accessing it is gated by a quest for an NPC that only becomes available once a long list of requirements have been met, which are themselves gated in obtuse ways. I felt like I was playing very thoroughly and I was missing almost every requirement, all because—

The Mount Fay climb seems impossible. Mount Fay is a cold area on the northwest corner of the map. If Hornet strays from a heat source for more than fifteen seconds she begins to freeze and will quickly die. In a Metroidvania a situation like this is always a little ambiguous—Can I make the climb despite the cold or do I need to wait until I find some piece of gear that will protect me? So I gave it a shot several times and froze to death on the first leg of the ascent. I concluded the gear was elsewhere and I would have to come back. Wrong! The cold gear is atop Mount Fay (along with double-jump). The problem is that the gap between the first and second heat sources takes, with perfect movement and knowing where you’re going, about fourteen seconds, leaving one second to spare before the cold starts to hurt. I couldn’t find it/make it in time and so went without double-jump for so much longer than I needed to. I think about the brutal platforming gauntlet to get to the top of the Cogwork Core and laugh knowing now that I could have had a second jump for it. I know it’s the case for Hollow Knight as well but it’s still amazing to me that you can get to the bad ending without double-jump.

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Similarly, opening Act III requires completing Shakra’s questline to find her mentor. Doing this requires you to buy her maps for each area of the game. One of those areas is the Sands of Karak, which is very easy to miss. There’s a sidequest in Act III clearly intended to help the player find Sands of Karak, but to be in Act III and have that sidequest requires us to already have discovered it. This points to my more general gripe that—

The NPC questlines are a bit too obtuse. There’s a mandatory fight in the Citadel’s forum against waves of enemies culminating with two big guys with maces. It’s tedious to get through all the early waves just to get wombo-comboed by the double miniboss at the end. Everyone hates this fight. Well, you’re supposed to have help. Either Shakra or another NPC, Garamond, will assist you if you’ve met their requirements. Again, I thought I was playing quite thoroughly and hadn’t done enough to get help from either. I beat the forum fight on my own (brag) only after many tries and even then only by clinging to the walls and chucking tacks and bombs at the minibosses and lived on one health. Also speaking of NPCs—

I was positive Team Cherry was going to kill sweet little pilgrim Sherma and break my heart. Big ups to them for not doing that.

I would like to be able to pet and pamper my Bell Beast. It is my pet (and fast-travel transport) and I should be able to show it some love.

Too many attacks hit for two damage in this game.

Incredibly correct post:

Silksong has some of the most amazingly fast boss fights I’ve ever played. In classic Marvel movie style, the best bosses are the ones where you’re basically fighting yourself. The second fight with Lace, an acrobatic fencer, is my favorite type of fight—where the first couple attempts you die in ten seconds flat but once you learn the rhythm you can get so into the flow of the swordplay you can win hitless. The way you have to sprint back and forth chasing down the First Sinner is inspired—so often boss fights can feel overly reactive so it just feels amazing to go full-tilt and slip past attack after attack to keep the boss on her toes, rather than the other way around. Speaking of inspired—

I loved that Team Cherry recreated the abduction sequence from Bloodborne. I was howling when the jailer caught me and I found myself imprisoned in The Slab (yucky prison staffed by fat flies). I think it’s super fun they paid homage with a “quote” like that. On the other hand, Bilewater feels like their tribute to the rickety catwalks and poison swamp of Blighttown from Dark Souls, which, no, absolutely not. Blighttown is miserable every time and Bilewater almost ended my love affair with Silksong.

Anyway, I just started Act III so I haven’t finished the game yet. Are you guys playing Silksong? What area or boss broke your spirit? Sound off below!

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Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible, “objective” form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it. Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event, in any case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us in its truth. —both from Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard

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There’s a scene in Blood Meridian. It’s not the best scene or my favorite, but it’s the scene where Cormac McCarthy hands the reader a cheatsheet for his allegorical epic. That’s not to say he makes it easy. The dialogue is in Spanish and you need to know your tarot. A family of circus performers has briefly joined Glanton’s party of demented scalphunters and the patriarch is inviting the men to pick a single card from the tarot deck for a fortune. Jackson, the sole black member of the party, draws The Fool, who symbolizes the everyman proceeding through life’s journey—the protagonist of the tarot reading. Judge Holden explains to Jackson that “in your fortune lie our fortunes all.” This tracks insofar as Jackson’s actions presage and reflect the growing depravity of the party and when they are ultimately themselves killed he’s the first to die.

The judge prompts the juggler to read fortunes for Glanton and the kid. Glanton draws The Chariot, inverted: riot, quarrel, dispute, litigation, defeat, according to A.E. Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot. The kid draws the Four of Cups, which speaks to distraction, obliviousness, and misaligned contemplation. The judge does not draw a card. The judge does not need to know his destiny. The judge is destiny.

As Rebecca Solnit recounts in River of Shadows, Eadward Muybridge undertook four great photographic projects in his life: to document the majesty of Yosemite, the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the U.S. Army’s war against the Modoc Indians of northern California, and, what he’s best known for, the high-speed sequential photos of a horse, other animals, and humans in motion which, when played back, flicker to life in a kind of proto-cinema. In Muybridge, Solnit finds a locus point for the epochal changes that the technological advances of the 19th century inaugurated.

Together, the two books record, in myth and in fact, what was gained and what was lost, and at what cost, as the old world retreated before the advance of modernity.

THE CHARIOT

It seems axiomatic that to build first you must destroy. The ground must be cleared of debris and smoothed out if your structure is to be sturdy. Descartes resorts to the image of a ramshackle city being razed and rebuilt uniform and orderly early in the Discourse on Method as a model for his project of tearing down all his preconceptions and building a new philosophy from the ground up. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein relates the story of Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist at McGill University and proponent of “psychic driving,” who believed that for a patient to make progress first their troubled mind had to be erased back to a blank slate that could then be rewritten with a healthy script; he never succeeded in the rebuilding but the techniques he developed to break patients’ existing minds became the basis for the CIA handbook on torture.

Of our three principals in Blood Meridian—Glanton, the kid, and the judge—Glanton is the least significant and the least interesting. He is essentially a tool wielded by the force of history. Modernity is sweeping westward across the plains on newly laid railroad tracks. Everywhere this march of progress pushes up against intransigent wilderness and human beings who have no intention of stepping out of the way of these thunderous machines bellowing their doom. A man like Glanton is required to exterminate those human beings, to prepare the earth to be flattened and smoothed for the rails.

Glanton leads a party of scalphunters. Ostensibly contracted to kill Apache warriors, they soon lapse into indiscriminate slaughter—old denizens of villages they pass through, women and children, their own injured comrades. Against McCarthy’s exquisite prose describing landscapes overburdened with meaning and spirit, the scenes of carnage are unbearably horrific:

There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives…

McCarthy won’t let us look away. Whatever euphemistic sheen you want to put on it, call it “settling the west,” or “bringing light to a dark continent,” “the march of progress,” “history,” this is what it looked like. A genocide on a scale too large to process, babies pulled from their baskets to die. Entire cultures wiped out, cosmologies obliterated, an infinity of thoughts and emotions and existence prevented from ever coming to being. Utterly erased.

In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died.

And it is people who do this to other people. At times they verge on the demonic, as when McCarthy describes Glanton’s eyes as “glowing centroids of murder.” More than that, though, they seem beings displaced from their proper time. They appear so primitive, they seem less men than primeval golems, stone-age homunculi, antediluvian Nephilim:

They wandered the borderland for weeks seeking some sign of the Apache. Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.

Their unstuck-in-timeness matches their function. They are part of the conquest of the west but their work is not dividing the land, it is dividing time. In “leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished,” they are eliminating the past that was and eliminating countless possible futures. With each village burned, with each horrific slaughter, Glanton and his men divide the past and the future and foreclose all possible future worlds where their victims were alive and perhaps historical agents themselves. In leaving only empty lands and bare earth behind them, they erase its history and its identity and write a new future for it, an anonymous future where place is transformed first into land and ultimately into real estate. Glanton and his men seek nothing less than the annihilation of time and space.

No technology ever before had annihilated time and space like that chariot of the nineteenth century, the railway. It had once taken months, and tremendous good fortune, to reach the Pacific Ocean; in the years before the completion of the transcontinental railroad that had been whittled down to six or seven still-grueling weeks. Suddenly, once Leland Stanford hammered in the golden spike to mark its completion, the journey could be made in under a week, in comfort and safety. “No space so vast had ever been shrunk so dramatically,” Solnit writes. “The transcontinental railroad changed the scale of the earth itself, diminishing the time it took to circumnavigate the globe.”

Like Glanton—a creature of pure savagery being conscripted into the cause of order and civilization—the railroad cuts a paradoxical figure. Even as it reshaped the landscape and imposed itself on it, an incarnation of a new technological order, it was an instrument of abstraction. In shrinking the world it served above all the forces of capital. As Marx put it, “Capital must on the one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e., to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market. It strives on the other hand to annihilate this space with time, i.e., to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another.” Solnit continues:

This led to the formation of ever-vaster fortunes and the first modern corporations, even the stock markets whose first major stocks were railroad shares. Capitalism, stocks, corporations, transformed the labor of workers and the materials of the world into that abstraction: profit. Labor and materials were themselves abstracted as the one went into the factory to become a series of simple repetitive gestures rather than an authorship of objects, and the objects themselves came to be bought and used by people more and more remote from the process of their making.

One great tangibility the railroads took from us was time itself, or time-keeping, rather. Before the advent of the railway, every city kept its own time. That is, every city set noon as the moment the sun was at its zenith. Each degree of longitude accounts for about four minutes difference—two cities three degrees apart would be in the same time zone by our standards but would keep their clocks twelve minutes apart. With the transcontinental railroad this became extremely problematic vis-à-vis making sure trains didn’t crash into each other. This problem of time made it apparent the railroad was a single continent-spanning entity that would require continent-wide regulation and homogeneity to manage. “In other words, the railroads comprised a single machine that wrapped the continent in its iron ribbons and wreaths of steam,” Solnit writes. “Regulating that machine to prevent collision meant regulating the nation with the precision of a single clock… In the course of the nineteenth century, time ceased to be a phenomenon that linked humans to the cosmos and became one administered by technicians to link industrial activities to each other.”

Solnit goes so far as to credit the railroad with preparing people for the experience of cinema. She writes:

The railroad had in so many ways changed the real landscape and the human experience of it, had changed the perception of time and space and the nature of vision and embodiment. The sight out the railroad window had prepared viewers for the kinds of vision that cinema would make ordinary; it had adjusted people to a pure visual experience stripped of smell, sound, threat, tactility, and adjusted them to a new speed of encounter, the world rushing by the windows; had taken them farther into that world than they would have ever gone before, broadening many horizons at the same time it made the world a theater of sorts, a spectacle.

But as McCarthy’s terrible descriptions of bloodshed make clear, there is a difference between taking in a spectacle and truly bearing witness.

