Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to Death is a Photograph. I am your co-host Chase here with my also co-host Sam. Sam, how are you? I'm good. it's ah It's a nice sunny day ah down here in Sussex.
Speaker: No, Sonny Sussex. Sorry, Sussex, of course. It's from the streets of Sussex. Was it sluts straight from the streets of Sussex? Well, yeah, I think of the the Simpsons, of course. Freshen your tea, governor. It's like we've got the finest the finest women of Sussex. It's just this buck-toothed ginger woman in a Union Jack, like tight, skin-tight dress. Yeah, it's supposed to be Jerry Halliwell from a Girls' Letters.
Speaker: ah they you know i learned yeah I assume that was the reference. yeah That's the fun about The Simpsons. is It's always from somewhere else and it sort of becomes this kind of Russian nesting doll of like cultural reference that takes you you know back to the dawn of time, essentially.
Speaker: um Like the Methuselah rookie card, one of my favorite jokes. um You got a Methuselah rookie card! Mike, don't cut this. they They want to hear this, okay? Today, where what are we talking about, Trey? We're talking about what might be, even though it defies description, or really do I think we're ever going to be able to do a good job because it's it's it's a movie only in the strictest sense, what might be the most Gen X film ever made, which is Shu Lia Chang's Fresh Kill from 1994. And let me say this. I've checked the the analytics on this.
Speaker: 96% of you watch Bridgerton, and it's probably because you're like... Wow, I love race-blind casting. i think we need a rainbow coalition of races to sort of overcome ingrained prejudices in society.
Speaker: Well, guess what? 1994, it's already happening. you can You can be, your your kid can be one race, you can be another race, your parent can be a different race, and and we're not going to explain to you how that's possible because that's the future. Yeah.
Speaker: I did say, i the film did sort of feel like watching an extended Rusted Root music video. there Yeah, it's, no, this movie, okay. Okay, a few things. Because i I don't know that... was just like gently having that. I'm on my way. I'm on my way.
Speaker: Well, let's start with this. Technically speaking, this movie does not really have a plot, but if I had to attempt to assign it a plot, it would be that the Fresh Kill Landfill, which, sorry, Fresh Kills Landfill, which was an actual landfill in Staten Island, which is one of the five boroughs of New York City, but it is the island where all of the cops and firefighters and Republican politicians live. And so it's not really connected to what you, dear listener, as a tourist to New York, might think of as New York City.
Speaker: They're building this gigantic landfill there. And this is kind of everywhere in the media, such that a lesbian couple who have a potentially biological child together who is eventually kidnapped by the syndicate— who is inputting the landfill but also buying up all other parts of industry in an attempt to you know kind of unite the world in one big corporation, that they need to recover their child and like use hacking to defeat the corporations and stop the landfill. Yeah.
Speaker: Except they never quite get round to actually hacking anything or defeating the corporation. The child just appears yeah again. Their child is kidnapped, slashed by green goo that she ingests via sushi, is polluted. It comes from Taiwan, which is polluted by nuclear waste in Taiwan.
Speaker: So she disappears, their child disappears, but then she is rescued or recovered or has always the whole time been with her grandfather, is inexplicably Native American. I should say the kidnapping is that sort of a um you know red herring, right? The corporation that forms the kind of evil of the movie whose ads are just constantly, they end with we care over and over again, ah just sort of propagandizing you. the This is, you know, for the death is a photograph heads out there, for the death heads.
Speaker: No, no, no, no.
Speaker: Those who remember our episode with the wonderful Charles Pinion, this will remind you most of Charles Pinion's Twisted Issues because it is a bare-bones plot tied together with television commercials representing the deep rot and corporate decay at the center of American society. Much of the film is centered around a sushi bar called, fittingly, Nagasaki, where various of the main characters in the movie work or often sort of go to right? the
Speaker: The brother of our main character ah is the sushi chef and is constantly being hit on by a sort of a denizen of the bar, right?
Speaker: The ah girl herself, the main character, whose name is Shireen, Shireen Lightfoot, played by Sarita Chowdhury, I don't think she works there, but she pops in her girlfriend or wife or whoever she's supposed to be, whose name is Claire, played by Erin McMurtry. She works there as a hostess.
Speaker: And all of the the people who are constantly there are sort of corporate folk. So there's like a Japanese businessman who only ever speaks Japanese. There are these sort of obvious sort of Wolf of Wall Street style kind of corporate raiders who are constantly just having conversations about like consumer goods and concepts. And often their dialogue will be sort of like voice modified so that they'll just talk like demons for a few lines. Yeah. Or something. like their conversation you never really know what their conversations are fully about. like It's very stochastic.
Speaker: One person will say, like you know the price of fertilizer is going up, and the other person respond like, Steve Urkel. It's not really, there's no substance. It's just sort of like a pastiche of things that you know an American kind of consumer capitalist might talk about in the early ninety s And they all have this kind of a Lockjaw-style accent that that you get in an American Psycho. It's a similar sort of cadence. which They're all like... Very newscaster-y. Back to you. you know very it it and And somehow...
Speaker: ah Well, essentially, the irradiated fish that, of course, enter— Oh, it should also be said that their ah sort of top item is the lips of a particular fish. And there's an interesting scene early on where the owner of this sushi bar called Nagasaki goes to the fish market in this sort of blue-collar, like sort of portly fishmonger is like— It's getting more expensive. I can't keep bringing in these fish just for you. And she's like, if the people want fish lips, they will receive fish lips.
