Nomadland (Google Play)
“I want to live like common people.
I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people
I want to sleep with common people like you.”
Frances McDormand owns two houses and is worth $30 million. In Nomadland, she plays a titular ‘nomad’ — someone who lives in a van and roams America looking for temporary work because they can’t afford a normal lifestyle. One of those temp jobs is with Amazon. During the holiday period, Amazon hires temporary staff to help with the increased demand for packing boxes.
McDormand’s character works at Amazon over the holidays. She works in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere. It is snowing and grey and the warehouse is grey and the only colour is the orange tick on the Amazon logo. People die working in Amazon warehouses. They have tiny cubicles where you can go to watch videos about mindfulness when you get stressed.
Chloe Zhao is the director of Nomadland. She has a degree in political science from a liberal arts college. In 2021, Zhao’s new film Eternals will be released in theatres. It is the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The film cost $200 million to make and stars an ensemble cast including Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Gil Birmingham, Harish Patel, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, and Angelina Jolie.
The Boys (Amazon Prime)
“We got lucky with Superman. He shared our values.”
Even twenty years later, the American blockbuster has a weird obsession with 9/11. Every superhero has been an allegory for this in some way. The American psyche still needs a little help processing it. For the most part superhero films are pretty supportive of the American narrative. Aliens from far away places appear wanting to destroy us. Some brave, exceptionally powerful heroes rise up to save us from them. They battle in some big city. Buildings and landmarks are destroyed. Thousands of civilians are caught in the cross-fire. Don’t think about it too much though — the good guys win in the end.
We like superhero movies, but most of us now understand America was lying to us. 9/11, if not a manufactured crisis, was politically expedient and likely manifested by the neocon cabal running the Bush administration. At the very least there was no real enemy, only an imagined one. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Al Qaeda was a legal fiction.
It has taken a while for superhero media to catch up with this cultural consensus. At first it seemed to be resisting it — in 2012, a weapons-manufacturing billionaire and a god join forces with doped-up soldiers and super-spys to fight invaders in the streets of New York. Later, they seemed to tentatively embrace it — in 2016, the Batman quotes Dick Cheney and the Superman is an immigrant struggling with the realisation that modern America is not the nation he thought it would be.
In 2019, a knock-off superman tries to stop a plane-jacking over the Atlantic. He kills the terrorists, but his laser-eyes accidentally fry the plane’s controls. The pilots are dead. Knock-off superman leaves the plane to crash into the sea. There are no survivors.
After the crash, knock-off superman gives an impassioned speech to the media, urging US Congress to allow superheroes into the military chain of command. This would allow them to respond to plane-jackings. It would allow them to save everyone. A crisis manufactured for political gain.
It also turns out knock-off superman is leaking super serum to the terrorists. Now there are super-terrorists — an enemy only superheroes can fight. So, the superheroes better be let into the military, or America is fucked.
The superheroes are owned and managed by a large pharmaceutical company who makes super serum. The only reason they want superheroes in the military is because it is good for their share price. Knock-off superman wants superheroes in the military because he is Christian and believes in American values. He wants America to protect its people. Establish dominance. Kill the bad dudes.
You can stream all of this on Amazon Prime. The idea that 9/11 was manufactured in order to drum up support for an imaginary war used to be a subversive one. Now, large corporations use that that same idea in a story about superheroes.
Inside (Netflix, Spotify)
“Binge-watching is great because it puts you in control” — Netflix CEO
Bo Burnham finished touring his comedy show Make Happy in 2016, and decided to quit performing live. In Make Happy, Burnham talks about his unhealthy relationship with his audience. There is a contract between audience and performer. The audience pays expecting to see something funny from the performer. Burnham feels obliged to honour that contract. He wants to perform, but that compulsion to perform — to have to move and think in ways that are funny, clever, endearing, interesting — was giving him anxiety. He started having panic attacks on stage. So Burnham quit.
In 2021, Bo Burnham released a new comedy special called Inside, which he performed and recorded by himself without an audience over the course of 2020. How does someone who needs an audience survive performing without one? Burnham doesn’t, not really. He writes a cute song about how the internet is ruining our brain chemistry. The CEO of Netflix says their greatest competitor is sleep.
One of the characters Burnham plays in Inside is a sock puppet which he wears on his left hand. The puppet quotes Karl Marx and talks about how genocide and exploitation make the world go round. Burnham doesn’t like what the puppet tells him, so he rips the puppet off his hand. A video of the sock puppet, called “Based Socko”, has over 120,000 views on YouTube.
Do you remember that scene in Fight Club (Amazon Prime) where they almost kill the convenience store clerk who wants to become a vet and Brad Pitt talks about how good the guy’s breakfast is going to taste tomorrow as if he’s just done him a favour?
Bo Burnham embodies the impotency which has permeated modern culture. Any subversive ideas we have are sold back to us. Capital is the greatest intelligence on the planet. It has created a total system. We are like the convenience store clerk who wants to become a vet in Fight Club. Brad Pitt almost killed us. But we’re still going to wake up tomorrow and eat the same breakfast we eat on a normal morning. A total life altering experience — and all we get is improved flavouring in our wheat biscuits.
Ideas change us. We can radically reorient ourselves to the object-level of our day-to-day. But that object-level won’t budge an inch. Dangerous conspiracy theories lack the bite they used too. Our culture is impotent. And we are too.