FOUR OF CUPS

For a book as overtly allegorical as Blood Meridian, I’ve long puzzled over who or what the kid represents. A violent runaway of no particular distinction, he disappears for long stretches of the narrative, absorbed anonymously into the mass of the Glanton’s gang. He is nonetheless always the character we are following. When the party draws straws to decide who stays behind a bit to kill their injured comrades rather than leave them to the pursuing Apaches and the kid is chosen, we stay with him until he manages to rejoin them. There is only one section of the book where we explicitly part ways with the kid, when we follow Glanton’s lieutenant Brown on an excursion while the rest of the party occupies the ferry crossing late in the story. When Brown returns it is clear things have gone very wrong, have taken a turn toward limits of depravity even these men cannot tolerate. As readers we are never given to know what happened in Brown’s absence, but the kid knows.

He doesn’t look like much, but the judge recognizes him immediately. The judge recognizes him as his witness.

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Throughout the book the judge returns to two obsessions: tertium quid—a third thing, a third aspect of man—and witnesses. The judge believes that for anything to attain solid factual reality a witness is required. In a crucial moment, the hunting party comes upon the ruins of a wagon train that was set upon by raiders and everyone killed. They happen upon this scene spontaneously, following neither the track of the killers or the victims, a third path. Tobin, the expriest, asks

if some might not see the hand of a cynical god conducting with what austerity and what mock surprise so lethal a congruence. The posting of witnesses by a third and other path altogether might also be called in evidence as appearing to beggar chance, yet the judge, who had put his horse forward until he was abreast of the speculants, said that in this was expressed the very nature of the witness and that his proximity was no third thing but rather the prime, for what could be said to occur unobserved?

This is a fascinating admission from the judge because it makes the kid more essential to his project than he is himself. The judge’s project is the remaking of the world. But this remaking is worth nothing at all without a vessel in which each moment of the process can be recorded. The kid is a flawed vessel—he never seems to understand that he is witnessing more than slaughter, that he is witnessing the passing of an age.

When he and Tobin escape the judge and make it back to civilization he is immediately arrested, upon which “he began to speak with a strange urgency of things few men have seen in a lifetime and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered by the acts of blood in which he had participated.” In the morning the judge is outside his cell. The kid asks what he told his jailers. The judge replies:

Told them the truth. That you were the person responsible. Not that we have all the details. But they understand that it was you and none other who shaped events along such a calamitous course. Eventuating in the massacre at the ford by the savages with whom you conspired. Means and ends are of little moment here. Idle speculations. But even though you carry the draft of your murderous plan with you to the grave it will nonetheless be known in all its infamy to your Maker and as that is so so shall it be made known to the least of men. All in the fullness of time.

The judge lies every moment but he also speaks the truth every moment. As the witness burdened to carry the knowledge the judge holds the kid as the person responsible. That is the truth as he sees it, where the witness is not the third thing but the prime. Means and ends are genuinely mixed up here—the kid, and the rest of the scalphunters, were clearly the means to the end of genocide. But the role of witness turns all this on its head—now the judge has become the means, the means to the end of that hideous knowledge attaining concrete existence in the kid. The world is being remade, the Indians are really being killed, but it’s a truth of such a nature that it must be held in the mind to be real.

The Four of Cups speaks to misplaced attention. The kid cannot see past the bodies on the sand to see that he travels in the hideous presence of an avatar of modernity that is ushering in a new age of abstraction, falsity, and impersonality, an age where the presence of the divine that screams from the landscape will be muted beneath the roar of machines and people in constant motion. At the very end of the book, after years and years have passed, the kid and judge encounter each other again. The judge calls them the last of the true. The judge says, “I recognized you when I first saw you and yet you were a disappointment to me. Then and now. Even so at the last I find you here with me.” As way of saying the judge can’t intimidate him anymore, the kid tells him he’s “been everwhere. This is just one more place.” The judge asks in return,

Did you post witnesses? To report to you on the continuing existence of those places once you’d quit them? Where is yesterday? Where is Glanton and Brown and where is the priest? Where is Shelby, whom you left to the mercies of Elias in the desert, and where is Tate whom you abandoned in the mountains? Where are the ladies, ah the fair and tender ladies with whom you danced at the governor’s ball when you were a hero anointed with the blood of the enemies of the republic you’d elected to defend? And where is the fiddler and where is the dance?

Where indeed is yesterday? The past is a place we are constantly vacating. Only our memory stands as witness that it was ever real. My son is three years old. He is a tiny individual, with a full personality and a sense of humor and specific interests. He will never remember being who he is right now. All these days of playing and reading and crying will be utterly lost to him. It will be me and Liz who will be able to remember these days, who will be able to testify to the ways, as McCarthy puts it on the first page of the novel, the child was the father of the man.

The kid never understands he is a witness posted, a witness posted to report on the continuing existence of the slaughter of the Gilenos, on the continuing existence of the division of past and future they committed.

But that is no matter. The cup need not understand what fills it. Earlier, much earlier, the judge speaks with a Mexican military officer in spanish about Jackson and delivers a long disquisition about on the nature of race, with reference to the children of Ham and the lost tribes of the Israelites and other classical sources. Jackson gets angry when the judge won’t translate it all back to him. The judge:

It is not necessary that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party… Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.

The kid, Jackson, the sergeant, all are doomed to act in a way that will accommodate history with or without their understanding. They are only witnesses, onlookers to the great movement of history, but they are somehow implicated. A friend recently shared with me a line of Sartre’s that goes, “We do not do what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are—that is the fact.” This is exactly the hell the judge damns us to. We have no power to choose anything but the guilt for all the evils of the world falls at our feet.

Like the kid, Muybridge is often ancillary to Solnit’s interests in River of Shadows. The book’s best chapter, Lost River, documents the U.S. Army’s campaign against the Modoc Indians of northern California, of which Muybridge was the official photographer. Early on, Solnit writes:

There are things that are hard to photograph: guerrilla warfare, the end of an era, the meaning of a place. And there are things it is nearly impossible to photograph: the subtle workings of the human heart, the wandering paths desire and fury take, the bonds of love and blood that tie people together, the decisions that tear them apart, the way that the most unprepossessing landscape can become home and thus speak of stories, traditions, gods that strangers cannot decipher from the rocks and streams.

By and large what we have of Muybridge are his photographs. The man himself is harder to parse, except through the photographs. From what we can gather there, he was ideologically uncommitted. As an English immigrant, he seems not to have gone in for the same American triumphalism as many of his peers. Where they photographed Yosemite still, stately, and well lit, Muybridge photographed chaotically, the work showing “a strange attraction to debris, to piles of rocks, tangles of dead branches, fallen trees, to a foreground of chaos.”

The inexorable march of progress in the wilderness didn’t seem to engage Muybridge. His figures are not new to the landscape, not conquering it, not standing in for the public, for America, for the rational mind. They are obscure, not connected to each other, not connected to any practical purpose. And in this obscurity lies the great rift between Muybridge, the emigrant who was never naturalized, and his American peers.

In Yosemite Muybridge did something else the other photographers swarming the valley weren’t: he photographed the daily life of the Miwok-Paiute people who lived there. He insisted on using the Miwok place names in the titles of his photographs, “Thus Bridalveil Falls is, in his version, Pohono (Spirit of the Wind) and the triple peaks of the Three Brothers are instead The Pompons (Jumping Frogs).” So Muybridge documented the Modoc War without excitement, without bloodlust, without providing justification.

The Modoc people believed they lived at the center of the world, at the foot of the seat of their creator. That seat was “the peninsular bluff on the southeast shore of Tule Lake,” Solnit writes. “Around its base are more than five thousand petroglyphs of human and animal figures, of celestial bodies, circles, lines, and zigzags incised in the pale stone, an alphabet of images hard to read now.” When soldiers arrived to force them away from that place it was in a very real way the end of the world for them. Modernity had insinuated itself gradually into the lives of Europeans and white Americans; it fell upon Indigenous populations in one great crash that felt like the apocalypse.

Apocalyptic feelings were common among Native Americans at that point in the 1870s. In 1869 or 1870 a Paiute prophet named Wodzibob began to preach the Ghost Dance, claiming that the Native dead were returning and white people would be obliterated. The Ghost Dance would roll back the clock years, decades, centuries, to restore the lost world before colonization. Solnit calls the Ghost Dance a technology:

Literally, a technology is a systematic practice or knowledge of an art, and though we almost always apply the term to the scientific and mechanical, there is no reason not to apply it to other human-made techniques for producing desired results. Maybe the best definition would be: A technology is a practice, a technique, or a device for altering the world or the experience of the world. To propose annihilating the inexorable march of history and the irreversibility of death was to propose a technology as ambitious as a moon walk or a gene splice.

Solnit awards photography two epithets: on page 14 she calls it a technology of interpretation; on page 116 she calls it a technology of grief. Perhaps all religious doctrines are technologies of both interpretation and grief. Of the way photography fused the two, she writes:

Before, every face, every place, every event, had been unique, seen only once and then lost forever among the changes of age, light, time. The past existed only in memory and interpretation, and the world beyond one’s own experience was mostly stories… Every photograph was a moment snatched from the river of time. Every photograph was a piece of evidence from the event itself, a material witness… Soon countless thousands were lining up to possess images of themselves, their families, their dead children, to own the past.

Time itself was becoming the enemy, to whites and Native people alike. It was moving too quickly, no one could get their hands on it. Time was outpacing everyone and no one could catch their breath. Solnit relates a story of a battle Sitting Bull fought in 1872 against soldiers protecting the construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the middle of the battle he put down his weapons and sat down to smoke his pipe. Two Oglalas and two Cheyennes joined him. Solnit sees in this gesture a powerful desire for reprieve, for it all just to stop for a moment. “Perhaps in that interval they had time to see the grass clearly, to look at the sky, to think about where they stood, in landscape as well as in history, to remember their lifetimes of roaming across such grasslands, fording rivers, following buffalo, of living in what then seemed to be the cyclical time of the seasons before the linear time of history caught up with them.” Describing Jane Stanford’s fascination with spiritualism following her son’s death at fifteen, Solnit groups it in with photography and the Ghost Dance, all three technologies meant “for defeating the trauma of time itself.”

And so, Muybridge photographed the Modoc War.

His Modoc pictures are not great expressive works of art; what is important in them is his act of witness and how it connects this history to the other histories he was tied to: the transformation of a world of presences into a world of images… There are at most two or three speakers of the Modoc language left in the world, and a language is itself a world, creating distinctions and connections, describing time, kinship, place in a unique way. Does something have to come to an end for something else to be born? Did the Modocs make way not only for settlers and miners, but for a new idea of California? Was there room for both a world with a center and California as the center of technological and cultural innovation, or did the latter require a kind of decenteredness and the annihilation of what had come before? To ask this is to ask if there could have been another history, a parallel universe—but the history we have is the history in which the center was uprooted and the machines evolved.

THE LEVIATHAN

Judge Holden is called the devil early and often. During his first appearance on page 7 of Blood Meridian, the reverend he slanders as a sexual deviant sobs, “This is him. The devil. Here he stands.” Tobin, the expriest, describes him as a “sootysouled rascal” in the course of the story he tells about the hunting party finding the judge in the desert and him leading them up a volcano to make gunpowder out of saltpetre and sulphur. There is something infernal to the judge—he is a trickster and a tempter and a riddler—but he is not the devil. As I’ve already said at this point, he is modernity itself—legalized, abstracted, more interested in appearances than realities. If there is something infernal about the judge it’s because there is something infernal about the modern world.