Speaker: no And these fish lips are like strangely labial. Yes, and there are many shots of them just being like sawed off and then somehow made into sushi. But these are radiated fish lips.
Speaker: basically lead to the irradiation of certain people who eat them. And this is signified through some beautiful early 90s, just green glow CGI, i like space jam ass shit. yeah And this sort of irradiated substance is what captures the child that, of course, the Hacker Collective made of our main characters, Shireen and her brother. which shall say, Shireen, South Asian. Her brother, East Asian.
Speaker: Their child... Hispanic? Not sure. Take every political concern you think Gen X has, put that into a movie, put it in the form of a series of television commercials and like commentary on consumerism,
Speaker: That's the mode of delivery. And then make it totally racially blind in terms of casting with no accounting for why that is, which is kind of an interesting, we've talked in the past about that being kind of a feature, usually in like a Hollywood movie, right? i don't Or you know similar, not Hollywood, but like... you know, a more mainstream film like a kids or something or, you know, a well-known film by a well-known director where sort of it's just like assumed that it is okay for people from various racial groups to hang out. What's interesting is this does that, but very intentionally because the director is very clearly doing something almost more like academic experimental film rather than, you know, like an object to be consumed for entertainment. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, the structure of it reminded me, both the structure and some of the content reminded me a lot of um Good Morning Mr. Orwell by Namejoon Paik, the South Korean conceptual artist.
Speaker: Which is this broadcast from 1984, which is sort of An early attempt at sort of analyzing the internet via this international broadcast, which clipped together weird bits of footage and different performances. i think it had performance from the Thompson Twins. and It a bit from Philip. There was like Philip Glasses in it, Merce Cunningham, Joseph Beuys, but then also like weird sort of bad graphics and stuff.
Speaker: I mean, this is 10 years prior, but it it seems to have in some ways come out of that tradition. And even there's the reference, there there's these kind of great stacks of televisions that the main characters walk past, which will have the occasional broadcast on, or they'll come on and they'll have something happening, which obviously very named June Paik, who specializes in these big walls of televisions.
Speaker: Yeah, it's it's very interesting media. it clearly has something to say. i mean, also, we should talk about the dialogue, because the dialogue is effectively like a prose poem. ah May I, I just want to read, before we go into it, I need to read some of the titles of other works that Chang has made to maybe just give the listener a sense of the kind of experimental thing that we're dealing with.
Speaker: In 2000, she made a pornographic film called IKU, which she claimed was inspired by Blade Runner. In 2017, she did a project called Brandon that was featured in Rhizome's Knit Art Anthology, an online exhibition of 100 important knit artworks.
Speaker: Another, I think, interesting example here would be that she's presented at the Whitney and the Guggenheim multiple times. We have work from 2001 called Baby Play, which is a large-scale table football field ah with opposing rows of 22 ballplayers replaced by human-sized cloned locker babies. The tracking of ball movement retrieves ME data, text and sounds, deposited in respective lockers. Or the follow-up in 2005, Love.
Speaker: which consists of six large-sized teacups and six clone babies. Each teacup is an auto-driving mobile unit with spinning wheels, allowing direction maneuver and speed variation. Each baby is a situated Mac mini engine with Wi-Fi linked to the k net depository of shuffles and remixes of popular love songs.
Speaker: um So we're kind of in the world of the YBAs that we talked about a couple of movies ago um at this point. We're talking about 24-Hour Party People, I think, is where that came up. I think where YB is a kind Dinos and ah Jake Chapman have come off a few times, as is Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin.
Speaker: mean, I think she's slightly old. She might be the same age, actually. Born in 54, so she's actually a boomer, but there's no way to not read this movie as just Gen X being projected into your brain, so...
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think all the actors would have been Gen X. Oh, definitely, yeah. Yeah, so Hearst 16, 1965. Tracy Emin, I think, is around the same. So they're slightly, they're maybe 10 years later.
Speaker: I think she's more interested in the internet and very interestingly and tech than any of the YBAs are. in a sense, the YBAs are quite... Reaction is the wrong term, but maybe um throwbacks in a sense are quite interesting objects, actually. And she seems to be very interested in sort of financial flows and supply chains and media ownership and yeah the internet. An interesting thing I picked up from her Wikipedia page was that she so she grew up in Taiwan, which was obviously a kind of Cold War, yes liberal, center-right, capitalist dictatorship for a lot of the time. And then she moved to New York and sort of got involved in the downtown scene in the 70s. So I suppose we're sort of talking about post-punk, that kind of era in the mid to late seventy s And then she joined this called the Paper Tiger Television Collective.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. which is a kind of antique, it still exists apparently, and it's based in New York. was formed in 1981, and it's a non-profit, low-budget public access television program, an open media collective.
Speaker: ah It's basically very Gen The idea was to sort of take over the broadcasting waves of non-commercial public access television They had lots of big academics. he had um Noam Chomsky who reads the New York Times. Recently retired from public life. yeah yeah ah Donna Haraway reads the National Geographic. Oh my God, Donna Haraway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But just linking us back to the film Fresh Kill, there's this kind of B-plot, I suppose, of her name's Mimi, and she's this presenter of a kind of chaotic...
Speaker: talk show that's broadcast from Staten Island. It is kind of part of this resistance against the corporates. So clearly this this is mined from her own experience working with this TV collective and in the 80s.
