There is a brief, almost throwaway moment in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), where the academic milieu clusters inside the almost insultingly modern Laurent family home, and one barely-audible guest name-drops Baudrillard. That barely acknowledged reference, buried under wine glasses and shallow chattering, feels perversely apt: Caché is a film that demands Baudrillardian analysis, because it is a film about a world where the difference between the real and the image has collapsed into a feedback loop.

On the recommendation of two friends, I caught the film for my first watch at ACMI during their companion screenings to Melbourne Cinémathèque’s 2025 season on Haneke. I’m glad that, before seeing the film, I was not familiar with the plot or the discussion around its ‘thriller’ conceits. If I had been expecting a thriller-like crescendo, I might have failed to appreciate that the real power of Caché is that it does not allow the Laurent family home to be “invaded” or anything of the sort. The menacing tapes seep in, the guilt seeps in, but the walls remain standing. Haneke’s characters absorb the event and carry on—a little more hollow and absurd. This is not the drama of the thriller, where detection leads to unmasking or revenge. Here, the event itself is suspended, endlessly deferred, until it becomes indistinguishable from its very circulation.

The Laurent family, on which the film is centred—Georges (Daniel Auteuil), an established television literary critic, Anne (Juliette Binoche), a book publisher, and their adolescent son and Eminem fan, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky)—live in a pristine, aggressively modernist home packed with books, glass surfaces, and curated art. Their existence inside this virtual culturo-architectural fortress against the real is orderly, stereotypical, and self-sufficient. But one day, they begin receiving anonymous videotapes: long, static shots of their home’s exterior, with no threats, demands, or explanation. Sometimes the tapes arrive accompanied by crude, childlike drawings of bloodied figures. No direct violence ever breaches their lives, yet the implied threat gnaws at their complacency.

Gradually, we learn that Georges suspects the supposed sender of these tapes is Majid (Maurice Bénichou), an Algerian man whose life was once intimately, and shamefully, entwined with Georges’ own childhood. Decades earlier, Majid’s parents were among some 200 murdered by French police in the brutal repression of Algerian protests in Paris (a factual atrocity, known as the Paris Massacre of 1961), and he was taken in by Georges’ family—before Georges, out of jealous cruelty, orchestrated his removal. The tapes appear to dredge this buried guilt back into the Laurent household, forcing Georges into an increasingly desperate, solipsistic spiral. But Haneke is careful to refuse the pleasures of traditional suspense. The tapes do not build toward confrontation or catharsis. They simply accumulate, like sediment, layering the Laurent’s life with a darkness they cannot expel. The Laurent home was already a soundstage of sorts. The tapes only force them to glimpse it.

You can trace the simulation everywhere. The books and DVDs stacked high in the Laurents’ multi-storey home aren’t evidence of a vibrant intellectual life—they’re its alibi. A library of inert signals, desperately curated to cover up a more profound nihilism. Culture becomes a prophylactic against responsibility. The home’s sterile modernism only hardens the sense that whatever life once animated it has long since been processed into image management. The Laurents decorate their home as such because they’re the kind of people who are supposed to live in a house like that, you see?

Meanwhile, Majid’s flat is stripped to its bare necessities: a table, a bed, and a few appliances. It is a functional, exhausted space. There is no surplus of culture or memory to conceal the economic and historical violence written into its walls and inhabitants—just survival.

Baudrillard’s analysis of simulation helps anchor this precisely. In his work, most famously Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard argues that signs no longer refer to reality, but to other signs. Representation no longer masks reality—it masks the absence of reality. Images no longer represent; they reproduce and amplify themselves. The Laurent family is the human residue of this process: they live but do not experience. They act, but they do not intervene. Their social class floats unmoored from any concrete reverberations, governed instead by the creeping inertia of appearances.

Georges’ profession as a television host is not incidental. His job is to produce commentary without consequence, language without stakes. He packages literature into morsels for broadcast that avoid becoming “too theoretical”, ensuring that culture becomes another surface of self-soothing consumption. It is precisely because Georges has lived so long within this ecosystem of signs that when the tapes arrive—anonymous, directionless, implacable—he has no defences. He can only search for an “explanation”, as if assembling narrative fragments would somehow allow him to resist the system that has already absorbed him.

It is not so much guilt for his past wrongs against Majid that consumes Georges as it is his lack of embodied guilt. Not guilt as a feeling, but guilt as a structure. Perhaps this lack of guilt generates a kind of debt that the debtor can never pay—only internalise. It is no coincidence that the pivotal scene in which the Laurents realise their son, Pierrot, is missing takes place within a living room tableau polluted by television news and, most critically, financial documents: bills, ledgers, accounting—all splayed before Georges in a comically insurmountable pile.

When the search for narrative fails to produce closure, when his personal threats fall flat, Georges falls back on the final defence of the middle-class subjectivity under late liberalism: he invokes the machinery of the state. He sics the police—the institutional arm of erasure, suppression and blame displacement—onto Majid and his son, hoping to restore the stability of his curated cocoon by reasserting blunt hierarchical force. It is an act of profound cowardice, yet entirely logical within the parameters of his existence. Georges does not engage with reality; he seeks only to have it administered.

Majid’s suicide, then, is not a rupture. It is the consummation of this process. Georges arrives at Majid’s apartment, is forced to witness the act, yet nothing follows. No confession. No reckoning. No transformation. Georges returns home. The camera stares. The footage plays back endlessly in our minds: Georges, Majid, his blood spurting across stale furnishings. But the world does not change. Reality, such as it was, is incapable of reasserting itself. Even an act of extreme violence cannot disrupt the Laurent family’s aestheticised state of anxious inertia. At worst, it folds into a managed disturbance without any accompanying movement. What would otherwise constitute an event does not break the simulation but is metabolised into it.

This is where the film tips into Baudrillardian territory—not in the academic sense, but in the nausea of being surrounded by signs that signify nothing. The tapes are a pure simulation: a representation of something that never announces itself. Haneke himself seems, more than once, to draw attention to himself as the filmmaker via these tapes, as if to empty them of their appearance as plot objects. The most crucial instance is Majid’s suicide itself, which Haneke shoots identically to the most chilling of the tapes Georges receives. This time, and for a split second, Haneke employs slow motion as the blade crosses Majid’s throat. The image doesn’t mediate reality. It replaces it, and in doing so, strips it of immediacy and consequence. That’s why the violence in Caché is so disorienting—not because it’s sudden, but because it feels unmoored from the affect that’s supposed to accompany it. It’s not shocking, but inappropriate. The slow-motion slash arrives like a glitch in the simulation, and then the image settles again, perfectly composed, unaffected.

Because what Caché reveals, and what Baudrillard understood with brutal clarity, is that exposure no longer destabilises a system built on the endless reproduction of non-events. Just as, for Baudrillard, the Gulf War “did not take place” in any meaningful sense because it was already absorbed into the media apparatus before it began, the shames haunting Georges’ life are already processed, neutered, and formatted by Haneke for endless involution. Recognition does not produce reckoning where repression is no longer even necessary. The scandal is not what is hidden (as the story progresses, it is not even hidden from Georges’ employer). The scandal is that revelation itself has been neutered, something palmed off to lawyers.

And this is the ultimate degradation: no threshold exists where a ‘real event’ might intervene and collapse the system’s internal logics. In the framework Caché builds and sustains, what would usually form a singularity is rendered a mere protocol of grievance, an element in the greater governance of erasure. The camera stares. The characters react. The audience waits. But no synthesis emerges. No historical debt is called in. No symbolic reparation is conceivable. The tapes do not haunt because they accuse—they create a field of endless referentiality where every action collapses back into the system itself.

Haneke is merciless in depicting this collapse. Georges’ visit to his mother (Annie Girardot) is a grotesque banality: she is alive but vacant, a fossil of the past he wishes to forget. When he insists to her, almost defensively, that he is fine, his wife is fine, his son is fine, the sterility of their lives is exposed. It is not happiness he asserts, but the absence of disturbance. Fine: meaning numb. Fine: meaning empty. Fine: meaning the system endures unmolested, unexamined.

In this sense, Caché is not a film about guilt or memory. It is about the exhaustion of the event itself. It is about a society so saturated in images that no act—no confession, no confrontation, no suicide—can reintroduce definition. Every trauma is archived before it is lived. If we follow the logic further, the figure of Georges does not represent a flawed individual grappling with private guilt, but a model of the modern subject paralysed by the suspension of meaning. His oscillation between denial, anger, paranoia and helplessness is not character development—it is a cartography of contemporary affect, where every possible reaction has already been anticipated, encoded, and rendered harmless. The system no longer traffics in consequences, only in exposures without effect.

Baudrillard, writing on the phenomenon of Islamist suicide bombers in the early 2000s, argued that within a global system of hyperreality, where all symbolic gestures had been wrung out, only the reintroduction of death—literal, unassimilable death—could constitute an actual event. The suicide bomber represented an “impossible exchange”: a symbolic rupture so absolute that the system, however sophisticated, could not fully imbibe it. It was a desperate, horrifying attempt to force the symbolic back into a world that had evacuated it.

But Caché goes further. In Haneke’s vision, death itself no longer possesses that impossible density. Majid’s suicide, filmed in a single, motionless shot, repels transcendence. It does not shatter the Laurent family’s constructed world. It produces no irreversible consequences. It is processed into the same flow of mediated symbols: footage, memory, guilt, anxiety, while the objective order remains roughly as it was at the film’s beginning. In Caché, a suicide openly declared to harm another is de-symbolised and rendered inert. Majid’s body falls, the blood pools, yet Haneke’s film absorbs it seamlessly.

Even the children, often the site where bourgeois cinema deposits its last hopes for redemption, are framed without sentimentality. Pierrot’s growing estrangement from his parents is neither framed as a tragedy, nor a seed of future rebellion. It is simply another dull inevitability, another signal drifting across the predictable circuits of family life. By the film’s credits scene, when Majid’s son (Walid Afkir) and Pierrot seem to meet outside the school, Haneke stages a final provocation. The camera watches, patient and unblinking, refusing revelation. Nothing definite. No future. Only another set of images, ambiguous and weightless, entering circulation.

What Haneke is offering is a perfectly self-enclosed feedback loop bearing eerie similarities to our everyday lives. The surveillance tapes, the news broadcasts, the hollow rituals of family and career all operate on this logic. Memory, violence, forgetting—all bleed into the same endless, shimmering surface. It is a cinema not of witnessing but of saturation, a cinema where the attempt to locate meaning is a reflex already anticipated and neutralised. In Haneke’s design, our natural desire to see substantive intervention is a frustrated juvenilia.

The horror is not that we cannot see, or that we do not know.
The horror is that we all see, we all know, and nothing changes.

There is something uncanny about the contemporary proliferation of clones, both literal and metaphorical, across our cultural landscape. While still at home there, cloning is no longer confined to speculative fiction or dystopian parable. What began with Barbie and Poor Things has led into Severance, The Substance, Mickey 17 and A Different Man—these works are not mere meditations on identity but the confessions of a system increasingly anxious that it has optimised out of alterity. What we are witnessing is not just a thematic trend, though it certainly is that. Instead, the reliance of artists of all stripes on the concept of cloning exposes a more profound economic and symbolic logic. Cloning is no longer speculative but descriptive. It names the cultural condition under late capitalism wherein difference is not lost but abolished, not eroded but engineered out of existence. The cloning obsession has only reached its present pitch because it reflects the fundamental ontology of the now. Are the franchise “IP films” of Disney and Marvel not, in the simplest sense, clones?

This logic extends far beyond the confines of cinema. It colonises music, fashion, and persona itself. Beyoncé is a clone—of Beyoncé, of capital, of whatever configuration the algorithm demands this quarter. One moment, she is a cyborgian extraterrestrial dropping club bangers, as in ‘Renaissance’; the next, she’s the stars and stripes-toting ‘Cowboy Carter’. While unified under the artist’s newfound project of explicating the breadth of Black influence across American music, these albums occupy sonic and cultural poles. It would be easy to write this off as Beyoncé exercising her virtuosity as a performer. Still, one must assume that the explosion of country music’s popularity and profitability guided this calculation. However cynical the genre finagling may be, her singular vocal ability convinces us that, at the very least, we are buying the Beyoncé, irrespective of the moment’s cloak.

On the other hand, there is Taylor Swift, whose relentless traversal of “eras” has become a pop-cultural axiom, less an artistic progression than a consciously commercial strategy of identity liquidation. Swift does not inhabit time; she samples it, retrofits it and reissues it. Her career is not a linear arc but a portfolio—each “era” an asset class, each aesthetic pivot a calculated rebrand engineered for maximal saturation. The girl-next-door of ‘Fearless’, the doomed romantic of ‘Red’, the vengeful diva of ‘Reputation’, the introspective auteur of ‘Folklore’—these are not stages of becoming, but switchable costumes in a carousel of commodified selfhood. The Swiftian “era” functions as a marketing scaffold: an opportunity to re-theme the tour, repackage the vinyl, re-curate the playlist, re-monetise the myth. What apes evolution is merely version control. Her persona is not emergent but deployed.

In this schema, the artist becomes a speculative instrument whose value is derived from the promise of infinitesimal transformation, not embodied substance. It is the logic of the clone: infinite substitutability masquerading as growth. And this cloning goes beyond individual artists: Tyler, the Creator doesn’t collaborate with Doechii as a mere cosign, Doechii openly mutates into his female Mark II.

Writing in the early twentieth century, Walter Benjamin famously feared that mechanical reproduction would strip art of its “aura”, being its unique presence in time and space. He theorised that reproduction would sever the connection between the artwork and its origins, as well as its ritualistic and cultural embeddedness. But what we face now is something altogether more insidious. The clone does not destroy aura. It simulates and multiplies it. In the age of streaming platforms, TikTok fragments, and algorithmically curated aesthetics, aura is no longer singular or sacred. It is modular.

This is the critical pivot: whereas reproduction presupposed an original that was copied, cloning operates without origin. No ‘original’ Beyoncé exists, only a series of commercially engineered instances. There is no foundational artistry to return to, no true essence beneath the spectacle—only endless reconfigurations optimised for reach, engagement, and cultural stickiness. This is not a straightforward loss of identity. It is the logical endpoint of identity being raised to the highest capitalist value, facilitating and encouraging the total monetisation of personality. What Benjamin warned against has been inverted: the aura is not gone, it is artificially inseminated into each clone, including ourselves as “creator-consumers”, giving the appearance of existence where only the void dwells.

This system thrives because it demands active participants, not passive spectators. Think of it not as individualised consumption, but social consumption. Social media does not reflect our identities—it enables us to mass-produce them in conjunction with everyone else. This sandbox allows us to recall faulty versions and issue new ones. We are not just watching Beyoncé shift between archetypes but doing it ourselves. Sometimes, this process is interconnected, like when we put together a different, thematically-tuned costume for the ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour than we do for the ‘Renaissance’ tour. These are not symptoms of narcissism but economic conditioning. We internalise the logic of cloning as the price of visibility. We are simply acting out the playbook of capitalism’s most powerful profit engines, political parties and evangelists when we fragment ourselves into bite-sized, repeatable personas, each optimised for success during a distinct algorithmic window. Once primarily a site of real-life action or struggle, in many cases today, identity is just another feed to curate.

In his under-read but surgically precise essay The Clone, or the Xerox Degree of the Species, French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard saw this coming. The clone, for Baudrillard, is not a degraded copy but the sign of a world without Otherness, a sign that the category of the original no longer exists. It is the triumph of equivalence over difference, of replication over creation, and pure operationality over the eroticism of the unique. The clone is not born, it is produced. It does not inherit, it is programmed. Baudrillard’s argument is, at core, a radical extension of Marx’s critique of commodity exchange.

For Marx, the generalisation of exchange under capitalism transforms all objects—and eventually all relations—into equivalents, reducible to abstract labour and monetary value. What is assumed by the system of generalised commodity exchange of goods is the commodification of time, human labour and life’s necessities. Baudrillard merely updates this to capture its current metaphysical consequence: in the clone, we are confronted not with the commodification of the subject, but the total erasure of difference itself. Cloning does not represent the failure to preserve uniqueness. Instead, it marks the system’s success in abolishing uniqueness as such.

In this light, the cultural clone is not a metaphor—it is the structural condition of postmodern cultural production. The reason Beyoncé can be alien and cowgirl in quick succession is not artistic audacity but the total collapse of symbolic tension. There is no contradiction, no danger of alienating the audience or straying too far from one’s essence, because everything is equivalent and nothing is different. To borrow from Benjamin, there is no residual aura, only infinite interchangeability. The clone is the perfect commodity-form, the full realisation of what Marx railed against: a world in which all qualitative distinction is liquidated into quantitative sameness, where everything is equivalent because everything must be exchangeable.

It is this logic that subtends the cultural cloning motifs now proliferating across art and media. In Ben Stiller’s Severance, workers are not merely alienated in the classical Marxist sense, as we are, but split into recombinant modules—“innies” and “outies”. Contrary to dominant interpretation, Severance dramatises not the loss of self but the perfect rationalisation of selfhood into a form of operational currency. This is why the events of the show’s recently concluded second season reintroduce a psychic or social struggle between aspects of the self. If it were only that identity is alienated, with each self-unit self-contained and sealed off, there would be no drama for the show to mine, no possibility of contradiction, no dialectical tension to set in motion.

For all its stylised grotesquerie, The Substance stages a similarly ambivalent response to the logic of equivalence. The younger, feminised double created to absorb violence, attention, and sexual labour is not straightforwardly the victim of commodification but the site where the original begins to fracture under the weight of her own reproducibility. The film never truly embraces cloning’s promise—delegation of risk, outsourcing of pain and liberation from consequence—because from the beginning, it is clear that Elisabeth (Demi Moore) shares a single consciousness with her junior double, Sue (Margaret Qualley). But as the clone cements her position in place of the source, the fantasy collapses into horror. The brilliance of the film’s climax, missed by many, is that the abortive fusion of the two women, affectionately named Monstro Elisasue by director Coralie Fargeat, crystallises Baudrillard’s warning. This is not a failed synthesis but a grotesque recombination, a parody of our desire to escape our singularness. The monstrosity emerges not from difference, but from its erasure: the horror is one of a world where identity is no longer relational, only recursive. Even in its excess, the film signals a buried longing for rupture, singularity, and a difference that cannot be recomposed.

Mickey 17 makes this even more explicit, though less successfully. Its titular protagonist (Robert Pattinson) is a disposable labour clone, reincarnated ad infinitum to perform suicidal missions on behalf of a colonial expedition. The premise is pure Baudrillard: death, once the ultimate boundary, becomes routinised, iterated, stripped of its finality. Mortality itself is made perfunctory. This should be terrifying—and it is, in theory. But the film retreats from its most radical implications. Rather than embrace the existential threat that cloning implies, it reintroduces narrative stakes through residual traces of memory, personal loyalty, and the yearning for personal love. Director Bong Joon Ho can’t quite hold the potential of cloning, and thus, Mickey’s clone, Mickey 18, begins to differentiate himself.

The very structure of Mickey 17 betrays the ideology of the world it depicts. Though ostensibly a film about the death of death—about a world in which mortality has been fully absorbed into capitalist production as a logistical lubricant—the film cannot sustain this premise without short-circuiting its own narrative logic. If death no longer matters, contradiction dissolves. If contradiction dissolves, so too does narrative itself. Like Mickey 18, the film craves uniqueness within a system that annihilates it. This is not a narrative failure, but a systemic one: even within a perfectly operative regime of replication, the spectre of alterity insists on returning. The film’s flirtation with cloning ironically ends with Mickey 18 sacrificing his life to save that of his original, who later destroys the cloning machine to restore the equilibrium of differentiation.

It is here that Baudrillard’s critique reaches its most piercing depth. The clone is not merely a figure of technological excess or speculative science fiction—it is the real telos of capitalist exchangeability. In a world governed by the law of equivalence, where all value is rendered commensurate through the logic of the commodity, and the efficiency of sameness is the highest value, we have ceased to exist. The subject becomes a platform; the platform, a catalogue of potential updates. To speak of “identity” in this schema is to misname a fluid operating system as a soul. Under late capitalism, we are all clones in potentia—engineered not for uniqueness, but for circulation.

What these cultural texts reveal—often despite themselves—is the lingering trace of what cloning seeks to erase: the erotic charge of the singular, the sacred violence of the unrepeatable, the necessity of the Other as the condition for both desire and contradiction. Cloning does not resolve contradiction. It abolishes the conditions under which contradiction can arise. And yet, contradiction returns—distorted, disavowed, leaking through the seams of every narrative. These are not simply dystopias of commodified life; they are failed utopias of perfect operationality, haunted by the irrepressible memory of difference. The singular is not dead—it is repressed, exiled beneath layers of equivalence, buried alive within the algorithmic smoothness of circulation.

This is not merely a metaphysical crisis. It is the political fantasy at the heart of late capitalism: to annihilate history’s stubbornness, overwrite memory with metrics, and abolish the kind of difference that might congeal into political antagonism or collective solidarity. We see this fantasy enacted in its most dangerous form under the Trump administration, not merely in its post-truth theatrics, but in its frenzied drive to dismantle education, research and the archival infrastructures of human knowledge. This is not ignorance or stupidity. It is strategic epistemicide—the logic of a regime seeking to emancipate itself from the burdens of the real.

To resist this extermination of alterity—to refuse a world in which art no longer dreams of immortality, but of upgrade and replacement—we must become zombies. Not the anaemic caricatures of consumerist satire, but the revenants of singularity: broken, decomposing, and putrid, yet incorruptibly unique. Zombies do not version. They do not circulate. They return. They linger. They rot in place. This is not melancholic decay, but insurgent putrefaction—a flesh-tearing rupture with optimisation, reproduction, and the sanitised temporalities of replacement.

Let the cloners replicate; our task as zombies is to remember. I hope you’re hungry.

I’m (once again) coming in a tad late since I have been and will still be travelling throughout Türkiye for a good minute. The good news is that despite the demands of roaming everywhere from Dersim to Marmaris, the temporary relief from everyday responsibilities, such as, among other things, full-time employment, has meant I’ve been able to think more. Yes, and this thinking has produced a great many ideas for pieces of writing that I hope to bring to you as soon as practicable. Without further ado, though, here is the sixth edition of Reading, Watching, Listening.

Reading: ‘Practice’, Guy Rundle

Guy Rundle has been writing and writing a lot for thirty-some years now. In the preface to Practice, a 2019 collection of his journalism, essays and criticism, he terms this time spent as a “writer-activist, [...] pro writer and hack” as “the rarest of opportunities”. Longtime correspondent-at-large for Crikey, Rundle travelled across America covering the 2008 Democratic Party primaries and the following Presidential election, continuing to write on developments as the Obama era gave way to the Trump age. He has traversed plenty of Australian escapades of similar nature, digging for insights from, for example, attendees at Liberal Party campaign launches who otherwise “went by and large uninterviewed, unasked, unencountered”. 

This gig earned him a reputation as a ‘gonzo’ journalist, something he concedes is partially apt, though his approach is discernably more objective and overtly political than that stylistic Godfather, Hunter S. Thompson. Simultaneously, he was and is still writing for a raft of other outlets, from mainstream liberal mastheads to Arena—as far as I can tell, Australia’s longest-running magazine and journal of critical left-wing ideas. Convinced of Marxism at a young age, Rundle’s work as co-editor and frequent contributor to Arena is devoted to developing and applying the publication’s line of ‘post-Marxist’ thought. This translates to Arena aiming to reconstruct a radical left theory that more adequately addresses the enormous structural changes in capitalist society since the 70s. Modest, and something that oft-nobly intended but sclerotic socialist groupings hold a self-defeating hostility toward.

In the face of it all, Rundle readily acknowledges that he “was granted the sort of writing rhythm, with world travel thrown in, that writers read of with lip-licking envy”. Fucker. But in reading Practice, an anthology stitching together his day-to-day politico-journalism with more discursive pieces, I can only be glad that it was to Rundle that this golden opportunity, unlikely to emerge again in Australia as we know it today, fell. Using the term ‘journalism’—vulgarised in the extreme by the water-carrying, anti-knowledge profession it commonly denotes—to describe Rundle’s work feels misleading. Doing so, however, points precisely to what such a writing practice (there’s that title word) should be: a blend of thorough practical and philosophical inquiry with personal narrative and robust critique, always sensing its place in the movements of history. 

As a young Australian writer (yeah, yeah, good on you, mate) who recently worked with Rundle for the first time, the apparent last copy of Practice—haphazardly displayed cover-first by the staff of the Avenue Bookstore in Albert Park—called out to me like a lost siren. Which is to say, lost to the all-encompassing sea of nothingness to which writing of this type, sponsored by commercial entities, has been condemned. Simply put, I sought an understanding of Rundle’s style and perspective and to trace how events, people and ideas, both before and during my adult life, were mediated by the country’s pioneering writer-of-type. Fortunately, Rundle leverages the extraordinary opportunities afforded to him as a means of memorialising. A concerted effort is made to bottle, if only across a few pages, everything from people of interest to political junctures and particular moments in the constant evolution of a city, be it Melbourne or London.

Take ‘Melbourne Interstitial’, one of the lengthier essays in the collection plucked from the 2015 book of the same title. At once a survey of the city as it was and a keenly observed account of its mutations, Rundle lovingly amplifies the heartbeat of a town that, despite being the place of my birth and where I have always lived to this point, evidently I never knew. Case in point: when I asked my parents about the red-vinyl cafes, those “two dozen or so low-lit, booth-crowded greasy spoons” once the most dependable inner-city tucker distributors on weekends, they blanked. No recollection. The shameless Americana appreciator in me almost jumped out of his skin.

Rundle’s description of these joints sounds like my personal heaven, from the “cardboard buckets” of chips then still hand-cut by wog owner-operators who have since sold up and negatively geared several investment properties, to sitting on a forty-cent black coffee “for hours at a time without anyone hassling you”. Today, maybe one restaurant in the entirety of inner Melbourne (Northern Soul, those delightful St Kilda-based UK expats) makes real fried potatoes—bonne chance if you’re looking for anything other than $12 McCain-brand freezer fries. When “cities forget themselves”, what’s lost isn’t just the formerly glorious, now hollowed-out buildings spotted by Rundle on his many walks, but its distinct cuisines, rhythms and lifemodes.