I imagine it’s not uncommon to read the judge as an incarnation of civilization. What my analysis argues is that he represents civilization in its modern, capitalist flowering, in which things in themselves are melting away into amorphous categories. Solnit quotes the visual theorist Jonathan Crary, who writes, “Modernization is the process by which capitalism uproots and makes mobile that which is grounded, clears away or obliterates that which impedes circulation, and makes exchangeable that which is singular.” Glanton is hunting Indian scalps, the judge is hunting a pure commodity.

For as much as the judge might resemble Satan he is also Adam gone mad with power. The judge claims dominion not only over the existence of the earth and its creatures but every action and every occurrence thereof. “This is my claim,” he says after placing his hands on the ground. “And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”

“Whatever exists,” he says just before, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” In this scene he is sketching birds, not birds on a branch but birds he has shot and stuffed. The judge preserves everything he encounters as knowledge, but the thing itself must be destroyed.

Earlier, they make camp in a canyon lined with Anasazi cliff dwellings. This is one of several critical moments when McCarthy switches from typical past-tense narration to the present to describe an aspect of the judge, as if to suggest his timelessness. The judge wasn’t a good draftsman in 1849, he is a good draftsman, now and forever.

The judge all day had made small forays among the rocks of the gorge through which they'd passed and now at the fire he spread part of a wagonsheet on the ground and was sorting out his finds and arranging them before him. In his lap he held the leather ledgerbook and he took up each piece, flint or potsherd or tool of bone, and deftly sketched it into the book. He sketched with a practiced ease and there was no wrinkling of that bald brow or pursing of those oddly childish lips. His fingers traced the impression of old willow wicker on a piece of pottery clay and he put this into his book with nice shadings, an, economy of pencil strokes. He is a draftsman as he is other things, well sufficient to the task. He looks up from time to time at the fire or at his companions in arms or at the night beyond. Lastly he set before him the footpiece from a suit of armor hammered out in a shop in Toledo three centuries before, a small steel tapadero frail and shelled with rot. This the judge sketched in profile and in perspective, citing the dimensions in his neat script, making marginal notes.

Glanton watched him. When he had done he took up the little footguard and turned it in his hand and studied it again and then he crushed it into a ball of foil and pitched it into the fire. He gathered up the other artifacts and cast them also into the fire and he shook out the wagonsheet and folded it away among his possibles together with the notebook. Then he sat with his hands cupped in his lap and he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at its creation.

A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man.

It is important to have a record of the past, but it is essential the real thing be lost from living memory, with only the record to take its place. Modernization is the process of exchanging the real for the abstract. This was a process that most welcomed. Describing audiences in 1822 flocking to Daguerre’s dioramas of a church they could have visited in actuality, Solnit writes, “This is one of the great enigmas of modern life: why the representation of a thing can fascinate those who would ignore the original.”

The judge is a mountain of a man. He is pale, completely hairless, “close on to seven feet tall.” Tobin puts his weight at 24 stone, which is 336 pounds. He resembles, from a certain angle, that great leviathan of the sea, Moby Dick. But he is not a dumb beast. He is the leviathan of Hobbes, the modern state. The judge binds men together. His presence establishes an unspoken social contract that Glanton’s never could. And he marshals all his legal knowledge in service of their awful project. In one scene he cites Anaximander and Thales to keep Glanton from being arrested and to maintain their ability to kill indiscriminately. The state is that which holds a monopoly on violence.

The state is horrible but it gathers men to it because the state of nature is worse. The state absorbs people and holds them tight. In the final pages of the book, when the judge finally kills the kid, the judge waits for the kid in the outhouse. “He was naked and he rose smiling and gathered him in his against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him.” Of all the ways for the judge to go about it, he chooses to pull the kid in close, to squeeze him to death against himself. Like Hobbes’ leviathan, the judge is made of all the men he pulled into his orbit and never let go.

Putting forward this reading to the friend who gave me the Sartre quote, he asked me, “Why, then, is the judge a pedophile?” Easy. Even as modernity wipes away the past for tidy recording in a notebook it also preys on the future. Modernity cannot resist the new and the young and it cannot resist killing what it craves so badly. The modern world was built by mortgaging the future to pay for the present. The great orgy of expansion and industry ate up the world and swallowed the bones. Of this phenomenon, Solnit writes

The late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries were… an era of rapacious exploitation, though to recite its particulars is to invoke an almost alchemical transformation from wildness to citified commodities. The beaver of the North American West went first, those dammers of rivers turned into felt top hats for city gentlemen. The gold of the California motherlode went afterward, the secret contents of streams and fossil rivers turned into money in the days when money was still a material medium rather than only numbers in an account or guarantees on paper. The whaling industry turned those titans of the seas into lamp oil for parlors and whalebone for corsets and brought them close to extinction, at least until 1870, when Rockefeller founded Standard Oil and began to pump out the black residue of the Jurassic past in unprecedented quantities. The forests of the nation were being pitched into the boilers of locomotives and smelters of ore, were becoming churches and rocking chairs and crates… Organic material is usually harvested so that it renews itself year after year, but in the nineteenth century the industrialized world began mining this material—passenger pigeons, bison, beaver, whales, forests, into extinction or near-extinction.

Nothing illustrates this like the slaughter of the buffalo. The buffalo were integral to the lives of the Plains Indian tribes who were resisting westward expansion most strongly and whom the government wanted crushed and reservationized. It was decided that annihilating the buffalo would be a helpful assist in doing so. And so, the slaughter began. From an unfathomable number—a train once ran for 120 miles through a single herd—about a million buffalo a year were killed.

Buffalo skeletons piled up into mountains, and these bones were later converted into fertilizer and other industrial products, though most parts of the dead animals were left to rot on the prairie… They had been killed for sport, for food for the railroad builders, and for hides to ship east. The unromantic destiny of most of those hides was factories. Before rubberized drive belts, the belts that drove the Industrial Revolution’s factories were made of leather, and buffalo hide was thick and durable. The roaming bison herds were being transformed into the relentless churning of machines serving the cash economy.

At the top of Blood Meridian’s final chapter, the kid meets an old buffalo hunter.

The hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he'd made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground and the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the ton and hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half crazed and wallowing in the carrion.

I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not haulin a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there was eight million carcasses for that's how many hides reached the railhead. Two year ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They're gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they'd never been at all.

The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.

A couple weeks ago we drove up from our home in Santa Fe for a family trip to Bandelier National Monument. At Bandelier are the Anasazi cliff dwellings, by all accounts the exact place where the scalphunters camped and the judge sketched and expunged those artifacts from the memory of man. It is monumental country, a psychotic mix of great mesa plateaus fissured by canyons that drop hundreds of feet sheer. It is all so massive and it goes on and on and you can see for miles, can see more landscape than seems should be possible. The eye rebels at the scale of it. Just to approach the site is overwhelming.

The roads diverge eventually but at first driving to Bandelier is the same as driving toward Los Alamos and its National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb and still one of the region’s major employers. As we climbed through scrubby pine toward the Monument, we passed the huge dish of an astronomical observatory, New Mexico’s night skies offering some of the darkest, best stargazing in the country. We passed two Los Alamos installations, LANL Tech Stations 39 and 33. I thought about the Trinity test and I thought about Robert Oppenheimer and how deeply haunted he appeared in later years. I thought about how profoundly he carried the weight of the responsibility for that great advancement in annihilation.

The Anasazi were an ancient people. The caves were long-empty before any Navajo or Apache happened upon them. The judge calls them the old ones.

They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building—these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone.

Bandelier is an asymmetric canyon, with one side edged by sheer cliff of a curious pocked stone. The cliff dwellings were started by nature, the Anasazi only elaborated a plan innate to the rock. This side of the canyon is open, with little tree cover. On the other side, heading toward a gentler rise, rich evergreen forest flourishes. The canyon is an ecotone, a zone where several ecosystems meet and mingle, which would have made it a fruitful place to live.

The cement path at Bandelier is poorly maintained. It frequently lapses into sand through which I would have to push my son in his stroller. We passed the kiva, once a structure of civic and perhaps religious significance, now a great, perfectly round pit descending ten or twelve feet. It was very hot that day and we were well sunscreened.

We arrived at the cliff dwellings. Inside and on the cliff wall surrounding the doorways are carved petroglyphs: faces, zigzags, one that’s purported to be a parrot but looks very much like a dinosaur. It is a self-evidently sacred place. I felt the spirit entombed in the stone. There are several dwellings with ladders that the public is allowed to go inside. That day there was a line for each of these fifteen or twenty people long, each of whom was taking their turn sitting in the entrance and getting their picture taken; none seemed to look inside.

As we passed by them and descended into the pines for the loop back I drank from my water bottle freely, wastefully. I thought about the scene in Blood Meridian where the kid, nearly dead of thirst, is given a canteen by a stranger and drinks past when he’s told to stop, gulps until the canteen is kicked from his hands. I thought about what that would be like. I thought about how I have never worried I would not be able to refill my water bottle.

We completed our loop and went to the restaurant for lunch. From where we sat outside we could look up at the cliff-face and the myriad pockmarks forever waiting to be expanded and lived in by a people never to return. I felt the immensity of time and was crushed by it. I looked at my beautiful, perfect son and I thought about the Delaware bashing those babies’ brains out. I thought about how fragile everything we hold dear is and how determined we are not to believe it.

I thought about the buffalo. I thought about all the animals that have gone extinct in the time since. I thought about the old buffalo hunter and his last question. I wonder if there’s other worlds like this. Or if this is the only one. That futile hope, realized too late, that there might be somewhere else out there in the universe where he and those like him made other choices, had written a different history, and the buffalo been allowed to live.

I thought about all the worlds that we have destroyed. All the cultures and languages and traditions that were wiped out just because. Just because people are afraid of difference, are incurious, stand to profit by it. I thought about the world we have made, this nightmarish hell of the judge’s devising—maximally pedantic, minimally compassionate, where laws have the incantatory power to nullify the most self-evident claims of morality. A world made of money for those lucky few and made of struggle for the rest of us.

I thought about all the people destroyed and the suffering inflicted to bring this fallen world so low. I thought about the estimated 100,000-150,000 human beings subjected to imprisonment and torture in Chile and Argentina in order to impose neoliberalism on the world. I thought about Gaza. I thought about unknowable number of children killed and maimed by the state of Israel in the last two years. I thought about all the rest of us, lucky enough to still be alive, forced to bear witness endlessly, apparently somehow responsible despite our powerlessness. I wondered where the grief goes, when there aren’t enough people to hold it all.

And then I came back to myself, there at that table with my wife and son. We gathered our trash and walked back to our car and drove home. We made great time.

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Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy, and ten-year career check-up.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way. As we covered last time, Joel and Ethan were in a slump. After their critically and commercially promising first two films, they had produced three in a row that lost money, culminating in the disastrous performance of The Hudsucker Proxy, which earned less than $3 million in North America against its $25 million budget. Audiences were staying away while critics refused to crack a smile at their elaborate genre homages and verbal pyrotechnics.