Speaker: Well, I do think it's worth actually to to kind of stop on that technology point. Like this may be a little bit... obvious, but again, as I've said in previous episodes, you know we're we're so good at going for the deep cuts that sometimes we miss the obvious. like this is the movie a review of this movie contains one of the first mentions of the term hacktivism. like This is a movie, and again, it's not like a normal narrative feature,
Speaker: But it clearly posits the idea that hacking will be one major way of being able to fight against the overwhelming power of the sort of corporate environmental degradation landfill state. And again, you know that's not like the core of the movie necessarily, but it does form an important part of it.
Speaker: And I think that, you know maybe we can come back to this later. We kind of have to reckon with the ways in which that's not what happened. It hit its apogee somewhere around Anonymous and the Arab Spring and, you know, Gene Sharp.
Speaker: we've got Beto O'Rourke. Yeah, yeah. I love, i mean, listen, I don't love, but I do think it's very funny that he was like, we're going to take away the church's tax-exempt status. like then they like That was the the sort of, like he went like Robespierre. you know That was sort of the radical position he staked out during the Bernie moment. you know novelgen x Gen X Robespierre, yeah.
Speaker: You will listen to the misfits. You will wear the t-shirt. you know like but ah But it it is it is interesting to pause for a second and just consider The movie really does seem to take very seriously the idea that the means of overcoming our oppression at the hands of transcontinental, transnational capital is going to be like hacker collective online that quite literally unlocks a safe on a computer. like There's a scene where they gain access to the files of the corporation online.
Speaker: by a safe opening up and the documents coming out and being like, you've got trade secrets. you know like that is I mean, I think the movie is intended to be funny and and playful in all sorts of ways. like i actually really I liked the movie a lot. I think it's it really is is a fun watch.
Speaker: But i don't think we should read that as fully ironized. I think it really does represent this early 90s moment where the glee about the idea of the computer, um it has not yet been soured by the emergence of Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or the inheritors of this tradition who are now like Palmer, Lucky, and that guy who runs Palantir, whose name I'm forgetting. i the The grandson of Mosley.
Speaker: No, he's not. Oh, yeah. The grandson of Mosley runs the UK branch of Palantir. Oh, that yeah. I'm talking about Alex Karp. Yeah, Alex Karp. guy who did his PhD in like the Frankfurt School or whatever. I forget exactly what. But yes, the co-founder of Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp. Those guys are at this point like the main inheritors of this idea, which is not great, obviously. i think that the probably the closest you would get on like the political left would be something like... ah what is it called? Unicorn Party or something? You what talking about? there ah the pirate but The Pirate Party. Well, the Pirate Party is in Sweden, Germany. Well, no, but there's a there's a hacker kind of collective Antifa group called like Unicorn Riot. That's what it's called. And they sort of like, they dox Nazis. They sort of like hack files and like,
Speaker: you know Kind of like WikiLeaks type stuff, but this this is a more overtly anarchist group. Well, like i mean closer to the actual film being made, we have in 1996, we have John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, right?
Speaker: Yes. That cyberspace, the internet, whatever, would effectively sort of usher in this life beyond the state, beyond fiat currency, beyond... But also beyond corporate control, I think it was it was sort of doubly liberal and or libertarian in the sense that it was sort of like, you know, so I was supposed to liberate us from the totalitarian states of, you leftist communism or whatever, but also from corporate capitalism.
Speaker: and We've sort of got maybe one of those and not the other. I also think it's interesting that, you know, that this comes of a moment, you know, Fresh Kill is sort of of that moment where there is a sort of techno-optimism in the air.
Speaker: But only a few years prior, um in the mid-80s, you have, I'm just trying to remember their name, Clodo, the Clodo Group in France, who went around bombing data centers and computer centers.
Speaker: Can we get some clapping in here?
Speaker: Yeah, so the Committee for Liquidation of Subversion of Computers. In French, Comité Liquidante du Automat de l'Ordinateur. i.e. Clodo. They were in 1980 and they were like a neo-Luddite anarchist group.
Speaker: Oh my god! Take me there! Bring me there! was very French. He would bomb like computer factories, whatever, because they just thought this was ushering in the end times. So like yeah, 14 years later, left, as imagined in this film, is very pro-technology, but you know only 14 years prior was seen as Something to be suspicious of. yeah I suppose at the time it was more deeply linked to like RPA and the sort of security state and stuff at that point, I presume. And that it sort of grew out of that into something being much more freeform and open source in the 90s before sort of returning to its origins in the year But um yeah, it's an interesting period, this film, right?
Speaker: I would like to give a quick shout out to Jathan Sadowski's book, Mechanic and the Luddite, a ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism that came out, I want to say last year, which is sort of, let's say a recovery of that tradition of blowing up data centers among French anarchists ah in the 80s. But I think the, so there are kind of different currents to track here, right? Like,
Speaker: On the one hand, you have something like Whole Earth Catalog. i don't Do you know what that is, Sam? Whole Earth Catalog? ive I have heard it, yeah. For those who aren't aware of this, the hippie and tech movements are sort of more embedded, more deeply intertwined than most might first imagine, right? And so, you know, a lot of these hippies who, you know, kind of come to the San Francisco area, they don't get strung out on drugs, whatever, in the Wow. They're strung out on drugs, but not to the point where it stops them from being, quote, ah you know economically productive. A lot of them kind of become entrepreneurs. There's whole earth catalog I'm using here as a ah metonym for a kind of bigger movement, which is a kind of libertarian, ecologically oriented DIY thing, but that also is very interested in the way that machines and technology are going to
Speaker: inform that that kind of countercultural future, right? It was founded by a guy named Stuart Brand, who I think is still alive. um It only ran for like three years or four years or something, but we'll call it a stand-in. It inspired Steve Jobs. Let's put it that way. like if you need to imagine who this stands in for, it's someone like Steve Jobs.