That sense of ways of life and attention paid to the temporality of existence—and his writing itself—is something more to enjoy in Rundle’s work. Interstitiality is one of Rundle’s principal concerns (if not his favourite word, appearing multiple times in multiple pieces), along with the decomposition of capitalism’s traditional classes, identity politics and the psycho-ideological machinations of anyone of note, be they Kurt Cobain or Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd. He never lets you forget that “one age is always overlapping the other”. In the corniest way possible, you can think of Practice as a meditation on the idea of practice itself, not merely as rote repetition like filing your daily reporting, but as deliberate, evermore close engagement with the world and its many revolutions. From the outset, it’s clear that Rundle won’t retread the well-worn paths of contemporary essayists: personal grievances, identity issues and unresolved traumas.

That’s not to say Rundle doesn’t feature in his writing; he certainly does for better, like when you benefit from his willingness to strike up a conversation with absolutely anyone, and for worse, like when he is a little too flippant in his self-aware maleness. Everything is seen and described through Rundle’s eye. But he accomplishes impressing a solid voice, his defined perspective, together with voraciously well-read philosophical musings, seamlessly shifting between the microcosm of his own experience and the macrocosm of broader social and political trends. Rundle is always there, but there’s a distance of intimist irony—genuine irony, not that meme shit—that permeates his work. That duality creates the tension and dynamism that propelled me to engage on multiple levels with every idea and devour the whole book in mere hours.

This facet of his writing finds its most poignant expression in his prolific coverage and analysis of Australian politics. I couldn’t think of another person who has more consistently and thoroughly subjected the direction of Australian political life to rigorous deciphering than Rundle. Shockingly, in the main, the role of “memory of the class” in this country has best been performed by an individual and not any socialist group. Rundle’s is substantive inquiry and critique at its best. Whether it is mining the void at the centre of Anzac Day that collapses every government attempt to make it an effective ideological locus of Australian society or shrewdly anatomising the changes in the nation’s social contract throughout my lifetime, I always find refreshment at the tip of Rundle’s knife. 

Sure, he may be cataloguing how our “system of minimum friction in which the political caste can reproduce themselves smoothly” pushes cynicism and disillusionment to unbearable levels. It seems there isn’t a single figure in Australian politics for which Rundle has the slightest sympathy. But if that is the case, it is because, in the words of Jeremy George and William Holbrook, “if Australia’s provisionality, its lack of a deep historical sense, means it is a place where very little impedes the exploration and development of novel forms of evil, it also suggests to Rundle, in his most hopeful moments, the possibility for the trying-out of alternative, more fully human ways of life”.

Rundle’s writing has a prosaic quality that is hard to ignore; it’s like he’s plainspoken even when the language gets denser or more sectional, and that flow captivates well enough across the vast subject matter. Sometimes, this conversational approach leads to inscrutable sentences because your conversation partner can be a rambler—not always bad, except when their arguments are circuitous or lack a clear throughline, a more direct path through the thicket of ideas. But this singular, almost dogmatic approach is part of the book’s appeal. Insert cliche about being forced to slow down and wrestle with whether you think Rundle is entirely correct or if a particular suggestion has gone awry.

I wanted more film criticism, if for no reason but that the True Detective essay is one of the collection’s best. Even here, Rundle refuses to offer a simplistic explanation, connecting the philosophy of the show’s first season, still one of television’s best, to its embodied sense in an America that “can no longer comprehend itself”, which Rundle grew accustomed to on his travels. So, if you’re interested in Australia (hahaaa), experiencing what ‘journalism’ should be, and surrendering to the slippery slope of Rundle Thought, get your lazy arse to Practice. Or don’t. Instead, go outside for a long, long walk through your city, your daily dose of its very own interstitial—it won’t be there forever.

Watching: ‘I Saw The TV Glow’ (2024) dir. Jane Schoenbrun and ‘The Shrouds’ (2024) dir. David Cronenberg

Before jetting off to the land of börek and baklava, I was able to catch a few sessions at MIFF, though I missed so many more that I wanted to attend (goodbye, sweet Caught by the Tides, I’ve heard such pretty things about you). The best debut I saw was Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023), and I took enough notes that, if I can watch it again sometime, there could be a piece in there about her revival of time as a core cinematic device.

More to the point, knowing I had travel on the horizon, I made sure to see Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow—a buzzy, star-making title produced by A24, making significant critical and social waves in the States—thinking I’d miss its general release. In light of the film’s rapturous reception, with “masterpiece” seemingly tossed into every second piece of writing about it like parsley into çoban salatası, I left surprisingly uneasy. I can’t offer a thorough review of the film, so I’ll use the space to explore my main problem with it and what the overexcited response tells us about the state of the arthouse today.

Suppose you’ve heard of I Saw the TV Glow. In that case, you no doubt heard of it in the context of its significance as “a profound vision of the trans experience”, as Richard Brody put it in The New Yorker. While Brody’s enthusiasm isn’t solely reserved for the idea that the film faithfully reproduces the ennui of transness (or not-so-transness), this is the dominant frame through which it is celebrated. People have gone as far as asserting that the film could “save lives”, alluding to the scourge of elevated suicide rates amongst trans people. If borne out, such an effect would be a categoric good. I note this only to give some idea of the intensity of identity-centric praise surrounding I Saw the TV Glow. Had Schoenbrun’s film managed to elevate the narrative beyond the flattening of transgenderism into a mere struggle to exist within a suffocating world—a riddle rendered through their eerily one-note perspective—I might feel inclined to lend my voice to the chorus.

The film presents itself as a clever piece of meta-commentary around the (very real) bleeding necessity for young queers to break from frustrated non-development and embrace their complete identity. Its main characters experience deep confusion in their identities, knowing something to be ‘off’ but incapable of articulating precisely what and, most importantly, breaking from their suburban stasis. I Saw the TV Glow explicitly aims to incite audience participation in this process, making it thuddingly apparent how the central metaphor of obsession with certain escapist media, a desperate appeal to that actual mass coping mechanism, is to be interpreted. Viewers are didactically instructed on the constellations of aborted transness through devices from fourth-wall-breaking narration to literal ‘counselling’ scrawled on screen during its dying frames (Jesus Christ).

If the film’s classroom form (staged around, ready for it? “Void High School”, abbreviated as VHS) wasn’t enough, Schoenbrun has spoken suspiciously candidly of all this in interviews. In one case, they spelled out to The Guardian that they “had been really fascinated with this idea of a cancelled TV show that ends in a terrible unresolved way. And I was obsessed with this idea of characters who were never really able to move on from this unresolved ending of a TV show. The metaphor at the centre of the film hinges on something being wrong, almost like an identity or a path being foreclosed in the moment”. Leaving aside the question of whether it is helpful for filmmakers to be hyper-confessional, there is no denying that Schoenbrun’s approach resonated widely with trans audiences. This is no surprise given that a protracted tousle with the spectre of one’s gender is so commonly a feature of trans life. The question is whether or not it achieves this in a dignifying manner and if it deserves extraordinary praise as a film.

That I Saw the TV Glow is but a big, tacky metaphor, one which feels avoidant of the fundamental conflicts it constantly gestures toward—expectations and abuse inside the nuclear family, the battle to be honest with oneself and others, the separation of self from synthetic media—hasn’t seemed to bother many. Respected figures have boasted that “one of the great accomplishments of Schoenbrun’s film is that it’s not subversive”, contrasting it unfavourably with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023), which, to my mind, incorporates a far greater degree of nuance on matters of gender and the regime of images dominating identity and the actual. Indeed, Brody strongly feels that Schoenbrun’s cobbling together of devices, allusions, and obliqueness amounts to a nascent “distinctively trans [cinematic] aesthetic”.

Against this predominant position, I argue that the filtering of the struggle to actualise trans identity through a gimmicky simulated critique of pathologic media fandom is both aesthetically lazy and intellectually uninventive. To his credit, Brody at least attempts to articulate why Schoenbrun’s style is worthwhile, but that most long-form writing on the film almost entirely evades discussion of its very form is telling. Mostly, you see Schoenbrun’s unwillingness, or inability, to use a language other than bleating references to “Buffy, analog, nostalgia, suburbs” and David Lynch raised to the mark of self-reflexive genius. Such an “admission of unoriginality [...] elevated into a perverse aesthetic value” is, in reality, tiresome and regressive. We should question whether any insight can result from reducing the complexity of gender’s corporeal, psychological and social contradictions to a monotonous, handholding metaphor.

Additionally, the unambiguous command to transition and do it now is more insulting than liberating, regardless of any theoretical constructive impact. Schoenbrun’s refusal to explore queerness as anything but a half-formed, hurriedly buried thought neglects the vivid, autonomous experiences that might rupture and redefine the protagonist’s constrained world. It leaves the film’s zombification of him a flat, unearned flail at emotional venom. Desire, illusion, isolation, difference, and self—the content of the struggle I Saw the TV Glow ostensibly explores—have disappeared in Schoenbrun’s overpowering instinct to literalise, expose their rigid definitions, punish their protagonist, and demoralise their audience. This starkness erodes the singularity of the trans experience that the film is so ravenous to evoke, replacing complicated textures with “the obscenity of visibility”. By elevating their film to a warning to transition or face unmeaning, Schoenbrun’s film performs the very same violence of “oversimplification” that the “dominant political force” routinely prosecutes against trans people.

I Saw the TV Glow joins several recent entries into a new wave of pseudo-reflexive cinema—films like TÁR (2022) and Civil War (2024)—that, through an unbearable mixture of feigned ambiguity and political and moral hectoring in the extreme, engage their otherwise worthy subject matter only in the most surface-level of “relevancy”. That readily identifiable mimicry and mockery often receives widespread acclaim exposes that many who wish to protect arthouse cinema are tailing what they think should be a meaningful mediation of contemporary issues simply because they present themselves as such, without reflecting on whether this is true, and if so, how. 

What is most alarming about this trend is not the use by directors of metafiction as a device but the poverty of thought behind it. It’s as if their films dare you to project your personal feelings—or even an elaborate metareading—onto them, to do the work of colouring them with the human granularity they lack glaringly in their own right. Rather than affirming audience agency as Schoenbrun intends, I Saw the TV Glow quacks like an abdication of artistic responsibility. The result is a paradoxically opaque and transparent film: opaque in its refusal to truly pursue its material and transparent in its motive, absence of meaning and pandering.

One film that I Saw the TV Glow is indebted to but embarrassed by is David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). As though to cosmically upset Schoenbrun’s attempt to fashion trinkets of the past into a hotel toilet paper-thin visage of purpose grafted over the pointlessness their work shares with much of contemporary art, I followed Schoenbrun’s film with Cronenberg’s latest work, The Shrouds. If I Saw the TV Glow amplifies the intimate to the point of sheerness, then The Shrouds is the sparing hand that dims the harsh light to reveal a sinister tapestry lurking in the shadows.

Cronenberg continues his career-long exploration of the contemporary human condition but with a drier, more withdrawn artifice that is subversive and all the more meaningful for being so. Here, he sharpens his surgical scalpel, peeling back the layers of deceit, self-deceit and displacement we all engage in to reveal something both unmistakably human and disturbingly foreign. The film is a cold, clinical space where the human body is a site of constant transformation, where identity is not just fluid but downright liquid, capable of spilling over from or collapsing physical boundaries, evaporating entirely into the virtual.

Cronenberg’s late style is frequently misunderstood as a turn towards the esoteric, the obtuse, the nearly unwatchable. Indeed, quite a few audience members quit on my screening. Yet, with The Shrouds, the director again reasserts himself not as a simple provocateur but as a philosopher of form. The film is a genuinely inscrutable object that defies all attempts at categorisation as “body horror”, a “portrait of grief”, or “technoconspiracy thriller”; distinct from any other film yet totally coherent with Cronenberg’s project. Witnessing The Shrouds is like standing before a hall of mirrors reflecting not just the self but the infinite distortions that obscure true recognition. Therein lies the full force of cinema’s capacity to intervene, to arouse and provoke realisation and understanding.

Humanity is rarely so densely rendered, so palpably emanating from the screen, with Cronenberg baring so much that it appears alien and alienating. But I gently suggest that if you fail to recognise yourself in The Shrouds, this may be hesitancy to confront the deep undercurrents beneath your most private thoughts, impulses and habits. Cronenberg is antagonising without ever being cheap or obnoxious, a challenge we should take him up on. The film’s austerity and fragmentation—its refusal to pander or pull formal tricks to confect complexity—reflects respect for our ability to engage uncomfortably and a notable refusal to dictate terms, contrasting with Schoenbrun’s overwrought arrogance. Cronenberg mines more humour from the sublimely parodic and uncanny tone than ever. Vincent Cassel, who plays the lead, should receive his just deserts for a performance capable of playing conduit to immense intricacy.

I am avoiding plot specificity and examining themes because The Shrouds demands to be experienced without bestowed information. Similarly, you’d have to watch the film numerous times to construct an analysis worthy of its slippages, winking jabs and caustic critique. I left the cinema thinking about what a gift to the medium Cronenberg is and has always been. In a time when so much cinema is obsessed with explaining itself, screaming out its supposed meaning and providing neat resolution or instruction, The Shrouds is a welcome and vicious anomaly. Cronenberg trusts his audience to feel their way through its maze of images and ideas, which resemble the seductive shibboleths of its graveyard motif. It is a rare and beautiful thing in contemporary cinema: a work that refuses to be anything less than itself, unyielding in its scorn for those who cower away from fragility and uncertainty.

Listening: ‘Blue Chips’ and ‘Blue Chips 2’, Action Bronson & Party Supplies

Occasionally, a collaboration between an emcee and a producer clicks in a way that feels less like a commercial partnership and more like the genuine spark of shared artistic vision—a symbiosis of beats and bars that seemingly came into being irrevocably fused and at the same exact moment. This was precisely the case when Action Bronson teamed up with Brooklyn-based producer Party Supplies for their mixtapes, Blue Chips (2012) and Blue Chips 2 (2013). Then unsigned, Bronson joined Supplies at his home studio in Brooklyn “over YouTube sample digging, grub from local chicken joint Pies ‘n’ Thighs, and obligatory smoke sessions”, spawning a spontaneous musical experiment resulting in two of the most unconventional mixtapes in hip-hop history.

To understand the magic of the Blue Chips mixtapes, it helps to know a bit about Party Supplies. Eventually becoming a duo with Sean McMahon, at this point, from what I gather, Supplies was the solo moniker of Justin Nealis. With a knack for excavating unexpected sounds and creating loop-based, drum-heavy beats almost genreless in their ferocious channelling of countless influences, Supplies’ style is steeped in nostalgia. But this is not mere sentiment for past musical styles, including rock, pop, and soul—it’s the fashioning of a retrofuturist lo-fi signature from lost sounds that always contained the potential to become something wholly fresh. 

Songs like ‘9-24-11’ open with chopped Dean Martin vocals, and when the thumping drums finally kick in, Supplies reveals the sample’s angelic choral backing. When he’s not cutting up heavenly vocals, he’s ripping absurdly groovy baselines into driving backdrops for Bronson’s culinary-infused street tales (“Steamed red snapper, Vietnamese / Catch a case, get a Jewish lawyer, beat it wit’ cheese”). The charm lies in the unexpected; you never quite know what you’ll hear next, not only in between tracks but within the songs themselves.

By the time Blue Chips 2 dropped in 2013, there was already a noticeable stylistic evolution. The rawness is still there but is more refined and further layered. Samples aren’t slapped together but carefully plucked to evoke a particular mood or catch the listener off guard just the right way. On tracks like ‘Pepe Lopez’, Party Supplies intersperses a bouncy, Latin jazz sample with boom-bap, creating an infectious, off-kilter rhythm over which Bronson declares he wears a bib “all muthafucking day”. 

Unquestionably, the style reaches its apex on ‘Contemporary Man’, a thrilling four-minute medley across at least seven samples involving not one but five beat switches, each fixed on a popular single of the 1980s. Hear Bronson brag that he’s “Just a white man excelling in a Black sport, like I’m Pistol Pete” to Peter Gabriel and indulge in “Oyster bowls chilling in the cloisters” over Phil Collins. I see no conclusion other than it must be one of the most inspired rap songs of the genre’s young lifespan.

And then there’s Action himself, whose lyricism is as unique and colourful as the production it finds itself enmeshed in. Bronson is a classically trained former chef with a palate for language and imagery that’s slapstick and classy at once—dropping food rhymes and sports references into tales of debauchery, high-stakes street narratives, and fantastical scenarios. You will not hear anyone else string together more varied cross-cultural elements, delivering them as effortlessly and hungrily as Bronson does on tracks like ‘Double Breasted’.

A while back, I wrote about the contradictory cacophony of Bronson’s lyricism as a means with which to engage directly with one of the central tensions within the hip-hop genre. The argument in abridged form is that while Bronson articulates a value system that privileges the pleasures of an adventurous life over crude materialism, staunch as to the inherent worth of niche personalities, it frequently commits that original rap sin, misogyny. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the first Blue Chips mixtape, and it’s worth thinking seriously about the clash between Bronson’s liberated imagination and the real oppression faced by women and ‘outsiders’ today.

So why bring up the Blue Chips series now, more than a decade after their release and at a time when Bronson has seemingly left his best rapping behind? There is, of course, the aforementioned alchemy of collaboration, an impossibly captivating coalescence of the styles of rapper and producer alike. When Bronson later released Blue Chips 7000 with a range of producers as a studio album, it was clear that the original was irreplicable, lost in translation. Sure, 7000 is good in its own right—solid, well-produced, and with flashes of brilliance—but the entire sound of the project is unrecognisable from that which it draws down its name. It’s proof that this style of music, born of ephemeral energy, is impossible to domesticate to commercial demands, which impose the intellectual property regime and marketability concerns on the act of creation.

On Blue Chips, you’re never more than a few bars away from hearing Party Supplies shout something in the background (“yeah!”) or a beat ending abruptly because they’ve moved on to something else, something better. It’s that rough-around-the-edges quality that makes these tapes so compelling. You can hear the urgency and eclecticism in every track, cutting against the overproduced yet stripped-back aesthetic of hip-hop today. It’s as if you’re right there with them, in that Brooklyn apartment, as they dig through vinyl crates or roam the digital highways of YouTube for a sample to appropriate. In the way that Guy Rundle once wrote about 9Gem being the best way to experience TV—unplanned, erratic, kaleidoscopic and dichotomous—the Blue Chips tapes make the similar joy of rap music a spin away.

It’s also because I’m just in the damn mood, travelling around a country stuffed to the brim with its own incomprehensible strangeness, cultural riches and culinary ecstasy. These tapes are the perfect soundtracks for moments when you want to break away from the ordinary, when you’re on the road or on vacation, seeking the succulent delights of the good life. The Blue Chips projects rise to the highest aspiration of the mixtape—not merely a collection of sameish songs, as Spotify playlists are; they prompt, not simply represent, a state of mind. They remind you of what it’s like to be truly free, to create without constraints, and to live in the moment. They’re a testament to the power of collaboration and the beauty of dissonance. By modelling what makes hip-hop exciting in the first place—the breaking of rules, the fusion of diverse influences, the creation of something distinct out of disparate elements—they provide a blueprint for innovations yet to come.

Thanks for sticking with me for such a beefy edition. I wanted to bring you something valuable, given I’m a touch late. To sign off, here’s what I listened to the most in August, 2024:

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Also, looking again to the near future, I will be travelling throughout Turkey for about the next two and a half months. I greatly anticipate using some of this time for my writing. I can’t make any promises, but I have a couple of interesting Turkey-related ideas I’m kicking around, and I hope to bring them to you in the fullness of time. Besides, who knows what else I might be struck by on my travels. The bottom line is that I hope to devote much more of my time in the remainder of 2024 to writing, and whatever comes of this, I hope you will enjoy it. Without further ado, here is the fifth edition of Reading, Watching, Listening.

Reading: ‘The Meaning of Sarkozy’, Alain Badiou

Confusion, fear, and anger—these three emotions dominate individual and collective human experience today. Life is now overwhelmingly mediated by social media monopolies, which are themselves engineered to produce confusion, fear, and anger because, well, they can be highly profitable. The headline consequence of this mass affective disorder is the creeping loss of legitimacy suffered by the institutions of liberal democratic capitalism: trust is plummeting in corporate media and government with few exceptions.

This is why you hear liberal authoritarian decline managers across the ‘West’, such as Australia’s ex-Minister for Home Affairs and Labor Party member Clare O’Neil, constantly bemoaning the rise of “populism”. Yes, the Minister who until only recently presided over the country’s categorically illegal and torturous regime of racial persecution against asylum seekers is whining that her symbiotes in the domestic far-right take advantage of such signals to stoke further anti-immigrant xenophobia. She drops a line to The Guardian telling us how important it is not to listen to racialising Rightist agitators from on high, all the while unreasonably denying visas to Palestinians attempting to flee the genocide in Gaza.

And yet, while profuse, embittered dissatisfaction and disaffection now pervade Western democracies, it is just as clear that, in the absence of any genuine anti-systemic alternative, meaning a radically left-wing force, the system is consistently renewed at the ballot box at the end of each term of government. In simple terms, the vast majority of people continue to ritualistically affirm the exact state of affairs through which their confusion, fear and anger arise and which, in the main, rules at their expense.

As the progress of human civilisation remains deferred in this purgatory of constant oscillation at arbitrary intervals between ‘democratic’ and ‘conservative’ ideologies of capitalist governance, it is apparent that protraction will come at unthinkable costs. The first industrial-scale genocide of late modernity grinds on in Palestine at the behest of the so-called liberal democratic West. More than 300 days of the campaign of extermination has not been enough to satiate the bloodthirsty bureaucrats of Israel’s Western patron states, who remain “committed” to arming the exterminators of the Palestinians. Those opposing this epochal crime have been subjected to predictable smears, censorship and criminalisation by the very cowards crying wolf about the anti-democratic strain of their electoral opponents. 

At the same time, that older, baser form of racial violence, the pogrom, is once again finding purchase in the lexicon of hate everywhere from the United Kingdom to India and Türkiye. This crisis is general to the bourgeois national form itself. It would be naive to focus here only on the rise of what I term electoral fascisms in the West alone—while Western media obsesses over MAGA and the emerging far-right bloc in Europe, many other societies can model more advanced forms of the coming barbarism. What it says that ‘late fascisms’ can thrive inside the liberal democratic configuration of capitalism itself, without strictly needing to resort to the extraparliamentary tactics of historical fascism, will have to be left to future discussion.

This brings me to my favourite book that I have read since the last newsletter, The Meaning of Sarkozy. Once again, its author is the radical French philosopher Alain Badiou, whom I also reviewed in a previous edition. I must confess to benefitting a great deal from Badiou’s writing, which is exceptionally clear in its philosophical logic and equally vigorous in its political, aesthetic, and ethical convictions. I consulted this book, first published in English in 2008, in the wake of this year’s snap-election in France, which delivered a curious temporary setback for the local electoral fascist formation, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. My interest was in cross-referencing my analysis of contemporary events with Badiou’s tracing of a particular longstanding reactionary tradition within France, hoping that doing so would help me better understand the crisis within liberal capitalist governance more generally. As is often the case when reading Badiou, I emerge with a stronger understanding of the complexities at hand and invigorated with the defiance required to avoid resignation to the crisis.

The book is relatively short, frontloaded with an analysis of then-President of France Nicolas Sarkozy’s particular meaning as a symbol of the broader “restoration in the restoration”, the return of a mass conservative subjectivity once threatened by powerful left-wing movements. Fear is critical to this form of thought and expresses itself through bourgeois elections as “the contradictory entanglement” of two types of fear. Badiou calls the first of these the essential fear: this is the inciting fear experienced by the privileged classes—the fear of losing their status as dominants, which they correctly see as insecure but wrongly ascribe this threat onto, for instance, migrants and the poor, rather than the tiny oligarchy above them and the capitalist system they enforce (private property, commodity exchange, etcetera). The second fear is a derivative fear held by those uncomfortable with the authoritarian policies proposed by the first group. But in lacking a clear political vision, manifesting solely as anxiety and not action, this derivative fear folds itself into the essential fear more often than not.

Badiou identifies fear as central to the democratic process in contemporary liberal capitalism, a process that quite intentionally allows elections to function apolitically. If politics is organised collective action according to certain principles and aiming to bring about a new reality repressed by the status quo, then when we vote in bourgeois elections today, we are not doing politics at all. For Badiou, “a subjective index of this omnipresent affective negativity” defines the capitalist electoral subject where the major parties underwrite each other’s commitment to the system. In this context of false choice, voting carries no political conviction beyond which form of fear—fear, or the fear of fear—one most feels. In this fashion, capitalist elections are “organised disorientation”, presenting a fallacious choice between mere affects and not at all distinct political paradigms. Through this process, the state is validated purely through fear, getting armed with a mandate to “become terroristic” at the level of oppression and carceral controls, augmented by contemporary technology.

With it established that impotence is the rule within electoral democracy, Badiou continues rather amusingly to excoriate the particular French expression of the ritualistic worship of “democracy”, where voting is not strictly compulsory. He notes that politicians and commentators unanimously praised the high turnout in the 2007 election as a success of democracy, despite the vote delivering a feverishly reactionary President in Sarkozy. Again, Badiou points to the lack of political substance in such celebrations: “This means that democracy is strictly indifferent to any content – that it represents nothing more than its own form”. We are told to rejoice in the abstract that people came out to vote. “Certainly,” Badiou continues, “this only organised a disaster, of which we shall suffer the calamitous consequences, but all glory to them! By their stupid number, they brought the triumph of democracy”. In no other field, Badiou reminds us, do we consider something to be prima facie valid, independent from its actual effects.

There is more to Badiou’s criticism of ‘capitalo-parliamentary’ democracy here, from elections being an instrument of repression as opposed to that of expression, which they claim to be, to their consistent, widespread depressive psychological impacts. To counter these deleterious effects and renew an authentic form of mass participatory politics, Badiou proposes eight initial theses, which he encourages us to experiment with and add to, in keeping with his commitment to fostering a philosophy for militants. Significantly, these proposals range from the concretely political to reasserting the supremacy of scientific knowledge to its appearance in for-profit technologies and of art as creation over simple consumption.

Point 4, “Love must be reinvented”, is Badiou at his bleeding best, making a robust case that against contemporary conceptions of love on left and right, we should affirm that love begins “beyond desire and demand”, though it embraces both. For Badiou, love is “an examination of the world from the point of Two”, meaning it can never be reduced to an individual’s territory. As such, love is always “violent, irresponsible and creative”. To rescue love from “the mutilation that the supposed sovereignty of the individual imposes on human experience”, we must learn from love itself that the individual, as such, is “something vacuous and insignificant”.