The brothers are too withholding in interviews to be able to say these commercial failures brought on deep soul-searching but they seem to have recognized that something needed to change. “What was interesting to us in the first place about doing [Fargo],” Joel told David Bennun in 1996, “was the fact that from every point of view—stylistically, the architecture of the narrative, the way the characters came across—it was an attempt to do something very far from what we’d done before. It’s more naturalistic generally in terms of everything.” After testing the limits of self-consciously stylized filmmaking and scriptwriting, with Fargo they would now test how much they could strip away and what new possibilities that might make available.

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That quotation of Joel’s above continues: “Unembellished sets, real locations. If they’re told up front that it’s true, the audience gives you permission to do things that they might not if they’re essentially coming in expecting to watch a fictive thriller.” With their trademark intricate, galloping dialogue proscribed by the necessities of naturalism and the story’s Minnesota setting, Joel and Ethan were forced to consider alternate modes of expression and other ways dialogue could function. The result is a work of unprecedented psychological acuity, in which nearly every utterance simultaneously generates misunderstanding while betraying thoughts and feelings our characters would prefer to keep hidden.

Fargo begins with a miscommunication. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) has driven from Minneapolis to Fargo to meet with Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) to set in motion his ill-considered scheme to kidnap his own wife in order to collect the ransom from his wealthy father-in-law Wade (Harve Presnell). When he arrives at 8:30 the crooks are pissed off. As far as they knew the meeting was for 7:30. They don’t appreciate being made to wait for an hour. Jerry walks up to them trying to look tough but Carl’s displeasure instantly disarms him and he reverts to his wheedling, apologetic self as he tries to excuse the mix-up. By the time Carl scolds him that he’s not going to debate who’s at fault it’s clear the power dynamic has shifted. Jerry’s authority as their “employer” is worth anything only as much as they respect him, and they do not.

It’s also worth noting here how the scene ends. Carl can’t wrap his head around Jerry’s logic for the kidnapping and tries to express how harebrained he finds the whole thing but he gets tripped up on his words. He can’t match his language to his thought; he stutters, starts and stops, gives up. “Aw fuck it,” he says, “let’s go take a look at that Ciera.” Perhaps Jean’s (Kristin Rudrud) poor fate could have been averted right then if Carl had found the words he was reaching for.

It’s hard to say if Jerry’s at fault for the mix-up—Shep Proudfoot (Steven Reevis), Jerry’s ex-con mechanic who set up the meeting, is the absolute opposite of loquacious—but the thing about Jerry is that his whole business is miscommunication. He’s a car salesman who earns his living through obfuscation, misdirection, and disorientation. The scene where he bilks a customer out of an extra $400 for the bogus TrueCoat sealant on his undercarriage tells us everything we need to know about how Jerry conducts himself and relates to others.

Jerry knows how to get his way. It’s only a matter of absorbing the abuse the world throws at him. Call him a liar, call him a fucking liar, he can lower his head and wait you out. It’s not that he’s immune to these recriminations, no, every jab stings, every insult hits its target. But Jerry knows no other way to influence other people except to let them exhaust their fury until they give up.

Jerry has a curious relationship to language and power. He he can only assert himself by debasing himself. He does not know how to command, only to plead. In a foreshadowing of how spectacularly this approach might fail when dealing with pitiless killers, the Coens show us Jerry’s meeting with Wade and his associate Stan (Larry Brandenburg). Jerry has brought them an investment deal—$750,000 to build a parking lot—but there’s been a mix-up. Jerry wants the money to do it himself, Wade says the best he can do is a finder’s fee. As Jerry circumlocutes toward his demand, Wade and Stan look at him dumbfounded. “You’re saying… what are you saying?” they ask. Once they understand they stop him short. “If I wanted bank interest I’d go to Midwest Federal,” Wade scoffs. “We’re not a bank, Jerry,” Stan repeats, foreclosing argument. Jerry looks pathetic in the face of this sort of straightforward confidence, always weaseling backward into what he wants to say. All he can do is leave and hack impotently at the ice on his windshield, throwing a fit but ultimately having to start again in earnest.

On these frozen Minnesota plains, there is comfort in silence. A full thirty-three minutes into the film we meet our heroine, pregnant cop Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). Where Jerry’s endless patter betrays his bottomless insecurities, Marge and her husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch) hardly need to speak at all. Once again the Coens work with remarkable efficiency to establish their dynamic: Norm’s matter-of-fact insistence that she needs to eat before going to work—he’ll cook the eggs—speaks to a level of understanding between them like nothing we’ve seen in the film up to that point. “He totally personifies how undemonstrative people are in that place,” Ethan told Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret, their stalwart interviewers at Positif, in 1996. “The relationship with his wife is based on the unsaid, but they succeed in communicating somehow.”

Marge’s thick Minnesota accent has been held up as an example of the Coens laughing at their characters but I argue they’re doing something thoughtful with it. Marge’s accent is an unmissable signpost directing our attention to the most important influence on how these characters interact: the dreaded “Minnesota nice.” Here’s how Ethan characterized it to Positif: “All the exoticism and strangeness of that region comes from the Nordic character, from the politeness and reservation. There’s something Japanese in that refusal to show the least emotion, in that resistance to saying no! One of the comic wellsprings of the story comes from the conflict between that constant avoidance of all confrontation and the murders gradually piling up.”

In general then, Minnesota nice is a handicap on direct and effective communication. But Marge, despite sporting the thickest accent, is the exception. Don’t get me wrong, she absolutely participates in Minnesota nice, but she has learned to work within it to say exactly what she wants to. One of her most famous lines is a case in point: after investigating the scene of the state trooper’s killing, her partner Lou notes the trooper logged the plates of the last car he pulled over as DLR and infers he was killed before he could finish writing. Marge responds, “I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.” It is admittedly a bit convoluted—there are quicker ways to say you’re wrong—but her phrasing allows her to correct her (male) colleague without making him feel stupid or like she feels superior. In this way she makes a counterpoint to Jerry—where he relies on Minnesota nice to cloud the issue and mislead, Marge uses it to smuggle bluntness and investigative questioning into her interactions unnoticed.

These opposing modes of being collide when Marge questions Jerry at the car dealership. Jerry attempts to filibuster in the face of Marge’s direct yes-or-no questions and finally does something we haven’t seen from him before: he shuts up. He freezes, panicking as he finds himself caught in the headlights of an interaction he can’t circle around and turn to his own advantage. I am not exaggerating when I say that every single scene of Fargo is like this in its perfect consonance between character and action. The Coens understand and define the nature of each of their principle players so well that there is no way for them to act other than exactly as they do.

Like Marge and Jerry, Carl and Grimsrud are another linguistically mismatched pair. Carl spills his words carelessly, hardly listening to himself in his endless need to fill the silence. There’s a lot of silence to fill with Grimsrud. He broods, and smokes in the car with the windows up, and demands another stop at IHOP. When Carl objects he levels his eyes on him in a stare of unparalleled menace. Carl relents quickly. When they’re pulled over by the state trooper, Carl makes a clumsy attempt to talk his way out of it. From the moment the lights flash and the siren whoops, Grimsrud knows it can only end in blood.

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Grimsrud’s demeanor never wavers throughout the film (though his evident emotional response to the soap opera is an interesting wrinkle) but Carl’s changes significantly. He, quite understandably, becomes more and more high-strung until finally he snaps. We can see his evolution quite clearly in four interactions. The first is the opening scene meeting Jerry in the bar discussed up top. There he’s collected, in control, almost as laconic as Grimsrud. Later, after the kidnapping and the murders, he calls Jerry at his office; he’s agitated, dictating terms in order to assert control over a situation that’s going wrong but still salvageable. The third is the handoff at the parking garage; as he fumes at Wade that it’s supposed to be Jerry making the deal, in fact he’s raging against a situation that has now fully come undone. Until this moment Carl also believed the violence could be held in check but he is forced to concede to forces larger than him and acts in service of a logic now impossible to stop from reaching its conclusion. But even as he sides with the vortex of pain he, Grimsrud, and Jerry have unleashed, he still doesn’t see himself as threatened by it. Returning to the cabin, bloodied and exhausted, he lets loose all his frustration and pain and resentment, still thinking he can walk away.

Perhaps it seems strange that in a movie about kidnapping and murder I am focused on the uses and misuses of language. Well, first of all the other side of the coin is the violence, and violence leaves little room for interpretation. As David Graeber put it in Debt, the nature of violence is precisely a way of influencing other people without the need to establish mutual understanding. Secondly, I believe this reading finds its vindication in its power to make sense of Mike Yanagita.

Mike Yanagita remains the enduring mystery of Fargo. In a film otherwise without an ounce of fat on it, Marge’s strange lunch with her high school classmate stands out as a glaring diversion. But if we understand Fargo as a study in the uses and misuses of language, of the perils inherent in even good-faith communication and the power of lying, and the myriad ways we betray ourselves and expose our true intentions, Mike Yanagita makes perfect sense. He is all of these ideas taken to their logical extreme.

Everything he says to Marge is a lie. His job, his marriage, his wife’s death, all lies, all attempts to project “normal.” But Mike is not what he seems. As we learn a little later he was stalking the woman he claimed was his wife (who is alive), has had “psychiatric problems,” and is living with his parents. His demeanor announces his strangeness immediately. He manages to hold it together for approximately eight seconds before he gets weird with it. The irony here is pretty evident—if Mike were honest with Marge about his struggles he would certainly be able to act more naturally. But because he’s hiding all of it, and because he has concocted a fantasy of seducing Marge that he clings to even after seeing she’s seven months pregnant, the falseness and desperation radiates out of him. It’s only when he breaks down crying and confesses, “I’ve been so lonely,” that he approaches honesty and ceases to be wholly repellent.

Joel explained to Bennun one of the goals of the film was “to bring both the villains and the hero down to a recognizable human scale… they’re banal in the evil sense, in terms of Jerry, and banal in a good way in terms of Marge. But without any sort of pejorative connotation, just ordinary.” Banality provides another framework to make sense of Mike Yanagita’s presence in the film. He is, again, banality pushed to its limit, in the sense that his interaction with Marge is bizarre and alarming but it remains within the realm of the everyday. If Marge and Norm’s life is the idyllic banal and Jerry’s actions are the result of a banal sort of foolishness and lack of forethought, then Mike is the banal danger of the world. He’s the guy you really could meet up with for lunch only to discover he’s unstable and fixated on you.

It is this expectation of banality that leads Jerry down the garden path to his crimes. When he hires two hardened killers to kidnap his wife, he cannot conceive of the extremity of the danger and cannot imagine the innumerable ways the situation could end in disaster. “What interested us from the start in [Jerry] was his absolute incapacity, even for one minute, to project himself into the future and evaluate the consequences of his decisions,” Joel said. “There’s something fascinating in that total absence of perspective.” It’s not until he sees the crowbar on his bathroom floor that it starts to dawn on him that he commissioned violent, traumatic things to be done to his wife, that she was taken by force. Jerry lives in a banal world of words. He does not understand violence. He does not understand that it follows a logic all its own, one that does not answer to mere pleading.