Speaker: And so I think that's like one direction, right? The sort of like, we accept and acknowledge the DARPA roots of this technology and we will use it to build the utopia. And then you have this sort of anti-tech, this kind of neo-Luddite response. And then you've got the tradition that this movie something like Donna Haraway or early Nick Land before he fried his brain on meth and went to China, where it's more like, how can I plug my brain into the mainframe and use that as a way to defeat evil?
Speaker: And you know the Matrix is probably the most prominent example of that kind of force culturally. like I think it takes another six, seven years, decade, for this idea to really like enter the mainstream fully with things like The Matrix. But here, Cheng, early on, clearly represents a much more radical variant of that tradition, like much less sanitized, much less sort of um interested in entertaining you, and much more interested in like investigating and provoking.
Speaker: I mean, you mentioned earlier the dialogue, Sam. like This is not dialogue that a normal viewer is like looking for in a movie. yeah very ah prose poem, as you put it earlier.
Speaker: Yeah, i mean, it almost reads like I don't know, like a postmodernist twist on a T.S. Eliot poem. or um Yeah, it it has this kind of prose poem sensibility. Well, yeah, here, I think I have a good way of describing what this might be like to listen to. So if you just give me a moment, I think I can act out a little bit of what this might sound like. So the first character sitting around the table at Harakiri, which by the way, the tables are literally like water, like there's water inside the tables. So they're like eating on the streams that presumably the fish would themselves be swimming in or something like this. It's very like...
Speaker: you know, points for attention to set design, it really does capture that, like, whatever that table represents in 24-hour party people is also represented by the set design in this movie. But okay, one character might say, let us go then, you and i when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table.
Speaker: And the other might go, April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Except the second one would be like, stirring the world with spring rain. Like, you know, like it wouldn't even be delivered. it would be like voice modulated, which I do think if we want to get into like a little brecht here, there's clearly this influence of a more radical tradition of like theater on this movie, a kind of experimental conceptual kind of artist direction. where the viewer is intended to be taken out of the movie, and that is supposed to kind of awaken us to the political ah vitality of the message.
Speaker: Like, it's built into the form and the presentation. Yeah, no, it certainly, I think, could be staged and sort of seems to come out of a kind of, the I mean, it has a kind of theatrical, quite camp-almost cadence to it.
Speaker: But at the same time, i mean, it could be staged. Yeah, it's an interesting interplay between a kind of quite sort of DIY, DIY-e do-it-yourself, quite constrained style of sort of theatrics that you could see sort of being staged at the same time. it It's very interesting sort of interspersing footage from all over the place, which is perhaps less stageable, right? And um one of the interesting things that I think the i didn't sort of tie up until right at the end, there's this sort of an epigraph or sort of footnote to the film, ah which is a to the end credits, it says, Orchid Island, Pacific Ocean, home to 3,000 Aborigines. And then it repeats and it goes, Orchid Island, Pacific Ocean, nuclear waste depository for Taiwan.
Speaker: um And throughout the film, there are these sort of spice bits of footage of what I at first assumed was like Java or like Bali, Balinese Indonesian fishermen, but actually turns out are the native inhabitants of the Orchid Island. think they're called Taos is the name for the indigenous habits inhabitants. So yeah, there's the strange bits of these canoes, carved canoes and people doing sort of... um folk dances um that has just sort of been displaced.
Speaker: And then there's, yeah, you realize at the end that there's this strange mirroring between Staten Island as a kind of repository for the financial district's waste or sort of whatever. It's this kind of marginal bit of New York that's an island by itself.
Speaker: And then Taiwan has, which is in its own sense a marginal, in some senses a marginal island off the of China, has its own marginal island called Orchid Island where they're dumping stuff. So there's this kind of double dumping going on East and West. Yeah. I thought it was quite interesting.
Speaker: I really do sort of respect the movies. Like we've talked a lot in this series, I guess, about the ways in which some of the sort of Gen X political consciousness becomes explicitly anti-political, right? or Or, you know, kind of takes on these purely like...
Speaker: I don't know, issues-based forms, right? So something like environmentalism, nuclear disarmament, ah whatever. This is a movie that, and I say this with praise, manages to be kind of genuinely intersectional in the sense that it wants to draw parallels between the ways in which environmental degradation generates environmental racism, right? Which is to say like the unequal effects of environmental pollution on groups who are already kind of marginalized in society. So Staten Island is where all of the cops and firefighters from Manhattan live. Their refuse, on the one hand, creates jobs because our main character, Shireen, is actually like a scavenger along the beaches of Manhattan. i mean, I don't, like, i I don't, they ever say it's Manhattan. It obviously is because of Staten Island, but it also is polluting everything. It's destroying them.
Speaker: It's you know literally ah even even ah attacking the restaurants in which the wealthy elite of the city live. But then, of course, there's also the way in which this affects the peoples of the Pacific on the other side of the world who are subject to the same kinds of problems. There is a kind of like...
Speaker: unitary or global vision here um that you can you know kind of read almost as a response to globalization. It's like, okay, you know the wall came down, whatever, Gorbachev is doing pizza commercials, all is well with the world.
Speaker: Well, actually now it just means that we all face all of these problems and can be cognizant of the fact that we all face those problems. if not an equally yoked way, then at least in a way that gives us a fundamentally similar experience of our own degradation. Because we we didn't you know we mentioned this earlier, but the bad guy in the movie is this GX corporation.
Speaker: And throughout the movie, they just keep buying more and more things, including the fish concern where the fish comes from, right? Well, I think that the funniest thing they buy out is is EcoCat.
Speaker: And it's actually quite a sly sort of comment on the the recuperation of... um The sort of counterculture, right? Almost like a Ben & Jerry's style. Ben & Jerry's cat food? Well, it's called EcoCat Cat Food.
Speaker: And it sort of goes, EcoCat, like fresh fish, organic, non-polluted, now owned by GX. And yeah, I think it's a almost, not to sound completely right on, but like, ah preston you know the term greenwashing that became quite popular in the twenty ten s um yes It's the most prescient of that concern. These kind of a hippie sort of things about this counterculture of being brought up by big corporations.
Speaker: Yes, 100%. And in fact, one of the things that the movie does really well, and it's a little hokey, but it it's it's Gen X in that way, is um there's always a new slogan for what equals what. you know Sort of in an Orwell 1984, is peace, you know so on so forth. And it'll be like, greed equals progress or, you know, something like this.
Speaker: And it constantly, it just like ramps up and ramps it up until it's totally in your face. And I'm reminded, those sequences reminded me very strongly of, um you know, I confess to Almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have gravely sinned, which is to say I've seen every episode of the TV show South Park ever made. I'm sorry.
Speaker: And there is a an episode that they released during the BP oil spill, you know, whatever that was, over 10 years ago. And the joke is that the BP CEO keeps releasing these apology videos that are just sort of him...
Speaker: Usually in some sort of like self-pleasuring or sort of like vulnerable, but kind of in your face, like him naked on a bearskin rug with like a fire blazing in the background or something like this. And he'll just be saying, we're sorry.
Speaker: We're so sorry. we're so sorry. It's like a little, it's, you know, this tongue-in-cheek sort of admission of you know, we know what we're doing is pure evil, but we still feel the need to broadcast it to you in the form of an apology. yeah Which, in in some ways, is what I think has broken the brains. you know, we talked recently about Cole Allen, you know, would-be assassin of Donald Trump, of the sort of, like, centrist.
Speaker: And in that case, I think a lot about one of the things that's broken, I think, the Gen X and millennial centrist brain is that you no longer need to apologize. Like there was this sort of form in our culture for a long time where like, whether you did something now that would seem almost like not a scandal, you, I don't know, cheat on your spouse or you, um,
Speaker: and I don't know, get caught coming out of a strip club. The kind of thing that in the 1980s, they would do like a public execution of you for to like restabilize the social fabric. You know, you at least had to apologize. But now, you know, you can have grabbing by the pussy be like your campaign slogan. And you just, you take the Roy Cohn route, you don't apologize. So I think there's a way in which the inclusion of that in the movie has a certain, um ah a time datedness that tells us something about Gen X's like,
Speaker: their imaginary and maybe how it's been broken since then at the you know through the end of history as it's kind of evolved. Yeah, I mean, there's ah almost like quite a a knowing send-up. I can't tell whether it's a send-up or whether it's serious. There's the m its a sort of daycare, right right towards the end, there's a sort of scene of a daycare, and there's this man sort cradling a baby.
Speaker: And he says, tree-free, dolphin-free, cruelty-free, 50 ways to save the Earth, bio-gradable, it's always commendable, ozone-safe, don't have children, adopt homeless person, liberate a zoo, unplug your television. And then he turns green from the um nuclear radiation because he's killing the fish from the sushi.
Speaker: And um yeah, it's it's interesting, a sort of a movie that on the face of it is quite sort of right on and sort of bell hooks coded, should we say. Cheng has done things with bell hooks, to be clear. Yeah, I didn't actually know that. I just guessed because it kind of felt um But there's all there's a kind of wry undermining of the the counterculture that going on, I think, at the same time, like this don't have children a adopt by this person.
Speaker: But he also just dies, right? like the The thing that I find funny about that is that like it's the you know the the interminable debate we all had to have around 2012 of um there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. you know And does that mean that you try to consume ethically or does it mean that you like start boofing McDonald's at every meal because who cares, right? And that that was, you know for for the youngins listening, a very big debate for many years.
Speaker: But I like that scene because it sort of is like, here are all the micro actions you could take. Oh, wait, everything's already irradiated. It doesn't matter. Like, you know what I mean? Like you can take all these little actions if you want, but you ate the poison fish and now you're going to die. You know, like it, it doesn't change the fact that, and one of the things that is kind of another interesting thing that film does, it constantly reminds you that the kills in fresh kills means stream in Dutch, right? It always wants to remind you of that.
Speaker: characters say that it comes up as part of that final sequence you mentioned at the end, Sam. And I think that that's, you know, meant to say like, the the sludge is coming for you, right? like It's not just fresh kill as in the fish is freshly killed in the movie, but that gigantic trash heap, that dumping ground is going to release itself into the waters and further pollute. And so whether or not you adopt a homeless person is not going to you know affect that reality. Well, there's a very interesting point to that, which is almost like a Jeffrey Epstein flash forward, which is, don't know if you picked up the bit where um right at the end of the film, it cuts, it goes from the sort of cuts to Orchid Island to actually fully filming on Orchid Island. And there are these two yuppies from earlier on in the film, sort of sunbathing.
Speaker: And they say in German for some reason, though even though they've been speaking English the entire time time, time to find another islander as like nuclear waste washes up on the beach. And there are these like spy planes or kind of like water planes start like flying above them and they sort of like look up and there's the sort of indigenous Orchid Islanders on the island and they kind of like shuffle off and sort of go wherever they're going to go next. um So yeah, the sort of inability of the escape is quite quite amusing. And just the island. is
Speaker: Quite... Quite scary, how it I don't know. No, it is, because you're right, that the the native peoples can't escape, right? And that's part of the point of the movie, is and it really is prescient in this respect. like I forgot about that scene, but i it makes me think of the classic...
Speaker: trip to Bali, you know, sort of um eat, pray, love, you know, sort of thing where it's like, I i go to the mystical East. But first of all, you never let a German go to the mystical East. A lot of bad things happen there as we learned in the 1930s. But more generally, like the European and American, and let's just say, let's use the term global North, ah you know, as our stand in here, I guess.
Speaker: although i think that term is sort of has its issues, you can kind of just always find another island where you can ignore the inhabitants and have your version of a pure naturalism that is dependent, that you're you're fleeing the fact that the landfill is spewing itself out onto you. And you do that by going and increasingly ruining some other place. And I think, again, what I find, i keep calling it prescient, but maybe the real way to think about it is just like,
Speaker: Maybe this is the positive impulse in the initial kind of Gen X era critique of the end of history that like the systemic thinking doesn't go away. Like we've seen a lot of movies where it is gone entirely and it's just sort of like,
Speaker: you know, let's ah sign a contract in blood. That doesn't mean I don't own anything or whatever, right? Yeah. Let's take ecstasy and and party in a field until the Thatcher's bobbies beat us up, you know? There is a vanguard in this film. There is a kind of... The hackers. Well, no, not just the hackers. There's also a thing that, i don't know if you spotted it, called the African Unity Network.
Speaker: Yeah, it comes up. It's hard to say what that really means, but yes, you are correct. They that they have a hostage that's being broadcast on one of the televisions, and there's a woman who's saying, you know, I'm i'm going to prepared to die for this, and I'm prepared to kill this hostage. There's this one figure who is still in the world of sort of politics proper. Yeah.
Speaker: um And then the director sort of has this pathetic outcome for this hardcore African sort of third-worldist group, which is, um there's a news report that like very briefly flashes, and it says, um the africans the Africans have blocked the cat food fertilizer shipment from Zaziland. there's this is like radical third-world movement, and all they presumably achieve is blocking like a cat food fertilizer shipment, which like could either be like a a kind of A knowing nod to the fact that actually these kind of um supply chains of presumably innocuous, unimportant goods are actually vital to the lifeblood of the system.
Speaker: So it could be a kind of like, actually, this is a good thing, or a powerful thing at least. Or it could be quite a pathetic reading. but This sort of radical group, all they can manage to do is block a cat food first, like a student.
Speaker: Which, yeah, I mean, I think the movie is kind of always doing both. And I think that's part of what makes it a joy to watch is that it it it's the kind of movie that at a certain level, if I showed this to like my dad, insofar as he would have an opinion on it, he would probably this thing's really up its own ass, huh? like you know it is It's a very like academic, kind of playful, you know knowing movie, but it actually, and you know Captain Planet style, it does have heart. you know It actually believes in something um in terms of imagining a kind of better future.
Speaker: And I... I don't know. I think it's interesting that that better future is in some ways tech-based. I know we touched on it earlier, but to me, I don't know. I grew up in the age of anonymous, when anonymous was like a real thing that you know presumably did real things. and I don't know, doxed people and released documents. and you know We are legion, right this whole thing.
Speaker: And that is so far gone from anything that anyone, again, who is not like Alex Karp believes now, that it does, i don't know, it gives me a kind of appreciation. Like, as a kind of technophobe myself, a movie like this does allow me to appreciate the degree to which the newness of that frontier exists.
Speaker: may have suggested a new vector for action when the African Unity Network has failed, when you know the building of socialism in in the Eastern Bloc and such has failed, when China is polluting you know the Orchid Islands here. Like when all of those things have sort of failed, it's like, okay, well, we have another terrain here that we can work with. And I i can see the beauty, and it it didn't work out that way, and it's not going to, but I can see why that would appeal. And that is sort of a beautiful thing to to find here.
Speaker: It's kind of in a way that, you know, this the sort of geopolitics meme, nothing ever happens. but Whenever anything happens, it it doesn't actually lead anywhere. there's just People will post on Twitter the kind of ah the guy the grumpy guy going, nothing ever happens. Often like a company with Francis Fukuyama. Nothing ever happens. like is any History can't end. like It doesn't matter that you the US s is at war with Iran. History cannot end.
Speaker: And this is, in some ways, a nothing-ever-happens film. So there's one instance where there's a news report going on about, um presumably, an A-bomb that's been dropped off the coast of Okinawa and hasn't exploded. And they say that the bomb is going to explode and kill everyone.
Speaker: And then five minutes later, the newscaster goes, reports indicate that the bomb is dissolved harmlessly on the ocean floor. Again, there's this is kind of comedic, pathetic resolution of just sort a shrug. of yeah These things are heightened they're not. And it's the same with ah the the sort of plot right in Fresh Kills, which is that you're expecting this kind of, for lack of a better word, lib-resistance movie.
Speaker: prior Like, sort of, avant de la terre. Lib resistance movie, obviously. and Prior to 2016, obviously. But it doesn't turn into one because you're expecting this kind of great big hack and resistance and they're going to go and like hang the CEO of CX Corporation from a lamppost and none of that happens.
Speaker: ah The grandfather has the child the entire time or finds a child we don't really know and the the couple are reunited with the child and that's kind of it.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, i I think what I find kind of interesting, well, first of all, ah my favorite version of the nothing ever happens meme is a kind of a Wojak guy at a roulette wheel.
Speaker: And all of them say nothing ever happens. But there's one that just says something and the ball is landed there and he's just grabbing his head like, oh, something happened. um But I think the movie's perspective to a certain extent And this is not a bad way, I think, of conceptualizing of like why we are doing this podcast by the end of history in an age when things do seem to be happening. It's because if so much is happening, there is a sense in which nothing is happening.
Speaker: Like the abundance, the kind of multi-causal reality, the unlockability of just like what is going on. I mean, the classic Trump strategy of, I'm going to do so many crimes in one day that you're not actually going to be able to talk about them. um I think that is in some ways where the movie comes down because obviously the polluting of the oceans caused by the harmless disintegration of the atomic bomb off the coast of Japan, like that has an obvious environmental effect. It's just like, it's not an event, right? Like it's just another background cause that is going to contribute further to the irradiated fish that are going to further infect more people and create more kind of dystopian chaos. You know, it's,
Speaker: It's a movie in which the world is so dystopic and has so gone to shit that like it's not clear what it would mean for something to happen. Because corporate acquisition is just, oh, it's another day. Oh, they're giving us a commercial. Now GX acquired this. Isn't that wonderful? like It's almost just like it's just goingnna it's just going to keep happening. And that that is kind of like the end of history that we live in now, right?
Speaker: It's the age of... Things might be happening, but they seem to happen so quickly, so so constantly, ah that we have no time to react, and therefore, we don't become actors in that something happening, which means nothing ever happens.
Speaker: um that That's my dialectical reading of nothing ever happens, as mediated by this by this movie, Fresh Kill. I mean, it's interesting that a particular kind of Gen X here is the sort of monopolistic or sort of unitary conglomerate corporate entity, right? Yeah.
Speaker: I think it hasn't really translated perhaps that neatly to the 2010s and 2020s, which is that now we sort of... Yeah, it's this kind of yeah I remember this rhetoric of like you know like people would point to something like Unilever.
Speaker: Unilever owns 80% of retail goods. it's going to be like Everything's going to be owned by one company and the state is going to be absorbed by this one corporate entity and everything is going to be owned by like this sort of eponymous GX group that...
Speaker: It's multi, you know, as it wants the state and entertainment and food and transport, it's just everything. And I don't think that's such a, I mean, there's obviously like antitrust stuff going on in the US, but it doesn't seem to be as an abiding concern for our generation ah compared to say the the concentration of wealth among more of like an oligarchy, right? Like of maybe 10, 20 companies. Just increasingly funneling wealth up rather than it being like this kind of like quasi-state style totalitarian corporate structure.
Speaker: You make an extremely good point because I remember there was that kind of, i say early internet, I don't mean the 90s, I mean like the early 2010s kind of chart, you know, where it would say like 90% of consumer goods are owned by five companies. And yeah, it's like Unilever, you know, I don't know, i'll just make one up like British Petroleum, they' just like random. Johnson & Johnson, yeah I think is one of them, yeah. Yeah, because it's always like companies... it wouldn't be BP, right? It's always a company that like isn't a company. like it's They always sell brands that are the companies you know, and they are sort of like the shadow. They're the ominous grise, sort of behind the scenes that's making everything happen. yeah And I think it is an interesting point that
Speaker: On the one hand, that presented as a major concern of a Gen X and then a millennial left, where it was like, this demonstrates the problem. it's It stands in for the problem, which is corporate ownership of all things, um almost implicitly like a lack of healthy competition, which makes our democracy function. you know like That's going to be missing. What's funny is that this like is still happening. I mean, obviously, under the Biden Reich, there was an attempt to do something about this to a certain extent.
Speaker: But um you know it's ongoing. like Which two media companies? Is it like Netflix is buying HBO or you know one of them is buying the other? i forget. But like where you know these things are still happening. It's not as if these massive mergers have disappeared. They form a certain kind of economic, if not necessity, then strategy for the kind of dominant players, right? If you've got an opponent...
Speaker: who you need to control. You know, it's a classic startup move. You buy out the startup that would challenge you. If you've seen Silicon Valley, this is kind of a constant in that series. It happens all the time.
Speaker: But consciousness-wise, it's really not something we talk about nearly as much because we frame it in almost... not quite class terms, but in something more like class terms. We have much less, sort of, we turn much less to the idea of like, well, we need the independent yeoman to compete with each other. And if Unilever owns 90% of all consumer goods, then the yeoman can't compete.
Speaker: I think there was something admirable about Gen X in the 90s, sort of interest maybe in structure and corporate structures more than personalities in the sense that I think post-Occupy Wall Street in 2008, you get the emergence of a kind of anti-corporate, anti-commercial politics that's very personalist.
Speaker: then We start talking about billionaires in the ah in the singular in the sense of singular billionaires, like da Musk, Zuckerberg, whatever. Over the age of sort of platform capitalism, you get much more focused on like individual billionaires rather than i kind of like individual standalone companies.
Speaker: i think that's products of Silicon Valley, right? Rather than these all-consuming... multinational networks like Unilever, like Johnson & Johnson. um and I vividly remember in the late 1990s, early 2000s, like, ah you know, well-meaning liberal left parents sort of refusing to feed their children Nestle, right?
Speaker: Because Nestle was this evil conglomerate that owned like half the the sort of food stock and was sort of telling African mothers not to breastfeed their babies because they could make more profit by ah sort of feeding them formula milk.
Speaker: Uh-huh. i No one at the time knew who the the ownership it was by nest or the CEO of Nestle was. the The animus was structural rather than personalist. um yeah I think that's an interesting shift. I don't know which is worse or better, but it's a change.
Speaker: I think that's a very good point. And I think really in some ways, it's i I bring it back to the revenge of the nerds all the time because I really do think that is the paradigm we should see our you know current cultural moment through.
Speaker: Because like the nerd requires that he be he be respected and seen. you know Think about Clerks 2 when the Jason Lee played tech entrepreneur comes in explicitly to humiliate his sort of like high school bullies. You know, he needs them to see that he is successful, right? That needs to be presented to them. And it's similar with like Zuckerberg coming out with his big chain and his baggy shirt and being like, hey guys, I'm cool now. I got sort of a perm thing going on. Like, don't I look just like Lil Yachty? Like, you know, whatever, right? Or Musk being like, oh, i'm very good at Dark Souls. Very good, huh? ah I'm i'm be one of the best Eldering in the world um or whatever, right?
Speaker: Even someone like Peter Thiel, who's a bit more behind the scenes, does, I think, to a certain extent, relish his sort of Darth Vader-like persona. I mean, why else give lectures on the Antichrist you know to like public crowds? like Which, by the way, is something the Antichrist would do. I just want to be very clear about that. That is Antichrist behavior.
Speaker: um you know I think that comes from that sort of psychological mechanism, whereas... I think your older or kind of, I hesitate to say waspier. I mean, probably by the numbers, they were waspier. But your older technique is sort of, no, no. I simply amass my money.
Speaker: Maybe I get my name put on a couple buildings. But does it really matter that I'm on the board of, you know, ah the west The West African Enslavement and Fishery Corporation? No, not particularly. It's much more about sort of just the accumulation of that wealth within this social contract where like, you know and to bring Robespierre back into this, you know we're all citizens of the Republic. you know Some of us might be wealthier, some of us might be poorer, but by God, we're in this together. Or at least that's the kind of social the the social resonance. Whereas now it's like,
Speaker: please respect me. Please respect me. you know And that's kind of the tech way. And so I think in some ways that might have more to do with the antagonists you know kind of setting the tone for us. like In this movie, the only like face, you know the bad guy that we get who has a face is just the like CEO of GX.
Speaker: And I don' don't think he gets a name anything. He's just like a guy. He's just a white guy in a suit. Like there's no, you know, it's not like, Archibald Hunker, my my greatest enemy who must be destroyed to ensure that the world isn't. No, the world is polluted and that is kind of multi-causal.
Speaker: And so the mood, it's okay. I'm just going come out It's a Deleuzian movie, folks. I'm just going to come out and say it very honestly and openly. This is a Deleuzian movie. That's what it is. I've come to, it's taken me an hour, but I'm there.
Speaker: It's a big body of our organs sloshing about. I mean, in a way, it it kind of is. it It imagines a world without organs is one way you might think about this movie. Yeah, replaced with rusted-rooted side characters.
Speaker: I kid you not, you need to watch this one. Everyone in this film is like a rusted-root extra. I need to come in and just say, this is a little side note for um you know all of the, again, I won't call them death heads. We'll say the fans of death as a photograph. We have to work on that. All of you folks out there, you know Sam once showed me a video from Limmy, from the sort of this UK show, I think. right It's called The Limmy Show, right, ah Sam? Yeah, it's yes's a Scottish sketch comedy show.
Speaker: So, uh, you know, and I thought it quite funny. The ones you've shown me recently, a thing came up on my sort of radar that was like, my phone won't let me forget that I took these 15 screen captures of Lemmy's face, like 15 separate times. And so whenever it like brings up the random photo gallery, it's just different pictures of him, like looking really uncomfortable over and over again.
Speaker: Um, I somehow that relates to what we were saying before it, it this is a peek into our relationship. We're people too. We have lives outside of the podcast. I'm done wrong. I live to do this. Um,
Speaker: which is Yeah, we we keep chasing the small room. With my lederhosen. Well, you know, maybe that's a good time for me to say that you should consider liking, rating, subscribing, leaving comments.
Speaker: You know, if you leave a comment... one of us, both of us perhaps, maybe the producer, we're going to see it and maybe we'll react to it on air and say, this person made me feel really good. like I was thinking about walking into the remains of the Fresh Kills landfill, but they left such a nice comment that I actually put on a tie today. I went to work and I decided to record another episode of the podcast. So you can be the difference between those two things.
Speaker: I think we've had our first paid conversion ah today. Let me, can we get, let's get some clapping. Thank you. i will also, i will just say, this is kind of an interesting factoid I gathered while like researching in gigantic scare quotes. This film is that at least one archaeologist has described the Fresh Kills landfill as, quote, among the largest man-made structures in the history of the world. So what does that mean when a landfill is up there with the pyramids and, of course, the London Eye, as among man's greatest architectural accomplishments.
Speaker: With that, I will say, you should watch this movie. It's definitely an experience, and I might check out some other stuff from this director, maybe some of the art exhibitions. And I'm going to watch, I'm going to go and watch some Rusted Root.
Speaker: Rusted Root it is. Bye-bye, everybody.