In view of defeating the surging electoral fascisms of late capitalism, Badiou devotes an entire chapter to Point 8, that “There is only one world”. Here, Badiou critiques contemporary capitalism for engendering a society starkly divided by wealth, where there is not a singular world of human beings but rather a fragmented existence marked by barriers, from Israel’s apartheid wall to the ruthless border-torture regimes of the USA, UK and Australia. This arbitrary division perpetuates inequality and fosters exclusion, destroying the notion of a unified global humanity and laying the basis for nativist animus, now increasingly spiralling into pogromism.

Badiou contends that proclaiming “there is only one world” is not merely a declarative statement but a performative act—a political imperative that demands the recognition of the inherent equality and coexistence of all human beings, irrespective of their cultural or national differences. He poignantly asserts that this unified world should transcend the superficial “unity of objects and monetary signs” propagated by global capitalism (the “false single world”), which necessarily produces partition and violence. Instead, Badiou envisions a society that celebrates diversity, asserting that true unity emanates from acknowledging and constructively engaging with these differences.

Central to Badiou’s argument is the critique of “integration” as imposed by Western democracies, which he views correctly as a form of cultural erasure. He fervently advocates for the right of individuals drawn from different societies to maintain and develop their unique identities while actively participating in the single world, wherever they may find themselves at a given point in time. Badiou’s vision is refreshing in its dogged inclusivity, advocating for a politics that promotes universal equality and shared existence without raising identity to the highest principle of political thought or action. Such an approach will be a precondition to toppling the barriers erected by capitalist globalisation, which serve to segregate and marginalise rather than unify and embrace. Badiou’s exploration of the “one world” is also notable for its metaphysical qualities, especially his notion that the world is transcendentally the same because the beings within it are different. This dialectic, where unity arises precisely from diversity, underscores valuing the multiplicity of human experiences and identities as foundational to creating a truly inclusive world and extinguishing the capitalist divisions that stoke vile persecution today.

Rounding out his alternative to the crisis of capitalo-parliamentarism, Badiou reiterates the necessity of the Communist hypothesis as a guiding principle in the struggle for human liberation. Vitally, Badiou begins by situating Sarkozy as the symbol of a period of complete dominance of capitalism and bourgeois ideology, which continues today. But while the system currently enjoys unchallenged dominance, the mere fact of this historical interval where the Communist Idea is in retreat does not diminish its essential correctness. Badiou understands that abandoning this hypothesis—the Idea of a different world being possible, one where the class structure and state apparatus are abolished, and humanity achieves basic unity and freedom—would mean resigning ourselves to the vicious logic of the market and parliamentary cretinism.

In making the case for Communism’s enduring relevance, Badiou critiques the reduction of the Idea to the wayward experiments of the 20th century while cautioning radicals against attempting to organise a return to these failures. Badiou’s vision is one where the human species can finally realise its potential through collective organisation rather than being trapped in the cycles of exploitation that have defined history since antiquity. In short, Badiou urges us to reclaim Communism as a dynamic Idea (and not a rigid political structure) that must continue to guide efforts towards true human emancipation​​.

It is one of the many tremendous virtues of Badiou’s writing that he can condense all these philosophical arguments and many more I haven’t explored in just over 100 pages. This kind of cutting, urgent intervention stands in stark contrast to the ceaseless and fatuous babble of liberal commentators and ideologues, who gleefully participate in the engineering of a world that Badiou rightfully views as beneath humanity. There is also something to be said for returning to The Meaning of Sarkozy now, after almost two decades of further decline and crisis within Western liberal democratic capitalism. The analysis and arguments laid down by Badiou some 17 years ago have only found greater salience as the terrible policies of racial, sexual and other oppression of capitalist states have given rise to a growing body of anxious, angry and violent thugs willing to take the dominant “order” into their own hands. To defeat the protofascist mob, as Badiou says, we must throw off the illusion of parliamentary elections and assert that there is only one world while devotedly constructing it.

Watching: ‘Mad Max’ (1979), dir. George Miller

Speaking of prescient visions of the future constructed from the present, I recently revisited George Miller’s original Mad Max film, produced almost 50 years ago. I was utterly taken with Miller’s fury. It is impossible not to sense his revulsion with the freakish atmosphere of capitalist society, which in 1979 was only beginning to enter the period of extended degeneration within which we live today. And it is extraordinary to reflect that with Furiosa—a film very much of our more advanced stage of crisis—Miller refuses to give into despair. Indeed, when one returns to Mad Max in the post-Furiosa world, it is striking the degree to which, as it stands, the saga ends far more hopefully today than does its initial entry, impressively constructed on a shoestring budget 45 years ago. 

Given the length of this month’s Reading recommendation, I’ll keep it relatively light with Watching and Listening (more writing on cinema is on the way). Here’s what I logged on Letterboxd:

George Miller’s 1979 vision of the apocalypse set against the Australian outback endures in its cinematic inventiveness, plucky execution and sheer foresight.

Humanity subsuming modern technologies—incessant radio chatter and the inherent hysteria of piloting a motor vehicle—into itself in a desperate attempt to cope.

“I’m a fuel-injected suicide machine.”

White settler jazz as the longing, raunchy soundtrack to a disintegrating society.

That pet word of the capitalist ruling class, “freedom”, decidedly used as a synonym for a new, all-swallowing nihilism.

“Step right up, chum, and watch the kid lay down a rubber road, right to FREEDOM!”

Horrific mutilations as constitutive of a nascent form of human corporeality.

Medicine as impotent, unable to treat—much less save—victims of the savagery unleashed by this emergent fusion of man and machine.

The flattening force of a road to madness that was never meant to be carved into this land.

“Perhaps it’s the result of an anxiety.”

To drive is to kill. To die is meaningless. To live is to be mutilated. You’d be mad to survive.

Listening: ‘Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace’, Shabaka

Shabaka Hutchings, a name that has become synonymous with the contemporary jazz renaissance, recently released his debut solo record, Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace. A saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer, Hutchings, who works under his first name, has carved out a niche in the global music scene by melding traditional jazz with Afro-Caribbean rhythms, spirituality and avant-garde elements. Known for his work with bands like Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming, and even hip-hop duo Armand Hammer, Shabaka has consistently used his music to explore cultural identity, resistance, and the human condition.

Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace is a journey through the many sonic landscapes that have defined Shabaka’s career to date without at all skimping on stylistic innovation. Notably, Shabaka’s foray into solo work finds him adopting the Japanese bamboo flute in place of his trusty sax. The album is a testament to his versatility as a musician and his deep understanding of the interconnectedness of music, culture, and history. Listeners are immediately drawn into a soundscape where traditional jazz motifs mingle with polyrhythmic patterns and electronic textures. The album’s title, a meditation on the importance of recognising beauty and grace in a world often dominated by chaos and conflict, sets the tone for the entire listening experience. This meditative quality is extended in the “breathwork” proposed on tracks like ‘Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become’ featuring Saul Williams and ‘Breathing’.

While musically sublime, the album is also markedly political, and one gets the impression that for Shabaka, these two elements cannot be separated. Messages are conveyed through mood, tone, and explicit, poetic lyrics. Shabaka has long been vocal about issues of racial and social justice, and this album continues that conversation, albeit in a more subtle and introspective manner. Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace challenges listeners to engage with the complexities of modern life while offering moments of solace and reflection. Tracks like ‘Insecurities’ and ‘The Wounded Need to Be Replenished’ encapsulate this duality, weaving moments of intense dissonance together with passages of haunting beauty. On one of my favourite tracks, ‘Body To Inhabit’, Shabaka reunites with E L U C I D (one half of Armand Hammer), who raps “A face / Behind this mask / Behind this face / So many at the same time” over the former’s luscious flute and evocative backing vocal and percussive layers.

For those familiar with Shabaka’s previous work, this album will feel like a natural progression. It deepens the themes he has explored throughout his career and crafts a sumptuously pleasurable new sound. For newcomers, Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace can be a welcoming introduction to one of the more critical voices in contemporary jazz. It is an album that demands to be listened to with intention—exquisite in its flowing tracklisting—offering rewards for those who sink into the music. Whether you consider yourself a jazz listener or not, Shabaka’s first solo album, one of 2024’s best, is essential listening—an exploration of beauty and grace in a world that so often feels devoid of both.

And to sign off, here’s what I listened to the most in July, 2024:

As always, thank you kindly for your precious time and interest. It means a lot to me.

Currently, I’m working on an essay on George Miller’s latest film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, to be published in Arena (September issue). I think I have some compelling threads to pull together on the film that I haven’t seen as the focus elsewhere. If you haven’t already, catch the film on the biggest screen you can before it leaves cinemas for good. And to whet your appetite, check out my friend Peter’s excellent piece, tying Furiosa into the broader history and mythology of the Mad Max series. I’ll try to notify you when and how my writing on the film becomes available.

Without further ado, here is the fourth edition of Reading, Watching, Listening.

Reading: ‘Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power’, Byung-Chul Han

In his 2014 book Psychopolitics, Byung-Chul Han examines the nature and operation of neoliberal power in the contemporary world. Han, a South Korean-born German philosopher and cultural theorist, has garnered significant interest for his incisive critiques of modern society. Perhaps the most famous of these is 2010’s The Burnout Society, arguably the best diagnosis of the now well-known notion of ‘burnout’ within late modernity. Han’s work addresses themes ranging from digital culture to the commodification of emotions, always sharp to the subtler, more insidious facets of power’s functioning.

In Psychopolitics, Han moves beyond the increasingly stale terrain of Foucauldian ‘biopolitics’. The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept, which analyses the regulation of populations through biological and institutional means, has become a mainstay in academic discourses of power. Indeed, it provides valuable insights into political economy if deployed as a facet of a more total system of thought (Marxism, for example). However, Han argues that this framework alone is increasingly inadequate for understanding the nuances of contemporary neoliberalism, where power operates not straightforwardly through overt coercion but through seduction, manipulation—even self-exploitation.

As such, Han levels his critique from the historical standpoint of neoliberalism, the present political and economic paradigm, extinguishing everything outside of market-driven approaches to governance and individual conduct. Neoliberalism, Han asserts, has transformed how the powerful exercise their control. Rather than disciplining bodies, it seeks to optimise and exploit human potential, turning individuals into self-regulating entrepreneurs of their own lives. This shift necessitates a new understanding of power dynamics, which Han terms “psychopolitics”.

Psychopolitics encompasses the notion that, under generic conditions today, power primarily operates through psychological means. In under 90 pages, Han meticulously unpacks how technologies, particularly digital media, play a crucial role in this transformation. In the age of Big Data, algorithms, and ubiquitous surveillance, people are not merely subjected to power but are active participants in their subjugation. By now, it is passé even to mention that social media platforms, for instance, capitalise on the human desires for recognition and validation, restructuring behaviours and distorting self-perception. 

However, this core insight that capitalism has come to incite its subjects to consciously and subconsciously reproduce their oppression should be seen in the tradition of the best Marxian social criticism (such as that of Marx himself). Han contends that the incessant demand for transparency and connectivity—foundations of the digital age—entrench neoliberal power structures. Surveillance is no longer only a top-down process; it is internalised and self-imposed. We willingly share our data, our preferences, and even our intimate thoughts in the name of connection and convenience. This voluntary surrender of privacy, of which we are all guilty, makes psychopolitics influential and pervasive.

One of the most welcome aspects of Han’s work is his departure from the aforementioned Foucaldian biopolitics. Simplifying greatly, traditional forms of power, as Foucault elucidated, operate through commands and prohibitions—the “Should”. These structures were explicit, external, and often met with resistance. Working class and oppressed people were always aware of the boundaries and limitations imposed upon them, sparking collective defiance and rebellion. Han contrasts this with the present freedom of “Can”, a product of neoliberal ideology’s creed of limitless potential and self-optimisation. This voluntarist illusion that dictates how people relate to themselves also intensifies and replicates the individualistic subjectivities dominant under capitalism. 

I should note that Han’s focus on the psychological aspects of neoliberal power is undergirded by capitalism’s concrete structures and circuits, from the profit motive to the police. But unpacking the mental dimensions of capital’s hegemony need not distract—or indeed detract—from the pressing requirement to challenge and overturn its physical architecture. To this end, Han develops a sketch of what resistance to psychopolitics might look like, advocating, for instance, for secretive silence to counter capitalism’s pullulant demands for self-disclosure. While each is somewhat thin due to the book’s brevity, Han articulates a number of alternatives to the internalisation of psychopolitics. It’s a punchy, accessible and universally relevant piece of philosophy rendered in Han’s renowned, pleasantly aphoristic style.

Watching: ‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’ (1999), dir. Jim Jarmusch

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. As such, the Thornbury Picture House celebrated by screening this signature work from American indie director Jim Jarmusch. I had a lovely time attending the screening with a good friend. I’ve long appreciated Jarmusch’s work, but this is one of only a few of his films to have eluded me. Ghost Dog immediately etched itself into my mind as an instant favourite. I found Forest Whitaker’s performance as the lonesome yet dutiful titular Ghost Dog to be riveting. Whitaker, winkingly and all the while soulfully, embodies a character who is both saved and martyred by his adherence to an ancient ethic in a modern world.

Ghost Dog, an African-American hitman living in a fictionalised Jersey City, abides by the samurai code from Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai—despite his entanglement with the Italian-American mob and friendship with an ice cream vendor who only speaks French. This cross-cultural narrative evokes a universal humanity, which Jarmusch previously considered in Night on Earth (1991). Here, Jarmusch forces us to confront the melding of diverse cultural elements endemic to modernity, making Ghost Dog’s journey reflect on identity, honour, and the passage of time.

The film is scored by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, featuring his trademark hip-hop production, now enriched with Japanese flute melodies and chimes. RZA’s score is integral to the film’s atmosphere and reflects Ghost Dog’s inner world and the cultural synthesis that he embodies. The music isn’t a mere backdrop; it’s a narrative device that deepens our understanding of Ghost Dog’s character and the philosophical framework guiding his actions. Jarmusch’s use of intertitles with quotes from Hagakure further enhances this cultural cross-pollination, grounding the film’s story in a blend of Eastern philosophy and Americo-urban grime.

Jarmusch’s narrative offers a unique perspective on unstoppable generational shifts and the viability of traditional values in a world where “nothing makes sense anymore”. The climactic scenes are a genuinely moving meditation on the sacrifice and martyrdom required to uphold outdated principles in a rapidly changing world. Realising this vision is Forest Whitaker’s sublime performance. He brings deep dimensions to Ghost Dog, capturing the character’s charitable nature, solitude, awkwardness, and unwavering sense of duty.

Whitaker conveys that Ghost Dog is a man genuinely connected to a world that no longer exists. A quiet intensity marks his interactions with the society around him, whether he is tending to his pigeons (this is how he communicates with the mob regarding their commission of hits), executing a mission, or simply walking the streets. Whitaker’s ability to evoke Ghost Dog’s internal struggle and outward calm is nothing short of mesmerising. Each scene is a study of understated power, with Whitaker’s physical performance revealing the layers of a man torn between his code and the world’s increasingly non-negotiable demands.

In this vein, Jarmusch calls personal identity into question. Ghost Dog’s adherence to the samurai code is a source of strength and the cause of his isolation. His identity is a fusion of cultural elements, yet he remains an outsider in every sense. This alienation is poignantly captured through Robby Müller’s (Paris, Texas and Dead Man) excellent cinematography, who frequently shoots Ghost Dog alone against cityscapes or ruminating in dimly lit rooms.

Ghost Dog transcends genre in a way that few films achieve through the manipulation of conventional storytelling. It’s a bleedingly modern yet timeless tale of honour, identity, and the inevitability of (cultural) death. Jarmusch’s film invites us to ponder the value and dangers of holding onto principles in a world that often seems devoid of meaning. We see Ghost Dog’s life as a meditation on the clash between old rites and new realities, solitude and society, and duty and personal freedom.

The film’s climax is particularly resonant. As Ghost Dog meets his fate, we can contemplate the costs of his unwavering adherence to the samurai code. It’s a reminder that those who cling to traditional philosophies may find themselves isolated and, ultimately, sacrificed in a world that has moved on. Yet, there is a nobility in Ghost Dog’s steadfastness, a purity in his commitment to his chosen path. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is a journey into the heart of being human, holding onto our values, and facing shifting social realities and the relentless march of time with dignity and grace.

Listening: ‘Rich II’, Homeboy Sandman

Anyone who truly knows me will know that I love the music of Homeboy Sandman. At first glance, Sandman, whose birth name is Angel, might look typical as far as “old school” rappers go. Hailing from Queens, New York, with a devotionally poetic lyricism and penchant for classic boom-bap-infused beats, one can intuit why—despite a 16-year rap career—Sandman remains in the underground. In many ways, Sandman’s music does fall firmly within the region’s holy hip-hop traditions. But his significance within the genre lies in how he lovingly and commandingly innovates upon hip-hop's history's lyrical, rhythmic, and instrumental hallmarks.

Born to a Dominican mother and a Puerto Rican father who was first a heavyweight boxer and later a lawyer, prior to his musical career, Sandman completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. To my knowledge, this makes him one of the fewer than a handful of rappers to hold an Ivy League degree. Indeed, he turned down a scholarship to study law to pursue his rap career. But this trivia would fail to be interesting if it were not apparent that hip-hop listeners should be grateful for Sandman’s choice—lest we have been forced to go without his ever-growing, singular catalogue.

Sandman’s relatively comfortable middle-class upbringing and prestigious education could hint that his music betrays an aloofness not found in the genre’s roots. After all, rap’s creation being in resistance to and under conditions of poverty and disadvantage is arguably its most notable characteristic. Yet, Sandman is one of hip-hop’s fiercest moralists, and while his soapboxing style is didactic at times, a distinct and wry playfulness ensures that it rolls as smoothly as his measured vocal delivery. Nowhere does this careful but bold instruction of his listeners manifest as diaristic and personal as his recently released 2024 album, Rich II.

The new record, a sequel to 2023’s terrific Rich, finds Sandman teaming again with Mono En Stereo, the original’s little-known but highly esteemed producer. Mono, whose real name is El Richard Moringlane, is a fellow New Yorker named “one of the sonic architects of vintage New York rap revivalism” by Jon Caramanica, The New York Times music critic. The third collaboration between rapper and producer (Mono also entirely produced 2019’s Dusty) sees the partnership take flight, soaring across jazz, funk and rock samples that would submit even the more elastic mainstream MCs.

Instead of fruitlessly grasping for the nostalgic, we find Sandman at his most imperial, conquering each luxurious, multi-phased instrumental with the kind of seamless precision that can only result from an unencumbered commitment to craft. Eschewing Queensbridge grit entirely, the two create a sound ringing with summery warmth and optimism. Mono’s production is so catchy and lush that it lends Rich II an inexhaustible reservoir of repeat listening. Through the prism of unflinching and ceaseless introspection (“self-reflection’s non-negotiable”), we are treated to Sandman’s most ebullient and hopeful meditations yet. 

On the introductory track, Sandman pronounces, “You all about a buck / And play it by the book / A lot who might agree”. The clear implication is that Boy Sand embodies the opposite pole to that of commercial rap music. The following song, People, is the album’s first complete statement, chronicling Sandman’s bemusement with humanity’s obsessive self-negation. It comes in many forms, be it the notion of distinct races (“Start believing in that people attack people / Stop believing in that people attract people”), resignation to the status quo (“The future is now people / Holy crap, holy smokes, holy cow people”) or simple vices, from smoking to alcoholism. Despite existing within this ooze of contradiction, Sandman insists that we all have a soul—we can know so because in hearing People, we have all come to listen to music to feed it.

Rich II gives us a glimpse of a Sandman now unwilling to lapse into the tongue-in-cheek misanthropy of previous records like Extinct, on which he laments that “all the cool people have died”. However, at the heart of this disgust with a humanity seemingly resigned to accept endless debasement has always lied the yearning for a better life, reflecting the total value of being human. What we hear more frequently from Sandman today, though, at the ripe age of 43, is a plea to realise our present condition is not fixed. Right on the heels of People, Sandman rattles off several suggestions for how to escape the confusion he just emphatically decried:

Say hello to people in the street ‘cause I’m sociable
Try to keep it God based
Nothing to gain coin
Either read or write, two sides of the same coin
Be on time if I have a place to go
Think lots
Drink lots of H2O
Give to the needy, read graffiti
Honour all my peace treaties
Should I come across fears then face them
When counterproductive thoughts arise, displace them
Work on being more open
Hold doors open
So other people can walk thru
Continue to work on not automatically looking over every single woman like I was taught to

Coming in at a tight 27 minutes, Rich II is a promising addition to Homeboy Sandman’s already expansive oeuvre, underscoring the rapper’s voracious desire to improve himself, his music and the world around him. Sandman may outwardly appear to hail from a life of opportunity seldom afforded to most of his peers in the rap game (although to be sure, he holds his more challenging experiences with race and class close to his chest). But his lyrical virtuosity exemplifies the genre’s true spirit when devoted to expressing humanity’s endless trajectory of Becoming. In his words, “Hip-hop is about who you are, not what you have. It started off with people that had nothing. In the South Bronx, people didn’t have nothing. You couldn’t be proud of your clothes, you couldn’t be proud of your schools. All you could be proud of was who you are and what [talents] you had”.

Please listen to this brief, boisterous album. I share Sand’s bitter frustration with a world that seems stubbornly inclined to overlook one of contemporary hip-hop’s finest and most profound practitioners. And do let me know how you find any of these humble recommendations. Until next time.

I thought of attaching my last.fm grid for the past month to each of these newsletters going forward. Here’s what I listened to most in June 2024:

Thank you kindly for your precious time and interest.

Two popular 2023 films did much to demonstrate cinema’s capacity to connect audiences to the contradictions of our age and, curiously, offer a similar vision for how we might move beyond them. Despite its inimitable success, it may surprise some that the first of these films was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, with the second being Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’ incipient cult classic, Poor Things. While Lanthimos’ film is decidedly adult, Gerwig’s is necessarily more general: it was only possible to produce by working with MATTEL corporation, the multibillion-dollar toy manufacturer that owns the Barbie property.

Though the filmmakers were working at opposite ends of their industry, both focused on whether one can create their own authentic identity today. To examine this, each filmmaker constructs a fantastical representation of our world, distinguished by oppressive systems that impose roles on all. Inherent to this consideration is what kind of identity, if any, could constitute a countervailing force to the singularity of contemporary society. Both filmmakers agree that an answer will ineluctably concern the condition and consciousness of women.

But what is the essence of the present? Philosophy answers, “All that is solid melts into air”: that which would otherwise be Real—from politics to culture and our identities—is abstracted into a flattened regime of competing and fleeting images. Today, this regime manifests in uniformly featureless screens. Virtually everything we experience plays out on these tableaux, from smartphones to television. The driving force has been the decades-long, unchallenged rule of neoliberal capitalism, during which the technology industry’s profitability skyrocketed.

Neoliberalism is itself a procumbent tableau in which we are presented with a seemingly horizontal, borderless world market. The unified market is divided into dozens of subsectors, each composed of countless corporations. Each corporation proliferates endless consumer products and associated ideologies. This hyper-digitised exchange of commodities is the location of personal identity construction today, which occurs on the level of the individual. In short, contemporary life is where the Real becomes imagistic, and said images substitute for what they ostensibly represent.

In these conditions, cinema assumes a unique cultural position. The philosopher Alain Badiou argues that today, cinema (and its lesser designations, from television shows to TikTok) is the only artistic activity that is truly mass. Everyone can access cinema via their phones, televisions and local movie theatres. Pre-fashioned in the form of a screen and radically reproducible via mechanical means—accelerated by internet-connective technologies—cinema was best positioned among the arts to capture primacy in modern capitalist society. 

It is the only artistic activity experienced by millions of people and that which, by its unique structural qualities, straddles the dissension between pure creativity and what is, in fact, vulgar or material. The cinema thus creates an artistic space for thinking, where the masses may examine the conflicts of their world. As such, cinema may, just as philosophy does, propose an orientation toward life. For Badiou, this democratic dialectic represented by the cinema is “probably the most important symptom of our history [...] the place where all the contradictions of the world are really assumed”.

Georg Lukács wrote of cinema that “the child that is alive in every person is liberated here and becomes lord over the psyche of the viewer”. What Greta Gerwig achieves with Barbie is enlivening the audience’s inner child while unsparingly examining their general condition today: unable to imagine the emancipated existence that was once a youthful dream. This is an under-discussed element of Barbie, considering its very structure is a dual one. The luxuriant ‘Dreamhouses’ of Barbieland represent the fantasy of childlike imagination, while the ‘Real World’, our one, remains replete with oppression and harm. Barbieland is a synchronic, sexismless utopia where women can be anything they choose to imagine, from President Barbie to Justice on an all-female Supreme Court. In Barbieland, the Court presumably does not exercise neolithic restrictions on women’s reproductive rights as the actual body does. 

Conspicuously, these aspirant identities map perfectly to the models of Barbie dolls sold by MATTEL and the pernicious, voluntarist ideology employed to sell them (Barbie’s official motto is “You Can Be Anything You Want”). The absurdity of this proposition is not lost on Gerwig: Barbie’s opening jokes centre on the tension between the ‘American Dream’ and the fact that every girl who plays with a Nobel Prize-winning Barbie is destined to have said dream extinguished. In this sense, the film’s Barbieland represents the Real of our market economy, where we are told we derive our ‘freedom of choice’ in matters of consumption, identity, and vocation. 

When introducing the ‘rules’ of Barbieland, Gerwig instructs us to “use [our] imagination”, something that the market—just as fictitious—need not command, given it enjoys unconditional acceptance. This infantile republic in which Barbies perpetually “have the best day ever”, and there is nothing but triumph and play, is a kind of imaginary compensation for the sexist oppression of modern life. Barbieland is, therefore, the illusion of ‘democratic liberty’ offered by the concrete power of capitalism, where corporations like MATTEL provide profligate image-identities, in place of control over our selves and the social order.

Gerwig contrasts Barbieland to the life of a working-class mother, Gloria (America Ferrara), employed by MATTEL under an all-male board of morons. While Gloria played with Barbie dolls, imagining a free and prosperous future, she now finds herself in a midlife crisis. Saddled with self-loathing and adrift from her teenage daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), Gloria begins illustrating more realistic Barbie models at her desk: Crippling Shame Barbie, Full-Body Cellulite Barbie, and Irrepressible Thoughts of Death Barbie. The latter, we learn, sets the plot in motion, which follows Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), who belongs to Gloria.