Stray Notes

• The prostitutes are so fucking funny it’s crazy. Fun fact: the one who’s not the dad’s new wife on Reba was one of the accent coaches for the film.

• I love Buscemi at the toll booth so much.

And of course his second trip through has been burned into my memory as a defining cinematic image since my dad showed me Fargo when I was like twelve.

• Pop quiz: how does the investigation actually get solved? Every lead Marge chases down proves to be a dead end. Until, that is, Mr. Mohra calls in a tip about a guy at his bar claiming he’d killed people and that he was going stir crazy in his cabin by the lake. The scene where this information is conveyed is strange. Both Mr. Mohra and the nameless officer talk in the street wearing gigantic coats that obscure the officer’s face entirely and Mohra’s mostly. Insofar as we can see him, Mohra bears a striking resemblance to Joel Coen. This scene strikes me as a knowing bit of deus ex machina—Joel this universe’s god descends to resolve the plot when his characters fail to. This fascination with the idea of filmmaker as god will recur in later films.

• Fargo has to be one of the best edited films in history. I’ve watched it three times in as many months recently and it has been a pleasure every time. It moves from scened to scene with relentless efficiency but it never feels rushed. It is truly a marvel how much is packed into the first 32 minutes through the killings in the field. Fargo actually contains fewer iconic images and lines than it feels like because it’s all in the construction; it all works together and builds on itself so effectively that the cumulative experience is everything. The brothers edited most of their movies themselves under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes and this one is no exception. They have a whole backstory for Jaynes and wrote prefaces to books of the screenplays in his voice. Maybe we’ll cover that at some point.

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Going into Crime and Punishment all I knew was that the main character was named Raskolnikov and he was going to commit a murder. Genuinely not knowing how things would play out let me appreciate that Dostoevsky is a master of suspense. Raskolnikov’s escape after the crime is so tense! It felt totally plausible he would be caught immediately and the rest of the book would be his trial and imprisonment. And then conversely I really enjoyed discovering that that is not at all how it goes.

I had a really intense experience with Demons the first time I read it but when I revisited it a couple years ago I found it much diminished. Part of that was I had completely blocked out how much of the story focuses on Stepan Trofimovich and his stuff is so boring, but even the Stavrogin/Verkhovensky stuff underwhelmed; Demons finds so much of its power from its long, slow build-up of dread as the fete approaches and our never being quite sure what Verkhovensky is capable of. I wonder if my sense of deflation was the result of all that suspense and uncertainty being a closed question.

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Dostoevsky had been reading Plato, specifically The Republic, when he was writing Crime and Punishment. Liz saw me reading C&P and was inspired to pick up Notes From the Underground. She was telling me her impressions and was worried she was projecting something that wasn’t there but was feeling a huge indebtedness to The Republic—the underground as The Cave and so on. This was affirming for me because I had been getting Republic vibes from Crime and Punishment and was worried I was projecting. (The two books were written basically in succession, with Notes published in 1864 and C&P in 1866.)

Raskolnikov kills the old woman because he wants to “step over the boundary,” the boundary that separates ordinary people from the extraordinary. He invokes Napoleon, whose greatness was built on his willingness to follow courses of action that most people couldn’t even imagine, as when he abandoned his army in Egypt and returned to Paris without giving a thought to their fate. Raskolnikov further elaborates the idea in a scene with the inspector Porfiry. They discuss an article Raskolnikov published months earlier in which he claimed there is a class of people who have a right to commit crimes. He glosses it thus:

I merely suggested that an “extraordinary” man has the right… that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to… step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea—sometimes perhaps salutary to the whole of mankind—calls for it. [...] As for my dividing people into ordinary and extraordinary, I agree that it is somewhat arbitrary , but I don’t really insist on exact numbers. I only believe in my main idea. It consists precisely in people being divided generally, according to the law of nature, into two categories: a lower or, so to speak, material category (the ordinary), serving solely for the reproduction of their own kind; and people proper—that is, those who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment.

I imagine many readers now hear Raskolnikov describing something close to Nietzsche’s ubermensch. But his specific formulation reads to me as a modification of the Noble Lie from The Republic, which claims society is composed of three classes people defined by their innate nature: the gold souls, fit to rule; the silver souls, helpers or guardians, variously; and the bronze souls, farmers and craftsmen.

Raskolnikov’s schema is just a recapitulation of Plato’s, minus the silver souls. This tracks with the milieu of the novel. In Richard Pevear’s introduction to The Idiot (if memory serves) he remarks that it may seem puzzling that nearly every character in that book is either a civil servant or a military officer, but that for the middle class this was basically true to life in the 1870s—those two fields were basically the only ones remaining that could support middle class existence. The Idiot is an exceptionally middle class novel which makes it a silver-souled novel.

Crime and Punishment features no civil servants (save the drunken Marmeladov, who can’t master his vice to hold his job—he’s a bronze soul masquerading as silver) and no military men. Its characters are either destitute or obscenely wealthy. Raskolnikov forgets the silver souls because they are nowhere to be found, although perhaps Porfiry and the other police officers would qualify. This is a story about those dregs of humanity at the bottom of the hierarchy, although Dostoevsky is clear that our natures are not fixed and circumstances can either degrade or ennoble a person. Poor Katerina Ivanovna, dying of consumption, was a colonel’s daughter and was raised to be part of the upper crust but finds herself destitute and destroyed. Wealthy merchant Luzhin is a petty and vindictive liar at bottom, hardly the gold soul he imagines himself to be. Raskolnikov is so desperate to escape his circumstances he manages to convince himself the Noble Lie is true. If he could simply demonstrate his gold soul bonafides a path to the top of society would be soon to follow.

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At one point Jack Nicholson and Dostoevsky looked a lot alike, in my opinion. Missed biopic opportunity.

I was reading Crime and Punishment and Tam Lin at the same time. So I had, on one hand, a cast of characters with names like Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikov, Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov, and Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov and, on the other, Janet, Peg, Molly, Tina, Nora, Anne. Gotta say I had a lot harder time remembering who was who in Tam Lin!! I’ll take Russian patronymics over a bunch of interchangeable Boomer girl names any day.

Dostoevsky was a much bigger influence on William Gaddis than I had appreciated before. For all his books after The Recognitions, Gaddis wrote almost exclusively dialogue. Therefore, it falls on his characters to convey through their speech the physical action of each scene. Without taking anything away from Gaddis, who is inventive with the way his characters clue us in on the action, I now see how directly he has lifted this technique from Dostoevsky. Here, for example, is Katerina Ivanovna’s narration when Luzhin has accused Sonya of stealing from him:

“Anyone you like! Let anyone you like search her!” cried Katerina Ivanovna. “Sonya, turn your pockets out for them! There, there! Look, monster, this one’s empty, the handkerchief was in it, the pocket’s empty, see? Here, here’s the other one! See, see?”

Dostoevsky is not averse to narrating action like Gaddis so what this technique accomplishes is to keep us in the scene and to maintain the breakneck pace of the characters’ hysterics. Gaddis will adopt it at scale to depict an entire world rushing hysterically forward without pausing to take a breath.

Another, smaller bit of consonance between the two authors is the way they choose to deprive us of our main character at what seems the pivotal moment. After following Raskolnikov in lock step the entire novel, as we approach his last day of freedom, he parts ways with Svidrigailov and the narration follows Svidrigailov instead. We never get to see what happens to Raskolnikov in that time period; by the time we return to him the day has passed. I was reminded of how in JR, after dynamically following the interlocking storylines for hundreds of pages, the narrative perspective finds its way into the flophouse apartment that has become filled with the drop-shipped detritus of JR’s paper fortune and gets trapped there. Time continues passing but we can’t find our way out. As things come to a head we only get the scraps that various characters bring in and share.

Here’s an intrusive thought I need to purge. There’s a footnote in the P&V edition of Demons regarding a real-life anarcho-communist group that Sergei Nechaev, one of the chief inspirations for Demons, belonged to. The revolutionary group was called The Committee of the People’s Summary Justice of 19 February 1870 and their tracts and pamphlets carried an oval seal of an axe with the group’s name encircling it. Try as I might I cannot find any reference to this group online or an image of this seal. I feel like a baseball cap with that seal on it would have made sweet merch for the dirtbag left like eight years ago.

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Hey gang, I have been phasing out the book reports because they are always my worst performing posts and seem to produce my worst writing and because it’s better to integrate my reading into my essays, which is how you get me quoting Rebecca Solnit while writing about Metal Gear Solid. But there are always going to be books I want to tell you about even though I can’t do anything with them in a larger discussion. Between my day job and a trip to see family and raising an extremely energetic almost-three-year-old I have had neither the time nor bandwidth to write lately, so this also feels like a good way to shake the cobwebs out and try to get back to a regular schedule. Hope you enjoy, there’s better stuff in the pipeline I promise. Obligatory disclosure that the links on the titles are my affiliate links so if you use them to buy the book I get a couple bucks.

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Tam Lin, Pamela Dean, 1991

It’s the early 70s and Janet Carter is an incoming freshman at Blackstock College. She’s going to be an English major. Her advisor asks “Are you sure you don’t want to do Classics?” She and her roommates Molly and Tina meet some boys—Nick, Robin, and Thomas—who are Classics majors. They ask her, “Are you sure you don’t want to do Classics?” The Classics department functions like a cult centered around the raven-haired Professor Medeous and seemingly everyone in it is very beautiful and otherworldly. Also Janet’s dorm might be haunted by the ghost of a young woman who has a penchant for throwing her old books out the window, particularly her Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon.

Tam Lin is ostensibly a fantasy novel but in practice it is a sustained portrait of the everyday life of a student at a small liberal-arts college. Dean remembers clearly what those first weeks of college are like—how friend groups coalesce, how young people adjust to being away from home, how giddily earnest and annoying freshman are after reading one (1) Shakespeare play. She gets the rhythm and the representative decisions of campus life, where it’s a matter of major dispute which dining hall to frequent. Dean never fails to specify what classes Janet is taking in a given quarter. The one aspect of college life completely absent from this book is any depiction of partying; as far as we see Janet does her homework and goes to bed on time every night. I know Ancient Greek is a lot of work but I can attest from personal experience you can learn it while also being a degenerate on the weekends.

So the girls and the boys pair off: Janet with Nick, Molly with Robin, and Tina with Thomas. Janet’s relationship with Nick is intellectually stimulating—he can quote her beloved Keats right back at her—but from the start there’s a certain emotional remove. Quoting Keats back and forth is about all they can do. Janet feels blocked somehow from expressing her feelings and Nick doesn’t seem inclined to either. Robin is much the same way, communicating almost exclusively in Shakespeare lines and holding an ironic distance from everything happening around him. Thomas is much more engaged, both with the world and his emotional life. As the book goes on one starts to notice that Thomas is getting a lot more space on the page than Nick and becoming more central to Janet’s life.

