Gabriel L. Helman 4/10/24 Gabriel L. Helman 4/10/24

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Oppenheimer

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously.

At the end of the day, it’s a movie about the atomic bomb that doesn’t have a single Japanese person in it, and that thinks the most compelling thing about the bombing is that a well-dressed, comfortable white guy was slightly uncomfortable.

This is the point where I should probably neatly set my bias out on the table. There’s a genre of “Man Cinema” that has always left me cold. “Man”, both in the sense that they’re about Men, but also that they’re beloved by a certain kind of male film-buff audience. Those movies where a Man is forced by Circumstances to do Things He Is Not Proud Of, and the central conflict is his terrible Man Pain, as he glowers into the middle distance, an Island that No One Can Understand. What few women there are tend to either be tools to use, prizes to be won, or The Secret Behind Every Man’s Success, but never really a character in their own right. Basically, the default mode of the 70s New Hollywood; essentially every movie Coppola, Scorcese, or DePalma ever made.¹ Or the kinds of movies that one scene in Barbie was making fun of.

Chris Nolan’s movies have always slid right into that tradition. And look, I’m not going to say these movies are bad, or invalid, they’re just not my jam. If Oppenheimer hadn’t been the other half of Barbenheimer, there was basically no chance I would have watched it.

One of the delightful things about Barbenheimer as an event was that it was clear, like Elvis vs The Beatles, it was possible to like both, but everyone was going to have a preference. Long before they came out, I knew I was going to be Team Barbie.

And so? In short, my feelings about the movie are as ambivalent as the movie’s feelings about it’s subject. It is, of course, well made, and I find myself with more to say about it than I was expecting. I also suspect that every criticism I have of the film is also something somebody who really likes these kinds of movies would say, just with different emphasis.²

And with the preliminaries out of the way…

This is a movie about Great Men, who recognize and respect each other, and the Small Men who surround and resent them, biting at their ankles. Greatness, in this movie, is an fundamental condition, recognized by other Great Men, sometimes even long before anything Great has taken place.³

The cast is uniformly excellent. The standout performance is Robert Downey Jr., who is so good in this they finally gave him his Oscar for Chaplin. He continually finds new ways to look Small, playing Lewis Strauss as a bundle of grievance and bruised feelings, starting every interaction with an air of desperation, and ending it with the look of a man who has formed a new permanent grudge.

Cillian Murphy, on the other hand, plays Oppenheimer as a man almost supernaturally serene, exuding confidence with a side-order of mostly-justified arrogance, but with an increasingly haunted look in his eyes.

Both Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh make the most of their reduced screen times to show why Oppenheimer couldn’t resist either (although the opposite is less obvious.) It does put Emily Blunt in the unusual-for-her position of playing the second choice, which she seems to relish, and she conveys Kitty Oppenheimer’s blossoming alcoholism as a sort of general aura of decay rather than any specific action.

My favorite character was Matt Damon’s Leslie Groves, who was the only person who seemed to be playing a character, rather than a sketch of one. Not only that, he plays Groves as someone both unimpressed but also unintimidated by Greatness; or rather, someone from a completely different Great-to-Small axis as everyone else.

But, there’s not a single weak link in the movie, even the actors that show up for just a scene or two. Most everyone else is are reduced to shadows, because the pacing is, to use a technical term, a little weird. The movie hurtles along at a breakneck page, skipping along the top of the waves from scene to scene, at times seeming more like sketches of scenes that actual drama—the characters arrive, strike a pose, deliver a series of one-line monologues, and then the movie moves on.

This is exacerbated by the movie’s nested-flashback structure, which I liked quite a bit. Three stories plays out across the movie—the period around and including the Los Alamos project, Oppenheimer’s security hearing after the war, and Strauss’ (failed) senate confirmation hearing. The movie slides from one time to another, additionally using color (or the lack of it) to indicate which parts are from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and which are not.

The result is a movie that seems to abbreviate everything and never manges to give anything room to breathe, despite being three hours long. My standard belief stands that no movie should be over 2 hours; I’m quite confident that there are better versions of this movie at both 110 minutes and at 4 hourlong episodes.

As such you don’t need to know anything about these people or events to watch the movie, but it certainly helps to know who the guy with the bongos is, because the movie won’t tell you.

Actually, let’s hang on Feynman for a second. One of the funnier aspects of the movie is that basically every character is a real person who was famous in their own right, and they pop in for a scene or two and then vanish. Occasionally, one can’t help but feel like the movie has focused on the least interesting person that was present for the Manhattan Project?

Feynman gets, basically, two scenes. He’s one of the few scientists who we see Oppenheimer personally recruit, and the scene is shot from below, causing Oppenheimer, Groves, and Feynman to loom like statues, as dramatic music plays. We don’t find out this character’s name, or what he does, but the cinematography of the scene makes it clear he’s one of the Great Men. From that point on he’s in the background of nearly all the Los Alamos scenes, although I can’t remember him having an actual line of dialogue other than occasionally playing those bongos.

Then, he pops back in again for the Trinity test for the really-happened-but-heavily-mythologized moment where he realizes he doesn’t need the special filter, he can just watch the explosion through his car windshield. And then he vanishes for the rest of the movie, because unlike, say, Fermi or Teller, he has nothing to do with the later political machinations. But still, you’re left pointing at the TV like DiCaprio in the meme, thinking “that’s Feynman! Show him picking some locks!” And the same with Fermi, and the Chicago Pile being reduced to mere minutes of screen time, or hoping he’d ask “Where is everybody?”

(And, Feynman is played by Jack Quaid, most known in these parts as the voice of Boimler on Star Trek: Lower Decks, and so presumably the reason he’s not in the later parts of the movie is that Mainer finally rescued him.)

But that’s not the point of the movie, and fair enough. Because the central concern of the film isn’t really the atomic bomb, it’s the vicious grievances of the small and petty, and to illustrate there’s no service great enough that can overcome failing to be The Right Kind of American.

There’s a quote from Werner Von Braun (not appearing in this film) about Oppenheimer that “in England, he’d have been knighted,” but instead he was hounded from any formal government post due to the constellation of long-standing grudges from Strauss and others being allowed to fester in the paranoid excesses of the 1950s. Although, speaking of England choosing who to knight, knowing what happened to Turing at about the same time makes it look like Oppenheimer got off light.

The scenes in the security hearing are excruciating. While the formal subject—the renewal of his security clearance—is technical and seemingly inconsequential, the subtext is that this is determining who gets rewarded for their work, who gets the credit, and most importantly, who gets to decide how to use what they all built. Everyone, and there are many, who ever felt slighted by Oppenheimer’s greatness gets to show up and slide a knife in, a cavalcade of trivialities and paranoia. Even Groves, nearly omnipotent a decade before, proves powerless before the unchained animus of the thin-skinned.

After Oppenheimer’s loss, the movie does its most fascinating and distinctive move, and instead of following the title character into exile, it watches the consequences play out years later for his nemesis. While the focus is on Oppenheimer, the man himself makes no appearance in this phase of the film, as Strauss runs headlong into the bill coming due for a lifetime of treating everyone the way he treated Oppenheimer.

I spent the whole first part of the movie with the nagging feeling that this was all very familiar. That kind of vague, near–deja vu feeling. What is this reminding me of? A Great Man, a Genius, taken down by the petty grievances of Small Men, told mostly in flashback?

About an hour in, it hit me: this is all just Amadeus.

Which illustrates what I think is the core flaw in the movie. It knows Oppenheimer is a genius, but a genius in something neither the audience nor the filmmakers know very much about. There’s no good way for him to Be A Genius on screen in a way the audience will recognize, instead we have lots and lots of scenes where other people talk about what a genius he is, and then Oppenheimer stands dramatically filmed from below, looking off into the middle distance, while dramatic music plays, not entirely unlike the Disney Pocahontas.

Recall, if you will, the opening scene of Amadeus. Salieri, Mozart’s colleague, Nemesis, and possible murderer, is in a sanatorium nearing the end of his life. A young priest, who acts as the audience’s surrogate, arrives to take his confession, and by extension, have the movie narrated to him. The priest has no idea who Salieri is, or was, or that he was once one of the most famous composers of Europe, just that he’s an old man with a piano.

Oppenheimer never mangages the simple directness of Salieri playing his own compositions, which neither the audience or the priest recognize, and then painfully playing the opening notes of Serenade №13: A Little Night Music and have the audience and their surrogate instantly recognize it. Just playing Mozart’s actual music covers the majority of what Amadeus is trying to do, and Oppenheimer has nothing like that to fall back on.

Similarly, RDJ is genuinely extraordinary in this, constantly finding new ways to be small, and petty, and fragile, but the script never gives him a scene with the clarity and focus of Salieri leaning back into his chair and hissing with a mixture of exhaustion and defeat, “That was Mozart.”

It is funny that for both Amadeus and Oppenheimer, it’s the actor playing the nemesis who won the Oscar.

The other biggest problem with this movie is it’s lack of an actual point of view. It’s not apolitical so much as anti-political, there’s a big hole in the middle where an opinion should go.

This is par for the course of Nolan movies—this is the man who made the definite “Fascism is good, actually” movie with The Dark Knight, but with the sense that he made it by accident, just by taking Batman more seriously than anyone else, and then failing to notice or care where he landed. There’s an almost pathological refusal to comment on what’s happening, to have an opinion. Part of this is the fact that the majority of this movie is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and his point of view is, to put it mildly, ambiguous.

The movie knows there’s something interesting about the fact that Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists are Jewish, building the bomb to stop the Nazis. It knows there’s something interesting about the fact he can speak multiple languages but not Yiddish. It knows theres something about the way many of these Great Men were leftist/socialist/communists types in their youth, then put that away to work on the bomb, and then have that come back to haunt them later. But the movie can’t quite figure out what to do with that, so it toys with it and then puts it back on the shelf.

It almost makes contact with the world view that only a WASP can be a real loyal American and that Oppenheimer is questionable from two directions—being both Jewish and a possible communist—but never makes the connection. It gestures at the fact that the jews were being put into camps, but then never addresses that the bomb was only used on the people the americans were putting into camps.

It utterly fails to put the security clearance hearing in any sort of context of the McCarthyism panic of the time, and the fact that a small people were using an atmosphere of paranoia to act on an old grudge and air out their personal animosity. It’s there, buried deep in the mix, but you have to have done the homework first to see it.

Some of this is down to the film’s structure and pace. For example, the fact that Strauss resented Oppenheimer’s seeming rejection of their shared Jewish heritage is actually in the movie, albeit expressed in two single lines of dialogue, 90 minutes apart. The root of their animus is left vague. In reality, wikipedia will give you screen after screen dissecting their mutual dislike; the movie more-or-less summarizes it with the look on RDJ’s face when he realizes that Oppenheimer already knows Albert Einstein.

