How To Deal With Now
Conspiracy theories, police states and looking at your phone.
I was reading this article the other day1 about “gooning.” And Jesus Christ.
We don’t need to get into the specifics, but it essentially highlights a group of isolated and despondent Gen Z-ers attempting to find any semblance of a community in the depths of the internet. The piece begins with a man committing a sex crime, becoming a “martyr” of sorts and things only get more bizarre and fucked up from there.
There are quite a few reasons for this—repercussions of the pandemic, the commodification of dating apps and the age-old sensation that things are getting worse and worse—but what it really comes down to is the Internet, and the fact that we have an infinite amount of chances to fall into online rabbit holes and fictional diatribes … never to return.
I thought about this during Bugonia, the new Yorgos Lanthimos dark comedy, featuring Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone and a conspiracy theory gone awry. It’s an ostensible remake of 2003’s Korean thriller Save the Green Planet! but also takes into account how the Internet has progressed and backtracked over the past 22 years.
Although Lanthimos mostly steers clear of phones through plot mechanics, there’s no doubt that Plemons’ Teddy Gatz is an Internet nut, trying to make sense of a broken world through the most fucked-up ideas imaginable. It’s the cinematic version of the alt-right conspiracy theories and everyone’s brains breaking during the COVID lockdown. Spend too much time listening to and spewing nonsense, and eventually, some rube out there will believe it.
It’s also very funny (and a bit too real) how Stone’s pharmaceutical CEO speaks in corporate jargon and exhausting girlboss-y buzzwords. There’s a hint of friendliness with an underlying evil, or at least a laissez-faire about how what she does affects everyone else in the world.
Although it may not reach the heights of Kinds of Kindness2 and some of Lanthimos’ other works, his collaboration with Emma Stone is must-watch material, and it’s interesting to see these collaborators wrestle with the broken world we’re all trying to survive.
Stone, in particular, seems especially interested in the Internet and its consequences, as evidenced by her work in Showtime’s The Curse and Ari Aster’s Eddington, the latter of which is a horror movie about being too online.
Although the movie has its flaws, Eddington is remarkable in how much time it films something startingly uncinematic: Phones. While writing the Joaquin Phoenix-led movie, Aster had a Post-It Note with a daily reminder for himself to “Remember the phones,” and he somehow turned them into a modern-day weapon.
“We’re living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is,” Aster told The Associated Press. “Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder.
“It’s important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird.”
It also doesn’t seem to be an accident that Bugonia, Eddington and (another living-in-the-now movie) One Battle After Another all center on the incompetence of those in charge and the police attempting to protect the wealthy and well-off. You can’t make a real 21st-century movie without identifying this nation’s horde of “protectors” and their own selfish reasons for keeping (or attempting to keep) the peace.
Bugonia’s example of this, played by Stavros Halkias, is a bumbling slob with a deeper sense of evil underneath it all. And Eddington’s Sheriff Joe Cross and One Battle’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw are just as corrupt, selfish and (frankly) dumb.
Interestingly, all three movies—despite centering on similar material and archetypes—then follow the director’s usual flair when it comes to conclusions. Aster goes full nihilism, indicating that the 1% will continue to win due to infighting and Internet-poisoned brains. Lanthimos goes fully surreal, signifying that what’s strange can only get more alien and darker. While the slightly older Paul Thomas Anderson is both furious at how evil usually gets away with everything it wants, while also staying slightly optimistic that the next generation won’t allow itself to live through the same terrors that the rest of us have taken for granted.
I’m not really sure where to land here, but of these three movies, One Battle After Another is the only one that has even the slightest bit of hope. I’d like that to be true, but the more I look at my phone, the less confident I am.
humblebrag intended
my beloved