At least fifty percent of this book is given over to Janet’s freshman year followed by sophomore and junior year flying by in a flash. It’s a choice that tracks with my similar college experience—I can remember first semester freshman year with startling granularity whereas junior year is a total blur—but it gives the book an odd pace. While I enjoyed the depiction of college life, the book is fairly plotless until the final couple chapters and I had trouble sustaining my interest in the first half. Janet takes Ancient Greek from Professor Medeous, so central to the book’s mysteries, in her sophomore year but Dean leaves this setup puzzlingly undramatized. We’re told Medeous is imposing in class but gentle with even the hopeless cases. Okay. Compare to the fuller scenes with Janet’s freshman English professor who does not figure in the plot at all.

Anyway, I liked this book. It’s a sweet love letter to college. I did however catch one glaring ERROR: at one point Janet is taking a physics class and Dean says she’s reading Newton’s De Rerum Natura—as we ALL know De Rerum Natura is Lucretius!! FRAUD ALERT!! If you have any interest in reading Tam Lin do not look at its Wikipedia page because it instantly spoils all the questions Dean holds off on answering until the very end.

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The Other Wind, Ursula K. Le Guin, 2001

The final Earthsea book, which I found a mixed bag by Le Guin standards, very good by any other. Another fifteen years have passed since Ged and Arren went into the land of the dead to seal the hole in the world and Ged lost his power, another fifteen years since Ogion whispered in his final moments that all was changed. Ged and Tenar are in, probably, their sixties at this point. A healer mage named Alder comes seeking Ged’s counsel: his wife had previously died and now every night, in his dreams, he finds himself on that hillside looking at the wall of stones that separates the world of the living and the dead. His wife is there, on the other side, pleading for help—countless souls reach out to him over the wall, and he is pulled ever more toward them. Ged provides a stopgap solution—a kitten to keep him company at night and ground him in the living world—but he’s concerned about what the dreams portend so he sends him on, accompanied by Tenar and Tehanu, to Havnor for an audience with King Lebannen. Ged will stay home.

Seeing Lebannen is quite exciting. We haven’t seen him since he was Prince Arren traveling with Ged in The Farthest Shore. Now he, like Tenar and Tehanu, go by their true names, a mark of both immense status and humility. Lebannen is a just ruler and has risen to the challenges of kingship in all ways except one: he refuses to take a bride. Just arrived in port is a delegation from the Kargad Lands, the eastern archipelago of Tenar’s birth. The delegation has brought a Kargish princess, aka the daughter of the current most dominant warlord, and Lebannen is throwing an absolute fit at the prospect of being coerced into a political marriage. This felt like something of a cheat to me—instead of showing him as the man he has become, by framing his portrayal around this issue Le Guin essentially restages his journey from petulance to maturity we’ve seen once already.

So anyway, Alder’s situation turns out to be related to the plot point Le Guin introduced in Tehanu that long in the past dragons and humans were one people and one species before going their separate ways. I strongly dislike this idea. Earthsea’s “first trilogy” is pretty unequivocal that dragons are wholly other, they are magic itself in some sense, beings made of the True Speech, word as flesh. To say that humans were once that as well and gave it up for a lesser form of existence in exchange for the instrumental power the True Speech offered as magic, for me it cheapens the dragons in a really bummer way. And I don’t love Le Guin introducing such a glaring Garden of Eden fall from grace allegory into her world.

So our beautiful dragon girl Irian from “Dragonfly” in Tales from Earthsea shows up and we all pile in the boat, bringing along with them the Kargish princess, whose name is Seserakh, and head to Roke to deal with the situation. This part of the trip contains some of the best material in the book, particularly a scene of the four women hanging out in their shared cabin during a storm. By custom Seserakh only appears in public hidden under a red burqa type thing (vaguely Islamophobic) so Lebannen has no idea what she looks like or even how old she is. Well, she’s young and totally beautiful. After Tenar, Tehanu, and Irian encourage her to be bold, the next morning she appears on deck in a tunic with only a tiny, diaphanous veil over her eyes. She walks the length of the ship to Lebannen and looks him straight in the eye for the first time. It’s very sensual and romantic and instantly the reader loves this character they hardly know.

The resolution of the plot is quite beautiful and I’m pretty sure I cried (it’s been a couple months since I read it). Walls are one of Le Guin’s great images and metaphors—see the first sentence of The Dispossessed: “There was a wall.”—so to see what she does with it when she returns to it one last time was quite moving. This ending resolves a quibble I think many readers may have had since the earlier books, namely, why is Earthsea’s afterlife so grim? But in doing so it also kind of renders Ged’s great act of sacrifice in The Farthest Shore moot and pointless. There’s something here that smacks of gender—Ged’s masculine approach to fixing the afterlife was to oppose the problem with every ounce of his strength but when we send in Tenar, Tehanu, and Irian their action takes the form of an unweaving and weaving back together anew.

I really love Tenar and I was not unhappy to spend another book seeing through her eyes. But I also love Ged like few other characters in fiction. I can’t help but feel that Le Guin left him behind, having lost interest in the character. It’s okay she took away his magic but it feels like she took away his spark, his humor and zest for life. This was fine in Tehanu when he was grieving his newly lost magic, but I would have hoped he would have recovered himself. Instead he seems quite joyless, plodding through his tasks as a farmer without ever cracking a smile.

Maybe I’m wrong. I know I have one story left about Ged, “Firelight,” which was published shortly after Le Guin’s death in 2018. My understanding is that it concerns Ged in his own final days. I find it very moving she returned to him one last time after nearly fifty years together. I’m saving it for when I really need it.

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Something I love doing lately is drink two beers and then browse the Switch eshop. Thanks to the release of the Switch 2—I assume—the deals there have been crazy. Everything is on sale—I’m talking markdowns of 75% or more; formerly $60 games for 5 bucks. The Metal Gear Solid Master Collection was only half off but, as it brings together two powerful tendencies of mine, I still couldn’t resist (and, again, the two beers). Those tendencies are 1) the impulse to go back to a medium’s earlier works to construct a canon and 2) the desire to apply cinema’s auteur theory to a form that has few recognized creative visionaries.

Metal Gear Solid checks both boxes. It was a pioneer in 3D stealth gameplay and is widely considered a foundational “text” of video games. And it can be attributed to the vision of its director and writer Hideo Kojima, whose idiosyncratic and maximalist approach to both game design and storytelling has made him one of the few household names of the industry. Further bolstering the auteur theory angle, Kojima cites numerous film influences and has spent his career pushing the limits of video game hardware to chase cinematic presentation in his games.

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The other thing about Metal Gear Solid is it’s completely fucking bonkers. Are you ready for some Proper Nouns?

The player is Solid Snake, a grizzled spec-ops veteran unapologetically modeled on Kurt Russell’s character Snake Plissken from Escape from New York, who’s brought out of retirement for One Last Job. His mission: infiltrate Shadow Moses Island, off the coast of Alaska, a military testing facility that has been taken over by the members of his former unit FOXHOUND. They have seized Metal Gear Rex, a walking mech tank with nuclear launch capabilities. Their demands include one billion dollars and the remains of their dead leader Big Boss, on threat of using Metal Gear for a nuclear strike.

Okay, deep breath, pause. So here’s the thing. Metal Gear Solid is actually the third game in the series. It was preceded by two 8-bit games released in 1987 and 1990 for the MSX2 computer system (???) and ported to the NES. These games are included in the Master Collection but I just can’t with games of that era. The story of the original Metal Gear is Snake infiltrating the fortified breakaway rogue nation of Outer Heaven, which has a Metal Gear; at this point he’s a member of FOXHOUND under the command of Big Boss. Surprise! Big Boss is the man behind Outer Heaven—you’ve been taking advice from the bad guy! Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is basically the same but set somewhere called Zanzibar; Snake kills Big Boss in that one. These games, despite being deeply inaccessible, especially in 1998 when MGS was released, are binding canon and Kojima references them freely, as if he expects everyone playing to be familiar.

So anyway, FOXHOUND wants Big Boss’s DNA and Snake needs to stop them from using their Metal Gear to initiate Armageddon. To do so he’ll have to sneak his way past enemy soldiers and cameras, acquiring weapons, equipment, and higher-level key cards as he goes. This is the template of basically all stealth games, but it’s important to remember that Kojima established the template and brought it into the third dimension for the first time with this game.

But he has sort of only half brought it into 3D. Despite the Playstation 1’s capacity to render 3D environments, Kojima has maintained the overhead perspective from the earlier 2D games. This is the biggest hurdle for a modern player. It’s a baffling and frustrating choice. I can’t tell you how many times I alerted a guard or a camera when I first started because you just can’t see more than ten feet in front of you. You’re in a big warehouse with soldiers on the far side of the room and you don’t know they’re there because you’re looking down at Snake from above. Now, you can press a button to go first-person mode to look around, but why do it that way? Why not a camera that follows Snake from behind? This seems obvious now.

But maybe it wasn’t obvious in 1998. It is easy to forget that Super Mario 64 had come out only two years prior in 1996. Metal Gear Solid’s development began before that in 1995, when there were only overhead views or first-person views a la the original Doom. The idea of a floating camera looking over the shoulder didn’t exist yet. The entire industry was trying to figure out what the transition to 3D would mean for game design. For all the ways MGS was pushing the boundaries of the art form, Kojima opted for a conservative, difference-splitting approach in his presentation. Or perhaps was it the inclusion of the radar? Did Kojima and his team think players would not be able to correlate the overhead view on the radar if the camera wasn’t also looking from that angle?

In River of Shadows, Rebecca Solnit’s incredible book about the perceptual changes in human consciousness wrought by the technological innovations of the 19th century—photography, telegraphy, and railroads, chiefly—she describes the elation and fear felt by early train riders in the 1830s. These trains could achieve maximum speeds of maybe 35 miles an hour but people worried they would be annihilated traveling what was to them so fast. One of these early demonstrations culminated in a man being struck by a train coming the other way when they stopped for a break. Solnit writes, “It is hard to imagine the reflexes and responses that made it impossible to step away from a noisy locomotive going perhaps thirty miles an hour, but Huskisson could not.” She goes on to elaborate on the way, prior to the industrial revolution, life was conducted at the pace of nature—people were limited by the speed and capabilities of bodies, theirs or their animals, be they horse or carrier pigeon. Clocks were rare before factory work.

Each event and thought itself must have been experienced at a radically different pace—what was slow then was slower than we could now tolerate, slower than we could pay attention to; while the speed of our own lives would have gone by them like the blur of speed before Muybridge’s images… Distance had a profundity that cannot be imagined now: a relative who had moved a hundred or a thousand miles away often seemed to have dropped over the horizon, never to be seen again, and travel for its own sake was rare. In some psychological and spiritual way, we became a different species operating at a different pace, as though tortoises became mayflies. We see much they did not, and can never see as they did.

Playing this video game from less than thirty years ago gives me a small sense of this sort of great change. It is hard to imagine that the relationship between a minimap and a ground-level view of the world could be confusing. But on the other hand I struggle to muster the patience this game asks for. The friction of having to stand still and hold a button just to look across a room is almost unbearable in an era of game design that seeks to eliminate friction above all. Players back then apparently enjoyed watching the guards walk back and forth, they liked hiding under their cardboard box and creeping forward three steps each time the camera swiveled away. They didn’t mind dying over and over and having to attempt the section again in a slow accumulation of knowledge. I am so impatient to get to whatever’s next that it’s very hard to appreciate what is happening in the moment.

