- source

Ernst Fuchs was one of the first artists shared on this site way back in early 2006.

Artist and date unknown.

You can see additional Russian satirical magazine illustrations from early 20th century in this previous post.

hiziri-pro:

Lesser Dragon.

Posted a picture to the patreon. Full size JPG and PSD and video can be downloaded according to the amount of support. https://www.patreon.com/satoshi_matsuura

"Satire on taxation, showing monsters personifying taxes devoring people in an arena, while smartly dressed people look on from above; in the background, at right, Louis Philippe and some of his ministers, including Soult, D'Argout, Madier de Montjau, Barthe and Thiers, watch from a balcony; plate 10 from La Caricature's 'Association mensuelle lithographique'. May 1833" 
 Artwork found at The British Museum.

Artwork found at Rijks Museum See more work by the artist in this previous post.

Offering to Moloch, 1908  Ambush, 1909  Girl of Pleasure, 1909  The Weird Orchestra, 1904  The Spider, 1910, Version 1  The Spider, 1910, Version 2  The Spider, 1910, Version 3  Satan's Slave, 1907  Evening Beast, 1900-22  The Grim Reaper, 1907  The Forest of Vice, 1907  Only Refuge, 1904 
 A few other works by Marcel Roux can be viewed in this previous post.
Many of these artworks were found at Rijks Museum.

Artwork found at Christies.

Alex Adams / June 15, 2021

Godzilla is one of the boldest visual metaphors in cinematic history, widely recognized as a phantasmagorical embodiment of the nuclear destruction inflicted on Japan by the US at the end of the Second World War. But perhaps less well known are the many spectacular creatures that he has battled with over the almost seventy years of his bombastic gladiatorial career. Western audiences may well be familiar with smash-hit headliners like King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Mechagodzilla, titans that our radioactive lizard lord has confronted time and again over the years. But ask a non-fan to describe deep-cut back-catalog obscurities like Megalon, Gigan, Titanosaurus, or King Caesar, and you will be met with incredulity—or, more likely, a straightforward and very definite lack of interest. 

This is a terrible shame, because some of the creatures from Godzilla’s Shōwa era (1954-1975) are tremendously evocative and great fun. Consider, for instance, the screeching lobster colossus Ebirah who chirps and squeals through a surf-movie showdown with Godzilla; the mutant Ankylosaur Anguirus who often comes to Godzilla’s aid in his hour of need; or the oversize praying mantises Kamacuras (known as “Gimantis” in the English dub of Son of Godzilla) who cruelly wallop boulders at Godzilla’s helpless offspring Minilla. Despite the widespread critical dismissal of Godzilla’s many sequels as increasingly childish and redundant, many of the fifteen Shōwa films are rich with social commentary and formal and stylistic innovations. Perhaps the boldest of them all—and perhaps the most unfairly maligned—is 1971’s psychedelic eco-horror Godzilla vs. Hedorah. 

Hedorah is an alien lifeform that feeds on filth and thrives on pollution. Falling to Earth and landing in Japanese waters, it quickly grows to enormous proportions, feasting greedily on the omnipresent slurry and sludge to be found in Japan’s once-green environment until it is the size of Godzilla. After the turning point of 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, in which Godzilla teamed up with Mothra and Rodan to defeat the golden space-hydra King Ghidorah, Godzilla would remain a hero, and it would be his godlike opponents who in their turn would represent mankind’s imminent doom. The black-green reptile-god was no longer an uncontrollable force of judgment; now, he was a family-friendly crusader for justice. By pitting him against Hedorah, Kaiju maverick Yoshimitsu Banno made a bold statement about climate change, the Anthropocene, and pollution that was years ahead of its time.

Hedorah: Anthropocene, Apocalypse, Appetite 

The contested term “Anthropocene” refers to the current geological epoch that we inhabit here on Earth, an epoch characterized by alarming increases in temperature caused by the organized human destruction of our natural habitat. That is, whereas previous epochs such as the Pliocene and Oligocene were characterized by natural and long-term evolutionary, climatic, and environmental changes (such as the diversification of vertebrates, the development of weather patterns, or the formation of ocean currents), the Anthropocene is a state of ecological emergency precipitated by the drastic effects of man-made climate change. Though the term is relatively recent—popularized by Paul Crutzen only 21 years ago, in 2000—and though its beginning is sometimes located in or around 1950, the processes that have contributed most to its emergence have a longer history. Admittedly, this history is chicken feed in geological time, but the Anthropocene has dawned over the last few centuries and is roughly contemporaneous with the environmentally annihilatory rampages of capitalist globalization.