Mostly though, the movie refuses to comment, Were Oppenheimer and the others going to communist meetings because they were believers, or because that’s where all the hot babes were? It’s ambiguous.

The whole movie is weird and ambiguous and ambivalent, because the real guy was weird and ambiguous and ambivalent. What did Oppenheimer really think about, you know, all that atomic bomb stuff? It’s not clear! And this is where the movie fundamentally makes a decision that I understand, but disagree with. Nolan and company make the call to just lean in to the ambiguity all the way, so not only do we never get a handle on Oppenheimer, we never really get a handle on what anyone else thinks, either.

So we get a scene where Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan project scientists are looking at pictures of the wreckage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the camera zooms on in on Cillian Murphy’s face filled with an ambiguous expression. No only does the movie not show the final result of their work, we don’t really see anyone else reacting to it either. And, that’s it, huh? That’s our take on the atomic bombing, the Scarecrow looking a little perturbed?

In fairness, the last scene lands on “this was probably bad, actually,” and Gary Oldman shows up (like he did in The Dark Knight) to deliver the closest thing to a point of view that the movie has, which is that Oppenheimer needs to get over himself, a whole lor of people had to work together to unleash what they did.

One gets the feeling that the movie ends on Strauss’ failure mostly because that’s the only storyline that has actual closure, everything else just kinda floats away.

And look, I don’t need every piece of art I consume to share my politics, I don’t need every movie to end with Doctor Who materializing and reciting the Communist Manifesto. I mean, that would be bad ass, but I get it. What bugs me is not when people have opinions I disagree with, it’s when they fail to have one at all. Because this is a movie deeply uninterested in having a broader opinion. There’s a point where a desire for ambiguity stops being an artistic statement in it’s own right, and starts looking like cowardice.

At the end of the day, this is a movie that thinks the atomic bomb was probably bad, but on the other hand, the guy who didn’t like Oppenheimer didn’t get his cabinet post so maybe that’s okay? It feels like nothing so much as a three hour version of that dril tweet about drunk driving.

If you want to spend three hours watching the way Greatness is torn down by Small Men, and about the way horrors of war beget further horrors made by haunted men, I’d advise against this movie and instead a double feature of Amadeus and Godzilla. If nothing else, in both cases the music is better.

One of the the things I love about Star Wars so much, especially in the context of the late 70s, is that Luke spends the first act being this kind of character, and then moves past it. One of the reasons Anakin never really works is that he is that kind of character—he’s clearly supposed to function like Michael Corleone, but they failed to hire Al Pacino to play him.
The all-time champion of this kind of review, of course, is Mad Max: Fury Road where the most positive and the most negative reviews were both “It’s just one big car chase!”
There’s a couple of scenes where you half-expect then to start comparing midichlorian counts.

Gabriel L. Helman 4/5/24 Gabriel L. Helman 4/5/24

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Wes Anderson 2023 Double Feature

I don’t think “realism” is a super-interesting aesthetic goal. It’s a legitimate goal, certainly, but far from the only option and rarely the most compelling. But Movies, especially since the 70s, have had an attitude that that “realistic” means “for grownups”, and anything fantastical or stylized means “for kids”, with certain carve-outs for “surrealism” that mostly only apply to David Lynch.

Which is one of the reasons I love Wes Anderson’s movies so much, as he’s one of the people who seem to be actively thinking about “what can we do other than make it look real, though?” There’s a running joke that every Wes Anderson movie is “the most Wes Andersony movie yet!” but that’s not quite right. He’s got a set of techniques, tools, and he keeps refining them, finding new ways to hone the point.

Anderson always gets kind of a strong reaction in certain corners of the web, which is funny for a lot of reasons, but most of all because the kind of people who don’t like his movies tend to also be the kind of people who are mad everything looks like a Marvel movie now, and it has a real quality of “we want something different! No, not like that!”¹ That said, people mustering the energy to actually hate something is a pretty strong signal that you made Art instead of Content.²

It was a stacked year, with two releases, which I watched in completely the wrong order.

Asteroid City

It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication. But together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.

Anderson has always leaned heavily into artifice as a storytelling technique, and here he pushes that about as far as possible. Even within the terms of it’s own fiction, it’s all fake: a fake performance of an unreal play, made for a TV broadcast which isn’t real either, and then proceeds into what is absolutely not a play. It’s a strong move to open with “none of this really happened”. That’s implicit in all fiction, but rarely is it foregrounded like this. The movie gets a couple of things out of this.

It results in maybe his all time best opening; black and white, a non-widescreen aspect ratio, and Bryan Cranston doing a Rod Serling impression as the host of the TV show from the 50s. He describes the play we’re about to see, and then introduces the writer (Ed Norton) who steps out onto the stage and introduces the plot outline, the characters, and then walks through the layout of the scenery, and the camera angle cuts around showing the “actors” in their street clothes, and then each piece of fake scenery. The camera pulls back, the lights turn off, and them—bam—we’re a color widescreen, following a train into Asteroid City, where the camera carefully shows us each of the pieces of the set around town, now both more and less real.

It’s Shakespearian, but not the way people usually mean it—instead it’s the opening of Henry V rendered in the language of TV.

And the movie proceeds in the multiple layers, moving back and forth between the Host and his TV show, the actors and writers of the “play” working on it, and then the “play” itself. This also means many of the actors are effectively playing more than one part, the “actor” and the “character”.

But we also get the layers bleeding into each other; the host accidentally entering the scene at the wrong time, actors leaving the play to talk to the director or to each other. Rushmore and Barbie meet up behind the stage and perform the scene that was “cut for time” roughly where it was supposed to go. Characters talk about ideas for how to stage scenes that are coming up. The structure of a play is maintained, with title cards popping in to remind us which act or scene this is.

The cast, as always, is stacked and excellent. Just about the entire Anderson rep company is in this, with actors who would normally get top billing showing up here to stand in the back of scenes with no lines, and then deliver one word or two. There is a Bill Murray–shaped hole that Steve Carell does about a good a job of fulling as anyone could. (Originally, I assumed the Bill Murray role was the one taken by Tom Hanks, but knowing that it was actually the hotel manager makes that character make a lot more sense.)

There’s a lot of thematic material churning around about loss and acceptance and moving on and human connections and art, but it’s also a movie where the characters openly talk about the fact that the don’t understand what it all means. Anderson likes to leave some blanks for the audience to fill in, and this might be his best deployment of that technique. I know what it all meant to me, but it feels like cheating to say.

Doesn't matter. Just keep telling the story.

But, now that we have all that out of the way, let’s focus on what’s really important: this is an incredibly funny movie, full of incredibly good actors, doing incredibly silly things with incredibly straight faces.³

It’s less of a movie and more a series of skits performed completely deadpan. All of Anderson’s movies are like this, but in some ways this as close as he’s ever gotten to the full Airplane!.

From the opening where Matt Dillon describes the two possible problems with the car and then discovers a third, followed by the three girls disagreeing with the waitress that they are princesses, the movie is continuously funny, and I pretty much laughed out loud the entire time.

Which, of course, is the secret to all the thematic and structural stuff I spent all those words on up front—it’s not that they don’t matter, but they’re there to set up a bunch of really funny jokes, and to do some slight of hand to keep you from noticing that the joke is coming, until, like the UFO, it’s right on top of you.

I loved it, by the way.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More

People love faces.

I could make an argument here invoking evolutionary biology, or some deeper philosophical point, but this isn’t that kind of review so I’m going to skip all that and say that most storytelling boils down to being fascinated by other people’s faces.

And so we come to The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which centers on “what if we had some really good actors look the camera dead in the eye and tell the audience a story?”

In a lot of ways, this quartet of stories feels like the endpoint of the increasing artifice Anderson has been working in since at least French Dispatch. My take is that this is less about artificiality for its own sake than it is borrowing visual storytelling techniques from other mediums and deploying them in a movie, where they look more fake compared to the default “realist” style.

A very early example of this is the scene in Life Aquatic where camera pulls back to reveal a cutaway side view of the Belafonte as Steve Zissou narrates a tour of his boat. The boat isn’t literally a cut-away, but the scene plays as “here’s how we would do this if it was a comic.”

Here, it’s using using techniques and tricks from the theatre, but remixed in a way you could never do live on stage. So, we have stagehands handing props to actors on screen, actors sitting on prop boxes to simulate levitating, pieces of scenery sliding in and out of frame as scenes reorient. Except the scenery moves in ways it never could on stage and the stage hands come from places they couldn’t have come; this is the visual language of a play deployed in a way that could only work in a movie.

The first segment starts with Ralph Fiennes in character as Roald Dahl himself, looking very much like the real thing, settling into a fairly accurate recreation of Dahl’s real-life writing hut. he settles into his chair, fusses about with his pencils, the heater pops and hisses. Bright colors non-withstanding, it’s realistic—we’re in the real world, watching Roald Dahl getting ready to write a story. There’s a naturalism to it, a sense of authenticity; this is probably what it really looked like when a roughly 60-year old man sat down to write. He settles into place, pulls the the writing surface into his lap, puts pencil to paper, and then…

…the whole tone changes. Fiennes continues to talk, narrating the story, but his aspect shifts; he’s the narrator now, not an old man writing; he pushes the paper away, stands up, walks out of the hut with a completely changed demeanor as the scenery changes behind him. We’re not in the real world anymore, we’re explicitly in the Land of Story now. It’s one of the most marvelous transitions I’ve ever seen, and it’s all in essentially one shot.

The story plays out as a series of nested stories, Roald Dahl’s outermost narration, Henry Sugar’s discovery of the book, the book’s contents as narrated by the doctor, the story told by the old man of how he learned to see without his eyes, and then back out again until we unwind back to Roald Dahl in front of his shed again. The narration passes hands, and the actors narrating play a kind of double role, both as a character on screen and then turning towards the camera to deliver an aside to the camera.⁴

I found it compelling almost to the point of hypnosis.

As with Asteroid City, the artifice is the point. Did this really happen? Of course it didn’t, it’s a short movie on Netflix based on a Roald Dahl story made by the guy who did Royal Tenenbaums. Does it matter? The end hits the same either way.

Anderson has never come close to matching the emotional punch at the end of Royal Tenenbaums of “I’ve had a rough year, dad.” He’s spent a lot of time trying to recapture that hit, never successfully. While he’s moved on from trying, he does like to end his movies with a punchline. “And that’s what I have done” is one of his best.

This is exactly the sort of experiments that 1) short movies, and 2) streaming should be used for. It’s outstanding that this was what finally won Anderson his first “big boy” Oscar.