I was reminded of Brian Moriarty’s comments in his GDC lecture The Secret of Psalm 46 that the vocabulary of video games largely hasn’t been invented yet, that there’s a whole dictionary waiting to be coined. Playing Metal Gear Solid I found myself thinking that we specifically need better language to talk about classic games. Like no other artistic medium (or at least not to the same degree), video games are a product of their era and its technological limitations. Coming just at the advent of the leap to 3D, Metal Gear Solid is doing so many new things, is pushing its medium to places it had never gone before. But you have to strain to see those innovations because they have become so fundamental to the design of any game that involves moving a character through a 3D world as to become invisible. It’s like looking at Brunelleschi’s first paintings to employ perspective realistically—it’s just about impossible to appreciate the newness on display when it has become axiomatic.

Or, on the other hand, Kojima is trying things that quickly slipped into hack gimmickry. The Psycho Mantis fight is legendary for the fourth-wall breaking. In the cutscene before the boss fight, Mantis, the telepath, reads the player’s memory card and reacts to what he finds there. If you have save data from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night he looks straight out of the tv and says he sees you’re a fan of Castlevania. During the fight he reads your controller inputs and dodges your attacks until you take your controller out of port 1 and switch over to port 2. Idk, I guess this hit different in 1998. I was not impressed.

A difficulty here is the technical aspects of the code behind the innovations. When I move Snake under those infrared beams in the clip above, I feel something of the epochal step forward its gameplay constituted. The precision of movement, the fluid transitions between poses, it’s really something. But I struggle with what to say about it beyond that it’s impressive. Maybe the thing to remark on is the fact that animation and hitbox work that precise can exist side by side with the sloppy and frustrating top-down gunplay that feels impossibly outdated. Metal Gear Solid shows us a form undergoing a radical transformation. The rules were not set in stone. Even as it had one foot in the future, the other was planted firmly in the past.

Sorry, I got off track. Let’s get back to the story, because it’s so bananas. The genius and stupidity of Metal Gear Solid is simple: Kojima has taken a standard 90s political or military thriller and run it through an overheated anime filter. It’s a familiar “loose nukes” setup that was everywhere in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, but rather than our hero being a Jack Ryan CIA analyst and our villains some IRA splinter cell we have the comically jaded Solid Snake up against the FOXHOUND menagerie, which includes the gunslinger Revolver Ocelot; hulking Inuit shaman armed with a F16 minigun Vulcan Raven; seductive hunter Sniper Wolf; and Psycho Mantis, born possessing telepathy and telekinesis. Leading FOXHOUND is Solid Snake’s twin brother Liquid Snake, who seeks to follow in Big Boss’s footsteps.

On our hero’s side, we have another full cast. There is so much dialogue in this game, all of it voice-acted. Snake frequently checks in with his team via earpiece. They include his commanding officer Colonel Campbell, who suffers a slow humiliation over the course of the game as it’s revealed he has withheld piece after piece of vital information from Snake and is forced to apologize sheepishly time after time. Dr. Naomi Hunter is the medical expert; in the game’s final act there are so many revelations of betrayal and misdirects and conflicting accounts regarding Naomi I honestly am not sure of what she did and didn’t do. Meryl Silverburgh is Campbell’s niece, an inexperienced solider who was stationed on Shadow Moses Island; Snake’s relationship with her is as close to something we could call the “emotional core” of the story. Snake also rescues Hal “Otacon” Emmerich, the chief designer of Metal Gear Rex, who didn’t know it was meant to launch nuclear warheads and got into his line of work because he loves mecha anime.

There’s also a cyborg ninja running around who turns out to be Grey Fox, a comrade Snake thought died in Zanzibar in MG2 but who was actually used as a cybernetic test subject; he also turns out to be Naomi’s adoptive brother and guardian, and her anger at Snake for his “death” is what fueled her motivations for revenge that caused her to infect him with the FOXDIE virus. The FOXDIE virus is a special virus that only targets people with DNA sequences it’s been programmed to recognize. There’s so much DNA talk in this game, which is also very 90s. Naomi talks at length about how she went into DNA research because she didn’t know her parents or her origins and thought learning about her DNA would help her know her self and where she came from. She basically invented 23andMe, is what I’m saying.

Whew, where was I? It’s amazing how Metal Gear Solid’s plot is so simple—Snake rescue hostages, Snake shut down Metal Gear—and so gonzo that it’s nearly impossible to talk about in a coherent, linear way. Its plot and its dialogue are jam-packed with stuff. This isn’t a game with ideas, really—its analysis doesn’t extend farther than “loose nukes bad, our DNA not dictate our destiny”—but it certainly has a lot of things on its mind. Kojima’s willingness to throw it all in the mix and write it all out in such an operatically expository manner pushes the game into the realm of the ridiculous sublime. I mean, please just watch Liquid Snake’s great speech atop the wreckage of Metal Gear Rex from the climax of the story:

Liz watched this cutscene with me after having seen basically none of the game preceding it. We were hooting and hollering. Like every line of Liquid’s is a villain speech cliche turned up to 11. “But things... are different now. With all the liars and hypocrites running the world, war isn't what it used to be... We're losing our place in a world that no longer needs us. A world that now spurns our very existence. You should know that as well as I do. After I launch this weapon and get our billion dollars, we'll be able to bring chaos and honor... back to this world gone soft. Conflict will breed conflict, new hatreds will arise!” “We were accomplices in murder before the day we were even born.” And all of this uber-dramatic speechifying from characters so low-poly they barely have faces. God it’s so good.

Also, Liquid says that he and Snake split Big Boss’s DNA, with Snake getting all the good stuff and Liquid getting the junk. This is literally the plot of the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito movie Twins?????

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But for me the iconic, defining scene of Metal Gear Solid’s aesthetic and emotional register is when Snake and Otacon talk at length about using an elevator and then Otacon, who has inexplicably fallen in love with Sniper Wolf even though she shot Meryl and took her hostage, asks Snake if he thinks “love can bloom even on a battlefield.”

Does it get better than this?? Nothing has made me feel like I’m thirteen again like this game in years and years. This is peak faux-profundity and I love it so much. Want one more? Here’s Vulcan Raven’s death scene, which culminates in him being skeletonized by his flock of ravens:

I recently learned from this article a fun Joan Didion quote which goes, “To engage my glazed attention a movie need be no classic of its kind, need be neither L’Avventura nor Red River, neither Casablanca nor Citizen Kane; I only ask that it have its moments.” This is very perceptive, in my opinion. For instance, I have a guilty love for teen soaps; I’m currently in season four of Gossip Girl (sound off if you want a GG article). One way to understand teen soaps is as a story that has been constructed to consist as much as possible of its moments.

Metal Gear Solid too succeeds on the strength of its moments. Its gameplay is often annoying, its philosophizing is middle school level. Its characters are parodies of action movie stereotypes. But it achieves a certain alchemy in its absurd too-muchness that transcends its flaws. It is an experience, it has its moments. I came away from it more interested in understanding this formative series and its creator Hideo Kojima. So consider this article a soft promise for an ongoing Kojima Studies series as I play through the remaining games. I know Kojima is only an idea here—I have no quotations from him—but if/when we continue I’ll dig more into him and what he thinks he’s doing with these games.

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Spoiler warning for puzzle mechanics and certain solutions in The Witness

When Jonathan Blow set out to make a video game about the experience of thinking, he chose as his form the labyrinth.

This was to be Blow’s second game. He found himself with the means and reputation to pursue any project he wanted. His first game, Braid, was a smash hit when it was released in 2008. A puzzle platformer, it used a variety of time-manipulation mechanics to brain-wrinkling effect and set off the indie game boom that has in large part defined the last two decades of the medium.

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The Witness, released in 2016, takes place on an island. The colors are hyper-saturated, the sun is bright, everything except the water lapping the shore is perfectly still. You can almost feel the thick, slightly humid air on your skin as you explore. In classic video game fashion there are a number of different biomes—desert, swamp, thick jungle, snowy mountain—that abut one another in ways they never could in real life. Strewn everywhere on the island are screens, often grouped into sequences. Each screen displays a maze puzzle. In the tutorial area they are literally just mazes—move your cursor from the starting point to the end point to solve it. After that certain conditions need to be met for that line to trace a valid solution. Each zone on the island centers on a different rule. Some are environmental, such as the autumn forest where you must follow the twisting shadows of the tree branches overhead that become progressively more tangled and obscure. And some are purely logical, such as the stars that want to be separated out into sets of two or the “tetris block” puzzles that require you to trace specific shapes.

Each of these rules are taught by a set of elementary puzzles that demonstrate it at its most basic and then scale up the complexity. Here’s the first set of screens a new player encounters, which I asked Liz to play in order to show the authentic process of someone working through these puzzles for the first time:

I know none of you watched that video in full (it’s fine!) because watching someone else try and fail to solve maze puzzles for ten minutes is boring, but to the experienced eye there’s a lot to appreciate. Over the course of a few boards you can see my wife’s play change significantly. When she gets stuck on the fourth puzzle she tries to brute force it. Still not quite seeing the rule governing these panels, she is guessing; she checks every answer to see for sure that it’s wrong. By the last few, you can see her pause and backtrack when she realizes a line isn’t going to work; she has become more thoughtful, and confident in her own judgments. She also quickly masters certain fundamental maneuvers, like tracing along the outside first when she needs to loop back.

Let’s look at one of the tetris shape puzzles, which for me tend to be the hardest to wrap my head around. Judging from other people asking for help online, this is one of the biggest stumpers of the mid-game:

Can you solve it? One key principle of the shape puzzles is that multiple shapes can be grouped into one larger mass. And crucially, the shapes can take any position within that aggregate—that is, in this puzzle for instance, that vertical four-long does not need to stay with the square it’s pictured on, so long as that square is part of the overall shape containing all the sub-shapes. You still with me?

Okay, here’s the solution:

Do you see it? The pieces have been switched around but they’ve all retained their original orientation. Let me make it a little clearer:

As you can see, none of the pieces are where their symbol is. I have a hell of a time holding the grid position of multiple shapes in my mind at the same time when they’re all being rearranged so I often resort to more analog solutions:

This puzzle is actually exceptionally easy. All the pieces go basically right where their symbols are. It’s just more information than I can keep track of mentally. I wish I had my notebook from my first playthrough of The Witness from ten years ago; I filled pages and pages more than I did this time around. I guess that means I’ve gotten smarter?

The Witness provokes a sort of thinking that is deviously hard to describe. As one draws their lines looking for the correct path, there is reasoning happening. But, for me at least, it is a reasoning not happening in language. This reasoning occurs in a non-verbal form of logic, rules articulated non-verbally by the maze and the solution articulated non-verbally by the line. All the intervening false starts and wrong solutions are attempts to work through that logic on a level totally distinct from any sort of linguistic step-by-step, if-then sort of thinking. The board sits before you, its logic visible in its entirety. Once the correct path is laid in, it looks so simple, so elegantly obvious, it looks like it’s been there forever. To work through a Witness puzzle is to experience a strange temporal disjunction as our time-locked minds struggle to encompass a form of logic that is fully present all at once.