For capitalism has always thrived amid shattering environmental catastrophe. In his book Slave Empire, historian Padraic X Scanlan describes how plantation agriculture at the height of the British Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries turned the Caribbean into “a creeping frontier of money, human suffering, dispossession and ecological mayhem.” Sweeping deforestation, monoculture, and industrialization permanently changed the weather systems of the Caribbean, to say nothing of the environmental ravages of the more or less constant colonial warfare between the multiple slave economies of the time. And this is only one example. From the disastrous spread of disease and the wanton destruction of biodiversity, through the sustained ruination caused by multiple forms of mining, drilling, and fracking, to the generation and release of the toxic waste that devastates precious and irreplaceable habitats the world over, industrialized international capitalism has always been at war with the natural world—plundering, polluting, and poisoning it for profit. 

By the 1970s, Japan had been politically rehabilitated after the devastation of the war, welcomed back into the West as a full participant in international capitalism, and Japanese corporations (like their American and British counterparts) had wasted no time getting rich quick and dirty. Industrial endeavors including mining, smelting, petroleum production, chemical refinement, city construction, and more led to near-catastrophic deforestation, contamination of air and water, and at least three man-made diseases: Itai-itai disease, named onomatopoetically after the screams of those who suffered from it, was a debilitatingly painful result of cadmium poisoning; Minamata disease, acquired by eating fish contaminated with mercury, attacked the central nervous system, sometimes causing insanity and death; and the city of Yokkaichi, a center of petroleum refinement, experienced skyrocketing levels of a specific form of chronic bronchitis caused by the release of untreated sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. By the time filmmaker Yoshimitsu Banno came to create his debut Kaiju picture, Japan was choking on smog. 

Hedorah, Banno’s monster, the name derived from the Japanese word meaning sludge, polluted mud, or chemical slurry, is the embodiment of a uniquely Anthropocene apocalypse. So foul is our treatment of our precious planet that a scum-loving alien considers our once-beautiful home a delightfully appetizing smorgasbord, and now that it is here it certainly does not intend to stop eating. One of the strengths of the Kaiju genre is its obligation to forego subtlety; the films’ characteristic exaggeration, caricature, and hyperbole enable them to treat their subject matter with both knockabout playfulness and polemic intensity. In their scholarly volume Japan’s Green Monsters, Sean Rhoads and Brooke McCorkle describe Godzilla vs. Hedorah as an “environmental call-to action”, and “a protest film of a different order.” Banno’s only Kaiju movie is a bold, flamboyantly weird parable about mankind’s responsibility for the murder of the Earth.  

Trouble at Toho

Though it may be uniquely uncompromising—even preachy—in its prioritization of eco-doom-mongering, Godzilla vs. Hedorah is by no means the only Kaiju movie with an environmentalist message. The theme features in many a Shōwa movie, and would resurface in the later Heisei series too (in particular Godzilla vs. Biollante [1989] and Godzilla vs. Mothra [1992]). 2016’s Shin Godzilla, which deals with the environmental and political fallout of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, is another vivid example of this preoccupation. Many Toho films end with a character looking into the sunset and delivering a didactic epithet about humanity’s responsibility to live in greater harmony with nature. 

And yet, although it is perhaps the boldest expression of Toho’s major theme, Godzilla vs. Hedorah remains a divisive oddity in the Shōwa series, 80 pulsating minutes stuffed with bizarre aesthetic choices and jarring narrative turns. Critics at the time tended towards the dismissive, a trend that was consolidated into an orthodoxy when Harry Medved lambasted the film in his 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. Perhaps this was because the film explicitly withholds the pleasures that audiences had come to associate with Toho’s work. Rather than the stomping, triumphant orchestral score familiar to fans, the film has a soundtrack peppered with rock’n’roll, Moog electronica, and jazz—including an introductory musical number with swirling lava lamp visuals that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Bond movie. Formally, it experiments with delirious hippie psychedelia, including the insertions of some baffling (yet oddly beautiful) animated sequences. None of the familiar faces from previous films—such as Akira Takarada, Akihiko Hirata, or Yoshio Tsuchiya, stars of many of the most popular Kaiju movies of the 1960s—appear in the cast, which instead features a young child protagonist and a group of dropout longhairs partying on Mount Fuji. Moments of humor and warmth rub up against scenes of striking horror; dry sequences of “scientific” exposition sit awkwardly alongside sequences of luminous, hallucinatory surrealism. Memorably, one of Godzilla’s early clashes with Hedorah is intercut with vivid scenes of fish-headed young people dancing frantically in a go-go bar.