Some stray observations on the other three stories:

“The Rat Catcher” was always one of Dahl’s slice-of-weird-life stories, where things keep getting more uncomfortable without ever being overtly dangerous. Here, it turns into an acting clinic between Ralph Fiennes finding new ways to be menacing, and Moss from The IT Crowd finding new ways to look horrified.

“The Swan” always bothered me as a kid, Dahl always had mean streak, and this was one of his meaner stories, the sort of story where only bad things happen. It also had a strangely ambiguous ending, especially for Dahl—what really happened there? Did the boy escape? Is he dead? Is the thing that happens at the end metaphorical for dying? And it’s ambiguous in the sort of way you can get away with in prose, since the reader can only “see” what the author describes. I was very pleased that they found a way to keep the ambiguity intact despite the audience now being able to see everything that happened.

Also, it’s hilarious that Rupert Friend was absolutely mesmerizing in this at the same time he was phoning in being the Grand Inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi. What a weird year he had!

“Poison”, meanwhile, after almost being word-for-word with the source material, does change the end, to refuse to let the racism off the hook. Partly this is through some sharp editing, but mostly through the looks on Ben Kingsley’s face.

It’s worth noting, for the record, that while this set of stories has a remarkable variety of narrators, none of them are women, which while accurate to the source material, rankles somewhat here in the twenties.

I Guess I Should Put A Conclusion

Like I mentioned way back at the start, I watched these out of order, Henry Sugar first, then Asteroid City, so on first swing the movie felt like a step back from the shorts. On a rewatch in the right order, it was more obvious how they built on each other. But I enjoyed them both either way.

Where do you go from here, though? Henry Sugar really does feel like an endpoint for the approach Anderson has been developing since at least The French Dispatch, there’s a straight line from that movie, though Asteroid City to Henry Sugar. Or maybe not an endpoint but more that the technique has arrived at it’s final form.

I’m really looking forward to whatever comes next.⁵

This is because these people don’t want “different”, they want everything to look like a Scorcese movie.
Which pretty much sums up the whole of the current economy and the human condition in one sentence. I will not be taking questions at this time.
It’s incredible.
It’s a kind of extended riff on soliloquies, but that both makes it sound overly pretentious and undersells it at the same time, so I won’t make that comparison.
I was expecting another stop-motion palette cleanser, but instead it sounds like it’s going to be a spy movie?

Gabriel L. Helman 3/29/24 Gabriel L. Helman 3/29/24

Getting Old

A very common trope in 80s movies was the tired, obstructionist, authority figure. You know, the EPA guy, the high school principal, the bad boss, whatever. The guy in a suit trying to stop the premise of the movie from happening.

These characters had two roles, narratively speaking. First, they acted as secondary antagonists, a miniboss for the middle part of the movie, if you will. But they also gave voice to the obvious objections to the high-concept premise, but did it in such an asshole way that the audience wouldn’t take them seriously. There probably are regulatory concerns about storing ghosts in a basement in Manhattan? Or problems with high school kids skipping that much school? But having the person bringing it up be such a jerk defuses it, and solidly positions the audience against the man with no dick, or whoever.

I suspect the reason these don’t crop up as often anymore is that movies feel that audiences are more confortable with those sorts of high-concept premises, and don’t feel the need to smooth that over as much. As an example, every John Hughes high school movie has the principal as one of the antagonists, but Clueless doesn’t even have the principal on screen, even though Cher spends less time in class than Ferris ever did.

I bring this up because one of the weirder changes I’ve noticed in myself—and by extension, my politics—as I’ve gotten older is an increased sympathy with these figures.

This observation is brought to you mostly by having rewatched Die Hard at the end of the year (remember kids, Santa won’t come until Hans Gruber falls off of Nakatomi Plaza) and I keep thinking about how Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson is a massive jerk, but isn’t actually wrong.

Die Hard is a great movie that has aged in some really interesting ways, which probably deserve a longer post at some point, but recall there are two sets of authority figure minor antagonists—the LA police, who are basically hapless, and the FBI, who are actively malevolent. The LAPD are there to make things harder at the start of the movie, as Hans Gruber says, he’s waiting for the FBI.

Deputy Chief Dwayne’s major objection is that, as he puts it, all the LAPD have is McClane’s word for what’s going on. What he doesn’t know is that he’s in an 80s action movie where reality is bending around Bruce Willis to make sure the first sentence of his obituary won’t contain the word Moonlighting; under “normal” circumstances, none of this would work out. The movie knows this, too, and makes sure we know it’s in on the joke by making his first objection, which the dad from Family Matters angrily denies, “how do you know he isn’t the guy who shot up your car?”—which of course, McClane was. When the FBI show up and turn out to be actual bad guys, the movie makes sure we know that Dwayne is as horrified as we are; he’s a jerk, and a dipshit, but he’s not evil, and he’s not wrong. Most days, he’d have probably even been right.

But that’s not the one I keep thinking about. The one I keep thinking about is the “Duality of Man” scene in the better, funnier second half¹ of Full Metal Jacket. You know, this one: Full Metal Jacket Born to Kill/Peace Button Duality of Man. It’s one of the most quoted scenes in the movie for a reason, it’s basically the whole movie’s philosophy in a nutshell.

The usual “young man discovering the movie” interpretation here is that the Colonel is confused, and that Joker outsmarts him here, and that the Colonel responds to his own confusion with angry bluster and weird jingoism. A scan of the youtube comments, which is always a mistake but bear with me, shows most of the people commenting have that view.

But go watch that scene again. General Rieekan, presumably fresh in from Hoth, knows exactly what the score is before he says anything. He’s not asking Joker about the peace sign because he’s confused, he’s asking because he wants to make Joker say it out loud.

“Then how about getting with the program? Why don't you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?"

There’s a whole media thesis in all this about the American Individualist Hero as the Lone Sane Man standing up to authority figures who represent The Establishment and the Insanity of the Status Quo, which I’ll spare you because I want to write that even less than you want to read it.

But look. If there’s one thing I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older, is that we’re only going to be successful if we all work together. There are very, very few situations where one person can actually ascend and leave everyone else behind. The colonel knows this—he might be waiting for this peace thing to blow over, he might be an asshole and probably a low-grade war criminal, but he knows all the marines are in the same danger, and all the statements in the world about the duality of man aren’t going to stop a bullet. (This is also kinda the point of the last scene in the movie.)

If I was living near that firehouse, I’d want to know that the EPA had signed off on anything called “a containment facility.” School is worth it, no matter how good your synthesizer coughs are. The guy on the radio who likes Roy Rogers really might have been the one that shot up your car.

And sometimes, in real life, the lame authority figure isn’t being obstructionist for obstructions sake, they sometimes know something you don’t. Or they’re remembering that there are other people here that you didn’t.

It’s worth acknowledging at this point that the “punk rocker to aging conservative suburbanite” is a cliché for a reason, and you have to stop and check yourself from time to time to make sure you didn’t accidentally dose yourself with the wrong red pill or whatever. But I think as long as you can keep your empathy up, you can shake that off, no matter how much you realize the boss might have a point.

Because real life is complicated, and messy, and full of choices with no good answers. And you have to power through, knowing there’s no good options, reducing harm as much as you can, linking arms, working together, pull as many people up the ladder behind you as you can. As fun as it is to be “that guy”, this isn’t Die Hard, for just about any possible definition of “this”.

There’s at least a dozen things I’m subtweeting here, but I cannot tell you how often I’ll see something—in the news, at work, just generally “around”—and mutter under my breath “why don’t you jump on the team?”

Kid, we all want to go home, and none of us want to be here. Let’s figure out how to all go home together.

Don’t @-me, it’s true.

Gabriel L. Helman 3/28/24 Gabriel L. Helman 3/28/24

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Animation Double-Header

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them, and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

In brief: loved it.

The Turtles are a weird franchise for many reasons, not the least of which because they started as a satire of early-80s comics generally, and Frank Miller’s Daredevil specifically and then managed to wildly outlive all the things they were satirizing. (If you will, they’re the Weird Al of comics.). They’re an intentionally absurd concept, the characters look weird on purpose, the whole thing is deeply silly. But, they’re still here mostly because they’re just so much damn fun. As such, they’ve landed somewhere between a fairy tale and a jazz standard; constantly being reinvented, every couple of years someone new does their take; not a reboot so much as a new cover version.

TMNT adaptations live or die based on how well they remember that the turtles aren’t a team, they’re a family. There’s a tendency to write them as, basically, store-brand X-Men, with Leonardo as Cyclops, and Splinter as somewhere between Professor X and that floating head from Power Rangers. But Splinter isn’t their boss, or commanding officer, or their teacher, he’s their dad, and Leo isn’t their field commander, he’s the older brother the others let pretend is in charge. On that front, Mutant Mayhem does about as well as anyone ever has done.

Possibly the most genius move was to cast actual teenagers as the Turtles and then record them as a group; the characters and their relationship’s shine in a way they almost never have. There’s a scene towards the start of the movie—which rightly ended up as one of the first trailers—where Leo is trying to get the others pumped up for their new mission, which turns out to be shopping, whereupon the others proceed to bust on him mercilessly, which manages to simultaneously nail all four words of the title better than maybe anyone has before.

It’s an incredibly thoughtful take on the material. There’s a lot of “stuff” out there to use or not, and clearly a lot of care was put into what elements to keep, which to highlight, and which to leave behind. Its also a movie that knows its main job is to be an on-ramp, so it avoids any sort of extended exposition or complex back stories in favor of a fun adventure movie with fun characters.

The best word I can come up with for this movie’s relationship with the existing material is relaxed. It knows that the core audience it’s targeting doesn’t know anything, and that the older fans who do already have their own “definitive version”, all of which the movie seems to take as permission to try new spins on old ideas.

This leads to some fun choices—the villain is new, and their backstory is assembled out of some fun bits and pieces from previous versions. The tease of Shredder at the end manages to hit the same “oh snap, that’s going to be wild!” energy regardless of if you’re a new or old viewer.

There are some deep cuts here—this is a movie with both Utroms and Mondo Gecko—but the movie assumes you don’t know who these things are and even if you do, you havn’t seen them in this configuration, so the recognition is pure value-add, rather than a reward for finishing the homework.

Even the seemingly-strange call to cast Jackie Chan as Splinter pays off, giving Splinter a fight right out of an early Police Story, staggering around, desperately pulling props out of left field to fight off an endless supply of bad guys—there’s a bit with a desk chair that if you told me was from Rumble in the Bronx I would believe you with no further fact-checking.

But critically, the movie knows the only thing from the past it has to get right are the five main characters and their relationships, and there, it excels. I wasn’t expecting much, and it turned out to be the best take on the Ninja Turtles anyone has ever done.

The animation style here is fantastic, and clearly exists because Spider-Verse cleared the way, landing somewhere around a “hand-drawn claymation” aesthetic, while still being 3d CG. It looks great, from the subtle moves of the Turtle’s eyes or hands while they talk, to things like the Turtle van crashing through a crowd of absurd monsters.

We’re starting to see the projects that were greenlit because the original Spider-Verse was a hit, and it’s clear that movie is giving everyone else justification to explore more and different styles of animation.

It’s fun, the action is exciting, the characters are appealing, the conflicts justified, emotions earned, with a satisfying ending that leaves you wanting more. Yes please.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Speaking of movies that were greenlit because Spider-Verse was a hit…

Let’s start with the negatives: this movie is way too long, and then ends with a cliffhanger. There’s no movie over two hours that wouldn’t be a better movie under two hours—or cut into two movies. If you really need that kind of time, you should probably be making TV? I’m utterly confident that when the sequel to this is finally released, it’ll be obvious how to rework the pair of them into three better 90 minute movies.

Otherwise, this is one of those sequels that actually understands what was good about the first movie, and then does more of that.

Most American comic-book superheroes tend to have a similar set of powers: strong, good at punching, maybe they can fly, some kind of signature weapon. Distinctive outfit, but not too hard to draw. Look at the Avengers; they’re all really good at punching, a couple of them can also shoot, and two can fly.

Part of what makes Spider-Man so fun is how weird the character is compared to that baseline. He’s not just strong, he’s crazy strong. He can’t fly, but he can swing? On Webs? And he can shoot those webs as either a weapon, or a tool, or a way to disable bad guys? Plus, sticks to walls, oh, and ESP. And on top of all that, he’s got one of the most elaborate costume designs out there. And then on top of that, he’s funny. Like the Turtles, it’s a character that started as a spoof—what if the teen sidekick was on his own, but didn’t have a job, and had to make his own costume from scratch and do laundry—that fully surpassed everything it making fun of.

As a result of this, Marvel has kept tossing out new spins on the character; as a woman, from the future, as a different kid, different revisions on the powers, maybe this one can do electricity. Even the “original” Peter Parker Spider-Man has two distinct iterations, one vaguely fifteen, one just shy of 30, occasionally married. Of the crowd of various alternate Spider-People, Miles Morales rose to the top as both a great character in his own right, as well as establishing himself as the definitive take on “Spider-Man as a teenager.”

The first Spider-Verse got a lot of mileage out of putting the older version of Peter and Miles together, with Pete acting as the mentor/experience superhero that Pete never had as a solo teen act, while—correctly—keeping the focus on Miles, and threw in some other Spiders while they were at it. The new movie wisely keeps Peter almost entirely on the sidelines, and fills the movie with other versions, delighting in being able to contrast the various Spiders.

The result is a movie that revels in how fun “Spider-Man” is a concept. Webs, sticking to walls, vaguely-defined ESP. Long scenes of Spider-People swinging through the air, shooting webs, solving problems the way no other action hero, super or otherwise, would.

It’s hard to begrudge the flabby length of a movie that’s enjoying itself so much. “How many times have you watched the Batmobile drive out of the Batcave?” you can almost hear the movie ask, “let’s spend a few more minutes with these ridiculous characters webbing up a falling building!”

This extends through the non-action parts of the movie just as well; these are characters that aren’t immune to gravity, but are highly resistant to it. My favorite scene in the movie was Miles and Gwen on what might be a date at the top of a building, casually walking off the edge of a ledge, and then sitting and watching the sunset from the underside of that same ledge, Gwen’s ponytail hanging down the only sign they’re sitting somewhere no one else could.

Which brings me to the other standout part of the movie, Spider-Gwen. “Gwen Stacy, but she got bit by the radioactive spider instead of Pete”, was one of those low-hanging fruit ideas that’s been waiting around for half a century for someone to finally pick. Originally tossed off as a one-off in the comics, the character hit hard enough she’s stuck around become the other best take on a Spider-Person in the last few decades. Even the costume is fantastic take on how a different kind of teenager would make a costume—spider symbol, but with ballet slippers and a hoodie. Expanding her role from the last movie, here she settles in as the other lead, anchoring most of the emotional journeys of the film.

My personal favorite alternate Spider-Man was Spider-Man 2099, from Marvel’s short lived 2099 experiment in the early 90s, which dared to ask, “what if our characters were just a little more cyberpunk, and a lot angrier?” None of them really worked, either creatively or commercially.¹ So, imagine my surprise when Miguel O’Hara, Spider-Man 2099 himself, showed up in this! I was a little salty when I found out he was going to be the bad guy, except he isn’t really—he’s the antagonist, but he isn’t the villain.

Good guys fighting each other is about the most tired trope super-hero comics has, and this movie might be the first time anyone has actually put the time in to work. I takes the time to set up a genuine difference of world view between Miles and Miguel, where by the end, you genuinely buy that neither is willing to let the other continue. Most of the time when the good guys fight each other it’s because they didn’t have one very simple conversation, here, that conversation happens, and things get well past that point before webs start slinging.

The nature of that conflict is delightfully meta. Miguel wants to “defend the timeline”, and if that means terrible things needs to happen to Miles, so be it. Miles, correctly, isn’t really interested in having loved ones die for an abstract point about “history going the right way”. This is explicitly framed in terms of “protecting canon” vs “new ideas”, with Miguel standing in for the old fans who won’t suffer changes to their beloved franchise, and Miles as the voice of the people saying, “yeah, but what if we didn’t just make bad copies of stories from the 70s?” Literalizing these kind of fan arguments feels like exactly the way to do franchise fiction here in the mid-20s.

And, I haven’t even brought up the animation yet, which is, of course, outstanding. Each alternate universe gets its own distinct animation style, which each character keeps when the move to a different universe, leading to multiple styles overlapping each other, which is visually astounding and somehow manages to never be overwhelming. It’s the sort of thing where you look at it constantly thinking “how did they do this?”, and then you find out that the answer was “labor abuse”, which does drain the enthusiasm somewhat.

It looks incredible, but for the sake of all the animators I hope the next one takes a long time to come out.

Fun, exciting, appealing characters, goofy powers, cool visuals. What more could you want from a two-and-a-half hour Spider-Man cartoon?

What did we learn from all this?

This is usually the point where were start talking about high-vs-low art, and questions like “what more could you want?” get answers like “real people with real emotions, we’ve had enough cartoons, thankyou”. This was the central conflict behind the Barbenheimer phenomenon over the summer, and why Coppola looked like he was going to have a stroke when he had to congratulate Barbie on “saving cinema”.

But I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Theres a class of movies that don’t get made enough: the adventure film targeted at 9-year olds, but talks up to them instead of down, that they can watch with their parents and older siblings, and everyone enjoys them. This has never been that common a genre, because it’s way easier to either skew younger, or juice it up and go for the “older teenagers sneaking into R-rated movies” demographic. The PG-13-ification of action movies has only made this worse, I mean, they actually made a movie called Batman vs Superman a couple years ago that I couldn’t take my 9-year old to, and he’d have hated if I did.

I’m not looking for something drained of all content, but I am looking to avoid any more nightmares about “the time captain america kicked that guy into the fan”, or “when han solo got stabbed”, or, you know, extended scenes of animals being tortured to death. (Watching movies with tweens, you really notice how much torture these kinds of movies have in them these days.) You know, movies like old Star Wars, not new Star Wars. It’s always worth celebrating when there’s a fun movie everyone can sign up for.

Something else that’s been talked about a lot with regards to 2023’s strange box office has been “super-hero fatigue”, and while that’s not not a thing, it’s also not the whole story. Both of these movies were new swings at old superhero franchises with decades of “lore” and factionalized fan-bases, and they both got a very positive critical reception, they made a bunch of money, and managed to avoid being a flashpoint for toxic assholes. And let’s just really underline this, despite being animation, both movies had explicitly diverse casts and characters. It’s possible. More like these, please.

Ironically the only time the “2099” concept worked, in the sense of “new takes on old characters, but in the blade runner-o-mancer future” was a couple of years later when DC Animation launched Batman Beyond. I’m utterly convinced that show started as “what would it have taken to make Spider-Man 2099 good,” and then worked backwards to make it Batman. Look, Terry is absolutely Spider-Man, he’s just stuck with a Bat-Suit.

Gabriel L. Helman 3/25/24 Gabriel L. Helman 3/25/24

Hot Takes on Lightsabers

This Monday dose of Hot Takes (tm) is brought to you by my having watched the trailers for both the next Rebel Moon¹ and the new Star Wars show The Acolyte² over the weekend.

I have some hot takes on Lightsabers.

Hot Take №1: Every Movie Should Have Lightsabers

I think the science-fiction movie community should do what fantasy novelists did with Tolkien’s elves, and just body Star Wars and run off with them. Put them in everything. The one thing from the Rebel Moons I fully endorse is the attitude of “it’s been long enough, we’re taking these.”

Hot Take №2: Movies With Lightsabers Should Use Them Less

A stylistic thing that the original trilogy did was that whenever a lightsaber powered up, it was a big deal. Partly, this was because they were expensive and hard to do, but the result was that they only³ came out at major story pivot points; when you heard that sound stuff was about to go down. Pulling a lightsaber out shouldn’t ever be casual, you know? It’s a sign the movie just shifted into a new gear.

This is where I segue and say I really like that Andor doesn’t have Jedi or the like, but I’d really like to see what that team could do with one (1) lightsaber fight.

Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver; Yeah, it looks like more Rebel Moon!
The Acolyte; On the one hand, the track record for modern non-Andor Star Wars isn’t great? On the other hand, it’s being run by the same person who did Russian Doll?
Okay, the one genuine exception to this is the part in Return of the Jedi where Luke fights off the last speeder bike. But…
1. This is Return of the Jedi, and that whole movie is a little thematically and structurally sloppier than its predecessors
2. Plus, the whole middle chunk of that movie, from the sail barge exploding to Wicket telling 3PO about the bunker’s back door, is a total mess
3. It’s pretty cool though, so we’ll let it slide

Gabriel L. Helman 12/30/23 Gabriel L. Helman 12/30/23

Fractals

(This may not appear correctly inside a feed reader or other limited-formatting browser.)

Part 1: DFW

Let me tell you a story about something that happens to me. Maybe it happens to you?
This same thing has happened probably a dozen times, if not more, over the last couple of decades. I’ll be in a group some kind, where the membership is not entirely optional—classmates, coworkers, other parents at the kid’s school—and the most irritating, obnoxious member of the group, the one I have the least in common with and would be the least likely to spend time with outside of whatever it is we’re doing, will turn to me, face brightening, and say “Hey! I bet you’re a huge fan of David Foster Wallace.”
I’ve learned that the correct answer to this is a succinct “you know, he didn’t invent footnotes.”^A
Because reader, they do not bet correctly. To be very clear: I have never¹ read any of his work. I’m aware he exists, and there was that stretch in the late 90s where an unread copy of Infinite Jest seemed to spontaneously materialize on everyone’s shelves. But I don’t have an opinion on the guy?²
I have to admit another reaction, in that in addition to this behavior, most of the people⁴¹ you run in to that actually recommend his work are deeply obnoxious.^α
So, I’ve never been able to shake the sense that this is somehow meant as an insult. There’s a vague “attempted othering” about it; it's never presented as “I liked this and I bet you will too,” or “Aha, I finally found a thing we have in common!” it’s more of “Oh, I bet you’re one of those people”. It’s the snap of satisfaction that gets to me. The smug air of “oh, I’ve figured you out.”
And look, I’m a late-era Gen-X computer nerd programmer—there are plenty of stereotypes I’ll own up to happily. Star Wars fan? Absolutely. The other 80s nerd signifiers? Trek, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Monty Python? Sure, yep, yep. Doctor Who used to be the outlier, but not so much anymore.³ William Gibson, Hemmingway, Asimov? For sure.
But this one I don’t understand. Because it cant just be footnotes, right?
I bring all this up because Patricia Lockwood⁴ has written a truly excellent piece on DFW: [Where be your jibes now?].⁷ It’s phenomenal, go read it!
But, I suspect I read it with a unique viewpoint. I devoured it with one question: “am I right to keep being vaguely insulted?”
And, he nervously laughed, I still don’t know!
She certainly seems to respect him, but not actually like him very much? I can’t tell! It’s evocative, but ambiguous? It’s nominally a review of his last, unfinished, posthumously published book, but then works its way though his strange and, shall we say, “complicated” reputation, and then his an overview of the rest of his work.
And I have the same reaction I did every time I hear about his stuff, which is some combination of “that guy sounds like he has problems” (he did) and “that book sounds awful” (they do).
“I bet you’re a fan”
Why? Why do you bet that?
I’m self-aware enough to know that the correct response to all this is probably just to [link to this onion article] And I guess there’s one way to know.
But look. I’m just not going to read a million pages to find out.

Part 2: Footnotes, Hypertext, and Webs

Inevitably, this is after I’ve written something full of footnotes.^B
Well, to expand on that, this usually happens right after I write something with a joke buried in a footnote. I think footnotes are funny! Or rather, I think they’re incredibly not funny by default, a signifier of a particular flavor of dull academic writing, which means any joke you stash in one becomes automatically funnier by virtue of surprise.^C
I do like footnotes, but what I really like is hypertext. I like the way hypertext can spider-web out, spreading in all directions. Any text always has asides, backstory, details, extending fractally out. There’s always more to say about everything. Real life, even the simple parts, doesn’t fit into neat linear narratives. Side characters have full lives, things got where they are somehow, everything has an explanation, a backstory, more details, context. So, generally writing is as much the art of figuring out what to leave out as anything. But hypertext gives you a way to fit all those pieces together, to write in a way that’s multidimensional.^D
Fractals. There’s always more detail. Another story. “On that subject…”^E
Before we could [link] to things, the way to express that was footnotes. Even here, on the system literally called “the web”, footnotes still work as a coherent technique for wrangling hypertext into something easier to get your arms around.^F
But the traditional hypertext [link] is focused on detail—to find out more, click here! The endless cans of rabbit holes of wikipedia’s links to other articles. A world where every noun has a blue underline leading to another article, and another, and so on.^G
Footnotes can do that, but they have another use that links don’t—they can provide commentary.¹³ A well deployed footnote isn’t just “click here to read more”, it’s a commentary, annotations, a Gemara.^H
I come by my fascination with footnotes honestly: The first place I ever saw footnotes deployed in an interesting way was, of all things, a paper in a best-of collection of the Journal of Irreproducible Results.⁹ Someone submitted a paper that was only a half-sentence long and then had several pages of footnotes that contained the whole paper, nested in on itself.¹² I loved this. It was like a whole new structure opened up that had been right under my nose the whole time.^J
Although, if I’m honest, the actual origin of my love of footnotes is probably reading too many choose your own adventure books.¹⁷
I am also a huge fan of overly-formalist structural bullshit, obviously.^α

Part 3: Art from Obnoxious People

What do you do with art that’s recommended by obnoxious people?⁴⁰
In some ways, this is not totally unlike how to deal with art made by “problematic” artists; where if we entirely restricted our intake to art made exclusively by good people, we’d have Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and not much else. But maintaining an increasingly difficult cognitive dissonance while watching Annie Hall is one thing, but when someone you don’t like recommends something?³⁸
To be fair, or as fair as possible, most of this has very, very little to do with the art itself. Why has a movie about space wizards overthrowing space fascists become the favorite movie of actual earth fascists? Who knows? The universe is strange. It’s usually not healthy to judge art by its worst fans.³⁶
Usually.
In my experience, art recommended by obnoxious people takes roughly three forms:³²
There’s art where normal people enjoy it, and it’s broadly popular, and then there’s a deeply irritating toxic substrate of people who maybe like it just a little too much to be healthy. ³⁰
Star Trek is sort of the classic example here, or Star Wars, or Monty Python, or, you know, all of sports. Things that are popular enough where there’s a group of people who have tried to paper over a lack personality by memorizing lines from a 70s BBC sketch comedy show, or batter’s statistics from before they were born. ²⁸
Then there’s the sort of art that unlocks a puzzle, where, say, you have a coworker who is deeply annoying for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on, and then you find out their favorite book is Atlas Shrugged. A weight lifts, aha, you say, got it. It all makes sense now. ²⁶
And then, there’s art²⁴ that exclusively comes into your life from complete dipshits.
The trick is figuring out which one you're dealing with.^q

Part 4: Endnotes

What never? Well, hardly ever!
I think I read the thing where he was rude about cruises?
And boy, as an aside, “I bet you’re a Doctor Who fan” has meant at least four distinct things since I started watching Tom Baker on PBS in the early 80s.
Who⁵ presumably got early parole from her thousand years of jail.⁶
In the rough draft of this I wrote “Patricia Highsmith,” and boy would that be a whole different thing!
Jail for mother!
In the spirit of full disclosure, she wrote it back in July, whereupon I saved it to Instapaper and didn’t read it until this week. I may not be totally on top of my list of things to read?³⁵
"Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" (1967)
The JoIR is a forum for papers that look and move like scientific papers, but are also a joke.
The bartender is a die-hard Radiers fan; he happily launches into a diatribe about what a disaster the Las Vegas move has been, but that F1 race was pretty great. A few drinks in, he wants to tell you about his “radical” art installation in the back room? To go look, turn to footnote ω To excuse yourself, turn to footnote 20
I knew a girl in college whose ex-boyfriend described Basic Instinct as his favorite movie, and let me tell you, every assumption you just made about that guy is true.
Although, in fairness, that JoIR paper was probably directly inspired by that one J. G. Ballard story.⁸
This was absurdly hard²¹ to put together.³⁹
The elf pulls his hood back and asks: “Well met, traveller! What was your opinion of the book I loaned you?” He slides a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men across the table. To have no opinion, turn to footnote d. To endorse it enthusiastically, turn to footnote α
Or is it five?
You’re right, that bar was sus. Good call, adventurer! To head further into town, turn to footnote 20. To head back out into the spooky woods, go to footnote 22.
You stand in the doorway of a dark and mysterious tavern. Miscreants and desperadoes of all description fill the smoky, shadowed room. You’re looking for work. Your sword seems heavier than normal at your side as you step into the room. If you... Talk to the bartender, turn to footnote 10. Talk to the hooded Elf in the back corner, turn to footnote 14. To see what’s going on back outside, turn to footnote 16.
"Glass Onion” from The Beatles, aka The White Album
Superscript and anchor tags for the link out, then an ordered list where each List Item has to have a unique id so that those anchor tags can link back to them.²³
You head into town. You find a decent desk job; you only mean to work there for a bit, but it’s comfortable and not that hard, so you stay. Years pass, and your sword grows dusty in the back room. You buy a minivan! You get promoted to Director of Internal Operations, which you can never describe correctly to anyone. Then, the market takes a downturn, and you’re one of the people who get “right sized”. They offer you a generous early retirement. To take it, turn to footnote 25. To decline, turn to footnote 22.
But did you know that HTML doesn’t have actual support³³ for footnotes?²³
You journey into the woods. You travel far, journeying across the blasted plains of Hawksroost, the isles of Ka’ah’wan-ah, you climb the spires of the Howling Mountains, you delve far below the labyrinth of the Obsidian Citadel; you finally arrive at the domain of the Clockwork Lord, oldest of all things. Its ancient faces turns towards you, you may ask a boon.

“Is this all there is? Is there nothing more?”: Footnote 27

“I wish for comfort and wealth!” Footnote 25
I have no idea how this will look in most browsers.³¹
This usually still isn’t a direct comment on the art itself, but on the other hand, healthy people don’t breathlessly rave about Basic Instinct,¹¹ you know?
Good call! You settle into a comfortable retirement in the suburbs. Your kids grow up, move out, grow old themselves. The years tick by. One day, when the grandkids are over, one of them finds your old sword in the garage. You gingerly pick it up, dislodging generations of cobwebs. You look down, and see old hands holding it, as if for the first time. You don’t answer when one of them asks what it is; you just look out the window. You can’t see the forest anymore, not since that last development went in. You stand there a long time.

*** You have died ***
And turnabout is fair play: I’ve watched people have this a-ha moment with me and Doctor Who.
The Clockwork Lord has no expression you can understand, but you know it is smiling. “There is always more,” it says, in infinite kindness. “The door to the left leads to the details you are seeking. The door to the right has the answer you are lacking. You may choose.”

Left: Footnote a

Right: Footnote 29
Other examples of this category off the top of my head: Catcher in the rye, MASH, all of Shakespeare.
You step through the doorway, and find yourself in an unfamiliar house. There are people there, people you do not know. With a flash of insight, you realize the adult is your grandchild, far past the time you knew them, the children are your great-grandchildren, whom you have never met. You realize that you are dead, and have been for many years. All your works have been forgotten, adventures, jobs, struggles, lost as one more grain of sand on the shore of time. Your grandchild, now old themselves, is telling their child a story—a story about you. A minor thing, a trifle, something silly you did at a birthday party once. You had totally forgotten, but the old face of the 6-year old who’s party it was didn’t. They’re telling a story.

Oh. You see it,

*** You Have Ascended ***
Fanatics, to coin a phrase?
This feels like it should have one of those old “works best in Netscape Navigator”, except Netscape would choke on all this CSS.³⁷
Björk: (over the phone) I have to say I'm a great fan of triangles.