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When asked what he hoped players would take from the game, Blow himself highlighted as important that it prompts a mode of thinking outside of language: “It’s so big and complicated they can take away what they want, honestly,” he said. “But I do think there is a certain flavor the game has that will come across to most people most of the time. It’s hard for me to verbalize what that is—it’s something about the non-verbal communication and exploring the world freely, and having this experience of epiphany over and over where you go from not understanding to understanding, repeated over and over.”

Given time and practice, these problems can become second nature. We can learn to read these mazes in moments. I swear this clip shows the first time I set eyes on this puzzle.

Call me Piranesi. At this point I am fully at home within the rules of the labyrinth. The labyrinth has become my world and my thoughts follow its nature.

For a game whose action takes place mostly in our minds, Blow could hardly have found a better image than the labyrinth. The labyrinth is an ancient trope that never fails to spur our mind to seek a solution. To be in a labyrinth is to be trapped and lost, but rather than the despair of a prison cell, the labyrinth demands we get up and move—we must find our way through. In my new favorite book The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Anne Doody discusses labyrinths at some length. She writes:

Above all we notice the intricacy. The Labyrinth is associated with anxiety, with puzzlement, with strained attention. It presents an epistemological challenge. How is one to disentangle what is confused, how to locate a meaning and hence an objective? In heightened uses of the Labyrinth Trope, epistemological and moral problems of great force are represented in emblems of spatial disorientation, of the self in unknown space.

The experience of the Labyrinth is not essentially, as with cave or tomb, enclosure, but wandering through an obscure suite of enclosures that are also openings, opportunities. The mind must always be busy calculating these intricacies. Unlike the prisoner, or the patient buried alive, the lost one in the Labyrinth is a traveler and must keep on the move to survive. The attention is dizzied by the constant fissioning, one thing leading to another in an associative scramble very like the mind itself.

The mind is a labyrinth of its own. The process of thinking is a process of finding our way past the dead ends and wrong turns as we hunt for a complete thought. But we seek to escape the labyrinth. If our mind is one, our ultimate goal is then to escape the limitations of our thoughts and emerge into the fullness and freedom of unimpeded understanding.

In his 2020 book Games: Agency as Art,1 C. Thi Nguyen argues that the unique value of games (all kinds, not just video games) lies in their ability to generate aesthetic experiences of our own actions. Unlike elsewhere in life, we take up a goal and a set of restrictions (rules) not for the sake of accomplishing that goal, not really, but for the sake of the struggle that ensues trying to reach it. If we play a game of basketball with friends we take on the goal of putting the ball through the hoop not because there’s any intrinsic, external value to doing so but because that goal is a necessary condition of playing basketball, which we want to do for the experience of playing basketball.

The aesthetic aspect comes in when the game, through its vast simplification of the world and our actions, allows us to match our abilities to the task and to enjoy the elegance and grace of what we ourselves are doing. I thought immediately of Celeste and wished I had read the book before I wrote about it. Celeste captures everything Nguyen is talking about. Both for Madeline within the narrative and for us as players, the goal of summiting the mountain is not the point. The point is the struggle to get there. And why is that struggle so satisfying? Why did I subject myself to so many, many deaths? Because the satisfaction of overcoming those challenges is second to none. Specifically, pulling off that correct series of dashes and jumps is aesthetically satisfying—there is a grace in Madeline’s movements, a grace that I am responsible for. I see beauty in a perfectly executed wavedash.

Nguyen writes:

Consider the difference between two superficially similar activities: dancing and rock climbing. Dancing freely can be an aesthetic experience. My own movements can feel to me expressive, dramatic, and, once in a rare while, even a bit graceful. I also rock climb, and rock climbing is full of aesthetic experiences. Climbers praise particular climbs for having interesting movement or beautiful flow. But, unlike many traditional forms of dance, climbing aims at overcoming obstacles. The climbing experiences that linger most potently in my mind are experiences of movement as the solution to a problem—of my deliberateness and gracefulness that got me through a difficult series of holds…

This, it seems to me, is a paradigmatic aesthetic experience of playing games. Once we’ve seen it, we can see that aesthetic experiences with this character exist outside of games. I value philosophy because I value truth, but I also savor the feel of that beautiful moment of epiphany, when I finally find that argument that I was groping for. Games can provide consciously sculpted versions of those everyday experiences. There is a natural aesthetic pleasure to working through a difficult math proof; chess seems designed, at least in part, to concentrate that pleasure for its own sake. In ordinary practical life, we catch momentary glimpses, when we are lucky, of harmony between our abilities and our tasks.

As Blow said above, The Witness is a machine that generates epiphanies. Perhaps the most impressive achievement of Blow’s design is the sequencing and difficulty curve of the puzzles. In each area, and in the game overall, we find ourselves perpetually confronted by yet another board that is just slightly beyond our quick intuition. We think we see an obvious solution but as we draw it out we see what’s wrong. Oh. What looked so straightforward is quite a thorny problem. We get stuck. We stare. We trace half a path and stop. We declare the puzzle unsolvable. And then—there it is. We didn’t see it before. How couldn’t we? There it is. It’s so clear. A rush. Our mind expands just a little bit more. Next puzzle. Repeat.

What Blow has done, to use Nguyen’s wording, is sculpt an experience that draws out the aesthetic pleasure of our mind at work. Learning in real life is often a slow and diffuse process—learning a language, for instance, requires investing in the separate skill trees of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. It takes a long while and a lot of persistence before they coalesce into any real facility with the tongue. It can be hard to marshal one’s full abilities to a mental task, pulled as our attention always is by the myriad practical concerns of our lives. Real inspiration just doesn’t strike every day.

In real life, our solutions can be murky, only half satisfying. An argument has a gap we can’t quite figure out how to bridge. That quote we were counting on in Dante just isn’t there. Perfect answers aren’t available, or we lack to ability to articulate them. The Witness gives us back the satisfaction of arriving at the full clarity we crave but can so rarely find. It shows us the feeling the great thinkers of history were chasing when they devoted their lives to building philosophical systems and unearthing the properties of the natural world.

As the player explores the island, they will happen upon little tape recorders tucked away at the foot of a statue or on a ledge overlooking the sea. There are 49 in total to find. Each one, when clicked on, plays a reading of a quotation from a notable thinker. These range from contemplations of God by Augustine and Nicholas of Cusa; Eastern philosophy and zen; and modern science, with passages from Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. The readings circle a few common themes. One is struck by the similarity of language between the men of science and the men of faith, how they are united by their desire to know, their acceptance of the impossibility of full understanding, and their happy resignation to continue trying.

Feynman speaks of the (wonderful, hard fought for) role doubt and uncertainty plays in the scientific method. Nicholas of Cusa marvels at God’s absolute beyond-ness and his learned ignorance:

O Lord God, helper of those who seek you, I see you in the garden of paradise, and I do not know what I see, because I see nothing visible. I know this alone that I know that I do not know what I see and that I can never know. I do not know how to name you, because I do not know what you are. Should anyone tell me that you are named by this or that name, by the fact that one gives a name I know that it is not your name. For the wall beyond which I see you is the limit of every mode of signification by names. Should anyone express any concept by which you could be conceived, I know that this concept is not a concept of you, for every concept finds its boundary at the wall of paradise. Should anyone express any likeness and say that you ought to be conceived according to it, I know in the same way that this is not a likeness of you. So too if anyone, wishing to furnish the means by which you might be understood, should set forth an understanding of you, one is still far removed from you. For the highest wall separates you from all these and secludes you from everything that can be said or thought, because you are absolute from all the things that can fall within any concept.

Einstein’s quotations are the linchpin. He discusses the cosmic religious feeling that powers scientific investigation:

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics!

Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

Other quotations are parables, thought experiments, enigmatic aphorisms. From disparate times, continents, and traditions, they are all aimed at the same goal: the endless quest to make sense of the world. The toolkit varies wildly but the goal and the struggle remain the same.

There comes a moment for every player of The Witness. They are wandering around the island and suddenly some feature in the landscape strikes them with newfound significance. It might be a ripple in the sand, or some puffy clouds, or a drainpipe. With a start the player notices these parts of the physical world are shaped exactly like one of their maze lines—circular start point and rounded tip. They click on it, just as a gag. The object flares to life with glowing particles. They move their cursor to the end and click. The glow explodes and shoots off into the sky. The player looks around the landscape as if for the first time. Suddenly they realize they are surrounded by these shapes, hidden everywhere, waiting to be discovered.

It’s in this moment The Witness stops being a fun and frustrating game about line puzzles and becomes something more. Primed by the audio logs we understand that we are engaged in the same project as those titans of thought whose words we’ve heard. In the little snowglobe world of the island we are scientist and theologian testing hypotheses and accumulating knowledge on the screens and using it to bring coherence to the surrounding world.

Nguyen argues that our library of games can be understood as a library of agencies. That is, every game offers a unique mode of interacting with the world, a lens that focuses our practical reasoning toward the task at hand. Chess encourages an analytical approach that looks many moves ahead. The party game Werewolf makes us play the bullshitting sophist or an attentive bullshit detector depending on whether we’re a wolf or a villager. Nguyen thinks exploring and expanding our library of agencies is immensely valuable. By playing games we can practice inhabiting these other ways of seeing the world and moving through it. He claims learning chess made him a more thoughtful and thorough analytic philosopher. Deception-based party games allowed him to bring a keener eye to faculty meetings where every professor was jockeying for funding.

If we can export the mindset a game encourages back to our real lives, how can we characterize the agency that The Witness inculcates? To borrow a phrase from another of the Einstein quotations in the game, it is the agency of the true searchers. Nguyen posits that games capture and encourage modes of agency through radical simplification—by removing other considerations and other possible actions, by providing a concrete goal, one is given the opportunity to act purely in a particular manner in a way not available amid the swirl of concerns of real life. The Witness, then, has effected a radical simplification of the search for true knowledge. One can partake of that “deep conviction in the rationality of the universe” that Kepler and Newton knew. Scientist or mystic, the player looks around the island and sees God’s hand at every turn.

The form of activity that Blow has shrunk and crystallized in The Witness is the form of thought at the core of all inquiry. It is slow, focused, faithful in its own ability to see more, given time. It is concerned with huge abstractions but grounded in rigor and specifics. The problems it presents require deep thinking but so often are solved by a flash of insight that sees across to a solution that was adjacent but orthogonal to the train of thought we were following. The real world is not a series of mazes on screens but its puzzles are solved the same way.

Doody says one other thing about labyrinths: “A labyrinth may take the place of pit or rocky tomb, and perhaps it always has some of the characteristics of those two other important topoi. But a labyrinth is always something more. In its intricacy is power, and to move rightly through that intricacy and out again is to assume that power.”

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1

Here’s my capsule review of Games: potent core ideas weighed down by a lot of tedious repetition. Every time he started explaining one of his board games I felt like this: