Someone – I think it was Nick Mamatas – recently made a sarcastic Facebook or Twitter post, expressing mock-surprise that a “multi-million dollar Hollywood movie isn’t the Communist Manifesto” (or words to that effect).  The thing being mocked there is the way in which it seems that some on the Left will criticise an expensive (and, the studios hope, profitable) product of the mass-market corporate capitalist culture industries for not being something it was obviously never going to be, and never could be. 

As it turned out – for a host of complex and contingent historical reasons – cinema and television became almost-overwhelmingly comforting and placating instantiations of the spectacle.  Every now and again a big movie will come along, like Mad Max Fury Road or (I’d argue) Prometheus, which contains aspects of radical critique within its aesthetic and/or thematics.  But firstly, this happens rarely, and only when a host of other factors constellate.  Based on the cited examples, I’d be tempted to suggest that franchises and auteurs have something to do with it, which is interesting, as is the way those two things are clearly related in the mentioned cases.  In any event, both films are akin to aberrations which can slip out occasionally, not despite but because of the existence of an overarching and hegemonic mainstream with tightly policed ideological rules and regulations.  To be crude about it: they can happen only because they are, by definition, exceptions to the rule.  And then, of course, we have to ponder what effect they actually have.  I am – as far as I’m aware – the only person who detected a metaphor in Prometheus about the fascist impulse immanent within all imperialist Westernism, about fascism as a syncresis, concatenation, and meta-expression of Western culture’s id), so I’m unsurprised to learn that it hasn’t led many people to fundamentally question Western civilisation’s foundation on the principles of racist empire.  Basically, to notice it (or to construct it through your relation with the text) you have to already feel it – which gives us a clear idea of its capacity for agitation.  Mad Max Fury Road possibly had more effect, in that it may have helped give some expression to a burgeoning new feminist consciousness in some Western women and men. 

I strongly suspect that media has very little ability to directly influence particular opinions or attitudes.  That isn’t how it works.  Media, over time, as part of a hegemonic ideological system, reflects, reinforces, and normalises certain assumptions and impressions.  When it comes to ideological production via media, individual representations probably mean less than the trends of representations over swathes of media, over long periods.  This is why one decent bit of representation is not going to achieve very much, except as part of changing trends.  These trends can be positive, but that’s the exception.  And the positive effect is minor, especially if we confine ourselves to thinking about the direct effects of one representation.

Of course, it’s easy for me to kvetch about the uselessness of representations.…

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Looper is a flawed film in ways that neither Brick nor The Brothers Bloom were. This is not to say that it’s a bad film; it’s not at all. But after two films that were notable in part for their impressively taut discipline the fundamental sloppiness of Looper stands out. There’s not a lot that follows from this – everybody who’s made more than one film has a worst film, after all, and most directors have one that’s far worse than this. There’s still a number of things it does well, and well in ways that confirm where Johnson’s talents lie. There’s just also whacking big problems, most of which have a reasonably obvious source.

The biggest and most fundamental problem is that the join between two halves of a script completed at very different times. The first hour – basically everything up through the diner scene – was written in 2008 during the shooting of The Brothers Bloom. The second half, starting with Sara’s introduction, came in 2009. And it shows. The first half is a well constructed film about a man in gripping contact with his older self. The second half, on the other hand, is a well constructed film about a creepy psychic kid. Both are good, but on a very basic level they’re not the same film, and the second half feels as though Johnson realized he didn’t have quite enough ideas to get over the finish line and so arbitrarily decided to raid Akira.

That Johnson should have this problem is admittedly a bit strange. Cid (the psychic kid) is little more than a MacGuffin – the thing over which the two iterations of Joe, the main character, must fight. It doesn’t seem like it should have been that difficult to find one that extended out of the existing time travel concept instead of adding a whole second set of big sci-fi ideas. Instead, the premise around Old Joe seems to abruptly shift as he’s suddenly revealed to have been planning a campaign against futuristic crime boss “the Rainmaker” since before he was sent back in time, a plot point that doesn’t really fit with how his being sent back in time is initially shown. More frustrating is the fact that Sara, the female lead, who ends up being the viewpoint character for the final scene, doesn’t show up until the halfway mark. It’s not that any of this is easy to fix per se, but it’s at least pretty straightforward what you need to do.

But it’s still a problem that only really means that the film never quite manages to hit a point where everything clicks and it starts really getting impressive. Instead, Looper simmers along on the brink of greatness without ever crossing the line. But in many regards it’s less productive to look at what holds it back than what almost gets it there. First and foremost is the most elegant premise of Johnson’s career to date. The basic jist of Looper is that there are hiit men who kill people sent back in time from the future.…

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Those who listened to our Doctor Who podcast series will have noticed that I had new theme music this year. Some also noticed that I never actually said what it was. My stock answer was that it was a secret transmission from the future.

The future is here. 

Seeming’s new album, Sol, is out on August 4th. You can pre-order it here. It’s absolutely incredible, and like nothing else you’ve ever heard. I’ll be talking more about it and how it’s the secret soundtrack to Neoreaction a Basilisk closer to when it’s out, but for now let’s all just enthusiastically watch that video again and again.

(Oh, and if you don’t know Sammus, the guest vocalist on “Stranger,” she’s absolutely phenomenal as well and you should check her music out. Her new one, Pieces in Space, is brilliant, but her older more nerdcore stuff is solid as well.)…

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OK. First off, announcements. The Patreon very did not hit $320, so no Game of Thrones reviews. It’s currently at $295; if it gets back to $300, I’ll do a season wrap-up post. You can contribute here.

This week’s post will be on Tuesday, as there’s a small but very fun thing to announce tomorrow. I’m going with the teaser “the future arrives” for that one.

Which brings us to the news of the day, which is that Jodie Whittaker is the Doctor and the Chibnall era might be worth getting excited for after all. Discuss amongst yourselves in comments. I’ll be moderating the fuck out of sexist trolls, including deleting all replies to them. So go ahead and enjoy a comment section free of that shit. …

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At first glance, there are relatively few similarities between Brick and The Brothers Bloom. Brick is a self-consciously dour noir film about ruined masculinity. The Brothers Bloom is an ostentatiously colorful heist film about the power of stories. There seems very little that one can conclude about things like Rian Johnson’s style based on them. This is, of course, pretty much all a director can hope for after their second film. Make two similar films or, worse, more or less the same film twice and you’re pigeonholed. Make a surprisingly dark high school noir and then turn around and make a quasi-Wes Anderson heist film, on the other hand, and you’re well on your way towards seriousness.

Brick was a good film. The Brothers Bloom, on the other hand, is a great one – one I instantly fell in love with when it finally came through Gainesville on its meandering limited release tour. Looking back at it, I realize it must have been a small and quiet influence on TARDIS Eruditorum, with “there’s no such thing as an unwritten life, only a badly written one” getting to the point a solid year before “we’re all stories in the end; just make it a good one.” And it is with this closing moral that the connections with Brick also become clear. Brick, after all, is also about storytelling – a fact most explicit in its closing scene, where Brendan’s revelation that Laura was behind Emily’s downfall is framed explicitly as a story, with Brendan’s accusation called a “tale.”

But in Brick this was more or less a silent thematic element. It’s present in the mix, and entirely sensible – a detective’s job is, in many ways, to uncover the story of events. But it’s fundamentally subdued. But, unsurprisingly given that the heist film is already an inverse of the detective film, The Brothers Bloom takes the latent metaphor and expands it wildly. Stephen’s cons are written “the way dead Russians write novels, with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and shit.” His explicit goal and vision of the perfect con is to “tell a story so well it becomes real.” This is entirely straightforward and true: a con is a story, and all stories are cons.

Obviously this gets very meta very quickly. The Brothers Bloom demands that we understand it as a con, and Johnson as a con man. But this is not in and of itself significant without some understanding of what a con is meant to be. Once again the film is happy to go for text instead of subtext as Stephen says that “the perfect con is where each one involved gets just the thing they wanted,” a line that’s repeated over the ending because this is not a film that’s shy about making its aesthetic points. So obviously Stephen’s central con around which the plot revolves is judged a success. Stephen gets to die on a job (Bloom had earlier suggested he’d like just this), and Bloom and Penelope get each other.…

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It’s the sort of week where the Waffling’s a day late, basically. The extra work of Doctor Who S10 has me typically behind on everything, and I’m scrambling to get back going on things. (I’m working on long-term fixes for my workload, but they’re necessarily long term.) Anyway, in light of the fact that I’m awful and behind on everything I can’t really complain too loudly that we’re $17 a week shy of me doing Game of Thrones reviews, but I figure I should be clear that those look like they’re not happening and like I’ll get to actually watch the show with Jill consistently.

But I did want to mention some other Patreons. For instance, Sam Keeper’s Patreon, from which you can get her fabulous new book on Star Wars. Or Jack Graham’s, which is $14 away from dragging him kicking and screaming back to watching Doctor Who. If you don’t decide to throw money at the likely doomed Game of Thrones goal, well, those are great places to throw it instead. (Of course, you could also just fund all of us. But I know that’s not an option for everyone.)

Back tomorrow with a post I only just got around to sending to my Patrons. Until then, I usually wrap these up with some sort of question for the comments section, so let’s go with this: for you personally, what’s the most awful aspect of the Trump era (whether you’re American or not).…

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