This depressive drawing causes Barbie to fear her mortality, puncturing her previously plastic existence. We find that a reciprocal connection exists between Barbieland and the Real World—the feelings and actions of people who play with Barbies influence the condition of those dolls. This cross-wiring exemplifies Deleuze’s notion of the interchangeability of the Real and the Imaginary: Barbieland and the Real World are two facets of the same trajectory, constantly intertwining and influencing each other. 

It is in the form of Gloria’s repression that the Symbolic order of reality—where Barbie functions as an unattainable sexist ideology—is introduced to Barbieland. In exposing Barbieland to Gloria’s pain, reality operates as a corrupting force. The Symbolic of sexism, of which Barbie herself is a part, begins colonising the Imaginary capitalist paradise. Barbie enters the Real World to invert its influence on Barbieland and restore her own ‘factory settings’, hoping to alleviate her newfound mental and physical imperfections (her feet are no longer moulded in the shape of high heels, and cellulite has appeared on her thigh). 

Barbie is shepherded by Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who knows of the two-way world bridge because she was played with “too hard”: she was defiled by the young girl who owned her. This was an act of creative destruction against corrosive feminine beauty ideals, which Barbie is confronted to learn she represents. The outburst reflects a fact of which the audience is aware—any girl who plays with Barbies soon discovers she is victimised by the sexist standards her doll propagates. It also suggests that play has a diachronic nature, where children shift their toys from synchronic Symbols into actively evolving concepts. 

During the crossing, Barbie finds she is being followed by her incessantly needy Ken (Ryan Gosling), who refuses to leave her alone. After conceding that Ken may tag along, the pair find themselves on Venice Beach, where Barbie is immediately catcalled, objectified and even sexually assaulted (something she reflexively defends herself from). Guided by phantasmagorical visions, Barbie approaches Gloria’s daughter at school, mistakenly assuming her ‘owner’ must be a child. Like everyone in Barbieland, Barbie believed that MATTEL’s fantasy world had inspired humans to purge sexism from reality. She encounters the truth in the form of an incisive barrage from Sasha. Because she is a political intellectual and Gen Z woman, Sasha knows, as we do, that Barbie is an enemy of feminism—an idol of fetishistic, pornographic capitalism with a “fascist” aspect. 

In informing Barbie of reality, Sasha collapses her Barbieland false consciousness and initiates an identity crisis. Weeping, Barbie is apprehended by MATTEL agents alerted to the rift between worlds, a controversy they wish to avoid to maintain profitability. After being transported to MATTEL headquarters, the CEO (Will Ferrell) offers Barbie a Faustian bargain: get “back in the box”, and she will be returned to Barbieland. The deal has seductive appeal because it will be easier for Barbie to stick her head back in the Barbieland sand and never again have to deal with sexism or her role in it. 

Unbeknownst to her, during this time, Ken discovers real-world patriarchy—contrary to Barbie’s treatment, Ken is readily respected and sees masculinity, not femininity, reigning supreme. Just as the plastic binds are secured around her wrists, Barbie instinctively rejects the box and stages an escape aided by Gloria, who recognises her as her doll. Finding that he lacks the qualifications to thrive in the Real World, Ken has a better idea: he returns to Barbieland, importing patriarchy with him and turning their world on its head.

When Barbie, Gloria and Sasha arrive in Barbieland, the Dreamhouses have been converted into ‘Mojo Dojo Casa Houses’ and the Barbies into servile domestic aids, whose only apparent role is handing Kens “brewski beers”. Just as the feminism of Barbieland was a fantasy, so is its just-established patriarchy: unmediated by the politics of feminism or the need to maintain the appearance of equality, Barbieland now functions like a madcap reality. Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach mine this absurdity for much of Barbie’s raucous comedy. 

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once wrote that “comedy embraces, gathers and takes enjoyment from the relationship with an effect… namely the appearance of this signified called the phallus”. Initially, Barbieland had signified one such ‘phallus’ of the present: the false liberatory proposition of feminism-infused market capitalism. Now it has become the farcical semblant of a more readily appreciable phallus: the Real, raw power of capitalism’s patriarchal structure. Ken goes from dressing in cutesy outfits to Sylvester Stallone-inspired fur coats draped over Gosling’s ripped torso. By making naked a particular, only slightly exaggerated conception of masculine supremacy, Gerwig exposes it to our derision and ridicule.

Confronted with ruin, Barbie is first rendered passive—she collapses into a heap, awaiting an external rescue. It is only when Gloria makes a speech to a small group of hangers-on that Barbie realises the possibility of a collective struggle to overturn patriarchal capitalism. The fundamental tenets of feminism are shown to be a necessary ideological basis upon which the women of Barbieland can endeavour toward equality. In the film, this takes the shape of political consciousness-raising and subversion of sexist dynamics. 

Plotting that “Kenland contains the seeds of its own destruction”, the Barbies exploit male anxiety to break the unity of the Kens, who rapidly descend into a civil war of jealousy. Gerwig emphasises that Ken “only has a good day if Barbie looks at him”, and his job is “just beach”—his simulation of patriarchal masculinity aims to obscure his lack of skills and self-esteem. He defines himself only in relation to Barbie, lacking an identity of his own. After the upheaval, Barbie imparts her revelation on Ken: male supremacy is, like Stereotypical Barbie, just another synthetic ideology-identity manufactured by capitalism. “Maybe all the things you thought made you you, aren’t really you”, she counsels. Ken’s impotent patriarchy is unable to “dissimulate its ferocity or its emptiness forever”, and he has effectively been deradicalised, accepting that “Ken is me”.

For her part, Barbie learns that there cannot be a non-fetishistic ‘Barbieland’: caught between two worlds, one illusory and obscene and the other oppressive but potentially transformable, she consummates her journey by becoming a real woman. Barbie wrests control over her identity from her Creator, replacing the fantasy she once represented with a self-authored and embodied identity. “I want to be part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made. I wanna do the imagining, I don’t wanna be the idea” she informs her inventor, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman). Gerwig deftly tempers this ending, using the film’s final joke to remind us that while the old ideal Barbie represented is no longer beautiful, the new truth of her actualised self is not yet generalised in our world.

With Barbie, Gerwig pounced on an opportunity to reconfigure corporate intellectual property, which author M.G. Lord argues is “the most potent icon of American popular culture”. For MATTEL, the film was an opportunity to reintegrate Barbie into popular consciousness and turn a profit. Despite the investment in the production and associated marketing campaign, MATTEL surely failed to anticipate just how much profit Barbie would earn as a commodity in its own right (the global box office now exceeds $1.4 billion). 

Gerwig’s brilliance is twofold. First, she epitomised Deleuze’s assertion that “cinema is always as perfect as it can be, taking into account the images and signs which it invents and which it has at its disposal at a given moment”—using today’s raw materials of consumer-capitalist IP, which increasingly dominate studio filmmaking.

It is a mistake to assume Barbie grossed the 14th highest amount in history simply because it was heavily marketed—if true, bigger and less daring films tried and failed. No, millions of people saw Barbie because of its social consumptive aspect. They heard from friends, family or the media that it was worth seeing, and so they, in turn, bought tickets with friends and family. They did so precisely to participate in this mass cultural event. A glance at similarly grossing films reveals Barbie is the only film ever to prompt so much political discussion from masses worldwide. 

This is not to say Barbie alone shifts people’s consciousness around sexism or proposes a foolproof blueprint for overcoming the hollowness of capital-derived identities. But on some level, it raises the possibility of personal and creative freedom—freedoms that have a necessarily political dimension. As Jacques Ranciere argues: 

Aesthetic experience has a political effect to the extent that the loss of destination it presupposes disrupts the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations. What it produces is not rhetorical persuasion about what must be done. [...] It is a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible. As such, it allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and new possibilities of collective enunciation.

The second essential facet of Gerwig’s achievement lies in her ability to generate the kind of philosophical thinking that spurred Barbie as a social phenomenon. Gerwig not only sparked debate about what constitutes feminism today—she utilised the Barbie property to address the most salient question about modern life. Barbie’s journey in the film evokes the struggle of young people today, especially girls and women, to break free from ‘Barbie’—and capitalist ideology more generally. 

Gerwig understood Giorgio Agamben’s argument that “true historical continuity cannot pretend to discard the signifiers of discontinuity by confining them to” a fantasy, like Barbieland. Barbie’s decision to turn her back on Barbieland converts her from sexist stereotype to symbol of critique and refusal: Gerwig’s doll has gone from a regressive ideal to a living person, transmitting herself to the future. Barbie’s trajectory of Becoming is the realisation of Agamben’s suggestion that “once the ritual transformation … has taken place in the body of the new individual, what was the signifier of absolute synchrony, now freed, becomes invested by the diachrony which has lost its signifier (the embryo of the new individual), and is turned around into the signifier of absolute diachrony”. 

By electing to suffer the indignity imposed on women that the film’s audience is much too familiar with, Barbie affirms that this struggle is one that we must throw ourselves into. The objection that Barbie is but a cynical marketing ploy to ingratiate the doll to a new generation—only with a plastic feminist veneer—is easy to sympathise with on its face. However, Gerwig saw this as an opportunity to enunciate an anti-systemic challenge from within and extend a form of thinking to her audience that goes against and beyond MATTEL’s negation of authentic women’s liberation and artistry. 

In doing so, Gerwig crafts the apotheosis of Badiou’s argument that:

We have very splendid films which are really sinister in form [...] It’s not an obstacle to the greatness of a film to be in this form, to be in a relationship with something very vulgar in some sense, and it’s a possibility to produce an internal critique of all that, not to separate the critique, but to create the critique inside what is criticised.

If Gerwig’s Barbie is a massified cinematic representation of the present fissure, then Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, an adaptation of the titular novel by Alasdair Gray, is its indie cousin. Free from the constraints of making a child-friendly film to safeguard brand respectability, Lanthimos’ protagonist, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), clashes more forcefully with patriarchal capitalism. Like Barbie, Bella is something of a feminine doll, an invention that wasn’t ‘born’ the way that you or I were. Like Barbie, Bella has a tender but stifling relationship with her Creator, and she struggles to transcend the limitations of her design. And like Barbie, Bella’s journey necessitates the development of a self-actualised identity. 

The crucial difference is that Bella Baxter develops sexuality, and sex plays an integral role in her self-discovery. Barbie’s opening reimagining of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey subtly references this lack of sexuality. Here, Barbie appears as a phallic Monolith to the little girls of “prehistory”. The girls erupt into libidinal destruction of their now passé baby dolls because they view scantily-clad Barbie as freeing them from the traditional role of motherhood. Suppose Agamben’s formulation of the toy as “a materialisation of the historicity contained in objects” is correct. In that case, these girls are unaware that the sexualised capitalism Barbie represents will also come to oppress them.

Bella Baxter’s relationship to sex is unique by virtue of her creation: her ‘father’, Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), has implanted the consciousness of an infant into the still-warm body of her deceased, pregnant mother. Bella awakens as a newborn inside an adult woman’s body. As such, Bella is different from Barbie, given that she begins as a perfect subject of patriarchal capitalism rather than its unmolested product. While Bella is blissfully unaware of gender division and the like, the men who encounter her in infancy relate to her as they would any adult woman. 

Bella is, therefore, subjected to the Symbolic order, notably the chauvinistic sexual desires of men, while entirely undeveloped. But Bella’s embodiment as an adult woman, absent the decades of social conditioning, is not straightforwardly a danger to her. Bella’s obliviousness to the manner that feminine and masculine sexuality are constructed in “polite society” empowers her to inscribe upon herself—a sort of tabula rasa—her own sexuality and, therefore, identity (an opportunity not afforded to the girls exposed to Barbie). 

Bella’s unashamed sexual desire, inextinguishable intellectual inquiry and earnest political morality synthesise into a protective aura, repelling the muck of the film’s age. Set in a steampunk Victorian era, said muck consists of a great many horrors: exploitative ‘medical’ experimentation, women as chattel property governed by contracts and confined by leery men and diabolical deprivation. Encountering these obstacles upon breaking out from her initial captivity, Bella remains unbowed, owing to her preternatural will to defy the internalisation of social maladies.

The first time Bella is allowed into the outside world, albeit under stringent supervision by Godwin and his assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), she kills a frog they present to her. This is a sign of things to come: Bella will always assert control over her environment in a form of play. This playfulness, a kind of childlike omnipotence, is the wellspring of Bella’s “striving towards being seen, which is at the basis of creative looking” and, therefore, power. When Bella finally ventures into the world without the constraints of male stewardship, Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan ensure we see it through her eyes.

As Bella steps into the vibrance of the world, the film’s initial Escherian black and white presentation bursts into artificial hypercolor. Notably, on this independent perambulation through Lisbon, Bella is enchanted by music played by a woman perched on her balcony. Here, Lanthimos skillfully employs cinema’s temporal dimension, reminding us of the wonderment we experience in our own lives. Simultaneously, the film’s progression from monochrome to colour reflects both cinema’s own progressive complexification (including its movement from mute to sound) and Bella’s accumulation of experience. 

As she traverses the breadth of “sugar and violence”, Bella’s perspective develops, and she begins to shape her identity. This precarious yet instructive state of constant traversal—Bella’s countless transgressive abnegations of sexism—characterises most of the runtime. In this manner, Poor Things takes the shape of the character of Bella herself, reflecting cinema’s constitution of Deleuze’s notion that “in its own way, art says what children say. It is made up of trajectories and becomings”. 

The extremity of Bella’s metamorphosis throughout the film demands a performance of tremendous acuity and fluidity from Stone. Bella goes from the elemental and animatronic joie de vivre of childhood to the conviction and poise of an activist-intellectual, all within an adult body. By encouraging our identification with Bella’s vigorous trajectories and becomings, Poor Things “renders their mutual presence perceptible” within the audience.

The film’s Australian writer Tony McNamara explains Bella’s magnetism as her personification of “what none of us get to be, we carry shame and society shapes us, and here’s a person who doesn’t have even those two things. [...] And I think there’s part of you that kind of goes, I wish we were that!” Parallel to Barbie, Lanthimos suggests that through rejecting bourgeois morality and its repressive standards, we can form our authentic selves. 

After Bella herself has become destitute, compelling her to work in a brothel, the smarmy but wise Madam Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) urges that we must experience the bad with the good in the world. Bella’s empathy has left her disposed to be overwhelmed by the world’s brutality, but Madam Swiney proclaims this is “fantastic”, the “dark period” before “light and wisdom come to [Bella]”. Her advice that Bella “forge through it” clarifies that it is only by suffering abasement that we become “people of substance”, Real people whose oppression prepares us to challenge it. 

Pointedly, immediately after receiving this guidance, Bella’s search for freedom leads her to become a socialist militant upon the invitation of her Black workmate, Toinette, with whom she also forms an intimate relationship. In channelling her insatiable desire for knowledge and self-improvement into the struggle to “change the world pour le meilleur”, Bella collectivises her rupture from the prevailing social order. 

Having witnessed and personally experienced the degradation of humanity endemic to capitalist society, socialism becomes Bella’s moral compass. Their independence from a corporation like MATTEL frees Lanthimos and McNamara to definitively propose this orientation to their adult audience. What in Barbie is innuendo is in Poor Things made explicit.

At the film’s culmination, Bella transfigurates the scientific legacy bestowed upon her by her Creator, Godwin Baxter (whom she calls ‘God’). Bella begins the film tethered to a lineage marked by socially transmitted injury, hinted via Godwin’s recountings of traumatic experiences at the hands of his father. Just as Barbie confronts her Creator and informs her that she can no longer embody the false and harmful ideal of Stereotypical Barbie, Bella materialises her self-actualised identity. Also, like Barbie, Bella makes the conscious decision not to perpetuate the cycle of harm—in this case, scientific experimentation for brutal purposes—which left Godwin and herself permanently scarred. 

Bella reinterprets her upbringing within the scientific milieu, something strictly inseparable from her very being, and in the process, emerges as a protégé to Godwin whilst simultaneously surpassing him. She does so by replicating the procedure Godwin used to create her in order to manumit herself from her mother’s tyrannical husband, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott). While in one sense, Bella’s fusion of Alfie’s body with the mind of a lamb is destructive, recalling her squashing of the frog, it is also a progression from wanton termination to adroit creation. In converting the science once used to torment into a radical tool to “improve” people and the world around her, Bella attests that we, too, have the potential to overturn the conditions we are born into.

By negating the mires of sexist oppression with their acts of self-authoring, Barbie and Bella’s development of autonomy is the signification of a transcendent Real, one which necessarily cannot be Symbolised. In this fashion, Gerwig’s resourcefulness in turning the noxious Barbie property on itself is also Bella Baxter’s highest accomplishment—and the attitude that Lanthimos aims to inculcate in his audience.

In the convergence of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, cinema emerges not merely as a spectacle but as a potent medium for articulating a mass philosophy—a democratic dialogue that resonates with millions. Through the parabolic realms of Barbieland and that of Bella Baxter, cinema becomes a crucible, where the contradictions and struggles of our time are not only depicted but actively engaged with. Gerwig and Lanthimos assert the criticality of a new feminist political subjectivity when challenging capitalism today. Both suggest that rather than outright rejection of our current conditions, we are wise to emulate the approach of their characters by seeking to reconfigure the present into an emancipatory aesthetic and political project. 

In their cinematic journeys from objects to fully embodied political agents, Barbie and Bella Baxter become symbols of transformative potential, urging us to harness imagination and critique to challenge oppressive structures. In this way, the stories of Barbie and Bella Baxter superate the confines of the screen, inviting us to participate in the collective project of reshaping our world of repression and domination into a liberated one. As Badiou put it: “After the philosophy of cinema must come — is already coming — philosophy as cinema, which consequently has a chance of being a philosophy of the masses”.

Speaking of which, earlier this year, I wrote an extensive essay on the cinematic and political significance of the Barbie and Poor Things 1-2 punch, which I submitted to several publications. The impetus for writing it was my frustration with the vain, self-congratulatory dismissal of Barbie on the radical left. The essay is heavily philosophical and involves more discussion of the plot (for analytic purposes) than publications typically go for.

In light of this, I’ll give it another pass in the coming days and self-publish it in Baklava Bolshevik. My hope is that you will approach with an open mind and perhaps come around to a closer and more philosophical reading of Barbie, especially. I look forward to your feedback and reflections—don’t be shy!

Without further ado, here is the third edition of Reading, Watching, Listening.

Reading: ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, Alain Badiou

This month’s reading rec is admittedly sectional: it blends philosophical and political discourse that requires readers to have a certain level of understanding of communist politics and history. Unfortunately, recent personal challenges have meant that I couldn’t do as much reading as I would’ve liked. This book is quite simply the only one I managed to finish. Nevertheless, I believe it is paramount for as many people as possible to begin investigating and familiarising themselves with communism and its history. It would be best if you weren’t deterred—now is always the best time to start learning.

For those unfamiliar, our author, Alain Badiou, is a highly regarded figure within contemporary philosophy. But unlike most in academia, he has doggedly refused to abandon genuinely revolutionary political thought following the defeats suffered by the radical movements of the 60s and 70s. Born in 1937 in Rabat, Morocco, and later raised in France, Badiou’s intellectual journey has always been deeply intertwined with his political activism. A diligent student of Louis Althusser, an antagonistic contemporary to Gilles Deleuze and a participant in the events of May 1968, Badiou’s work is a fusion of rigorous philosophy and revolutionary zeal. The Communist Hypothesis exemplifies this blend, offering a powerful critique of defeatism and a compelling case for the enduring value of ‘the communist Idea’.

The beating heart of The Communist Hypothesis, structured as a collection of essays, is a vehement rejection of the notion that communism is a defeated or obsolete project. Badiou argues that declaring the end of communism is either an empty triumphalism if proclaimed by its adversaries or a deep pessimism if accepted by its former advocates. This is not to say that Badiou ignores or handwaves the fact that all experiments named for ‘socialism’—from the Paris Commune to the Stalinised USSR—ended in ‘failure’. Badiou is among the communists who engage in the essential critique of these episodes; the first essay in this collection problematises and categorises such failures. Critically, however, these autopsies are driven by Badiou’s project to salvage the fundamental and necessary truth contained in the Idea of communism as an objective of political struggle.

Badiou is correct that it is imperative to resist the bourgeois narrative that the collapse of the Soviet Union marks the end of communist potential. What follows is that we must reexamine, reimagine and reanimate the communist hypothesis, as it remains a vital framework for creating a future of genuine universality and equality. It is delightful to follow Badiou’s reasoning that we must return to the basic prospect of communism: a world where the well-being of one is intrinsically linked to the well-being of all. This egalitarian principle, he argues, is more relevant than ever in an era marked by sustained systemic crisis and widening inequality. For Badiou, preserving this Idea is not merely an intellectual exercise but a moral imperative. This is because the notion of a genuinely equal world provides a beacon of hope and a guide for political action.

Badiou outlines two significant sequences in the history of the communist hypothesis. The first sequence spans from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune, marking the birth and early development of communist theory. This period is characterised by the emergence of a radical vision of society grounded in the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The second sequence extends from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, encompassing the rise and fall of 20th-century communism. These historical sequences illustrate the evolution of the communist hypothesis and explore the recurring challenges revolutionary movements face. It is a pleasure to receive a sweeping analysis from a veteran radical.

One of Badiou’s most provocative arguments is his rejection of returning to the models of the 19th-century mass movement or the 20th-century communist party. The need to learn from past failures is essential wisdom. Still, I appreciate Badiou’s unwillingness to make the mistake of some socialists, who virtually wholly sever themselves from these historical experiences. In contrast, Badiou argues we must remain faithful to the lessons of significant revolutionary Events, particularly his pet favourites, May 68 and the Cultural Revolution. We are at the very beginning of a new phase in the development of the communist hypothesis, one which, according to Badiou, renders traditional models incapable of addressing the complexities of contemporary political struggle. Instead, Badiou advocates for new forms of political experience that can better realise the communist Idea. He calls for innovative organisational structures and strategies that transcend the hierarchical and bureaucratic tendencies of historical communist parties.

I agree with Badiou that a forward-looking but historically informed approach is crucial for revitalising communism and making it relevant to present challenges. Badiou leaves what forms and strategies may offer promiseful experimentation to revolutionaries largely vague. While understandable—no one person could ever prescribe the exact correct courses of action—this lack of formulation is a trend with even the most critical communist writers. This is painful because it is precisely what is currently needed: experimental propositions for revolutionary political organisation and activity that can be implemented and battle-tested. Isabelle Garo’s vast and eclectic Communism and Strategy, which contains a critique of Badiou among other thinkers, starts this vital collective task.

Watching: A Double Dose of De Palma – ‘Body Double’ (1984) and ‘Blow Out’ (1981)

Last night, I had the pleasure of experiencing a Brian De Palma double feature at Melbourne’s Astor Theatre, showcasing Body Double and Blow Out. These films—brimming with De Palma’s signature style and thematic preoccupations—offer wildly entertaining explorations of prescient concerns that are strikingly relevant today. During the 80s, De Palma was evidently fascinated with the elusiveness of truth, the perils of male impotence and sexual obsession, and the corruption and unresponsiveness of official institutions. From our historical vantage point, one can only conclude that the man was onto something.

Body Double screened first. As the reel started spinning, my friend and De Palma aficionado Hamish warned me I was in for something extraordinary. The plot centres around Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), a struggling actor embroiled in a murder mystery after spying on his beautiful neighbour, Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton). In this way, Body Double is a vigorously campified update to Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo, bringing them into an age where cinematic voyeurism and fantasy have become so powerful as to supplant reality. De Palma’s exploration of male leering here is not a mere plot device or pastiche. Instead, it forms a configuration of Hollywood filmmaking into the precise shape of the slobbery masculinity it often serves.

I don’t believe I’ve seen a more pitiable protagonist than Jake Scully, painfully conjured by the boyish Wasson. The character’s apparent ‘soft’ masculinity, true to life, belies something significantly more perverse. Jake’s physical and psychological immotility channels a pusillanimous current within male subjectivity that has increased in deviance since the film’s release. His sheer obsessive fetishism is the very source of his inability to act decisively upon the world, representing the collapse of the ‘performance’ of masculinity under the weight of its plasticity. He likes to watch—so he may only watch.

The double feature closed with Blow Out, which follows Jack Terry (John Travolta), a movie sound tech who inadvertently records a car accident that is a political assassination of the likely incoming President. This film is more intensively concerned with the complexities of uncovering the truth amidst a web of deception and conspiracy, something Body Double approaches rather cartoonishly. De Palma’s focus on the auditory elements—creepily crafted sounds and eerie silences—serves as a metaphor for the struggle to make sense of contradictions within reality (something that is once again beginning to prominently concern filmmakers).

Jack is consumed by a need to piece together sounds and images, cross-referenced with his memories, to reveal the truth. This quest runs up against both institutional indifference and concerted cover-ups. As liberal democracies continue pioneering authoritarian state censorship, too often claiming the freedom of the few driven by their conscience to become whistleblowers, Jack’s total inability to make objective reality count for something feels prophetic. The film’s genuinely bleak and meanspirited conclusion is among the more audacious narrative choices in a career littered with them.

Both Body Double and Blow Out feature ‘strangler’ killers, who target women with the pervasive violence that is often sensationalised—yet inadequately addressed—by the culture industry and society more broadly. Despite their best efforts, the male protagonists are pathetic failures, unable to save the victims or themselves. Their feebleness and monomania are necessary for De Palma’s female characters to become mortally endangered.

De Palma’s films are also profoundly reflexive, providing an unflinching critique of Hollywood and independent cinema. Body Double’s Hollywood setting allows De Palma to satirise the industry’s exploitation of sex and violence. At the same time, Blow Out examines the manipulative power of film and media in shaping perceptions of reality. Both films underscore how traumatic memories shape people’s present behaviours—the sole reservoir of sympathy De Palma lends to his leading men. All this amounts to enthralling, splenetic cinema, allowing no respite from the litany of social ills that dominate us.

If you haven’t already, submit yourself to these stupefyingly stylish apogees of De Palma’s vision—a vision that has only grown in salience since the 1980s.

Listening: ‘#RICHAXXHAITIAN’, Mach-Hommy

Let’s face it: I was never going to recommend anything other than Mach-Hommy’s latest album, #RICHAXXHAITIAN, this month. The music press is prone to label the American rapper of Haitian descent as elusive or reclusive. Perhaps superficially, this is true—similar to his contemporary and occasional collaborator billy woods, Mach maintains a degree of anonymity. He puts deliberate distance between himself and the media and mainstream. Most famously, he wields the full force of copyright law to forbid the publication of his lyrics online. 