The result is a singularly strange mix of arthouse avant-gardism, early music video aesthetics, children’s dreams, and special effects-led genre pugilism—in short, a tonal miasma that some audiences (especially overseas audiences, who lacked the cultural context provided by the many poisoning scandals in Japan) found almost unwatchably dissonant. “Even for a movie about a big anthropomorphic fire breathing reptile fighting a giant pollution eating monster that looks like a big pile of blackened teriyaki chicken,” writes Kaiju fan site Stomp Tokyo, “Godzilla Vs. Hedorah is a weird movie.” Another reviewer writes that they’ve never “seen such an intractable tangle of the laugh-out-loud stupid and the chills-up-the-spine disturbing in one movie,” in part because of the way that the film features some of the franchise’s most goofily comic moments—such as Godzilla’s atomic-breath-fueled flight—and some of its most openly horrific set pieces, such as the famous sequences in which the noxious fumes Hedorah exudes dissolve human flesh. “Sometimes,” writes yet another reviewer, “the grim and the giddy are mixed in the same sequence.” 

But such criticisms overstate the strangeness of the film. It is weird, but in a spirit of experimentation and adventure, rather than gloomy or pretentious incoherence; it is dark and audacious, even somber in some places, but so are the best entries in the Godzilla canon. Quite apart from its many peculiarities, perhaps the most noticeable departure that Godzilla vs. Hedorah makes from its predecessors is the visible cheapness and roughness of the movie. In the 1970s, the Japanese film industry struggled with slashed budgets; the dramatic rise in the popularity of television corresponded with a precipitous dive in cinema ticket sales that hit Toho in the wallet, hard. Banno had to shoot the whole movie with only one crew, on a drastically reduced timescale and with half the money that the studio would usually spend on a Godzilla movie. 

Banno himself is an interesting figure with a complicated, unfortunate story. Former assistant director to the legendary Akira Kurosawa, he was offered the directorial role on the new Godzilla feature after he impressed Toho by completing a documentary on behalf of special effects maestro Eiji Tsuburaya, who fell ill during production. Toho was looking to expand its pool of regular Godzilla directors, and Banno’s strong credentials and valuable experience placed him first in line. Immediately upon accepting the job, Banno knew that he wanted to make a serious and powerful statement about pollution, which he called “the most notorious thing in current society.” Despite the severe budgetary and time constraints, he was able to realize and deliver a singular, extraordinary piece of work. 

But the film quickly made enemies in high places. Tomoyuki Tanaka, one of the most senior figures at Toho, hated Banno’s film so unreservedly that he swore never to allow Banno anywhere near another Godzilla picture. And Tanaka got his wish: even though Banno teased a sequel at the close of Godzilla vs. Hedorah, he was never to work on another Godzilla production for Toho, and Hedorah would never be heard from again apart from one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars. Banno’s enthusiasm for Godzilla, though, remained undiminished to the end of his life in 2017, and, despite his creative exile, he would later become a key figure in the development and production of Legendary’s 21st century Godzilla movies. For Banno, the spectacular success of 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong is an extraordinary posthumous vindication: Toho’s anarchic outsider belatedly bringing Godzilla to his widest ever audience.

“Green pastures exist only in our hearts now” 

To return once more to Banno’s creature itself: Hedorah is interesting primarily because of its near-indestructibility. Our prehistoric hero’s atomic breath and powerful physical brawling have little to no effect upon Hedorah’s viscous, semi-solid body, and neither can human weapons damage Hedorah. Bullets and Kaiju fists simply pass harmlessly through the evanescent sludge. Like the flesh-eating snot-monster in classic US sci-fi The Blob (1958), Hedorah is uniquely adapted for pure, unthinking consumption, and the very simplicity of its anatomy—an uncomplicated embodiment of sheer appetite—is what makes it virtually impossible to stop. 