Space Ghost: Well, I have to say that I am a great fan of Chuck Norris, and he was in the Delta Force, and the delta was a triangle.
Instead you have to code¹⁹ them by hand.
Yeah, I see what you did there.
Okay, that's also a lie; I've actually been working on this on-and-off since July.¹³
Cases in point: I, II, III , IIII
Certified: “It works on my machine!”^α
Especially when they themselves don’t seem to like it?
I mean, the writing itself was tricky enough, with three¹⁵ interleaving essays.
Not annoying people, not assholes: obnoxious. Hard to define, but like pornography, you know it when you see it.
On the other hand, back in the 90s these people were asking about Robert Anton Wilson or saying “fnord” at me, so some things have gotten better, I guess.
That's not the problem. This is: Change. Read it through again and you'll get it.

Part 5: No Moral.

Gabriel L. Helman 12/16/23 Gabriel L. Helman 12/16/23

Doom @ 30

I feel like there have been a surprising number of “30th anniversaries” this year, I hadn’t realized what a nerd-culture nexus 1993 was!

⁂

So, Doom! Rather than belabor points covered better elsewhere, I’ll direct your attention to Rock Paper Shotgun’s excellent series on Doom At 30.

I had a little trouble with experienced journalists talking about Doom as a game that came out before they were born, I’m not going to lie. A very “roll me back into my mummy case” moment.

⁂

Doom came out halfway though my second year of high school, if I’m doing my math right. My friends and I had all played Wolfenstein, had been reading about it in PC Gamer, we knew it was coming, we were looking forward to it.

At the time, every nerd group had “the guy that could get stuff.” Which usually meant the one with well-off lax parents. Maybe going through a divorce? This was the early 90s, so we were a little past the “do you know where your kids are” era, but by today’s standards we were still pretty… under-supervised. Our guy showed up at school with a stack of 3.5-inch floppies one day. He’d got the shareware version of Doom from somewhere.

I can’t now remember if we fired it up at the school or if we took it to somebody’s house; but I _do_ remember that this was one of maybe three or four times where I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was seeing.¹

Our 386 PC couldn’t really handle it, but Doom had a mode where you could shrink the window down in the center of the monitor, so the computer had fewer pixels to worry about. I played Doom shrunk down nearly all the way, with as much border as image, crouched next to the monitor like I was staring into a porthole to another world.

I think it holds up surprisingly well. The stripped-down, high-speed, arcade-like mechanics, the level design that perfectly matches what the engine can and can’t do, the music, the just whole vibe of the thing. Are later games more sophisticated? Sure, no question. Are they better? Well… Not at shooting demons on a Mars base while early 90s synth-rock plays, no.

⁂

Reading about Doom’s anniversary this last week, I discovered that the current term of art for newly made Doom-like retro-style shooters is “Boomer Shooter.” I know everyone forgets Gen-X exists, that’s part of our thing, but this will not stand. The Boomers can’t have this one—there is no more quintessentially, universal “Gen-X” experience than playing Doom.

Other than everyone forgetting we exist and giving the Boomers credit, that is.

The others, off the top of my head, were probably the original Kings Quest, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto III, and Breath of the Wild.

Gabriel L. Helman 12/15/23 Gabriel L. Helman 12/15/23

Layoff Season(s)

Well, it’s layoff season again, which pretty much never stopped this year? I was going to bury a link or two to an article in that last sentence, but you know what? There’s too many. Especially in tech, or tech-adjacent fields, it’s been an absolute bloodbath this year.

So, why? What gives?

I’ve got a little personal experience here: I’ve been through three layoffs now, lost my job once, shoulder-rolled out of the way for the other two. I’ve also spent the last couple decades in and around “the tech industry”, which here we use as shorthand for companies that are either actually a Silicon Valley software company, or a company run by folks that used to/want to be from one, with a strong software development wing and at least one venture capital–type on the board.

In my experience, Tech companies are really bad at people. I mean this holistically: they’re bad at finding people, bad at hiring, and then when they do finally hire someone, they’re bad at supporting those people—training, “career development”, mentoring, making sure they’re in the right spot, making sure they’re successful. They’re also bad any kind of actual feedback cycle, either to reward the excellent or terminate underperformers. As such, they’re also bad at keeping people. This results in the vicious cycle that puts the average time in a tech job at about 18 months—why train them if they’re gonna leave? Why stay if they won’t support me?

There are pockets where this isn’t true, of course; individual managers, or departments, or groups, or even glue-type individuals holding the scene together that handle this well. I think this is all a classic “don’t attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence” situtation. I say this with all the love in the world, but people who are good at tech-type jobs tend to be low-empathy lone wolf types? And then you spend a couple decades promoting the people from that pool, and “ask your employees what they need” stops being common sense and is suddenly some deep management koan.

The upshot of all this is that most companies with more than a dozen or two employees have somewhere between 10–20% of the workforce that isn’t really helping out. Again—this isn’t their fault! The vast majority of those people would be great employees in a situation that’s probably only a tiny bit different than the one you’re in. But instead you have the one developer who never seems to get anything done, the other developer who’s work always fails QA and needs a huge amount of rework, the person who only seems to check hockey scores, the person whos always in meetings, the other person whose always in “meetings.” That one guy who always works on projects that never seem to ship.¹ The extra managers that don’t seem to manage anyone. And, to be clear, I’m talking about full-time salaried people. People with a 401(k) match. People with a vesting schedule.

No one doing badly enough to get fired, but not actually helping row the boat.

As such, at basically any point any large company—and by large I mean over about 50—can probably do a 10% layoff and actually move faster afterwards, and do a 20% layoff without any significant damage to the annual goals—as long as you don’t have any goals about employee morale or well-being. Or want to retain the people left.

The interesting part—and this is the bad interesting, to be clear—is if you can fire 20% of your employees at any time, when do you do that?

In my experience, there’s two reasons.

First, you drop them like a submarine blowing the ballast tanks. Salaries are the biggest expense center, and in a situation where the line isn’t going up right, dropping 20% of the cost is the financial equivalent of the USS Dallas doing an emergency surface.

Second, you do it to discipline labor. Is the workforce getting a little restless? Unhappy about the stagnat raises? Grumpy about benefits costing more? Is someone waving around a copy of Peopleware?² Did the word “union” float across the courtyard? That all shuts down real fast if all those people are suddenly sitting between two empty cubicles. “Let’s see how bad they score the engagement survey if the unemployment rate goes up a little!” Etc.

Again—this is all bad! This is very bad! Why do any this?

The current wave feels like a combo plate of both reasons. On the one hand, we have a whole generation of executive leaders that have never seen interest rates go up, so they’re hitting the one easy panic button they have. But mostly this feels like a tantrum by the c-suite class reacting to “hot labor summer” becoming “eternal labor september.”

Of course, this is where I throw up my hands and have nothing to offer except sympathy. This all feels so deeply baked in to the world we live in that it seems unsolvable short of a solution that ends with us all wearing leather jackets with only one sleve.

So, all my thoughts with everyone unexpectedly jobless as the weather gets cold. Hang on to each other, we’ll all get through this.

At one point in my “career”, the wags in the cubes next to mine made me a new nameplate that listed my job as “senior shelf-ware engineer.” I left it up for months, because it was only a little bit funny, but it was a whole lot true.
That one was probably me, sorrryyyyyy (not sorry)

Gabriel L. Helman 11/27/23 Gabriel L. Helman 11/27/23

Doctor Who and the Star Beast (2023)

Beep the Meep on Disney+. What a time to be alive.

Spoilers Ahoy

Kicking off the 60th anniversary proper, we have first of 3 specials with Tennant back as the Tenth, excuse me Fourteenth Doctor.

It was great! Perfect execution of what it was there to do, put Tennant and Tate back on screen having a throwback adventure. It’s the big anniversary party! Let’s replay some of the greatest hits!

On paper, this is a classic Russell T Davies season opener; funny, exciting, big feelings, but mostly about setting the table for what comes next. It looks great, and Rachel Talalay directs the hell out of it, making sure every penny of that Disney money is up on the screen¹. And after the last couple of seasons (and disappointments like Loki), it was a breath of fresh air to watch something so confidently competent.

I’d love to know how this played to a new audience, which presumably the Disney+ deal brought in. The opening narration does, I think, about as good a job as you could of spinning up a new audience on what they missed. And I dearly love the juxtaposition of the gorgeous 4k shots of Tennant in space cutting back to the blatantly standard definition “previously on” clips. Let the new kids know that this is a show with more enthusiasm than budget and that’s whats so great about it right from the start.

Everyone slides back into their old roles immediately. In a lot of ways, it’s as if no time has passed at all, one could easily imagine a version of this kicking off season 5 in 2010.

But both Tennant and Tate have visibly spent some time thinking about how to play older versions of their characters, both the characters are slightly different, changed by the experiences of the last decade and a half. Tate especially does some really nice work with “Donna, but a mom now”, where all that energy now has a place to focus, and informed by her relationship with her own mom. Speaking of Donna’s mom, Jacqueline King’s Sylvia, who was the third and least interesting of RTD’s “companion’s moms as bad mother-n-laws” is a million miles better here than she ever was before; here her objections have merit rather than just being obstructionist or cruel, all that energy redirected into a woman desperately trying to keep her daughter safe. And in addition, she gets to be the voice of the audience, saying “wait a minute, you said if this happened it would be bad!”

Finally, I had some initial qualms with Tennant coming back as a new incarnation, as opposed to “just” reprising the Tenth. But a few minutes in, it becomes obvious why RTD made this choice. Both the Doctor and Donna are older now, and emotionally the same amount older; all “that” was years ago now, they’ve both moved on, done other things, lived their lives, and now both older characters have come back together to deal with unfinished business. You couldn’t make that work with a version of Tennant’s Doctor from somewhere in that gap between Ood Sigma’s warning and his arrival on the Ood Sphere. This is a version of the character who’s past River Song, who spent some time with a hole in his memory where² Clara should be, and was a woman for a while. They’re older, and like the author, has a very different take on what happened in the 2008 season finale than they had at the time.

On that point, though: More artists should get the chance to go back and revisit their previous work.6 As much as this was a big reunion special, this was also very much an older author in conversation with his younger self, and handling some unfinished business. Specifically: It’s pretty clear RTD has been thinking about Donna’s end ever since 2008.

RTD always enjoyed giving his companions tragic endings; nearly everyone who travled with the Doctor between 2005 and 2010 came away worse for the experience. Donna though—I’m not sure that was supposed to be as tragic as it landed. I suspect RTD was going for “the grownup in the room doing something unfortunate but necessary”, and then Tennant and Tate played it as the assault that it really was. It’s clear that stuck with him, and it’s also clear that the fairly stinging rebuke of the story from the end of “Hell Bent/Heaven Sent” also landed.

RTD is—obviously—a very strong, very talented writer, but in his time with Doctor Who he had a bad habit of writing very compelling characters with complex emotional journeys, and then at the climax of their story, taking all their agency away and making it a story about The Doctor’s lack of good choices. Very few characters ever got a say in what happened to them, they would get backed into a corner and then the Doctor would just choose which of their bad choices they would get.

It’s a mistake to read too much into this I think? I always suspected this was less of a statement of purpose and more a factor of the fact that they made a whole lot of Doctor Who very quickly. The production schedule didn’t leave a whole lot of room for “rethinking ideas”. “Lonely God” was a very successful note for the show to play, and it makes sense to focus a finale on the character who’ll still be around to deal with the fallout next year, so it makes sense that in a pinch they’d head towards “David Tennant crying in the rain” as fast as possible.³

With The Star Beast, RTD goes out of his way to fix both issues. The plot is carefully constructed to give Donna the choice she never got back in ’08 to either get her memories back and die or live as she has been. And then, having made the choice she would have made then, but for reasons that are new, the show lets her (and her daughter) figure out the solution themselves, reminding the Doctor that just because he can’t think of a solution, that doesn’t mean there is one. You can almost hear RTD muttering to himself “see, this was how you should have done it!”

But speaking of unfinished business, The Star Beast itself feels like one too. The comic story this special is based on was a very successful, well regarded entry from the 80s, and it’s on the obvious short-list of spin-off media that could be adapted for the Main Show. It’s impossible to believe that the RTD that was adapting or recycling Jubilee, Spare Parts, and Human Nature wasn’t thinking about Beep the Meep. Heck, _”Smith and Jones”, the opening of Series 3, has a seemingly friendly old woman being chased by alien troopers, only for it to turn out that the Judoon are really the police and the old woman a criminal. I’d be very surprised if that didn’t start as a Star Beast adaptation, just continually rounded down to something the show could afford until it was two rhino-men costumes in a hospital. But now, goosed by Disney’s investment and a decade of computer graphics advancements, we get the real article.

Anyway, I loved it. Perfect job resolving the left-over business, now on to things to come. As I write this, we still don’t know anything of substance about that second special, which they’ve kept almost totally under wraps. What are they hiding for next week? Can’t wait to find out.

— Because I couldn’t help myself, I went and checked the tops of the waves of the reactions on the ‘net. And, as you might imagine, all the folks that were hoping for the end of “Woke Dr. Who” are all losing their minds, and: good.

But, one of the other criticisms I saw was that The Star Beast wasn’t very subtle. As if subtlety automatically meant high-quality! And look, subtle is great when it’s Hemmingway dancing around what really happened to Jake in the margins of The Sun Also Rises, but not when you have something to say. Subtle isn’t always a virtue. Sometimes “Subtle” is just “Cowardice.” Whispering when you should be shouting.

When it was announced that RTD was coming back to do more Doctor Who, the obvious question was: why? He already had a tremendously successul run, he can clearly do whatever he wants, why come back? What’s the upside?

In interviews, he always says something like he’s always been a fan, and never stopped thinking up ideas, and was excited to do more when given the chance—and I think that’s true. It also seems likely that the show wasn’t doing as well as anyone wanted, and with the transition to being make by Julie Gardner and Jane Trantor’s Bad Wolf productions that there was some strong desire to get RTD back to relaunch the show the same way he did in ’05.

But I think there was something else. He’s been a busy guy the last couple of years, between Years and Years and It’s a Sin, and he’s had plenty of time to be out talking into microphones, and it’s been clear that he’s angry. The last decade or so have provided plenty to be angry about! It seemed to me the reason to come back and do a show like Who now, on top of those other things, was the size of platform. A man with nothing left to prove but plenty to say.

I was going to bury this in a link, but no: go watch this acceptance speech he gave for one of the awards won by It’s a Sin. That’s not a guy who’s coming back to Doctor Who to do a series of interchangeable Base-Under-Siege stories. He’s got things to say.

And after The Star Beast, I’m pretty sure I was right. It’s a very angry show, but focused. It’s determined to show a world where diversity is a good thing, where UNIT officers wear turbans, where wheelchairs are an advantage5, where the secret to saving the day is being Trans, where surface readings based on appearance are wrong. It’s perfect that they waited until now to use The Star Beast—at the time it was calling out the parent show for constantly using disfigurement as a shorthand for evil, and now they get to use the same story to do the same thing again.

It’s a bold, brave statement of what progressive Doctor Who should actually look like (as opposed to what we’ve been getting the last half-decade.)

There’s always a portion of the audience—any audience—that would rather “whatever this is about” be stuffed down under the covers, hidden far enough away that they don’t have to notice or think about it. The kind of people who think art should “soothe, not distract.”

But fundamentally, art is about things. If you have things to say, subtle isn’t the way to go.

We’re in an age where we don’t need “subtle”, we need people to stand up and speak clearly. And if you can use Disney’s money to do it to a wide audience on BBC One, so much the better.

There were a couple of beats that seemed specifically built around the team giggling “look what we can do with this extra cash!” The holographic UI on the sonic screwdriver was one. But I thought the biggest was the opening credits, that had real “we always wanted to do it like this but couldn’t afford it” energy. Those drone shots of the battle between the Wraith Warriors and UNIT! And, of course, that new Console Room.
That is what happened at the end of Twice Upon a Time, right? Twelve got his memory back?
There’s a quote from RTD somewhere⁴ bemoaning that it’s the Doctor in balloon at the end of “The Next Doctor” instead of David Morrissey’s Jackson Lake. And he’s right, it’s Lake’s story, and Lake should be the one to resolve it. But this plays into what we’re talking about—in a pinch, go with a closeup of Tennant looking serious.
I could have sworn this was in The The Writer’s Tale, but a cursory exam didn’t turn it up. Maybe one of the DVD commentaries that used to be on the BBC website?
Ruth Madeley’s characer—the wheelchair using UNIT scientific advisor Shirley Anne Bingham—is a great character on their own, but represents something extra coming a week or two after RTD refused to keep Davros in a wheelchair.
The thing I kept thinking of while watching this was Fury Road. Very different content, obviously, but the same air of a creator looking back at his past work and disagreeing with his past self.

Gabriel L. Helman 11/24/23 Gabriel L. Helman 11/24/23

What was happening: Twitter, 2006-2023

Twitter! What can I tell ya? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a huge part my life for a long time. It was so full of art, and humor, and joy, and community, and ideas, and insight. It was also deeply flawed and profoundly toxic, but many of those flaws were fundamental to what made it so great.

It’s almost all gone now, though. The thing called X that currently lives where twitter used to be is a pale, evil, corrupted shadow of what used to be there. I keep trying to explain what we lost, and I can’t, it’s just too big.¹ So let me sum up. Let me tell you why I loved it, and why I left. As the man² said, let me tell you of the days of high adventure.

I can’t now remember when I first heard the word “twitter”. I distinctly remember a friend complaining that this “new twitter thing” had blown out the number of free SMS messages he got on his nokia flip phone, and that feels like a very 2006 conversation.

I tend to be pretty online, and have been since the dawn of the web, but I’m not usually an early adopter of social networks, so I largely ignored twitter for the first couple of years. Then, for reasons downstream of the Great Recession, I found myself unemployed for most of the summer of 2009.³ Suddenly finding myself with a surfit of free time, I worked my way down that list of “things I’ll do if I ever get time,” including signing up for “that twitter thing.” (I think that’s the same summer I lit up my now-unused Facebook account, too.) Smartphones existed by then, and it wasn’t SMS-based anymore, but had a website, and apps.⁴

It was great. This was still in it’s original “microblogging” configuration, where it was essentially an Instant Messenger status with history. You logged in, and there was the statuses of the people you followed, in chronological order, and nothing else.

It was instantly clear that this wasn’t a replacement for something that already existed—this wasn't going to do away with your LiveJournal, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or blog. This was something new, something extra, something yes and. The question was, what was it for? Where did it fit in?

Personally, at first I used my account as a “current baby status” feed, updating extended family about what words my kids had learned that day. The early iteration of the site was perfect for that—terse updates to and from people you knew.

Over time, it accumulated various social & conversational features, not unlike a Katamari rolling around Usenet, BBSes, forums, discussion boards, other early internet communication systems. It kept growing, and it became less useful as a micro-blogging system and more of a free-wheeling world-wide discussion forum.

It was a huge part of my life, and for a while there, everyone’s life. Most of that time, I enjoyed it an awful lot, and got a lot out of it. Everyone had their own take on what it was Twitter had that set it apart, but for me it was three main things, all of which reinforced each other:

It was a great way to share work. If you made things, no matter how “big” you were, it was a great way to get your work out there. And, it was a great way to re-share other people’s work. As a “discovery engine” it was unmatched.
Looking at that the other way, It was an amazing content aggregator. It essentially turned into “RSS, but Better”; at the time RSS feeds had pretty much shrunk to just “google reader’s website”. It turns out that sharing things from your RSS feed into the feeds of other people, plus a discussion thread, was the key missing feature. If you had work of your own to share, or wanted to talk about something someone else had done elsewhere on the internet, twitter was a great way to share a link and talk about it. But, it also worked equally well for work native to twitter itself. Critically, the joke about the web shrinking to five websites full of screenshots of the other four⁵ was posted to twitter, which was absolutely the first of those five websites.
Most importantly, folks who weren’t anywhere else on the web were on twitter. Folks with day jobs, who didn’t consider themselves web content people were there; these people didn’t have a blog, or facebook, or instagram, but they were cracking jokes and hanging out in twitter.

There is a type of person whom twitter appealed to in a way that no other social networking did. A particular kind of weirdo that took Twitter’s limitations—all text, 140 or 280 characters max—and turned them into a playground.

And that’s the real thing—twitter was for writers. Obviously it was text based, and not a lot of text at that, so you had to be good at making language work for you. As much as the web was originally built around “hypertext”, most of the modern social web is built around photos, pictures, memes, video. Twitter was for people who didn’t want to deal with that, who could make the language sing in a few dozen words.

It had the vibe of getting to sit in on the funniest people you know’s group text, mixed with this free-wheeling chaos energy. On it’s best days, it had the vibe of the snarky kids at the back of the bus, except the bus was the internet, and most of the kids were world-class expoerts in something.

There’s a certain class of literary writer goofballs that all glommed onto twitter in a way none of us did with any other “social network.” Finally, something that rewarded what we liked and were good at!

Writers, comedians, poets, cartoonists, rabbis, just hanging out. There was a consistent informality to the place—this wasn’t the show, this was the hotel bar after the show. The big important stuff happened over in blogs, or columns, or novels, or wherever everyone’s “real job” was, this was where everyone let their hair down and cracked jokes.

But most of all, it was weird. Way, way weirder than any other social system has ever been or probably ever will be again, this was a system that ran on the same energy you use to make your friends laugh in class when you’re supposed to be paying attention.

It got at least one thing exactly right: it was no harder to sign into twitter and fire off a joke than it was to fire a message off to the group chat. Between the low bar to entry and the emphasis on words over everthing else, it managed to attract a crowd of folks that liked computers, but didn’t see them as a path to self-actualization.

But what made twitter truly great were all the little (and not so little) communities that formed. It wasn’t the feature set, or the website, or the tech, it was the people, and the groups they formed. It’s hard to start making lists, because we could be here all night and still leave things out. In no particular order, here’s the communities I think I’ll miss the most:

Weird Twitter—Twitter was such a great vector for being strange. Micro-fiction, non-sequiturs, cats sending their mothers to jail, dispatches from the apocalypse.
Comedians—professional and otherwise, people who could craft a whole joke in one sentence.
Writers—A whole lot of people who write for a living ended up on twitter in a way they hadn’t anywhere else on the web.
Jewish Twitter—Speaking as a Jew largely disconnection from the local Jewish community , it was so much fun to get to hang out with the Rabbis and other Jews.

But also! The tech crowd! Legal experts! Minorities of all possible interpretations of the word sharing their experiences.

And the thing is, other than the tech crowd,⁶ most of those people didn’t go anywhere else. They hadn’t been active on the previous sites, and many of them drifted away again the wheels started coming off twitter. There was a unique alchemy on twitter for forming communities that no other system has ever had.

And so the real tragedy of twitter’s implosion is that those people aren’t going somewhere else. That particular alchemy doesn’t exist elsewhere, and so the built up community is blowing away on the wind.

Because all that’s almost entirely gone now, though. I miss it a lot, but I realize I’ve been missing it for a year now. There had been a vague sense of rot and decline for a while. You can draw a pretty straight line from gamergate, to the 2016 Hugos, to the 2016 election, to everything around The Last Jedi, to now, as the site rotted out from the inside; a mounting sense that things were increasingly worse than they used to be. The Pandemic saw a resurgence of energy as everyone was stuck at home hanging out via tweets, but in retrospect that was a final gasp.⁷

Once The New Guy took over, there was a real sense of impending closure. There were plenty of accounts that made a big deal out of Formally Leaving the site and flouncing out to “greener pastures”, either to make a statement, or (more common) to let their followers know where they were. There were also plenty of accounts saying things like “you’ll all be back”, or “I was here before he got here and I’ll be here after he leaves”, but over the last year mostly people just drifted away. People just stopped posting and disappeared.

It’s like the loss of a favorite restaurant —the people who went there already know, and when people who wen’t there express disbelief, the response is to tell them how sorry you are they missed the party!

The closest comparison I can make to the decayed community is my last year of college. (Bear with me, this’ll make sense.). For a variety of reasons, mostly good, it took me 5 years to get my 4 year degree. I picked up a minor, did some other bits and bobs on the side, and it made sense to tack on an extra semester, and at that point you might as well do the whole extra year.

I went to a medium sized school in a small town.⁸ Among the many, many positive features of that school was the community. It seemed like everyone knew everyone, and you couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone you knew. More than once, when I didn’t have anything better to do, I’d just hike downtown and inevitably I’d run into someone I knew and the day would vector off from there.⁹

And I’d be lying if I said this sense of community wasn’t one of the reasons I stuck around a little longer—I wasn’t ready to give all that up. Of course, what I hadn’t realized was that not everyone else was doing that. So one by one, everyone left town, and by the end, there I was in downtown surrounded by faces I didn’t know. My lease had a end-date, and I knew I was moving out of town on that day no matter what, so what, was I going to build up a whole new peer group with a short-term expiration date? That last six months or so was probably the weirdest, loneliest time of my whole lide. When the lease ended, I couldn’t move out fast enough.

The point is: twitter got to be like that. I was only there for the people, and nearly all the people I was there for had already gone. Being the one to close out the party isn’t always the right move.

One of the things that made it so frustrating was that it had always problems, but it had the same problems that any under-moderated semi-anonymous internet system had. “How to stop assholes from screwing up your board” is a 4 decade old playbook at this point, and twitter consistently failed to actually deploy any of the solutions, or at least deploy them at a scale that made a difference. The maddening thing was always that the only unique thing about twitter’s problems was the scale.

I had a soft rule that I could only read Twitter when using my exercise bike, and a year or two ago I couldn’t get to the end of the tweets from people I followed before I collapsed from exhaustion. Recently, I’d run out of things to read before I was done with my workout. People were posting less, and less often, but mostly they were just… gone. Quietly fading away as the site got worse.

In the end, though, it was the tsunami of antisemitism that got me. “Seeing only what you wanted to see” was always a skill on twitter, but the unfolding disaster in Israel and Gaza broke that. Not only did you have the literal nazis showing up and spewing their garbage without check, but you had otherwise progressive liberal leftists (accidentally?) doing the same thing, without pushback or attempt at discussion, because all the people that would have done that are gone. So instead it’s just a nazi sludge.¹⁰

There was so much great stuff on there—art, ideas, people, history, jokes. Work I never would have seen, things I wouldn’t have learned, books I wouldn’t have read, people I wouldn’t know about. I keep trying to encompass what’s been lost, make lists, but it’s too big. Instead, let me tell you one story about the old twitter:

One of the people I follow(ed) was Kate Beaton, originally known for the webcomic Hark A Vagrant!, most recently the author of Ducks (the best book I read last year). One day, something like seven years ago, she started enthusing about a book called Tough Guys Have Feelings Too. I don’t think she had a connection to the book? I remember it being an unsolicited rave from someone who had read it and was stuck by it.

The cover is a striking piece of art of a superhero, head bowed, eyes closed, a tear rolling down his cheek. The premise of the book is what it says on the cover—even tough guys have feelings. The book goes through a set of sterotypical “tough guys”—pirates, ninjas, wrestlers, superheros, race car drivers, lumberjacks, and shows them having bad days, breaking their tools, crashing their cars, hurting themselves. The tough guys have to stop, and maybe shed a tear, or mourn, or comfort themselves or each other, and the text points out, if even the tough guys can have a hard time, we shouldn’t feel bad for doing the same. The art is striking and beautiful, the prose is well written, the theme clearly and well delivered.

I bought it immediately. You see, my at-the-time four-year-old son was a child of Big Feelings, but frequently had trouble handling those feelings. I thought this might help him. Overnight, this book became almost a mantra. For years after this, when he was having Big Feelings, we’d read this book, and it would help him calm down and take control of what he was feeling.

It’s not an exaggeration to say this book changed all our lives for the better. And in the years since then, I’ve often been struck that despite all the infrastructure of moden capitalism—marketing, book tours, reviews, blogs, none of those ever got that book into my hands. There’s only been one system where an unsolicited rave from a web cartoonist being excited about a book outside their normal professional wheelhouse could reach someone they’ve never met or heard of and change that person’s son’s life.

And that’s gone now.

I’ve been trying to write something about the loss of twitter for a while now. The first draft of this post has a date back in May, to give you some idea.
Mako.
As as aside, everyone should take a summer off every decade or so.
I tried them all, I think, but settled on the late, lamented Tweetbot.
Tom Eastman: I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.
The tech crowd all headed to mastodon, but didn’t build that into a place that any of those other communities could thrive. Don’t @-me, it’s true.
In retrospect, getting Morbius to flop a second time was probably the high point, it was all downhill after that.
CSU Chico in Chico, California!
Yes, this is what we did back in the 90s before cellphones and texting, kids.
This is out of band for the rest of the post, so I’m jamming all this into a footnote:

Obviously, criticizing the actions of the government of Israel is no more antisemitic than criticizing Hamas would be islamophobic. But objecting to the actions of Israel ’s government with “how do the Jews not know they’re the bad guys” sure as heck is, and I really didn’t need to see that kind of stuff being retweeted by the eve6 guy.

A lot of things are true. Hamas is not Palestine is not “The Arabs”, and the Netanyahu administration is not Israel is not “The Jews.” To be clear, Hamas is a terror organization, and Israel is on the functional equivalent of Year 14 of the Trump administration.

The whole disaster hits at a pair of weird seams in the US—the Israel-Palestine conflict maps very strangely to the American political left-right divide, and the US left has always had a deep-rooted antisemitism problem. As such, what really got me was watching all the comments criticizing “the Jews” for this conflict come from _literally_ the same people who spent four years wearing “not my president” t-shirts and absolving themselves from any responsibility for their governments actions because they voted for “the email lady”. They get the benefit of infinite nuance, but the Jews are all somehow responsible for Bibi’s incompetent choices.

Gabriel L. Helman 11/18/23 Gabriel L. Helman 11/18/23

Apparently the Last Veridian Note was fifteen years ago?

Wow! Turns out today is the 15th anniversary of the Last Viridian Note. The Viridian Design Movement was one of those fun early web things where Bruce Sterling & company dressed up climate change activism as a design movement. It was a very late-90s “ha ha only serious” thing. It all seems a little bit precious now, in retrospect, but mostly that’s because it was a movement populated entirely by people who hadn’t lived through the first decades of the 21st century yet.

But also this was 6 years before the phrase “grim meathook future” emerged; everyone could sense that the future was coming in fast and would be very different that anyone could predict¹. The veridians, at least, saw it coming and tried to redirect some of the energy in a positive direction, rather than lie back and accept it, or figure out how to use it to get rich. The positive side to all that stuff I was griping about WIRED yesterday².

Anyway, I was super into it. It was always out on the fringe of the fringe, and so after Sterling wrapped up the party in ’08 it seems to have vanished from the discussion. I myself never would have remembered if it hadn’t been referenced in the “this day in history” section of today’s pluralistic.

The Last Note was really Sterling wrapping up everything he’s learned about how to live in current era. While the rest of the “Viridian thing” has floated back into the mists of the “Old Internet”, this essay is something I find myself coming back to every few years.

You should go read the whole thing! But a few pull quotes;

This tends to be the bit people quote if they do:

You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.

Beautiful things.

Emotionally important things.

Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.

Everything else.

“Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in "everything else."

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.

Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

But my favorite bit is this, which I quoted almost word-for-word when I handed my teenager her first Swiss Army Knife at her birthday:

I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.

A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.

And that’s really the whole thing wrapped up: be someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options.

As a total aside, I first saw the phrase in something Warren Ellis wrote, probably whichever of his newsletters was running in ’05. I had forgotten, or just mashed up in my head, that the phrase was coined by Joshua Ellis, no relation. But I digress.
Of course, it was more important to keep an ironic distance than let anything think you were sincere or earnest, so….