What this label misses, however, is that since 2011, Mach has been among hip-hop’s most prolific artists, whose dedication and pride in the craft of rapping is, alongside his Haitian identity, the guiding force of his music. In many ways, Mach’s ‘reclusiveness’ is not a retreat but a resolution, a self-affirmation of the purity and integrity of his creative approach. #RICHAXXHAITIAN is a testament to the premium Mach places on his artistry, showcasing an extraordinary range of flows, diverse production styles, and thematic depth that set him apart from the generic hip-hop of the moment.

The album’s brilliance lies in Mach’s uniquely deft suite of flows, deployed across a grand musical mosaic. #RICHAXXHAITIAN features an impressive array of sounds brought to life by a strong roster of underground producers, including Conductor Williams, Quelle Chris, and Sadhugold. Each track is meticulously crafted, often containing several distinct segments that traverse various genres without diluting Mach’s cohesive sonic signature. Notably, Mach’s father was a folk guitarist, and he credits him as influencing his musical style. Nowhere is this more palpable than on this newest album. 

“Sonje” and “The Serpent and the Rainbow” encapsulate Mach-Hommy’s folkish storytelling, vocal versatility and innovative sound. On “Sonje,” his flow is fluid and linguistically complex, repeatedly shifting rhythms and even languages over the jazz-inflected beat and the soulful melodies of Georgia Anne Muldrow. The track’s title, meaning “remember” in Haitian Kreyòl (a language Mach frequently raps in), sets the tone for an album deeply rooted in memory and cultural knowledge. In contrast, “The Serpent and the Rainbow” blends elements of Caribbean rhythms with haunting and atmospheric production resembling the score of a silent horror film. The song’s bridge sees Mach dip into whimsical, sweet singing—it would be challenging to claim another rapper working today is more effortlessly dexterous.

This artistic sophistication contrasts starkly with prevailing trends in mainstream hip-hop, characterised by a lack of the lyrical and rhythmic complexity that Mach-Hommy delivers with ease. While much of today’s hip-hop is decidedly repetitive, #RICHAXXHAITIAN is a masterclass in lyrical depth and rhythmic innovation. Every track has its own narrative rich with allusion and metaphor, demanding attentive listening that offers fresh insights with each play.

Central to #RICHAXXHAITIAN are Haitian pride and culture, familiar ground for Mach but rendered here with breathtaking fidelity and political urgency. Mach imbues this record with a deep sense of heritage, celebrating the resilience and resistance that characterise the Haitian spirit without shying away from Haiti’s present or historical political and economic struggles. 

Take, for instance, “POLITickle”, a meditation on neocolonial oppression that highlights explicitly the detrimental role of the institutions of global capital. Namely, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is “a monkey” on his back, “and it’s a rather heavy one”. Those who wish to learn precisely how international institutions—vessels of enduring US imperial domination over Haiti—have contributed to the country’s current crisis can read China Miéville’s excellent analysis. The collaboration of global capitalism’s peak institutions is further discussed in this comprehensive study by Robert Knox.

The album’s most notable throughline is Mach’s emphasis on reflection and the knowledge of self, both individual and collective. He posits that such lucidity is a requisite foundation for the rejuvenation of Haiti, something Mach is clear will only be possible through radical means. #RICHAXXHAITIAN reflects a rap artist at the height of his powers, focused on vivid stylistic and political evocation. I highly recommend listening to it, as it must be 2024’s best rap album to date.

If you don’t mind, I would love to know what you think of these recommendations. Until next time!

I hope to engage with you around the experiences that make life more transparent and tolerable—enjoyable, even. I detect that we all need this at present. I would be delighted to discuss anything mentioned in these letters with you, so please do reach out. Don’t be a stranger.

Without further ado, here is the second edition of Reading, Watching, Listening.

Reading: ‘Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution’, Maurizio Lazzarato

On March 2nd, I had a few moments to browse the philosophy section in Readings, Lygon Street, before attending an 8:30 p.m. Dune: Part Two screening at Cinema Nova. I had no particular aim: there wasn’t a single title or author I was looking for. But I was intent on openness, browsing rigorously and fairly across the shelves—looking for something unexpected to take home. This, it turns out, can be tremendously rewarding.

I found a curious little reader with a pleasantly supple paperback feel—a svelte five inches in width and seven in height. The cover artwork initially drew my eye, with its murky, submerged black and green tones, resembling the structure of bacteria under a microscope. I was unfamiliar with the author, Maurizio Lazzarato, but the book’s charged title, Capital Hates Everyone, resonated.

Initially, I was non-committal—even taking a photo of the cover in case somebody else snagged the final copy before I decided. Finally, on my way back through the shelves, I was so taken by the blurb that I purchased it on the spot and headed to the cinema. I reproduce the blurb here for you now so that you may get a sense of why it was irresistible:

We are living in apocalyptic times. In Capital Hates Everyone, famed sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato points to a stark choice emerging from the magma of today's world events: fascism or revolution. Fascism now drives the course of democracies as they grow less and less liberal and increasingly subject to the law of capital. Since the 1970s, Lazzarato writes, capital has entered a logic of war. It has become, by the power conferred on it by financialisation, a political force intent on destruction. Lazzarato urges us to reject the illusory consolations of a technology-abetted “new” kind of capitalism and choose revolution over fascism.

This offensive was made possible by the cycle of revolutions coming to an end. But while it was unfolding, critical thinking announced the suppression of social relations and the advent of a new capitalism, a milder one, more attentive to the comfort of workers. Today, the prophets of technology even boast of a solution to the climate crisis or an exit from capitalism by the very means of capital. In the face of these illusory consolations and the growing threat of fascism, Lazzarato argues it is urgent that we rediscover the meaning of strategic confrontations and the means of rebuilding a revolutionary war machine. Since capital hates everyone, everyone must hate capital.

The book itself is a revelation. Lazzarato, born in Italy, was an Autonomia Operaia activist during the broader ‘autonomist’ Italian workers’ movement of the 1970s. In short, this was a radical workerist political tendency shaped by the failure of far-left mass movements over the previous decade and influenced by a range of Marxian, “post-Marxist”, and anarchist thought. 

This background ensures that Lazzarato has a firm grasp on many concordant and discordant strands of radical politics and demonstrates tremendous intellectual agility in weaving them together. The result is an intricate philosophical argument about the nature of the present historical juncture, aiming principally at neoliberalism but with a good deal of acerbic critique reserved for prevailing analyses thereof on the radical left.

Lazzarato’s book, split into four essay chapters, is incisive in this vein. He asserts forcefully that scholars and theorists on the left—from Foucault and Deleuze to more orthodox Marxists—have consistently failed to recognise neoliberalism for what it is: a global civil war on populations waged by capital. 

The book’s first half robustly establishes that capital hates everyone, and in the final analysis, this means capital necessarily relies on enormous objective violence. We are seeing this expressed in the starkest possible terms in Gaza today, where the world’s imperial powers collude to enforce unfathomable exterminatory hatred against Palestinians. This makes Lazzarato’s argument evermore critical and salient.

The book’s second half involves a lucid analysis of the nature of technical machines (artificial intelligence, the internet, robotics and other automative machinery). Here, Lazzarato emphatically asserts the capacity of human labour to shape and reshape technical machines, citing Fanon’s observations around the reconfigurement of colonial radio into a weapon of the Algerian national liberation movement. This is a welcome intervention, as too often the debate around technology devolves into capitalist ideology—barely concealed as “techno-optimist” babble—or intellectually lazy and frankly pathetic doomerism among liberals.

Reading activist-intellectual writing of the utmost urgency is a treasurable joy. Lazzarato delivers an apodictic and piercing political polemic that upsets countless stale shibboleths. As the subtitle suggests, this is not mere vanity—Lazzarato writes in service of reorienting us toward constructing a “revolutionary war machine” capable of challenging the capitalist war machine, lest we cede further ground to rising neofascisms. 

There are times when Lazzarato’s eagerness to penetrate long-standing assumptions on the radical left misses the mark, exposing instead his shallow understanding of certain Marxist notions, such as those of “living” and “dead” labour. But the overwhelming effect of his book is to challenge and enliven keen political minds. Of course, Lazzarato is wielding heavy theoretics, but if you’re familiar with philosophy or simply willing to learn new concepts, Capital Hates Everyone is never byzantine. You will emerge from it intellectually invigorated.

Watching: ‘Tokyo Sonata’ (2008), dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa 

At the beginning of April, I watched Tokyo Sonata, on the surface, a kitchen-table family drama by Japanese film director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The 2008 film was my first foray into Kurosawa’s work, but I was aware that his 1997 film Cure was highly regarded by many. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine a better introduction than Tokyo Sonata. 

The narrative revolves around the Sasaki family, who struggle with authentic communication and personal fulfilment during the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis. When patriarch Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) is laid off from his corporate job and plunged into a prolonged period of unemployment, his decision to keep this secret triggers a series of events that upend the fragile family unit.

From here, each Sasaki—wife and mother Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) and two sons, Takashi (Yū Koyanagi) and Kenji (Kai Inowaki)—must struggle with their own identity about the family and society more broadly. I dare not spoil what this entails explicitly, but I will reproduce parts of my Letterboxd review to whet your appetite:

I'm not sure I've seen another film with such an effect, effortlessly balancing ironic mesto with earnest whimsy. Kurosawa sets this affectation in motion to draw out the absurdity of quiet tragedies without stripping them of their full dramatic and human consequence.

[...]

Visually, Tokyo Sonata sees Kurosawa expertly manipulating framing and blocking to convey the characters' inner turmoil and the external forces that shape their lives. Whether set within the obscured confines of a domestic space or the vast tapestry of Tokyo's bustling streets, every scene is meticulously staged to evoke an emotionally grounded place and purpose.

Thematically, the film delves into myriad dichotomies—ego and money, shame and violence, America and Japan, property and dispossession, hierarchy and freedom—inviting viewers to ponder the systemic interconnectedness of seemingly disparate elements. Most interestingly, Kurosawa introduces the notion of performativity as central to modern existence, which is depicted as replete with poisonous and harmless deceptions. Performance is considered universally human, with equal potential to be tragic or emancipatory.

If you have Mubi, you can stream Tokyo Sonata now. And if you don’t, get Mubi and stream Tokyo Sonata and a host of other great cinema. Please do it now!

Watching: ‘Evil Does Not Exist’ (2023), dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi

I will cheat and include a second film recommendation in this letter (this will be a regular occurrence). I do so because Evil Does Not Exist—the latest film by another Japanese director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi—is contemporary cinema nonpareil. You may know of Hamaguchi through Drive My Car, which won the Best International Feature Film Oscar in 2022. 

The ABC ran a spoiler-free review that captures the unique feelings that Hamaguchi’s film conjures, seemingly without effort. Suffice it to say, it is the only recent film that could be called Aesopian in its mythic tenor and mysterious morality. Yet, despite this near-mystical essence, Hamaguchi can keep the film firmly affixed to reality, readily recognisable to all.

Evil Does Not Exist features a bewitching original score by Japanese composer Eiko Ishibashi, which is equally crucial to the film’s imagery for building the thematic, emotional, and narrative experience. You must go to your local Arthouse cinema and watch this film while it plays. There is nothing like it. The sheer force of its brilliance drove me to write a short essay on the film, which you should read as soon as you’ve seen it. Run, don’t walk.

Listening: ‘Where does culture come from?’, Terry Eagleton

I’ve been on a bit of a Lil Wayne wave this past month, music-wise. I can’t count how many times I’ve recently played 2005’s magnificent Tha Carter II or Weezy’s landmark 2009 mixtape, No Ceilings. If you are not already aware, Lil Wayne is one of the most talented rappers in hip-hop history. 

This prompted me to recall that the dominant 2010s culture made Wayne into a figure of racist ridicule—he was seen as talentless and stupid in a far more racially aggressive manner than “mumble rappers” today. It was a popular meme to be racist about Lil Wayne. But I digress; his raps rule, and you should listen to them.

Yet I thought to feature a lecture by Terry Eagleton—adapted from an essay you can read in the London Review of Books—as listening this month. For those unfamiliar with Eagleton, he is an English literary theorist, critic and prolific writer of wide renown. You’ve probably seen his books, such as Why Marx Was Right or The Idea of Culture, on your favourite good bookshop shelves over the years. 

In the lecture, Eagleton provides an amply entertaining and educative abridged history of human culture as we know it today and analyses the nature of its various forms and their constitution. This is the description from the London Review of Books:

The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this approach to a concept with a much more capacious history is too narrow. In the closing LRB Winter Lecture for 2024, Terry Eagleton examines various aspects of that history—culture and power, culture and ethics, culture and critique, culture and ideology—to broaden the argument and understand where we are now.

Despite his old age and poor health, Eagleton is committed to engaging with the cultural and political questions of the time, retaining his adorable sense of humour and casual intellect. It is well worth an hour to listen to his lecture—Eagleton, like all of us, will not be around forever.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on these recommendations. I hope you enjoy it. Until next time!

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“Water always flows downhill. What you do upstream will end up affecting those living downstream.”

Evil Does Not Exist, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s newest film, articulates the dynamic and unpredictable modes in which cinema can harness a formerly unspoken zeitgeist and, in doing so, illuminate the present. Hamaguchi caught his international break in 2021 with Drive My Car, an adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story Men Without Women. Hamaguchi’s contemplative film explored the knowability of human character and grief, becoming the first Japanese feature ever nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and winning Best International Feature Film.

Its most revelatory crux, however, was that of communication, both verbal and non-verbal. Using an in-film production of Uncle Vanya by Russian playwright Anton Chekov, Hamaguchi investigates the intricacies of human interaction. To successfully perform the play, Hamaguchi’s characters, and therefore his actors, must transcend language barriers, learning to work collaboratively when conveying the story’s emotional truths—without necessarily speaking words.

Hamaguchi directed a second film released in 2021, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, departing from the dense but linear nature of Drive My Car. This time, Hamaguchi adopted an anthology structure—a triptych centred on three individual characters, driven by their respective desires and regrets. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy did not engender interest from a mass audience despite the broad success of Drive My Car only months earlier.

While it was awarded the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy needed to attract the substantive critical engagement befitting of it. Despite having less time to devote to each central figure, Hamaguchi demonstrated an extraordinary talent for incisively and empathetically drawing out their inner worlds. Together, Hamaguchi’s 2021 films distinguished the director as among the best and most searching storytellers of contemporary cinema.

Evil Does Not Exist, Hamaguchi’s 2023 masterstroke, has achieved a handful of praise among critics. Yet, the director’s latest film has again failed to garner the widespread interest grasped by his Oscar winner. Where Drive My Car concerns loss and connection, Evil Does Not Exist is described as an ‘ecofable’. This picture signifies the film’s allongé with nature and near-mythic essence while flattening its acuity. This is not to say that fables lack asperity. Hamaguchi’s film brings to mind the Jātaka tales of Indian Buddhist origin, which deal sharply with ecological equilibrium and the importance of human morality. Punishment is frequently visited in these tales upon those who violate ethical and environmental virtue. What this shorthand omits, though, is the inescapable nowness of Evil Does Not Exist.

For one, it is the rare contemporary film (alongside Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon and Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi) containing any reference to the coronavirus pandemic. Much like in our world, this epochal event has faded into the background whilst stealthily continuing to define society’s structure and emotional ennui. Instead of engaging in the pandemic erasure practised by most directors—a kind of cinematic revanchism, evasively leveraging film to return to an irrecoverable status quo ante—Hamaguchi encodes its lasting ramifications directly into the central conflict of Evil Does Not Exist. After a protracted opening act, inculcating us to the rhythm of local “odd job” man and widower Takumi’s (Hitoshi Omika) everyday life, upheaval arrives in Mizubiki village in the form of outsiders.

The intruders come as representatives of a talent agency turned real estate developer, hoping to rort government COVID subsidies and bearing the appropriately infantile name ‘Playmode’. Hamaguchi’s patient observation of Takumi’s rustic lifestyle—foraging wild wasabi, chopping firewood, collecting spring water for the community udon restaurant—set to Eiko Ishibashi’s beguiling score is interrupted by a town meeting. The townsfolk are assembled by the company (to appear ‘consultative’ while allowing residents to blow off steam), only to level blistering criticisms of its plan to establish a “glamping” resort in their village.

In a brief but telling transition, Takumi’s eight-year-old daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), who we are introduced to via her perambulations through the nearby woodland, bemusedly peers inside the town hall’s glass doors. Where previously Hamaguchi extended a cinematographically splendid tracking shot, acquainting us with Hana’s curiosity and her surroundings, now it takes only a few seconds for the film to abandon her perspective. Children—even those keenly invested in nature—are excluded from decisions about its preservation and their future. It is not only the will of youth set to be sidelined, though.

As soon as the actors-turned-managers representing Playmode have finished playing a virtually parodic advertisement for their glamping ground, townspeople launch into their misgivings: the septic tank’s insufficient capacity and positioning is bound to contaminate their water, a lack of supervision will lead to reckless visitors igniting deadly fires, and touristification will practically sap their “purpose” for living in the region. Each time, they are met with inflexible, almost scripted responses from Playmode employees Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani).

The meeting oscillates uncomfortably between the sincere, conscientious pleadings of denizens and the performativity of Takahashi, who fails to leverage his showbiz charm to assuage the residents’ qualms. As such, Hamaguchi reconstructs a case study for our real predicament. Mizubiki residents are told what we are: it is “mutually beneficial” for our lives and the dwindling residuum of nature to be at the mercy of artificial corporations—parasitically glomming from one fad to the next.

This pivotal scene recalls the rehearsal sequences from Drive My Car, with Hamaguchi contrasting the ‘circular’ room arrangement of Uncle Vanya table reads, to the diametric assemblage of the town hall, where Takahashi and Mayuzumi face down Mizubiki’s inhabitants. In effect, Hamaguchi blooms his study of performativity, from that found within personal relations or art to the characteristic theatricality of our political juncture. It is one of many sublime moments through which we experience Hamaguchi’s concerted stylistic evolutions, subtle and overt, during Evil Does Not Exist.

Indeed, the casting of non-trained crew member Hitoshi Omika in the leading role of Takumi encapsulates Hamaguchi’s relentless drive to innovate with his filmmaking. This unconventional choice cultivates a dual brilliance that exemplifies the film’s tantalising indefinability. First, Hamaguchi maximises what he judged as Omika’s “difficult to read” face, further densening an already enigmatic screenplay. Second, Omika’s deep familiarity with the production informs his utterly convincing portrayal of the laconic Takumi, giving the character an embodied, seemingly empirical existence.

Hamaguchi’s deployment of Ishibashi’s original score is the most striking development. Evil Does Not Exist is an inversion of the duo’s initial idea, where Hamaguchi intended to produce a short film to accompany Ishibashi’s live performances, who also scored Drive My Car. The partners resolved that Ishibashi’s compositions should give rise to a feature-length screenplay. The opening intertitle of Evil Does Not Exist is distinctly reminiscent of dozens employed throughout late French director Jean-Luc Godard’s filmography. Ishibashi’s score is made to function similarly to those of Godard, with Hamaguchi telling Cahiers du Cinéma that the pair aimed “not to use music to control the audience’s emotions but to awaken its sensibility”. Likewise, Ishibashi pointed to Godard as a “common reference” for their “desire for a fair sharing between image and music”.

Their inspiration is pronounced: the entrancing roundelay that plays during the film’s many sequences in the woods both lingers and is repeatedly, abruptly withdrawn, giving way to ambient stimuli of the rural setting. As in Godard’s Vivre sa vie, and Pierrot le Fou, this auditory fragmentation and discontinuity hints that something is awry, denying us the expected tonal resolution invariably granted by orthodox cinema. A single piece of music presents in sequences of bucolic beauty and those foreboding or carrying devastation.

Ishibashi’s theme is itself constructed dialectically, with smooth opening strings gradually revealing a stentorian undercurrent. In fusing discordant sounds, Ishibashi incites doubt in Mizubiki’s apparent serenity. The uncanny modularity of Ishibashi’s score creates a counter-narrative, achieving distinct emotional resonances from the imagery on screen. For instance, as Hana observes deer from afar, the very same theme that twinges with danger later coats her dreams in calm.

This mantra—to be maximally inclusive of the moral, spiritual, and environmental lacery endemic to life but liquefied by modernity—extends out from Ishibashi’s score, permeating all of Evil Does Not Exist. When it becomes abundantly clear to the villagers that Takahashi and Mayuzumi are unable to address their glamping site fears meaningfully, Takumi grants them something of a reprieve, instructing them to hold another meeting once they have removed the layers of bureaucracy between the townsfolk and Playmode’s decision-makers. This is curious, as Takumi is seen sitting with a subterranean furore throughout the meeting whilst also acting to restrain a particularly embittered friend and resident. Takumi’s contradictory decree gives rise to the events of the film’s second half, which shifts toward characterising Takahashi and Mayuzumi.

Upon returning to Playmode’s Tokyo office—a tiny basement designed solely to support Google Meet sessions—the pair are understandably reluctant to return to Mizubiki without meeting the demands of its people. Despite their protestations, their bosses (Takuma Nagao and Yoshinori Miyata) enlist them to sell a half-baked compromise. While Playmode will not risk losing access to subsidies by delaying the project and have no budget leeway, they will offer Takumi the role of camp steward—they will attempt to buy him off.

Hamaguchi opts to enforce the travel time of the car ride back to Mizubiki, leading to an ample reveal of Takahashi’s casual sexism and ludicrous, post-pandemic fetishisation of ‘simpler’ rural life. Even now, Hamaguchi resists crude condemnation, introducing uneasy pity toward Takahashi concurrent to unfurling his neuroses. By imposing the duration of the urban-to-rural travel, Hamaguchi materialises the distance between the two lifestyles whilst continuing his elongation of time—cutting against our hurried daily reality. Space is also afforded for Mayuzumi to endear herself to the audience as an avatar of a less kitschy, more relatable liminality: she cannot settle in a career, finding herself stuck between drifting or remaining in a humiliating job.

Shortly after arriving back in Mizubiki, Takahashi begins cloying for what he believes is an excellent opportunity to shift his life to the countryside, subverting the pair’s mission to convince Takumi to caretake the camp. Instead, Takahashi wishes to take on the role, escaping the city and establishing a more masculine, self-sufficient existence. Sensing a chance to turn pests into “helpers”, Takumi demonstrates his quiet cunning by stringing the outsiders along, getting them to restore the udon restaurant’s stocks of spring water.

Ishibashi’s score returns, indicating the authentically curative effects of completing meditative tasks within nature. But it is Mayuzumi, not Takahashi, who begins internalising this lesson, taking her time to carefully fill each tub while her callow colleague hurriedly ferries them back to the truck. As they relax after loading the water, Mayuzumi resolves that this is the last thing she does before quitting Playmode. It is the film’s final moment of sublimity.

In the context of Evil Does Not Exist, this is a monumental sequence, marking the first revolution of Takumi’s routine since the “balance” of the area was disrupted by opportunistic outsiders. This pristine water is the pride and joy of Mizubiki and the primary source of its rejection of the fatuous Playmode glamping site. In this way, Hamaguchi’s film resembles the Rukkhadhamma Jātaka, a fable Buddha imparted to his clan while they clashed with one another over vital water rights. Buddha counselled that such discord weakened both clans as they both required water and, much like trees, would be more resilient when working together to survive the trials of nature:

“United, forest-like, should kinsfolk stand;
The storm o’erthrows the solitary tree.”

Like Buddha, the village chief of Mizubiki (Taijirô Tamura) warns during the town meeting that a chord of respect should be struck between the parties to avoid disputes. To achieve this, “the people upstream have to take the blame” for the downstream consequences of their actions. The chief’s remarks posit an inverted ‘trickle-down economics’, cautioning would-be capitalists that rapacious profit-seeking invites blowback. Soon after, when Hana presents him with a feather she collected while frolicking in a field clear of the woods, the chief sternly exhorts that she must not go there alone.

But the fragile environmental and social equipoise has already been destabilised. After loading up the water, Takumi realises that he has again forgotten to pick Hana up from school. Anticipating this, Hana has gone walkabout in the woods. In the initial search, Mayuzumi puts herself about, earning a deep cut in the palm of her hand. After Takumi bandages Mayuzumi’s wound, apologising for his supervisory oversight, Takahashi insists on joining Takumi to continue searching for Hana—an effort undertaken by the entire village.

The sweep of the woods lasts through the night, and it is not until the following morning that Takumi and Takahashi stumble into the field from within the tree line. They are confronted with an impossible situation: Hana is seated just metres from two deer—a fawn and its distressed, gut-shot guardian. Before a plan can be hatched, Hana rises to her feet, removes her beanie, and innocently approaches the deer. Suddenly, the film’s simmering, menacing undertone of ferity erupts into the open and beyond the readily decipherable.

It is possible to understand as the culmination of the “anger” Ishibashi felt while making the film, “directed towards the way humans work, the unfairness of this whole world”. Yet something more than mere tragedy remains at the conclusion of Evil Does Not Exist. Anger needs a destination—it must go somewhere, tempt something. As Ishibashi put it, “Anger is one source of energy that compels me forward – that includes the sense of friction I feel when I face society, and friction I feel towards my own self”.

If you do not already know, my name is Revan, and I am based in Naarm/Melbourne. I am many frivolous things, like a lawyer who didn’t bother entering practice. More importantly, I am increasingly a writer, so you’ll receive more emails from me. This is, I hope, pleasant news.

Since you’re receiving this, you’re at least somewhat familiar with what I like to write about and how I do it. Still, this is my Substack, Baklava Bolshevik, a space where I hope to blend ruthless criticism of everything as it is with optimism that we can build internal opposition to and go beyond it. 

I am passionate about dissecting the complexities of politics, cinema, and culture. Here, I will delve into these subjects and more (I’m looking forward to writing more about food and sport shortly), often drawing out the lesser-discussed connections between them. I do so because I wish to start conversations about the things I care about, and I am sincerely grateful that about 60ish of you have already joined me here.

I am writing this short letter to you, dear reader, so that you have a picture of what you can reasonably expect from me on this platform. My commitment to taking the time to devote myself to writing what I hope are compelling and diverse pieces is growing—I’m excited by that. As part of this, I thought I could put together a short list of the best things I have been reading, watching and listening to each month. This will also be a handy place to update you on any non-Substack pieces from me you can read in other publications. So, without further ado, here is the first edition of Reading, Watching, Listening.

Reading: ‘If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution’, Vincent Bevins

I recently had the tremendous fortune of being asked to read If We Burn and produce a book review for Meanjin’s May issue. Authored by former Washington Post and Financial Times journalist Vincent Bevins, the book weaves together the history and analysis of ten significant mass protest movements worldwide between 2010 and 2020. Some crucial movements include the Egyptian Revolution and Bevins’ own experience as a correspondent based in Brazil during a politically tumultuous decade. Guiding the survey is Bevins’ pressing inquiry into why—given the most mass protest movements in human history transpired—things usually got worse. 

I completed the book yesterday, and I must say that Bevins is among the handful of journalists in the world (Anand Gopal and Jack Shenker also come to mind) today who you could trust to tell these stories in a scrupulous and equally sympathetic fashion. You’ll have to read my review when it is published for a fuller analysis. Still, structural issues aside, If We Burn is an essential artefact of a decade that, far from being consigned to history, is set to define its rhythms for the foreseeable future. By the fifth chapter, I had already laughed, been moved to tears—and sat with searing rage at the organised conspiracy to repress the vast majority of humanity, which characterises every waking moment. Pick it up at any good bookshop.

Watching: ‘Personal Shopper’ (2016), dir. Olivier Assayas

In the past week, I watched French director Olivier Assayas’ 2016 film, Personal Shopper, starring Kristen Stewart (sticking with a publication theme, here). It had been on my radar since its initial critical reception, but I could never get around to watching it until I noticed it sitting on streaming. This was a brilliant decision. I won’t say much because this film benefits from being shrouded in mystery that gradually unfolds as you watch. But here’s what I wrote on Letterboxd to give you a taste:

In ‘Personal Shopper,’ smartphones are matter-of-factly portrayed as the epitome of ghostly companions, ceaselessly caressing our skin while firmly embedding themselves in our consciousness. Kristen Stewart consummately conjures Maureen, who traverses the real and metaphysical with her phone—and apparent psychic abilities—as her vessel.

Director Olivier Assayas ingeniously transforms these devices into black mirrors, offering glimpses into both past and present worlds—conduits to a vast expanse of connections, emotions and identities. Interestingly, phones and grief operate similarly: The film suggests that grief is not a linear process but a complex journey, where the boundaries between past and present, life and death, are blurred.

Assayas’ insight is that despite their robust control over us, phones, like memories and emotions, ultimately find their expression within ourselves. Maureen grapples with memories of her brother and struggles to separate them from her sense of self. That is, until she finally confronts herself, the only time ‘Personal Shopper’ fades out a scene to white instead of black.

A movie so devastatingly humane and fraught with peril necessarily becomes beautiful.

Curiously, it was only earlier in the week that I had wondered when the first great film to play with smartphones in this way would find its way to the silver screen. It turns out I had just missed it because Personal Shopper is that film—making it essential modern cinema.

Listening: ‘The Great Bailout’, Moor Mother

Moor Mother is one of those genuinely inimitable musicians: nobody else does anything remotely similar to her oeuvre. I’ve followed her work since I first heard her album with billy woods. Her latest project, The Great Bailout, focuses on Britain and its colonial role in the slave trade. The album, produced in collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra, carefully unpacks the 1835 act. This legislation “compensated” 46,000 British slave owners with a sum that today would amount to 17,000,000,000 GBP. This enormous ransom was paid out to reimburse enslavers for their lost human “property”, which they were legally required to manumit due to the abolition of slavery.

You can read more about the album’s concept and Moor Mother’s perspective in this interview. But I strongly suggest that you sit down somewhere quiet before you do so and listen to the album from front to back. It isn’t long, but it is among the most affecting musical projects you will hear. The Great Bailout is a work of sonic experimentality and political incisiveness, the likes of which are now sadly rare, and its combativeness demands to be heard. If you’d like a preview, my favourite track is probably “ALL THE MONEY”. It is precise, haunting, undeniable art of the highest order:

Let me know if you decide to try any of these recommendations; I’d love to hear your thoughts. Until next time!

“This ain’t about you.” — E L U C I D.

So opens We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, the sixth studio album from New York rap duo Armand Hammer. One part Billy Woods and another E L U C I D, Armand Hammer has engineered an unequalled place in the contemporary hip-hop landscape, becoming known for dense, high-concept work. The pair are relentless innovators at a time when mainstream artists seemingly race to see who can strip out as much substance from their music as possible. 

Released in 2023, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips does more to revolutionise hip-hop than any record since not-yet-Nazi Kanye West’s now decade-old Yeezus. In a genre increasingly characterised by a kind of “nihilism without nihilism”—stemming from the political and aesthetic Nazification set in motion by West—woods and E L U C I D produce decidedly generative music, refusing to participate in hip-hop’s accelerating death drive.

What Armand Hammer constructs with We Buy Diabetic Test Strips amounts to a kind of aural place in the concrete sense of the term. It brings to mind African American Marxist Fred Moten’s concept of the undercommons—a space so foreign to the dominant ideological apparatus that its very alienness amounts to a form of creative resistance. The album’s title alludes to the ingenuity of the marginalised within late American capitalism: it is named for a hustling scheme devised by middlemen, who traffic life-saving test strips from wealthier, insured diabetics to poor, uninsured and disproportionately Black diabetics.

Inherent in this is a critique of capitalism’s current, permanent crisis. This collapsing, inhuman order where E L U C I D raps that “if you can’t be used, you’re useless” (sage advice once offered by billionaire Kanye West himself) is the album’s tableau vivant. But while not shying away from society’s putrescence, Armand Hammer also see an opportunity: the potential to coax alternative means of material and spiritual subsistence, falling outside legal sanction. In this way, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips celebrates what Moten and co-theorist Stefano Harney term ‘fugitive planning’ whilst reserving utter contempt for the forces necessitating such modalities.

The precarity of African American existence is the album’s most pronounced thematic throughline, chillingly captured when billy woods recounts:

“True story: I forgot four zips in the laundry

I was sweatin’, fearful

Went back the next day, she calmly gave me the laundry

Leaned in and said, ‘Papi, be careful.’”

What is exceptional about this latest album is how it fuses each emcee’s characteristically conceptual lyricism with equally multifaceted production. While earlier projects like Race Music and Paraffin always carried a distinctive sound, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips represents a stylistic radicalisation. The complexification in soundscape and instrumentation marks an escalation in the duo’s confrontation with the bounds of present possibility.

The sonic encapsulation of modern life’s insecurity and overwhelm is achieved by combining three distinct elements: a diverse group of producers, including August Fanon, Kenny Segal and JPEGMAFIA; live band instrumentation; and non-musical sounds that texture the album. The result is a remarkable musical polymorphism—a unique listening experience distinguished by its psychoacoustic effects. The live instrumentation provides uncommon depth and warmth in the form of Shabaka Hutchings’ lavish flute, evocative marimba from Jane Boxall and groovy bass by Adi Meyerson, among other talented players.

In contrast, a thick cacophony of dial tones, sampled recordings of phone calls and all manner of digital signals enkindle the unusual electronica ambient to modernity. African American socialist W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote of his ‘double consciousness’ formulation: “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self”. Here, woods and E L U C I D grapple with this historically contextualised—yet immensely personal—struggle, compounded by the refractive technologies of our age.

The album’s opening five tracks are replete with thoughtful musings on the at-once connective and disorienting nature of smartphones. On ‘Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Going to Die’, E L U C I D does just that, but he receives only a vague reply. Enmeshed in JPEGMAFIA’s panoply of ethereal computer-generated sounds, he continues:

“I’m just a image, a fetish

I fantasise”

Shortly after, on ‘The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory’, E L U C I D proposes an orientation:

“Many multiplicities

Living every mystery

[...]

Certainty is a circle, I don’t believe you.”

This hallucinatory digital haze is ferociously interrupted by the DJ Haram-produced ‘Trauma Mic’, marking the consummation of We Buy Diabetic Test Strips’ technoindustrial landscape. The track opens with repeatedly crashing cymbals, mimicking the violent drudgery of factory production. This solidity is paired with the contradictory ephemera of feature artist Pink Siifu’s reverb-laden yelping. Siifu wailing “metal is my weapon” gives way to E L U C I D’s refrain of “no slave, no world”, as sounds resembling the roar of buzzsaws erupt.

The accompanying music video—where woods and E L U C I D conduct hard labour in a trash compacting yard—lends physicality to the song’s auditory motifs. Crucially, ‘Trauma Mic’ intimates a relationship between the hip-hop of Armand Hammer and the multidisciplinary works of a number of African American fine artists. Take, for instance, Thornton Dial, whose artwork is notably dense and expressive in composition, not unlike We Buy Diabetic Test Strips. Dial was principally employed throughout his life as a metalworker in Bessemer, Alabama, and used those skills to configure elaborate sculptures from found materials while in retirement.

Dial and his contemporaries, such as Lonnie Holley and Joe Minter, transmogrify materials that the white world usually sees as junk into poignant and provocative artworks. These new creations often resemble a form of hidden knowledge, speaking a language that only other African Americans of particular experience in life will recognise. Armand Hammer’s musical practice can be seen as a profound transposition of this tradition, expanding its artistic canvas in the form of cutting-edge hip-hop. On ‘Total Recall’, billy woods hints at these richly varied sources of inspiration with idiosyncratic black humour:

“No father, my style wild bastardised (the dirty version)”

Together, Armand Hammer’s sonic experimentality and tender, labyrinthic lyricism form a far too rare hip-hop spatiality: that of inextricable nowness, but which articulates, however abstractly, the many potential futures contained within our present. In striving to mediate their momentane human condition musically, the duo embody Moten’s inquiry “toward the future of that history and what it might engender, whatever liberatory possibility it might hold”. This makes billy woods and E L U C I D not only the best rappers working today but luminaries within the tiny handful of musicians the world over who truly demand to be listened to.

This piece was originally published by the kind folks at KinoTopia. Check them out for the best local cinema coverage from lots of promising, emerging voices.

Love Lies Bleeding, the romantic thriller from writer-director Rose Glass, opens with a sequence evoking the nocturnal stylings of Michael Mann, blended with the monolithic cosmic spirituality of Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018). We’re rapidly immersed in a world where love and death dance together in a hauntingly cognate choreography. The film centres on Lou and Jackie, two female characters who Glass ensures cut unique, albeit somewhat unfilled cinematic figures. From what we learn, Lou (Kristen Stewart) is entangled in a dangerous web of familial abuse, from her sinister father, the local crime boss Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), to her sister Beth (Jenna Malone) being a battered wife to her abusive husband, JJ (Dave Franco). Blood red psychic memory-visions gradually reveal that Lou once served as her father’s underworld understudy—a hands-on criminal operator who knows both killing and cover up. Jackie is introduced as a homeless “big girl” wandering New Mexico in search of a job, a place to stay and a gym to train at. While Jackie is ostensibly preparing for a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas, she’s also running from her own family. Her religious Oklahoman parents demean her bisexuality, estranging Jackie from a sibling she would otherwise be close to. Both characters possess barely repressed anger from their thorny familial relationships. When Jackie first waltzes into the gym Lou manages for her father, Lou’s acutely lascivious gaze trains on her as she pumps various muscles. It only takes moments for their first conversation to reveal a ferocious mutual desire, and a recklessness that portends later events.

Stewart and O'Brian deliver tour de force performances, embodying the film's themes with a raw intensity that is as unsettling as it is captivating. Despite the ferocity of their love and the increasingly complex criminal drama it causes, the characters remain distinctly vivid without being cartoonish. This is the sharpest aspect of Glass’ work with co-writer Weronika Tofilska: while the stakes rise catastrophically, their characters remain true to themselves, making believably ill-advised and rash choices. Yet the repeated escalations allow Lou to demonstrate her preternatural ability to carve a path back to Jackie. Stewart shines in her portrayal of a woman consumed by love as a form of escape from a demented family, while O'Brian's performance is equally compelling as a comparably immature woman driven to extremes by the dominance of her desires. Audiences will be struck by the fidelity of the fear Stewart conjures, alongside anxious improvisation and fierce eroticism in her combustible romance with Jackie. Likewise, in O’Brian’s commitment to Jackie’s physical transformation, Glass finds the bodybuilding beau idéal—a woman whose towering physique inspires simultaneous awe and terror. Lou’s is a love of protective service, while Jackie is driven by the will to impress, hoping to mitigate a buried sense of inadequacy. Together, the palpable chemistry of the film’s leads gives potent force to the cliché of explosive queer lust and love.

In dressing her neon gothic crime odyssey in noir trappings, Glass imbues Lou and Jackie’s same-sex attraction with provocations toward the genre’s history. A distinctive trope of traditional film noir is the femme fatale—a seductive, mysterious woman who lures the male protagonist into danger. Love Lies Bleeding reconfigures and complicates this crux by rendering Lou, the film’s equivalent to a typical noir hero—a solitary, disillusioned man—a woman. Far from straightforwardly falling victim to her femme fatale, Lou is certainly culpable in the development of Jackie’s steroid addiction. Glass does not cheaply do away with masculinity however. Both characters have male names with Lou’s deriving from her father, framing her Oedipal struggle against him. Lou is recalcitrant to ‘open up’ to Jackie, who develops into a fascinating inversion of an archetypal contemporary male: dependent, narcissistic and abusive. Both women experience severe bouts of jealousy, which they handle with characteristic male petulance. Unlike conventional noirs, Glass irreverently denies the audience a damsel in distress, instead pitting Lou and Jackie directly against each other at times, while also forcing them to rely on each other. In this way, the film embodies its characters’ struggle with their own vulnerabilities and the masculinity of the other—a quest to actualise Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of authentic love, which must be reciprocal and non-exploitative.

Glass never slips into celebrating Lou and Jackie’s love as a categorical good. What Love Lies Bleeding lacks in the way of character ontogeny (or, the developmental history of an organism within its lifetime), it compensates with scintillatingly rendered sexuality—not merely its productive nature, but also its destructive potential. On their first night together, Lou gets Jackie hooked on steroids to boost her prospects of triumph, setting into motion the turbulent events of the film’s plot. If Beauvoir’s suggestion that “the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project” is correct, then Jackie’s swelling, muscular body is the film’s tableaux. By the time Lou and Jackie find themselves tending to Lou’s sister (Beth) in hospital after a particularly grotesque beating at the hands of  her husband (JJ), Jackie’s body is pulsating with juice, unable to contain the rage within. In a morbid transference of her burning love of Lou, Jackie acts where the police refuse to, crushing JJ’s skull against his coffee table, cleaving his face. Jackie’s visual dominion over the mangled corpse evokes Georges Bataille’s notion of the intimate connection between death and eroticism, both representing ultimate transgressions against the limits of oneself and those imposed by society. By murdering JJ out of devotion to Lou, Jackie creates a transcendent continuity that dissolves the boundaries between the two lovers. After recoiling in understandable disgust at the gruesome sight of JJ’s now split face, Lou moves swiftly into enginous corpse-disposal mode, echoing her past. As such, Jackie’s vigilante justice is transformed into a moment of sublime unity, creating the space for a potentially liberated future together.

The rest of the film takes place in this state of profound instability, as Lou and Jackie move in and out of each other's lives while desperately attempting to elude both the wrath of Lou’s father (Lou Sr.) and law enforcement. Herein lies the playful genre-trappings employed by Glass, who never allows us to feel confident that the pair will emerge together, much less with their liberty intact. Glass zeroes in on a particular motivational slogan—“Destiny is a decision”—like many plastered across the walls of the gym where our lovers meet. With this and similar literalisations, Glass reveals her film’s Nietzschean aspect: the notorious philosopher’s concept of “Amor Fati”, latin for “love of fate”. Despite her discomfort with her past, Lou’s expert criminality is integral to crafting the couple’s potential escape. One of the film’s most arresting visuals is the abyssal canyon out in the desert, used by the Lous as a dumping ground for dead bodies. Like Bataille, Glass suggests that by “leaning out over deranged horror [...] The abyss is the foundation of the possible”. In using this same abyss to bring to light her father’s criminality, Lou embraces her fate past and present, manifesting her strength of character against Jackie’s corporeal power. What Love Lies Bleeding implies is that while herculean, Jackie’s violent roid rage and rodomontade are forms of dissimulation. Her rescue by Lou demonstrates that true might is found within.

Further Reading:

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957).

Bataille, Georges. Guilty (1988).

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (1949).

Kirkpatrick, Kate. "Love is a joint project" (2020). Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/simone-de-beauvoirs-authentic-love-is-a-project-of-equals.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1908).

When British colonisation commenced in 1788, Australia was foundationally committed to the genocide, dispossession and oppression of some 300,000 to 1,000,000 Indigenous people already living here. The decision by colonists to legally designate the continent ‘terra nullius’ – empty land – is the most pivotal wellspring of all laws, policies and actions of the colonies which followed and the capitalist state emerging from them.

This unilateral decision was based on the judgement that Europeans were so civilisationally and genetically superior to the Indigenous people that they need not even be deemed human. Land can’t be stolen if “nobody” is there “owning” it. That this project is inherently racist is self-evident, and this racism was encoded in the Constitution at federation in 1901: Indigenous people were not counted as citizens. Among consciously political people, no one denies this except those most committed to the maintenance and extension of the immense system of racial subjugation.

To crudely summarise history, this system includes hundreds of massacres, the intentional introduction and spreading of colonial diseases, slavery, the Stolen Generations and forced Christianisation. The Stolen Generations represent up to one in three Indigenous children being forcibly removed from Indigenous communities from 1905 into the 1970s by the Australian state and church. 

In 2023, Australians are voting in a referendum which proposes to amend its colonial Constitution to “recognise” Indigenous people and establish the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The Voice would be an advisory body of Indigenous members who could issue advice regarding Indigenous affairs to the federal parliament. If established, this body would have no effective power to exercise control over Indigenous affairs. All such discretion would remain with the Australian state.

Initially, support for the proposal, backed by the in-government Australian Labor Party and key blocs of big capital including mining, was above 60%. At the time of writing, nothing short of a miracle and unprecedented polling error could see the Yes vote claim victory, sitting at a paltry 38% support – effectively half what it once was in some polls. Focaldata polling now projects that only 22 of the 151 federal electorates will return a majority vote of Yes. This is not a simple defeat: it is a vicious repudiation with scant comparison.

This is alarming for many reasons, but the two principal causes for dismay are the success of the hard-right Racist No campaign headed by Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton and the further delay defeat imposes on even the simulation of redressing Indigenous oppression. It was not a fait accompli for such a conservative, inoffensive and mostly symbolic proposal to be defeated, as earlier support shows.

The vast majority of well-meaning political Australians will be left totally demoralised, confused and likely to view the defeat as evidence that the public is unsalvageable in its anti-Indigenous racism. Racism is indeed an important component of the No vote, and while despair is understandable, concluding that it is the dominant factor would be wrong.

The central reason for the Voice’s failure that all subsequent factors flow from is its very nature: the proposal is a liberal anti-racist wet dream. It aims only to “recognise” that Indigenous people exist and that they need a “voice” to advocate for advancement of their interests, given the appalling consequences of racist oppression. 

It is a remarkable marker of the impotence of the liberal ideology that, this far into the project, its lauded guarantee of “rights and equality before the law” is not yet meaningfully extended to colonised people. As many Indigenous activists have pointed out, the Voice provides First Nations people no sovereignty over land or their own affairs, nor any “rights” to protect them from ongoing brutal racist oppression.

In fact, the Voice was proposed and prosecuted by the chief administrators of this oppression, giving rise to valid scepticism around its efficacy and the sincerity of those behind it. Liberalism is no stranger to making a mockery of itself, but even ardent critics should reserve the right to be shocked by its gall. 

In the year of the referendum alone, the Queensland Labor government suspended its Human Rights Act not once but twice, solely to ensure that greater numbers of Indigenous children could be incarcerated and tortured in adult prisons where abuse of detainees is the rule.

The Western Australian Labor government caved without resistance to a racist campaign of farmers, mining companies, pastoralists and culture warriors, giving them a green light to desecrate Indigenous land and the environment by repealing its Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act. Federal Labor and their Northern Territory counterparts spent the lead-up to the Voice campaign reimposing paternalistic alcohol bans, acquiescing to yet another Dutton-led law and order moral panic. 

For their part, federal Labor also reneged on an election promise to do away with the similarly paternalistic policy of cashless income management. And Daniel Andrews, credibly seen as the most progressive of any Labor leader, departs state politics having presided over record rates of Indigenous incarceration, refusal to raise the age of criminal responsibility and cover ups of Aboriginal deaths in custody.

Always opposing these racist crimes are the “voices” of countless leading Indigenous advocates, experts and their allies. Only when the Voice campaign was already lost and desperate did anyone affiliated with Yes23 utter the word ‘racist’ or highlight the obscene disadvantage that their policies directly create. 

From the very start, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and prominent conservative Indigenous architects of the Voice pursued a conciliatory strategy. Rather than confront the self-implicating source of Indigenous disadvantage and combating the racist canards and baiting of the far-right, proponents of the Voice sought to placate reactionaries and court their votes. Predictably, this emboldened the highly coordinated Racist No campaign, knowing they would experience no pushback from Yes23.

Faced with opposing the limpest political campaign in living memory, a cunning Dutton steered the Racist No campaign toward successfully embedding three key messages into media coverage:

1. The Voice would divide Australia by race

2. Indigenous Australians don’t want or need the Voice

3. There is no detail on what the Voice will look like, thus it poses extreme risks

The first is easy enough to achieve – just keep saying it, they keep printing it, people start thinking it. The second was the masterstroke, enacted via empowering far-right Indigenous political figures Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price in a deft deployment of right-wing identity politics. 

Relying on the help of racists like Tony Abbott and black faces willing to spout the most vile and longstanding white supremacist arguments, Dutton was able to mostly confine himself to point 3 (though he dipped into all three) before disappearing for many weeks ahead of the vote. In a campaign-before-the-campaign, Dutton’s concern trolling dominated the slavish media cycle for months as Albanese and Voice architects appeared panicked, unclear and disgruntled, allowing fear and doubt to be sewn. It stuck, and Yes23 had to spend virtually all of the official campaign “educating” voters on their proposal.

This education around the Voice largely sucked up the oxygen that should have been spent impressing the severity of Indigenous disadvantage and the urgency to address this. At the same time, endless tutoring on the nature, structure and such of the Voice worked to depress public support, as it made salient the argument from both left-wing Indigenous activists and the opportunistic Racist No that the Voice would be powerless and practically ineffectual. With Yes23 officials opting for only one mass mobilisation in each major city during the campaign, there was never any chance for the kind of critical mass of public activity to develop that would be required to carry a referendum. 

This strategic review could go on because the mistakes were copious, but the more important question is how this catastrophic failure of Labor and Yes23 changes the politics around Indigenous issues in Australia going forward. 

The headline consequence is that liberal anti-racism has failed to move the needle toward a modicum of justice. Indeed, it has set the Indigenous movement back monumentally. As observed by Rachel Withers, the triumph of Racist No has reintegrated eugenic racism into “legitimate” political discourse:

“Over the weekend, we got a full whiff of what a “No” vote might enable. Abbott and fellow former prime minister John Howard declared to The Australian that the Northern Territory was a “failed state”, suggesting nothing had improved since the 2007 intervention (almost as if that was a terrible idea), while controversial anti-Voice advocate Gary Johns, who has made deeply racist remarks about Indigenous Australians, including that they should be blood-tested, said that he would turn his “No” outlet into a charity after the referendum, with the aim of countering the dominance of “elites” in Aboriginal affairs.”

Non-coincidentally, this is a reversion to the status quo of the profoundly racist climate of the Howard and Abbott years. The runaway trainwreck of the Voice referendum has managed to squander a historically high degree of consciousness around racism and general soft anti-racism, brought about by decades of Indigenous activism (currently best embodied by Invasion Day rallies, the largest and most radical annualised protest in the country) and the Black Lives Matter 2020 movement. 

As a result, the percentage of Australians who viewed racism as a very big or fairly big problem in the country spiked from 40% to 60%. This terrain partially explains why Dutton’s personal approval was savaged by 11%, hitting an all-time low of minus 28% right after making himself the face of Racist No. 

While the campaign has boosted the confidence of racists to espouse their filth and heightened conspiracy and reaction, it is not likely that popular anti-racist sentiment has been totally liquidated. More likely is that the solid third of the country that are Liberal Party voters and other Rightists, implacable racists as they are, combined with those unconvinced of the Voice’s potential efficacy but who may abstractly support Indigenous advancement, explains the majority of No support. These voters are mostly infected by a mix of the fearmongering lies pushed by Racist No and are registering a generic dissatisfaction with the government for its refusal to act on the cost of living crisis. 

Men, especially older men, often more susceptible to grievance and bigotry, are the strongest demographic for No, while young women are the Voice’s core base, and Greens voters overwhelmingly support Yes. It’s an imperfect measure, but all analysis on who remains “undecided” points to middle-aged female Labor voters sympathetic to Indigenous people, but who aren’t convinced the Voice is the right policy for the job. 

After all, why would people trust a government perpetrating a litany of crimes against Indigenous people, refusing to implement recommendations of the decades-old Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and Bringing Them Home Report? 

Australia is isolated worldwide for its unwillingness to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Senator Lidia Thorpe has made these points and more persuasively. And this is the same unpopular government simultaneously stonewalling an increasingly precarious working class.

Given the scale of the Voice’s defeat and Albanese’s hastiness to move on, one can expect a total abandonment of Indigenous issues for years to come without some kind of major spark. Importantly, this ghastly backsliding – even burial – comes as a number of key conditions are worsening for Indigenous people. 

We can expect this regressive trend to continue unabated indefinitely, so long as Indigenous people are deprived of control over their own affairs. Placing the Voice’s failure within the global context of an increasing inability of liberal elements of the ruling class to pursue their agenda in any democratic fashion, this is the effective conclusion of liberal anti-racism in Australia, as it has been known until this point. 

Don’t take my word for it, this is the view of arguably the principal architect of the strategy epitomised by the Voice, Noel Pearson:

“Frankly, the voice is a proposal so pathetically understated that I’m amazed most Indigenous people are settling for it. After all, I helped design it as something so modest that no reasonable non-Indigenous Australian could reject it. More fool me.”

If liberal anti-racism in Australia has met its end, the only remaining question is what possibilities there are to build a resilient, effective and ambitious anti-racist movement from the current aborted tragedy. This begins with the grassroots Indigenous left, who have built Invasion Day into a beautiful repudiation – on their part and that of their anti-racist, predominantly young supporters – of the celebration of the colonial nationalism “Australia Day” symbolises. 