Hedorah is also the first of Toho’s monsters to metamorphosize through a range of physical embodiments. It begins life as a species of microscopic organisms, a dispersed collective of hungry tadpole-spores from outer space; after gorging on the plentiful industrial slime encountered in Japanese waters, they meld into one solid organism, growing, absorbing and mutating, constituting itself in a series of increasingly threatening forms. First it appears as a mean, amorphous marine creature; second, a crawling, slug-like amphibian; third, as a sort of flying disc of malevolent ooze; and finally, after repeatedly frustrating Godzilla in battle and guzzling more goo, it achieves its final incarnation as a semi-anthropomorphic titan. Such an evolution would recur with Godzilla’s later foes Biollante—the product of weapons-grade bioengineering, half Godzilla, half haunted rose; Destoroyah—a hostile crustacean life form created by the Oxygen Destroyer, a weapon of environmental annihilation used to kill the very first Godzilla back in 1954; and, with time, Godzilla himself, as he grows from a sea-beast, to an enormous worm, to a murderous ambulatory nightmare over the course of Shin Godzilla. 

Each of these movies feature monsters that embody some form of ecological disaster, and this dynamic metamorphic principle is key to their meaning. Ever-changing, ever-growing, unfixable, slippery, unkillable, given ever more power by humanity’s hubristic efforts to defeat them, Hedorah and his later analogues embody this most central and confounding aspect of climate disaster. It is not only that we humans are responsible for the desecration of the Earth, but also that the problem we have created is so nightmarishly flexible and generative that anything we do to tackle it simply makes it worse. In the face of this doom-laden iconography, Godzilla represents not merely justice or virtue: he represents hope itself.  

However, even though child protagonist Ken calls Godzilla “a superman” at the start of the movie, the film is unrelentingly pessimistic about the possibility of ever defeating Hedorah for good. For most of the film, Godzilla is simply unable to wound Hedorah, and the beast is only (ambiguously) banished through Godzilla’s cooperation with the military. State institutions are powerless to stop Hedorah, and the counterculture youth who attempt a mass mobilization against the smog monster are unable to imagine any form of resistance to it apart from throwing a party and playing vacuous protest songs. “Why complain about it?” asks the guitar player. “Green pastures exist only in our hearts now. Let’s sing! Let’s dance!” 

This muted hope is, in the final analysis, what makes Godzilla vs. Hedorah really compelling. The previous entries in the series, notably 1968’s Destroy All Monsters and 1969’s All Monsters Attack, were lighthearted, triumphant, and easygoing—and all the more enjoyable and relatable for it. Yoshimitsu Banno, though, knew how to take the Godzilla films back to their shocking, politically urgent origins. Decadent, sour, and an idiosyncratic gem, Godzilla vs. Hedorah is one of the most striking entries in that most idiosyncratic and freewheeling of cinematic cycles—the Shōwa series of Godzilla movies.

Alex Adams is a cultural critic and writer based in North East England. His most recent book, How to Justify Torture, was published by Repeater Books in 2019. He loves dogs.

 

Artworks found at the Welcome Collection.

Jonathan Lukens / June 3, 2021

As a young man, I felt that most people conceived of memory differently than I did, believing that failures of memory were errors of playback more than of recording. This idea, that memory works like a vinyl record in which everything we experience has its groove, supposes that it’s just a matter of knowing precisely where to put the needle down to replay the experience. In contrast, my younger self operated with the also erroneous belief that our memories are only hazy recordings of what we have somehow deemed worthy of recalling—that memory is like finding old semi-legible notes to ourselves written in an old notebook and trying to  figure out what they mean.

It was with this theory of memory in mind that I had begun to consider Split, a movie that I thought I remembered renting from a video store up the street from my childhood home sometime around 1990. For over a decade, my occasional recollections of the film, often spaced years apart, might prompt a web search with no results, which would then introduce a sense of disorientation: I could not experience the instant gratification of finding some online mention that might confirm that what I remembered was real. Was Split (that was the name, right?) just an Easter Egg written into the script of my past—some sort of Berenstain (sic?) Bears thing? After all, and with all due respect to the films’ creators: if my adolescent mind was going to fabricate a memory, this is the sort of thing it would have come up with. 

Originally released theatrically in 1989, and subsequently on VHS in 1991 by Futura Home Video, Split was reissued on DVD in 2018 by Verboden Video and is also available through Alamo Drafthouse’s streaming app, which is how I was able to confirm its existence and watch it again. Spoilers of the film follow, but only insofar as my synopsis is veridical to the plot—a nested disclaimer I wouldn’t need to make if the film were less fractured. Whether its cracked mirror nature is a deliberate mindfuck, the result of freshman filmmaking hamfistedness, or both, is not something I can tell you. 

The film opens with Starker, our hero, wandering the streets of San Francisco. His ripped jeans show his bare rear end, and he’s wearing the sort of jagged and discolored false teeth that might have been advertised in old comic books alongside fake vomit and squirting flowers. He walks through a parking lot full of city buses, suddenly looking directly at the camera and yelling, “Stop following me. Leave me alone.” At first, we believe he is addressing us, the viewers, and breaking the fourth wall, but the camera cuts to two men dressed in a mid-‘80s Ivy League casual style—like they just walked out of a JC Penny catalog shoot. One sits at a computer; the other, older and mustachioed, is framed over his right shoulder. The younger man was surveilling Starker, and, as the dialogue reveals, the populace more broadly. He rewinds a recording of Starker’s camera-facing monologue and consults with the older agent, who says Starker is just crazy, but capitulates to the younger agent’s desire for further observation.

They run a face recognition program, presented as a musical montage, in which we see Starker’s head rendered as a 3D model as the camera hops around a black and white grid of similar hairless heads looking for a match. The sequence is still enthralling and somewhat hypnotic after 30 years. This isn’t a real 3D scan of a human head; rather it’s a painstakingly created proof of concept showing us what the technology that would soon become ubiquitous might look like. It dances. We hear pitch-shifted human voices of the sort we might associate with Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” and they create a synthetic and escalating harmonic pattern as the facial recognition nears completion.

This is the first of a few similarly rendered and soundtracked scenes that make Split worth more attention than it will ever receive. Analog processes are used to pre-mediate future digital operations, and there is a lo-fi poetry to them. These skies are the color of the ancestors of our flat-screen TVs, their saturations and frequency roll-off the stuff of a time when there really were dead channels, and tuned-in heads bobbed to the tangible yet barely audible click that the phone made just before it rang. Different media have different dispositions, and I explain these in the hope of being descriptive, while mindful of any argument about the veracity of concepts of authenticity.

Jittering a bit and mumbling, Starker heads into a diner and has a seat at a booth. He orders coffee from a waitress we’ll meet again later while speaking in a hybrid of fake European accents. Making a mess while examining a ketchup bottle, then pouring a packet of artificial sweetener onto the table and snorting it up his nose like cocaine, he talks to himself as the surrounding patrons begin to grow nervous. One of them gets up, takes him by the shoulder and leads him outside. At one point the camera lingers for a moment—letting us know that a brightly colored fabric pouch that Starker has left behind means something. 

As the film progresses, we watch Starker give the agents surveilling him the slip. After being knocked out and having his jacket tagged with a tracking device, he discovers the device, removes his jacket, and changes clothes to elude his pursuers. To illustrate the process of his being tracked we are treated to a primitive color representation of a 3D vector map of the city. It’s like an isomorphic video game built of an extruded and pastel colored De Stijl painting that says, “Welcome to the control society. Now you’re playing with power.” The whole sequence provides a taste of the ‘90s to come, bringing to mind critiques of the automatic production of space and tactical media projects like the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s iSee and the performances of the Surveillance Camera Players.

Starker retrieves the brightly colored fabric pouch from the trash outside the diner. He dons a new—and more ridiculous—disguise: a stick-on mustache and goatee paired with wire-rimmed glasses, a brown turtleneck, and a beige corduroy sports coat. Setting the scene for an art gallery opening, a lovingly blocked shot of Starker creates the sort of recursion we would associate with a Magritte or Escher through a row of champagne flutes. The camera lingers over a series of paintings reminiscent of Basil Wolverton’s or Erol Otus’s more psychedelic work. Gallery patrons talk trash about the paintings and each other while Starker shoves food in his pockets—John Belushi in Animal House style—as a lovely minimal synth piece by Robert Shaw, the director’s brother and creator of the computer generated effects seen through the film, begins to warble and flutter.

Conversing with the fictional creator of these paintings (in reality those of writer/director Chris Shaw himself), a flat-topped New Waver wearing a mustard yellow dinner jacket over a t-shirt, our ludicrously costumed hero mentions preparing to “wake people up.” As they discuss the artwork hanging on the gallery walls, they stop to look at a storyboard—which we realize is the storyboard of the current scene. As the artist begins to realize the same truth, he becomes enraged. He screams, but none of the patrons seem to notice or care.

The film meanders for a while, if it was not already meandering. We see the junior and senior agents discuss an analysis that reveals no discernible patterns in Starker’s behavior, and they escalate their attempts to find him. Now at the artist’s apartment after the art opening, Starker is coaxed into revealing his plan: “All we have to do is change the program!” he says, later addressing the painter’s skepticism with, “I have the way. The way is here—in my package!” Removing the pouch from an inside coat pocket, Starker then opens it to reveal a white plastic disc approximately the size of his hand. The artist remarks that it resembles a urinal deodorizer.

Starker goes on a tear: “Science is a jealous god.” The mystical “separates us from robots.” “What I am holding is a mutant biological organism.” He almost immediately contradicts himself and says the substance is just a placebo because people require a scientific reason to believe in something and that that is necessary for “the dream” to have power. He explains that he is going to dose the city’s water supply with this substance and then it will spread around the world as people excrete it through their urine. Sort of an Amanita muscaria re-trip meets infrastructural schwerpunkt: The MacGuffin is Elan Vital as urinal cake.

A few meaning-laden but plot-insignificant scenes later, Starker heads back to the diner. After a scuffle in which he startles Susan (the waitress we saw earlier) and she kicks him to the ground, he pressures her to let him hide out at her place. Reasonably viewing him as a crazy and potentially dangerous creep, she declines his offer. But, after following her to her car, he convinces her to relent by claiming that he used to be a veterinarian and that he may be able to explain the lethargy of the cat in a carrier in her back seat. The absurdity of this caged animal suddenly appearing to move the plot along is rendered even more absurd when Susan later explains that she already understood that the cat was lethargic because she had had it sterilized earlier in the day. There is something so metaphorically overt about this detail that I can’t tell if it’s a bad joke or a catastrophic mistake. In any event, Starker seems no less concerned about going home with a woman that left a post-op feline in the back of a car all day than Susan is about bringing home a man who claimed he was being followed and sat in her place of business snorting Sweet and Low through a straw while ranting in a fake French accent.

I will omit a lot of interpersonal awkwardness, strange dialogue, and things that may be significant to alternate interpretations in revealing that Starker crashes at Susan’s place (Pop Tarts and chill). The time they spend together only serves to make her subsequent death at the hands of the Starker’s pursuers insufficiently tragic to motivate his subsequent attempt at revenge. Discovering her murder at the hands of the Izod-clad archons, Starker—now in drag and blackface—follows the agents back to their bosses’ HQ. They enter through a large circular metal door, and Starker, who they don’t realize is following behind, is unable to enter.

Their boss, perhaps too obviously referred to as the “Agency Director” in a film about agency panic, laments his “monstrous” newly installed cybernetic arm. In an abrupt spasm of the plot that seems to indicate that the Director’s body is deteriorating, a lab-coated flunky soothes him by explaining that he has created that ultimate mad-scientist expression of mind-body dualism: a machine that can transfer a mind into another body. The camera cuts to Starker, unseen on the Agency Director’s CCTV, who is loading a pistol. He tries to find a way to open the door while the minions inside hurry to find a body to receive the Agency Director’s mind. The agents open the door and grab Starker, having seemingly no idea that they have apprehended the very person they were relentlessly pursuing earlier. Starker drops his gun in the struggle, and they strap him to a chair and lower a brain transfer apparatus over his head.

“Let me out! It worked!” Starker says, but it’s not clear if the process was successful or if Starker is trying to convince the agents that it was. We’re left to wonder if this Camp Concentration-style mind transfer worked at all. It’s set up as a techgnostic climax that never happens, as if this cyberpunk yacht rock anthem makes it to the guitar solo just as the amp blows. The enraged Agency Director yells and tells his minions to get rid of “her.” They throw Starker out, not seeming to care that this random person just entered their secret bunker, and still not realizing that it was Starker himself. 