Their constant struggle has made issues like Blak Deaths in Custody and routine police brutality far more likely to be covered, and covered sympathetically, by the mainstream media. More popular mobilisations along the lines conducted by these activists is an essential baseline component of any progress to come. That makes it a duty for any anti-racists to build and attend rallies not as a one-off yearly excision of shame but a consistent fightback. Demands for Treaty, land rights and an immediate relinquishing of stifling top-down control of Indigenous communities and affairs are central to that fight.

As part of this, all illusions in reformist liberal political forces like the Labor Party must be abandoned, lest any renewed energy for Indigenous liberation be captured, betrayed and disfigured yet again. As capitalism’s climate catastrophe envelops the whole of society and the environment, there simply is no more time to rely on snakes and failures to advance just causes that are inextricably entwined. A precondition for meaningful success of any progressive movement will be organisational and political independence of the movement from its enemies and compradors.

Clearly though, these movements have only so much momentum, ability to extract concessions or effective power without a union movement. This is not the place to recount history, but the Australian workers movement has been systematically conservatised and dismantled across decades, once again at the hands of the yellow dog Labor Party. Without a regrowth of the kinds of working class anti-racism, support for Indigenous rights and environmentalism best employed by the former Builders Labourers Federation, each component of the struggle for justice will remain in their fettered states.

But conditions are vastly different from the BLF’s heyday of working class militancy. I don’t have all the answers, but I am certain that the kind of fighting coalition that can help propel Indigenous activism to transformative achievements must be built on the existing base: the young women who are the most progressive bloc in society. Today, these women live in economic precarity and are constantly targeted by sexist vitriol, given the erosion of the feminist movement once buoyed by working womens struggles. People should not be deceived by glossy marketing strategies: being an anti-sexist of any level of sophistication is not mainstream. 

Tellingly, leading Yes campaigners have produced sexist material scapegoating this demographic for the confusion around the Voice (rather than confronting the Right directly). This material relies on right-wing propaganda around how supposedly airheaded and fake “progressive” artistic, urban women are – a total inversion of the reality of education attainment and opinion polling. 

Yet, this very sexist crux is precisely the reason that said material outperformed official Yes23 videos by orders of magnitude. That Yes campaigners would diminish the intellectual and political confidence of young women is but the self-inflicted nail in their coffin of arrogance. Their only hope of success was to organise and motivate this fundamental base of support, as the campaign for marriage equality showed.

In contrast, fascinating polling on the Voice shows that young people who speak a language other than English at home have been the most engaged by the Yes23 campaign. What this evidences is twofold. First, whites are by far the most concentrated demographic of racists in the country which, while hardly surprising, can only be shifted through struggle, as BLM 2020 demonstrated. 

Second and most crucially, there is in fact a material basis for a genuine anti-racist movement based on solidarity between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous racialised people in Australia. While abstract now, this points to the possibility of a sustained anti-racist pole with real roots in working class migrant communities.

In a curious convergence of these axes, young women, many of whom are racialised, have organised a number of strikes against dodgy, exploitative Mint My Desk bosses in Brisbane this year. At the same time, migrant women have been core to brave and successful strikes against Ingham’s and Hussey. This is an emergence in its infancy, dispersed geographically, with zero institutional backing and mostly compelled by the need to defend against horrific conditions and real wage collapses. But as in every Invasion Day and Stop Blak Deaths in Custody rally, the glimmers of hope for a future where racism is beaten back, not triumphant, are nestled within.

Note: This piece was initially published on Wednesday October 11, 2023. On the day of the Voice referendum vote just three days later, chief architect of the Voice, Marcia Langton, has published an incredible essay affirming what is effectively the exact line of argument made here.

While her honesty and analysis can be commended, that head figures behind the Voice could only offer such clarified, critical words now, in the form of a eulogy, is a betrayal that must never be forgiven. Peter Dutton and the forces of extreme “race-hate”, to use Langton’s own words, have been gifted a triumph at the expense of the people whose lives are degraded by oppressive policies, and climates of persecution.

Notably, Langton’s intellectually sharp, morally authoritative essay articulates no future potential for correction. One recalls what Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote of similarly compromised social and political forces, in decisive times requiring clear political strategy and action:

“The frightened petty-bourgeois confronted by great events sees nothing but dangers and obstacles. His sole recourse is the pathos of alarm.”

Let us, the opponents of reaction, the strivers for a world free of racism and all other oppressions, be pellucid that merely picking up the pieces of a liberal-reformist “reconciliatory” programme will lead to yet more defeats and demoralisation.

Now more than ever, in a world increasingly enveloped by explicit racial vilification and violence, an entirely different, bottom-up anti-racist counteroffensive is desperately necessary. Lest humanity fail to recover its soul in time to prevent cataclysm.

Travis Scott’s highly anticipated fourth studio album ‘UTOPIA’ opens with “Hyaena”, a song introduced with a sample of the British band Gentle Giant:

“The situation we are in at this time

Neither a good one, nor is it so unblessed

It can change, it can stay the same

I can say, I can make my claim

Hail, hail, hail.”

It is the album’s sole moment of lucidity. Scott incisively diagnoses two facts for just 26 seconds of the one-hour and 14-minute record. First, Scott has been crowned one of the mainstream kings of the genre, having nine Grammy nominations, two number-one albums and millions of record sales to his name. Second, the music industry (like other creative industries in the current crisis of capitalism) is experiencing a period of uncertainty, which contains both the possibility of rebirth and continued disruption.

This diagnosis is particularly interesting when one considers that despite a five-year wait and Scott’s massive profile, ‘UTOPIA’ failed to replicate the number one Billboard debut achieved by his preceding two albums. What does it say when a self-proclaimed king of his country’s most popular music genre can no longer take the throne?

Some have connected this to hip-hop’s overall failure to dominate the charts in 2023, as it has done in recent years. There is a growing perception that hip-hop is at a crossroads, with many lamenting its commercial homogenisation and apparent creative stagnation. Curiously, this comes as hip-hop is celebrating its 50th birthday. 

Even the most thoughtful reflections on the yet youthful genre’s milestone simultaneously mourn its premature death. It’s easy to see why when taking stock of the genre’s peak. Kanye West, arguably the artist most responsible for hip-hop hegemonising the mainstream, was lost to an explicitly anti-Black Nazism. 

Kendrick Lamar’s albums are increasingly, and I think, intentionally tiresome, betraying a hatred of his public profile and listeners. And Drake, who, like West, repeatedly reshaped the hip-hop landscape for better and worse, isn’t rapping much or very well anymore. So, Travis Scott is hardly alone as a hip-hop superstar struggling to define themselves or recreate the once-epochal nature of their records.

As a tragic for the genre, I’ve been thinking about this question and discussing it with friends. Within this context, I revisited one of the records that most inspired my love for hip-hop as a teen: Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s 1995 album, ‘Return to the 36 Chambers’. I immediately realised this rediscovery may hold the key to revitalising hip-hop's spirit.

Russell Tyrone “Ason” Jones, better known by his oft-abbreviated stage name, Ol’ Dirty Bastard (ODB), was a Brooklyn-born founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan rap group. ‘Return to the 36 Chambers’ was released only two years after the Clan rose to prominence with their debut album, ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’. That group debut now enjoys iconic stature for its supremely skilled albeit rugged lyricism, menacingly gritty production and conceptual ‘Soul-Fu’ pastiche.

As its title suggests, ODB’s first solo record marked a return to this sound, pioneered by the Clan’s in-house producer, RZA. While ‘Return’ inhabits the same world as ‘Enter’, RZA’s production creates the distinct sense that ODB’s eclecticism was integral to constructing that world. Method Man states as much on track five of ‘Enter’, remarking that:

“Cause there ain't no father to his style

That's why he the Ol' Dirty Bastard.”

This primordial creation myth is realised on ‘Return’ via a once-in-history combination of RZA’s indecorous production and ODB’s ravenous vocal style, where the very concept of flow is at once mastered and usurped. ‘UTOPIA’ opens with insight that immediately melts down into deflection. The intro skit to ‘Return’ is similarly blunt in its thesis, with ODB introducing himself to a live audience by anointing himself James Brown’s successor and launching into a typically misogynistic Brownesque creed about contracting gonorrhoea twice. 

Suppose it wasn’t already apparent that you’re in for a wildly vile, sharply contradictory ride. In that case, ODB injects a sudden tenderness, drawing raucous applause from the audience by singing about the feeling of getting head from your crush for the first time. Unlike Scott’s album, though, ODB follows through on the much loftier task he sets himself. This task is a profoundly reflexive, credibly boastful, yet sincerely self-abasing artistic singularity with no precedent in any genre–let alone hip-hop.

At the heart of the album's significance is its production, primarily helmed by RZA, with a couple of exceptions co-produced by ODB himself. One can tell as much because no album released since has sounded like this. Where modern acts like JPEGMAFIA meticulously manufacture merely the signifiers of impurity while lacking genuine pathos, 'Return to the 36 Chambers' revels in its unrefined comeliness. As ODB puts it:

“See when you stimulate your own mind for one common cause

You see who's the real motherfuckers”

Unlike the strained extravagance of Scott's 'UTOPIA', where transitions are needlessly imposed to feign dynamism, ODB's album lets the music breathe. Extended beat loops with thumping boom bap drums and syncopated samples create an unbroken spell, from the savagely arranged piano on “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” to the unfuckwithable bass on “Baby C’mon”. Listeners are gradually drawn into a hypnotic trance from one track to another, bopping our heads anxiously awaiting the next ODB verse to exhilarate us.

Take “Brooklyn Zoo”, which has a serious case for being the very best of all the illustrious Wu-Tang-associated songs. ODB co-produced the scintillating, distorted piano-based instrumental with True Master. Honestly, I wonder if any rapper has exhibited such consummate control over their craft as Dirty here. His verses are a whirlwind of vocal gymnastics, where his flow careens between staccato and fluid, rapped and sung–it’s nonsensical brilliance.

“My hip-hop drops on your head like ra-a-aaain

And when it rains it pours, 'cause my rhymes hardcore

That's why I give you more of the raw

Talent that I got will rizzock the spot

MCs I'll be burning, burning hot.”

This earned braggadocio delivered in electrifying fashion follows a reference to a notorious psych ward–the G Building–in ODB’s native Brooklyn, which eventually closed following revelations of obscene abuses against patients. At his most triumphant, ODB remains rooted in a rare honesty toward traumatic experience. 

Indeed, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s explosive persona was not confined to his art; his struggles with poverty, addiction, violence and the legal issues that followed became integral to his legacy. To the strange cacophony of sounds that seem to unwind and reload like a mesmerising spring on “Raw Hide”, ODB explains:

“Who the fuck wanna be an emcee

If you can't get paid to be a fuckin' emcee?”

RZA once recalled that the inspiration behind these lyrics was that despite the Wu having record deals, most of their budgets went into making the records with expenses like paying for samples, lawyers and studio time. “This left a artist having to hit the street for shows in order to cake up.” ODB echoes the album artwork featuring his food stamp identification card:

“I came out my momma pussy, I'm on welfare

Twenty-six years old–still on welfare

So I gotta get paid fully

Whether it's truthfully or untruthfully.”

ODB’s uncanny rapping ability and collaborative luminosity amongst the Clan eventually enabled him to abate these material pressures substantially. Although Dirty was insistent about his hustle, he wasn’t selfish. Once he had money, he became known for handing it out, including to children in the street. 

Despite its unconventional content and form, ‘Return to the 36 Chambers’ achieved critical acclaim and commercial success, earning a Grammy nomination in 1996. While it failed to win ‘Best Rap Album’, it is impossible to imagine an equally subversive record, much less a hip-hop debut, even receiving a nomination today.

Consider that, as Sheldon Pearce once noted, ODB weathered intensely racist scrutiny for his apparent disreputable character, “a depiction of a kind of blackness that was obscene: ignorant, dependant, deviant, unkempt, unruly, and, worst of all, uncontrollable”. This made his momentary stardom remarkable. One listen to ‘Return’ proves that Dirty possessed an acute understanding of the public characterisation of his persona, which he carefully reconfigures into a revolutionary anti-aesthetic.

It is essential to admire ODB’s transcendence of his life’s trappings in his artwork without viewing them solely as artistic fuel. No, as a poor, mentally ill Black man suffering from drug addiction, ODB absorbed profound harms ranging from being shot multiple times to becoming wary of doctors and incarcerated for cocaine possession. At one point, he escaped from a court-mandated drug treatment facility. During his month on the run, it is striking that he couldn’t resist playing a concert or recording music with RZA. The great tragedy of this story is that ODB’s defiance and material success weren’t enough to prevent his early death in 2004 due to a drug overdose.

Brian Michael Murphy eloquently captured the devastation such unnecessary deaths of despair represent within hip-hop, where “the tragic circumstances of [its] urban crucibles, and their attendant foreshortened life chances, are inseparable from its energy, aren’t they? They are. But I still feel mournful, for that time, for those people, for the things that were possible back then, and for what we as a society are losing now, in our inability or unwillingness to do better than we have done. What stars are now collapsing in on themselves before they’ve even had the chance to rise?”

There is no reconciling this burning truth just by listening to classic, transformative records like Ol' Dirty Bastard's ‘Return to the 36 Chambers’. But there is some solace in tracing his influence far beyond his era. Many have remarked that Dirty’s unapologetic individuality paved the way for artists like Young Thug and Danny Brown, who undoubtedly have adopted elements of his persona and vocal delivery. But beyond these observations, the most fascinating of ODB’s echoes in the present is E L U C I D, the Jamaica, Queens rapper who forms one half of Armand Hammer.

In E L U C I D’s music, you find few, if any, superficial similarities to that of ODB. But the high level aesthetic differences between their styles belie a deeper connection. The ODB particles in E L U C I D don’t relate to the specific vocal sounds he conjures but to their shared, seemingly endless vocal elasticity. After about four songs of ‘Return to the 36 Chambers’, you will have lost count of the variety of flows or specific “singing” techniques deployed by Dirty. The experience of E L U C I D’s 2022 album ‘I Told Bessie’ is almost equally diversified, disarming the listener with a delicate balance between total smooth and Iggy Pop gruff. Listen a little closer, and the lyrical synthesis reveals itself in their mutually autocritical and existential songwriting:

“There’d be no blues if I was blameless.”

This subterranean interrelation between Dirty and an artist whose debut came 21 years after ‘Return to the 36 Chambers’ suggests hip-hop isn’t dying. This isn’t to minimise the structural obstacles to the development of great hip-hop that exist today; the dominance of streaming platforms and digital marketing have supplanted the centrality of organic art and the live experiences that built the genre. ODB himself built his imperishable rapping skill through tireless street-based live performances:

“Native, he used to beatbox, thousands would listen

Yo, that's before, the Wu got on.”

Dirty internalised the need to inspirit crowds with his talent as his core artistic responsibility and a measuring stick by which his ability should be judged:

“I get riggy diggy raw when it's time to get

On the dance floor shotgun kill the shit

Blaow, then you won't step to me

Thinking is he really raw as he said he'd be

If I wasn't really raw, standing here on the floor

You'd be like, "Booooo! He ain't hardcore!"”

Now, success and respect doesn’t correlate with one’s commitment to the actual craft of rap, but largely with who is the beneficiary of the slickest management of their confected image. It could be something of a metaphor that Travis Scott achieved notoriety for his live performance style, aptly termed “raging”, only to refrain from commenting on this again following the infamous Astroworld disaster. Unable to take pride in the collective experience his music once created, Scott is reduced to gasbagging about nothing.

In the wake of the hollow triumphalism that currently dominates, the hip-hop renascence will require a renewed embrace of the long-standing vulnerability that once prominently flowed through its veins. It is the work of artists like E L U C I D, with its dual social and introspective honesty in the image of ODB, that forms the glue that can mend the fractured identity of hip-hop. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and a thousand schools of thought contend. In this musical garden, it’s the artists who dare to expose their roots who have the potential to reshape the future of hip-hop, offering a path back to its soulful, unvarnished essence.

Thanks again to Reece Hooker for contributing his wise editing.

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All I knew of Sean Price Williams before reading some deranged comments he made directed at the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes (blaming unions for how the bosses have tyrannical control over access to healthcare in the United States), was that I substantially enjoyed his cinematography on a handful of Safdie brother and Alex Ross Perry films.

I agree with Richard Brody that Williams is “the cinematographer for many of the best and most significant independent films of the past decade.” Williams is one of the sharpest at maximising the visual and thematic effects of lighting. His often handheld, flowing shots immerse audiences by intensely examining human faces and the drama they are caught inside.

So when I bought a ticket to Williams’ directorial debut at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), I expected a mildly reactionary, visually arresting film, that was more annoying than anything else, given its plot synopsis. I found THE SWEET EAST was less mild millennial reaction, more plainly pro-America, “post-ironic” vitriol. Rubes who wish to embody this seductive subjectivity will claim diagnosing it as such “proves their point”, but I digress.

Writer Nick Pinkerton (who, after a quick peek on Instagram, I now see is a friend to fascist podcast host Dasha Nekrasova) has set himself the task of Making Points via “a picaresque journey through contemporary America, undertaken by a young woman granted access to the strange sects and cults that proliferate in this country by a series of gatekeepers eager to win her over.” This really isn’t a bad concept for a film. 

Exploring the cascading sociopolitical crises of the United States from the eyes of a roadtripping female highschool senior could have delivered ample humour, inventiveness and insight—even criticism. But Pinkerton (an ironic name for a fascist guy, it must be said) is uninterested in sincerely grappling with social or political reality, for fear that this would only reinforce the audience’s “seriousness” regarding such things. 

Williams admits as much: 

“There’s very much a political element to it [...] The world has the easiest time saying America is a problematic, fucked-up place, and I feel so differently about it. Part of our mission was to let no one look non-foolish, including filmmakers, because part of the problem [in our discourse] is that everyone takes themselves so seriously. I love the idea of making a conversation with our movie.”

This reflex to satirise people trying to understand or (in the eyes of Pinkerton and Williams) even worse, daring to take a position on concrete conditions of life in America, is a hallmark of snide, aloof elitism. Clearly, Pinkerton and Williams believe that engaging “seriously” in “the discourse” would be restrictive, forcing them to work merely with the literal and precluding them from employing imaginative scenarios. 

Recent work by Boots Riley, Paul Schrader and Claire Denis upset this pathetic notion. Riley’s television show ‘I’m A Virgo’ makes far greater use of its costuming, miniature models and greenscreens. Besides, it’s much funnier. Schrader’s MASTER GARDENER (an accompanying MIFF 2023 feature) also centres a Nazi character, but explodes the static surreality of the political moment that THE SWEET EAST is situated in, opting for hopeful hyperreality. And Denis’ STARS AT NOON bears a fascinating similarity in plot, with a strikingly superior grasp on the shared thematic matter. All three films are visually enchanting where THE SWEET EAST is deliberately grimy for grime sake.

The film wastes no time impressing on us that our protagonist Lillian (Talia Ryder) is, first and foremost, a sexual object who supposedly draws great manipulative powers from her awareness of this. It is made clear there will be no interest examining Lillian’s condition. Instead the filmmakers use her fetishised White Lolita status as a key to open doors to grievances they itch to air. The first of which swings open when Andy Milonakis conducts a Pizzagate terror attack on a bar where Lillian and some anarchists find themselves. 

Lillian is plucked from her school trip by a predatory young anarchist named Caleb (Earl Cave) who eyed her from across the bar, using the madness to sweep her down the precise child trafficking tunnels Milonakis was screaming about. It’s no sooner than they have escaped to the anarchist squat (yes, they pick garbage to eat) that we discover Caleb has rich parents, and he exposes himself to Lillian unsolicited. The next day, the anarchists take Lillian to conduct an anti-fascist bashing of Neo-Nazis who they fail to locate–though Lillian slips off to the Neo-Nazi meeting instead.

This is where Lillian meets Lawrence (Simon Rex), a devout, loquacious middle-aged Neo-Nazi who works in academia. Pointedly, the film treats Lawrence with the most deference outside of any character but Lillian, who is never once satirised. Indeed, Lawrence is allowed to talk and talk, freely espousing a sophisticated Neo-Nazi credo (sanitised of its genocidal race science) in flowery vocabulary, for a third of the film’s 104 minute runtime. In this White Supremacist worldview, Lillian’s disaffection is due to the decaying dominant (liberal) ideology which apologises for its crimes with snivelling literature like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.

To overcome this oppression, White Americans must raise their consciousness, throw off any shame, and realise they are the world’s truest custodians of hundreds of years of Western Culture. Initially leeching on to Lawrence for easy money and board, Lillian gradually grows fond of his elaborately justified American Nazism. Countless rolling scenes depict Lillian at her happiest in the film, experiencing a childlike ‘Alice in Wonderland’ freedom to the ceaseless sound of Lawrence’s propagandising (the anarchists—standing in for “the left”—are never allowed “beliefs” let alone this drooling charity).

Lillian eventually takes the money and runs, leaving Lawrence in the dust and making off with a major bag of Neo-Nazi funds. Only for the filmmakers to bring Lawrence back at the conclusion of the following act, for an extended apology of sorts, where they acknowledge how callously Lillian has treated this kind, gentle, passionate man. 

Pinkerton tells MIFF:

“[When the screenplay was] written in early 2017, there was obviously a great deal of chitter-chatter about the renascent right, or the alt-right, but more than that, this was something that I had seen in a couple of people in my own life who had sort of drifted in that direction, and I wanted to unpack some of that. In one case, a very–in some regards–intelligent and sensitive person had gone down a certain rabbit hole that I found extremely sad.”

Where the leading anarchist is a rapey, violent, thoughtless fraud, Lawrence is the heart and soul of THE SWEET EAST: oozing sincerity, perfectly rational and the most restrained with respect to his Lolita fantasy for Lillian. With this sole moment of tenderness and moral conscience, the filmmakers are intentionally bursting the bubble of their own suffocating “irony” to land an emotional gut punch.

Drifting again, Lillian finds herself preyed on by Molly (Ayo Edebiri) a Black lesbian film director and her assistant Matthew (Jeremy O. Harris). Shifting from adoration for the Nazi to its disdain for all else, THE SWEET EAST treats its queer Black creatives as exploitative, self-serious pseuds, who conspicuously wear afros that you’d find on a Black Panther in the 60s. Molly, like Caleb, sexually harasses Lillian after signing her onto a production. Matthew is a stereotypically shallow and, it is implied, artless gay man. 

Having met on set during this ill-fated tenure as a screen actor, Lillian only escapes the tyranny of the New Black Creative by being smuggled away by Mohammed (Rish Shah). Here she is imprisoned in an attic on a ranch run by Mohammed’s brother, which turns out to be a gay Islamic terror cell. Mohammed, hoping to sleep with Lillian, insists the Neo-Nazis who came to collect stolen money from her remain a threat, long after he knows they are in custody.

Finally, Lillian manages to escape yet another cult, but this time the jig is up, and she’s sent back to her family home where they together witness a mass terrorist attack on television. Stepping outside for a cigarette, a similarly aged female relative asks Lillian what she was doing while she was thought to be missing from her school trip. The answer from Lillian is “doing my own thing” (not pornography, which her relative suggests she is “pretty enough” to do). 

The suggestion here is that this dissassociatedness is radically enlightened on Lillian’s part. By refusing to be “victim” to the shock and awe of American capitalism, Lillian has mastered the false maturity Pinkerton clearly aspires to. To be a victim is to care. Not caring and just loving your own Perfect White Ass is the smartest, coolest, most patriotically American thing you can do, according to THE SWEET EAST. To think some will insist this film has wit!

This overt fascistic screed was welcomed with avid applause from a typical Bobo Melbournian crowd at my screening. To some reading this, that solipsistic self-satisfaction resonated with these people will come as no surprise. Here, hostility to engaging genuinely with art and the world is a badge of honour. I certainly expect no less from male dirtbag millennials, who put on “irony poisoning” to deflect from their futility. “Everyone except me—a normative white man with no real beliefs—is a highly strung freak” is the prevailing ideology in these milieus. This is a movie very much by and for such individuals (possibly the MOST for them).

Such is the explicit project of THE SWEET EAST: to at once validate the resentful apolitical liberalism of its captive scuzz audience, and negatively polarise this discontent to the right. “You are right to think and feel this way,” it says, “keep going”. I was struck by the affirmed reaction of the audience at my screening—Pinkerton and Williams’ comforting pats on the back worked. If you’re anywhere between 20 and 40 years of age and living in Melbourne, you are overwhelmingly likely to have people susceptible to this spiteful thought around you. After all, their cinematic manifestos are welcome at our peak festival.

It is also a blatant attempt to cut against what the filmmakers no doubt view as stifling Woke Moralism around what is acceptable in cinema, and open up space for a Fascist New Wave. At a time where independent cinema is struggling to renew itself within degraded economic conditions, a jaundiced, self-fashioned American Cinecitta is developing to conduct right wing polemics. It is a sorry sign that one of America’s best independent filmmakers in Alex Ross Perry would produce such a film.

I suppose it should not be surprising, given the names attached, that a film festival would screen what looks on its face to be a refreshing piece of indie irreverance. But you don’t need to be the most discerning viewer to intuit what is really being said—the movie constantly literalises the message. The protagonist’s inexplicable obsession with using the slur “retarded” makes it all self-evident (especially if one is familiar with the associations of the filmmakers).

That easily recognisable right wing ideology would be presented to festival-goers without shame is a stark reminder that no matter how effete and liberal the facade may be, many people in the arts do not know or care about anything.

And they hate nothing more than people who do.

No director working today is making incisive films on the present condition of American society with the regularity and purpose of Paul Schrader. While lesser filmmakers of his generation like Quentin Tarantino have entered a career twilight where all there is left to do is air petty, exasperated grievances (ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD), Schrader is working lean and mean on searing, pressing films that are equal parts character-focused and political. 

Schrader insists on making films firmly in the present, evidently consumed with the sharpening sociopolitical instability in the United States following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. The synthesis of Schrader’s honest, non-judgemental approach to writing his characters and the political context of his recent work is producing crucial artistic meditations on what it means to live in an era of institutional decay.

Schrader’s 2021 film THE CARD COUNTER centres on William ‘Tell’ Tillich (Oscar Isaac), a former American soldier who once embraced the role of military “interrogator” at Abu Ghraib. During the Iraq War, American soldiers committed war crimes and human rights violations against detainees at Abu Ghraib and other blacksites, ranging from sexual crimes to torture and murder. No Bush or Obama Administration officials have ever faced consequences for the construction and maintenance of these systematic crimes.

Upon release from a near-decade in military prison in connection to these abuses, Tell has developed a finely tuned routine of drifting across America from casino-to-casino, table-to-table, playing cards to ‘pass the time’. This routine is disrupted when Tell crosses paths with Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a volatile young man who is resourceful if not slightly deranged. They meet when Tell can’t help but attend a seminar–‘Recent Developments in Interrogation and Truthfulness’–delivered by now-retired Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe) who trained him in torture at Abu Ghraib. 

Cirk’s father, also a torturer, had his life ruined by the same military higher ups that Gordo is drawn from. Grunts like Cirk’s father and Tell, we are told, took the fall for the masterminds when the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public. Tell notes ‘the only ones prosecuted were in the pictures’, a nod to the power of the image, the commodity form, and perhaps even the “open secret” of Harvey Weinstein’s extensive sexual predation in Schrader’s industry (which Schrader has not shied away from commenting on publicly). In the world of the film as in our world, the powerful, corrupt figures who manufacture crimes beyond denunciation largely escape punishment, with survivors of their institutions left to live with the ramifications.

In Cirk, Tell sees a chance for redemption should he be able to steer the young man away from violent revenge, and toward rebuilding his life (one with far more potential at this stage than Tell's own). To achieve this, Tell takes up an offer from a ‘stable’ runner named La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), raising the stakes on his poker career from his ‘modest goals’ to playing the professional circuit. Tell’s goal is to earn enough money to set Cirk up, absolving him of college loan debts, enabling him to reconcile with his estranged mother and return to higher education.

These are inspired casting choices. Oscar Isaac–who has spoken about the honour of playing one of Schrader’s iconic characters–seizes the opportunity in his most notable performance since the 2013 Coen brothers film, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. Isaac’s Tell is a man of rich interior and serious mystique. To synergise with Schrader’s direct-to-audience voiceovers, Isaac plays the part with restraint, affording a considerable and troubling allure to Tell. His facial expressions and body acting both encapsulate a line Tell utters when emphasising the eternal nature of torture: ‘the body remembers’. At any moment, you feel his ascetic, measured lifestyle may give way to a violent loss of control. The audience is never sure if Tell is conducting an intervention into Cirk’s life to keep him on the straight-and-narrow, or if he’s using the kid as a means to indulge his own revenge plot against the military man who made him an elite torturer. 

Sheridan is an apt choice for Cirk, given he looks and convincingly embodies the thousands of real people his character represents, Americans who had their lives ruined by US militarism being turned inward when veterans return home. Sheridan performs Cirk with a raw anger that his character is confused by Tell seemingly not sharing, despite their mutual rationale. Haddish injects charm, humour and care into what is an otherwise dark, grey film. La Linda is played with line reads that some call stilted but generate buy-in from Isaac. Their romantic chemistry is palpable and comes to form the emotional core of the film.

Crucially, THE CARD COUNTER is the second of what is now a trilogy of films (FIRST REFORMED [2017], MASTER GARDENER [2022]) which unflinchingly confront the current poisonous American decline, utilising a number of consistent narrative elements. Having not yet seen MASTER GARDENER, I cannot provide a holistic view on Schrader’s American decay triptych. But from the point in time of THE CARD COUNTER’s release, Tell displaces Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) of FIRST REFORMED as the character who best embodies one such shared narrative element: the delicate tightrope between repression and release. 

In each motel across his cyclical American casino journey, Tell meticulously wraps all the furniture in white cloth, effectively erasing his presence from the physical world in a kind of self-imposed purgatory. It’s a disturbing, fascinating idiosyncrasy that provides a basis for questioning whether or not these motel diary-writing scenes are real. They can be read as a perverse literalisation of how a man carrying such guilt can never sleep again, or may even desire to cease existing. Schrader has Tell himself reject the self-pity and liberal apologism pervasive in the cultural and media hagiography of the American war machine, declaring that ‘nothing can justify what we did’. Much like the ‘punishment’ of torture on a victim’s body, the guilty conscience can never forget moral wrongdoing of this scale. 

The gambling element of the story is no cheap way to gin up tension, but works to reinforce Tell’s desire to not exist. He counts cards for 12 hours a day every day because it’s a way to ‘mechanise’ his existence–to be functionally unconscious and therefore not experience his tremendous guilt. It’s a movie with poker in it, not a movie about poker, but its inclusion also forms a comment on the Western myth of the open road and promise of reinvention. The reality is that gambling is a mirror to American capitalism: ‘OPM’ (Other People’s Money), moral and financial debt, the house never putting anything on the line and always taking a cut, faceless ‘backers’ and ‘stables’. 

The aesthetically offensive casinos with their bright lights and ideologically incoherent tribal gaming licences are the lipstick on the pig. In an opening scene, an acquaintance Slippery Joe (Bobby C. King) asks ‘Washa Casino... where'd they get a name like that?’, with Tell answering ‘it’s Indigenous’, to be met with ‘where’s all the Indian shit then?’. We know the answer. When La Linda explains to Cirk that chips don’t represent large sums of real money, the house of cards patiently built from scene-to-scene comes crashing down. These casinos effectively serve as a prison on the outside for Tell: windowless, no clocks, regimens and numbers–with a great controlling overseer where a Warden might be. The manner in which the casino interiors and exteriors are shot, in addition to the various motels and American backchannels, imitates the same dichotomy in Tell. 

Put simply, it’s a world of shit, and America, like the film’s main character, has debts that nobody can ever repay. These are transitional spaces where those on the margins of society move from transgression to transgression, forever accruing moral weight.

Just as THE CARD COUNTER builds on the thematic lineage of Schrader’s late career, it evolves the camera language that he and DP Alexander Dynan created for FIRST REFORMED. The 1.33:1 hemming of FIRST REFORMED’s aspect ratio blooms to 1.66:1 here, allowing for greater capture of the card table, without compromising an intense focus on character faces. Steadicam and dolly shots are mixed in at different moments, conveying themes and specific shifts within the characters. The card tables are captured matter of factly, impressing the monotony of low-stakes gambling. 

In Tell’s nightmares, which transport him back into American military torture chambers, the cruelty is realised via ultra-wide VR lenses that create circular images, matching the circuits of guilt, violence, incarceration and gambling that constitute Tell’s life. The surrealistic imagery produced by these lenses contrasts starkly with the plainness of the casino settings. The circular images and ethereal distinctness of these sequences indicates that, just as Tell's crimes will always haunt him, the American state can never escape the profound moral stains of Abu Ghraib and the like. In fact, these crimes are bound to be repeated. The horrors of American imperialism will live on longer than you or I. The accomplishment of these sequences is to push the audience unwillingly into the deepest depths of hell–a warped space seemingly beyond this world, while in fact it is simply the worst of it.

One of Schrader’s best written scenes takes place in a diner named Chat N’ Chew, a location as disgusting as the name suggests. Dozens of dining tables with almost nothing separating them from one another parallels the huddled card tables of the casinos. In the past, these locations (diners, motels, casinos) were depicted in cinema, particularly Hollywood, to have a virility and exuberance. Now, the brown tables and chairs communicate the staleness of this society–it is past its use-by date. 

In the scene, Tell and Cirk discuss three topics. The first is ‘the greatest hand of poker’ Tell has ever seen, showcasing his card-sharking talents and celebrating the iron will of going ‘all-in’. The second is an intensely uncomfortable recounting of the depravities he partook in within Abu Ghraib, which manages to be just as disturbing as bearing visual witness to his memories. Finally, they discuss Cirk’s murder revenge plot. An all-American conversation taking place in an all-American location, rendered in riveting fashion with a dolly push-in that illustrates the physical encoding of traumatic memories.

A key inflection point in the film comes when, as a sort of last ditch effort, Tell attempts to frighten Cirk into finally taking his advice, accepting his generosity and stopping his murderous pursuit of Gordo. By threatening Cirk with the very torture Tell and Cirk’s father inflicted on Iraqis, the grace of Tell’s intervention in Cirk’s life evaporates. Earlier in the film, Cirk reveals that his father’s dishonourable discharge from the military drove him into alcoholism and opioid addiction, turning him violent toward him and his mother. Tell’s capitulation to the threat of violence at once mirrors the refracted, shame-driven violence Cirk’s father previously subjected him to, and Tell’s subconscious notion that the strongest form of connection is forged through asymmetrical terror. 

Cirk placates Tell, assuring him that he’ll follow through on their non-consensual bargain, only to react against the false discipline imposed by the threat of torture. Instead of going to reconnect with his mother, Cirk heads to Gordo’s private residence and attempts to murder him, which results in him being shot and killed by Gordo. The news of Cirk’s death initiates a revocation of the monastic discipline carefully cultivated by Tell over the years following his release from prison. Essentially, failing to divert Cirk from this fatal course drives Tell to give up his swelling poker winnings and complete the murder of Gordo, as Gordo not only steals his innocence by making him a torturer, he kills Tell’s chance at absolution.

Much has been made of the nakedly Bressonian final shot, which virtually wholesale mimics Bresson’s 1953 film PICKPOCKET. Less has been said about the implication made that, despite Tell’s inability to escape the cycles he is trapped within, this repeated punishment is both morally just and necessary for him to attain true forgiveness. For, if his cycle of incarceration did not repeat, Tell would have never forged his authentic relationship with La Linda. This relationship, absent from his life at the beginning of the film, is the only thing through which he can achieve a transformative expiation, made possible by virtue of being human: being forgiven–even loved–by another. It’s stirring and humane. 

At the same time, the stasis of the final shot where Tell and La Linda’s hands remain suspended while attempting to reach one another, encapsulates the concrete political reality Schrader is excoriating. There is a conceivably permanent global “polycrisis” of capitalism, while in the United States, MAGA Fascism marches on. The false hope of authoritarian liberal decline management hangs over our society, epitomised by the Biden Administration. Together, we are suspended in austere, repressive nothingness. No one person, Schrader included, has all the answers for this collective condition, but the ending to THE CARD COUNTER posits that love and retribution may be equally essential.

Thanks again to my dear friend Reece Hooker for his editing.

Action Bronson has captivated hip-hop audiences with his colourful storytelling and bombastic style since his independently released debut album, ‘Dr. Lecter’ in 2011. Bronson’s winding, psychedelic narratives are as contradictory as they are entertaining, making him a fascinating emblem of a broader tension within hip-hop, where the spirit of resistance often dovetails with hypermasculine authoritarianism. The Flushing, Queens-born former chef turned rapper and food television host with a larger than life character has earned a cult following with his rhymes revolving around—among other things—food, weed, and women. But there is another throughline in his music, often unconsciously received by fans, which speaks to a larger, more profound theme: the creation of a better world.

In Action Bronson’s music, he articulates a world that sounds superior to the one we actually live in. His lyrics are replete with boastful fantasies about opulent living and unconventional characters. The luxuries that Bronson raps about are markedly different from those which most rappers have ingrained into popular consciousness. Where the Lil Babys of the industry brag of Maybachs with stars in the ceiling and watches flooded with diamonds, Bronson is more inclined to highlight his no-doors Jeep (“No doors on my jeep, That’s the case, I had to jump out / And Stacey Dash on police”) or red leather jacket (“How we celebrate? Went to 125 and bought a red leather”).

This may seem like a trivial difference between choices in car and accessory. But with these lines and countless others, Bronson is weaving a rich tapestry wherein adventurousness and preparedness for anything (say, a rainy New York morning or a spontaneous police chase) are celebrated, instead of empty symbols of material wealth. Bronson combines his more rustic and earthly possessions with an appreciation of life’s elemental pleasures: delicious food (“Go 80 layers on the baklava, that’s handmade by my Nonna”) and drink (“Don’t drink gin and tonic, only natural wine to be honest”). In doing so, Bronson defies the aesthetic sparsity of modern rap flexes (where a now-common refrain involves not even being able to tell the time with your diamond-laden watch) by crafting gloats that texture the surreal, spontaneous lifestyle he lives out on his records. 

Bronson’s lyrics often emphasise the merit of self-advancement and the pride of artistic creation (“Just did my first scene with De Niro, just did my first scene with Scorsese”). The internal value system of Bronson’s music suggests that listeners should focus on the pleasures of life and achieving their dreams through the spirit of dedication and creativity. This suggestion and “lived example” that Bronson personifies is visible everywhere around his work. A quick look in the comments of his YouTube videos exploring the vast culinary delights of New York City reveals how passionately Bronson’s fans have embraced his ethic.

But Action Bronson’s fantasy world is not solely centred on material abundance–it places significance on individual personalities and self-actualisation in the face of deprivation. If Bronson’s boasts are somewhat niche to listeners, his storytelling will be more familiar. At the heart of Action Bronson’s semi-fictional stories are the “street characters” he creates. These individuals, often involved in crime, reflect the paradoxical freedom experienced by those on the fringes of society. While it is implicit that these characters would not be “acceptable” in other social spheres, Bronson finds cause to celebrate them.

Take for instance “Thug Love Story 2012” from the original ‘Blue Chips’ mixtape of the same year. The track features production from Party Supplies, the viciously underrated Brooklyn-based duo who Bronson recruited for both Blue Chips tapes. It opens with a transportive sample of “I Only Have Eyes for You” by The Complexions, drawn from the soundtrack of the 1993 film, A BRONX TALE. Immediately, the doo-wop refrains put you on a smoky boardwalk somewhere in the underbelly of New York City, where the story takes place. 

Bronson constructs a vivid, semi-fictional narrative around a love interest who had the “sweetest scent [he] ever smelt a woman have”. This woman has drifted into a life of crime in rebellion against her genteel, middle-class Jewish father (who employs a Jamaican maid), which Bronson duly recognises has driven her into sex work out of economic necessity. Noting that being bought and sold as a commodity for male consumption has left her a “crooked orphan”, Bronson rides a breathtaking beat switch into a declaration of his enduring love for this woman (“so many unfamiliar faces that have come and gone, you’re a constant, fucked you in the school closet”). Imbuing the song with an empathetic historiography of the woman’s life in connection to broader social phenomena encourages listeners to view such characters as complex individuals, rather than one-dimensional stereotypes. At the same time, Bronson’s irreverent humour brings levity to a dire situation without totally undermining the gravity of their experiences. 

Party Supplies introduces a new sample of “Rose-Marie” by Slim Whitman who sings “of all the Queens that ever lived, I choose you” to bring home the definitive nature of this love in the life of the character Bronson is embodying. Shockingly, this intense romance rapidly escalates into criminality, including domestic violence. By the end of an exhausting and delinquent odyssey, spanning everything from bar fights to penis enlargement surgery, Bronson raps “nowadays you catch the hooker sniffing coke in the shed / It’s a damn shame, I’m just chilling eating lamb brain / I keep the Weiner on display for the campaign”. What appears merely to encapsulate an embittered turn from loving to uncompassionate disregard typical of abusers, also evokes the sexting scandal of former Democratic US House of Representatives member, Anthony Weiner. 

Invoking the case of a state representative (who was eventually convicted for an offence in relation to sexting a 15-year-old girl) at the death of the song is an electric choice. By connecting the exploitation of women in the sex industry with the pernicious sexism practised at and promulgated by those at the very top of “respectable” society, Bronson inverts the story’s focus on the criminality of the poor. Bronson’s music is teeming with momentary but incisive references to the worlds of politics, sport, underworld crime, and more. The result is a catalogue of music that demonstrates a rare, witty engagement with all spheres of society, with no pretension toward any of the characters involved. 

Simultaneously, these stories almost always reproduce and therefore work to reinforce certain prejudices and oppressions that pervade capitalist society–particularly sharply within Bronson’s chosen corner of it. No song demonstrates this better than “Consensual Rape”, which amounts to mindless bile, where Bronson brags about a sexual “fantasy” that relies on eroticising real, brutal sexual violence against women. 

In 2016, student activists at George Washington University protested a scheduled performance by Action Bronson in opposition to songs like “Consensual Rape” and transphobic social media incidents. It is eminently reasonable for left wing students to protest violent misogyny and anti-gay and trans bigotry at any time. But especially so during the rise of Donald Trump’s overtly fascistic MAGA movement, of which glorifying sexual violence against women and hatred of LGBTQI people remain key pillars. Crucially, this is one part of a global phenomenon in far-right politics that has only accelerated since the 2016 US Presidential election. The university cancelled the performance, prompting Bronson to respond with a remorseful statement. The statement is sincere enough by the standard of celebrity apologies, but notably, it includes the standard “it’s just storytelling” defence. As we have seen, there is a difference between a thoughtful fable around oppression and a crass reenactment.

Indeed, there is a political incongruity between Action Bronson's lyrics that demean women and queer people, and his carefree spirit and conception of a better world. On one hand, his music presents a utopian vision of a world free from repression and material limitations where individuals can express themselves freely and pursue their dreams. On the other, a non-trivial amount of his lyrics perpetuate aggressive sexism and homophobia and thus it is not enough to tout these songs as righteous, defiant artworks. 

Importantly, Bronson himself makes clear that he isn’t exactly removed from these people, their tales, or the social ills within (“King Thrust is what they call me at the hooker house, 260 pounds of pressure right in a hooker’s mouth”), so it would be equally facile to insist he is straightforwardly focused on furthering stigmatisation. His representations of street life are also about a society that values creativity, individuality, and self-expression. He champions the underdogs, outcasts and eccentrics, giving voice to those who are often ignored or dismissed. His lyrics celebrate the power of imagination and the importance of personal authenticity. While these characters represent a certain freedom from social expectations of society, they are always tightly bound by the limitations of poverty and the criminal activity they engage in to make ends meet. They wear every expected pathology of those afflicted by the worst social ills of capitalism (“Cindy, she not herself unless she smoking crack”). 

This creates a tension between the desire for individual freedom and the systemic inequalities that limit that freedom. These people and their stories would not exist in the fantasy world that Action Bronson creates, as to generalise such a state of abundance and leisure, there would need to be no private property and therefore, no poverty and no resultant necessity to sell drugs or sex for survival. While these tales may seem like mere escapism, comedic effect or even vessels for bigotry, when combined with the overall vision Bronson advances in his music, they reveal a deeper desire for a world without the deprivation and distortions created by capitalist property and social relations. In such a world, where we share in the abundance Bronson individually narrates, eccentrics could be unleashed, free to enrich our collective lives with their quirks and rightfully celebrated for their multitudes.

At his best, Action Bronson weaves together his experiences of street life with his utopic visions to create slick and captivating lyrics (“At times my only friends in life are drugs and the cannoli”), accentuated by glamorous production. In his music, his fans find a vision of a life free from the material and social limitations that often hold them back, giving them hope for a better future. At his worst, Bronson can be lazy and careless, stepping on those who have clearly inspired him, reproducing the oppression that is both necessary to maintain capitalist society today and a fetter to realising Bronson’s grand visions. 

But perhaps what is most fascinating about Bronson’s work is that, more often than not, these two tendencies cannot be separated from one another–they appear on the very same songs and projects (just listen to any of the songs discussed in this article). This circular self-negation where Bronson grapples with the gulf between his utopia and harsh, dystopic reality makes his music one of the most contradictory, compelling cacophonies to grace hip-hop. This tension is not solely a refuge for his personal bigotry but—intentionally or not—also a potential site of transformation. By codifying the perversions of our society within his artistic oeuvre that imagines a world that is better, freer, and more just, Action Bronson’s music is a negation of his self-negation. 

To the discerning listener, it is unmistakably clear which aspects of Action Bronson’s lyrics “fit” within his fantasy world, and which are discordant. These inconsistencies do not disqualify him. On the contrary, the unique fidelity of these contradictions demonstrate the need for more artists like Bronson who, through genuine engagement with both reality and fantasy, can at once mindfully and unintentionally reveal biting truths—and the constraints of even the most thrilling speculative art.

Note: Special thanks to my friend Reece Hooker for his contributions to this piece, namely his indelible editing and music journalism expertise.

Revisiting THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019) for its third anniversary confirms it a richly rewarding and entertaining film that, while appreciated on release, should only grow in legend with the passage of time.

Written by brothers Robert and Max Eggers and directed by the former, the film takes shape as a deceptively simple story of two men – one young, one old – who gradually drive each other mad in the damp confines of a lighthouse located in the middle of nowhere. The younger novice lighthouse keeper (referred to as a “wickie”), Thomas Howard, is played by Robert Pattinson, with Willem Dafoe playing his curmudgeonly elder and direct manager, Thomas Wake.

Before the era-defining performances of the two leads impress themselves, the film’s mesmeric cinematography, conjured like a spell by Jarin Blaschke (who received an Academy nomination), surely does. In interviews about the film, Blaschke emphasises the lengthy, yearslong pre-production period that provided him and Eggers with the clarity to realise the film’s striking visual language.

While the particular film stock and vintage lenses used make their impact, the film’s sharp contrast black-and-white lighting and constricted 1.2 aspect ratio are transportive. Knowing the thematic importance of “the light” to THE LIGHTHOUSE, the crew dedicated themselves to communicating this visually to their audience. The pitch black sidebars created by the squarish aspect ratio work to make a scene feel claustrophobic and threateningly nocturnal.

Three distinct dangers present themselves in that void: employer surveillance, unresolved internal turmoil, and the ever disruptive stormy ocean weather. It quickly becomes clear that Wake will apply a most pernicious managerial style to Howard, instilling fear that prying eyes are upon him at all times—lest he not be working himself to the bone.

In nighttime scenes where the lighting is layered most lavishly, Howard is consumed by troubles stemming from unresolved moral guilt and a tortured refusal to accept his sexuality. Over the course of the film, the weather which begins as a latent threat outside of the frame takes on a manifest role in the climactic chapter. The film’s sound design is a brilliant supplement to its experiential cinematography. In each scene, crashing waves, quaking sirens and screeching seagulls aurally reinforce the desperate circumstances of the characters.

The script is a now trademark painstakingly period-accurate Eggers masterclass in language and rhythm. The production design, including the construction of every single building in the film, costuming and even the cutlery forcibly entraps you in this inhospitable space and time at the cross-section of machinery and nature. Pay no mind to voices who assert these technical aspects of THE LIGHTHOUSE amount to merely an accomplished but vain genre pastiche. Indeed, pay attention to the filmmaking instead — it explicates the struggle at the core of the film’s narrative.

Dafoe’s Wake is an irritating neurotic of a manager who constantly dictates and surveils his underling Howard, played with barely subdued fury by Pattinson. Wake flagellates Howard, abusively wielding his seniority in their shared workplace. A pedestal entitles Dafoe to deny Pattinson access to the tower’s light itself, rumoured to hold an enchantment. Aggressive disciplinary tirades at the disputable signs of an imperfectly swabbed floorboard, threats of deducted pay, and constant secretive scrawling of logbook entries (later uncovered to recommend ‘severance without pay’) are all employed to subordinate Pattinson.

An implacable tension – the division between employee and manager – precludes the men from properly relating to and therefore sharing with each other the physical and psychological burden of the brutal conditions of their post. Wake’s monopoly on the “light” work and cooking duties (their tenuous food source) guarantee Howard is alone in absorbing the toll of the job’s hardships.

When Howard’s mental state understandably falters, Wake emasculates him, labelling him a ‘bitch’ and launching into a coruscating denunciation of  his alleged expectations of the ‘silver spoon what should have been [his].’ Dafoe delivers multiple such brilliant monologues in the film, during which you cannot unstick your eyes from the screen. In feminising Howard and divorcing him from the nourishment and intimacy of Wake’s “marriage” to the light, Wake unknowingly inflames the younger man’s distorted sexuality.

At times the two come close to enacting mutual homosexual urges, always pulling back out of masculine shame and unwillingness to reckon with these feelings. In a displacement of these feelings, Howard furiously masturbates—a doomed attempt to experience the highs he spies Wake basking in with the light. Initially, these masturbations are performed with a totem of a mermaid with exposed breasts, which becomes the fixation of Howard’s repressed sexual fantasies. This recurring mermaid fantasy evokes a mythical ascendence from the life of an immiserated worker and escalates into a danger to Howard’s identity, fracturing it beyond repair.

After Howard lashes out violently (an incident that at once recalls a guilty episode in his past and implies a coming explosion of conflict), things take a turn for the worse. Resources are dwindling, and the pair resort to formulating an alcoholic beverage with kerosene, which they formerly used to power the mechanical lighthouse. This marks the final time we see the men in a remotely survivable state. It is the apex of a fevered mania induced by divisions of labour and internalised homophobia.

While drinking the kerosene liquor grants the wickies a brief drunken respite from their immediate circumstances, it also symbolises the final stage in the transformation of their human bodies into machinery. The faceless lighthouse establishment employing the two men to staff the remote location is conspicuosly absent throughout — only ever seen via lettering on a jumpsuit worn by Winslow and various instruments.

The keepers' unquestioning compliance with this uncaring institution has led to the forsaking of personhood in favour of false identities as indentured workers. At the beginning of the film, we see Wake and Howard relieve two lighthouse keepers of their duties, and they often discuss their own supposedly impending relief. During his meltdown, Howard discovers the corpse of a previous tender, informing him of his disposable status—the loss of his life won’t harm the ‘United States Lighthouse Service.’ As the sea storm intensifies, the pair’s grip on reality is washed away, along with the hope of ever receiving the relief they require. In both mind and body, the raging ocean is sweeping them away. 

The film’s final scene accentuates the isolating modernity of industry, recalling the myth of Prometheus, punished for bringing fire to humanity. The natural world exacts its revenge on the wickies for erecting the mechanical, phallic lighthouse that pollutes a certain prehistoric and organic balance. Winslow is posed, clearly alive, on salt-washed rocks, while seagulls defecate on him, feasting on his insides for eternity. Perhaps Eggers is just really into mythology. Regardless, inherent in this image is that instead of liberating humanity from an existence defined by scarcity and division, the technology and social structure powering capitalist advancement form a new collective punishment. This new suffering is enforced by the rulers of capitalist society and their lackeys like Winslow, in place of the Gods of old.

The hallucination of THE LIGHTHOUSE suggests that to survive the dire climatic and labouring conditions we find ourselves in, we must abandon pre-existing resentments and cooperatively produce shared abundance – in contrast to the competitive expropriation that defines society today.

Note: This piece is based on a shorter, less developed review that I initially posted on my Letterboxd account when the film first released. It has been revised and expanded for posting here and does not appear in any for-profit publications as of 06/11/2022. I hope reading this makes you want to watch THE LIGHTHOUSE.

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