The final quarter of the film involves agents pursuing Starker while the Agency Director’s body is gradually replaced with a mechanical one. The music is great here and evokes both a sort of period instrumental soft rock call-center hold music and early Chrome. Someone with disposable income should release a proper soundtrack.

Now looking like a lo-fi Robocop or a reject from a Shinya Tsukamoto film, the Agency Director’s cybernetic augmentations (or too on-the-nose self-amputations) have endowed him with new powers. He accesses satellites while issuing abrasively vocoded directives that also appear on a camera-facing screen, perhaps to ensure intelligibility to the audience. Starker’s location is revealed on a map as crescendoing lo-bit sound effects accompany synth pads and drums. “Eradicate!” The Agency Director yells in a Davros-like moment. The camera cuts to Starker hopping over fences and traversing a roadside embankment, while the Agency Director seems to glitch out as he installs one last bionic eye into his head. 

Now fully metal-skinned and ambulatory, he walks over to a pool of water inside headquarters. Elsewhere in a meadow, Starker stumbles into a pool himself, grabbing the white disc he revealed earlier. Somehow, both pools have become a sort of fold in space—the Agency Director reaches through and grabs Starker. They struggle, each remaining primarily in their own physical location while their arms bend through each others’ space. Starker breaks free and releases the chemical in the white disc. White dust floats in the air.

The end credits roll (well, melt, actually) and no further explanation is given.

***

Ultimately, outside of the beauty of the graphics and soundtrack, the joy and frustration of Split is that we are confronted with something that we can’t quite classify. Foregrounds and backgrounds of plot and image oscillate and change places, but so do the cues we’d typically use to determine whether or not we approached the material as comic or tragic, accidental or deliberate, high brow or trash stratum.

Watching Split (had I really seen it before?) left me with the distinct feeling that I just missed five minutes of it without leaving my seat. Shaw never really makes it clear what we should focus on, and the director’s commentary on the DVD doesn’t provide much help. There Shaw describes the film as “a dream that doesn’t really explain itself.” He does, however, talk a bit about chaos—not just disorder, but the branch of mathematics we might associate with Lorenz, Mandelbrot, the butterfly effect, and fractals. While history might provide examples of minor perturbations in complex systems causing them to collapse or toggle into alternate states, it seems here that chaos is really just used as a sort of “magic” (in the same way that “science” is used in superhero comics) to attempt to explain how Starker has a capacity for action that exceeds that of the archons that surveil him.

Really thinking about agency as contingent and distributed means something quite different and perhaps far more unsettling. I’d like to tell you that Split reveals a negotiation between ideas of cowboy individualism on one end, and on the other an appreciation of the behavior of complex adaptive systems of which human “individuals” are both composed of and parts of. In reality, the film presents 20th century ideas of autonomy and individuality taken to such an extreme that they become a bit goofy. The film presents an inverse relationship between attachment and individuality. Take, for example, this dialogue between the two primary agents who discover and begin tracking Starker, in which the frustrated junior agent asks:

How can he make it? We all have something: our family, our friends, something, but he… he gets by on nothing. How can he be that free? No human needs, no weaknesses, no feelings, nothing.

As they discuss their pending report to the Agency Director, the senior agent explains that they will just have to tell it like it is:

       No recurrent behavior, no attachments, no soft spots: superman.

So, the superman, the “free” man, is the man who cares about no one and has no routine. Attachment to others is presented in the same way that an ascetic might present an attachment to material things, but also as a commodity that the system of surveillance capitalism depicted in the film exploits. In the world of Split, one can either be “free” and thus detached from social forces one can’t actually detach from, or part of some sort of winkingly self-aware Matrix.

Many of the characters, including Susan, the painter, some street crazies, and the pursuing agents, seem to have some awareness that by participating in society they are being had. It’s as if they are wearing the glasses from They Live (1988) but realize that if they call attention to their alien overlords they will just be ignored anyway.

Shaw’s broader argument seems to be that as an “individual” who is truly “free,” Starker exists without a data-body; he’s an Übermensch who cannot be profiled or reduced to his so-called statistical self. As such, Starker stands outside of culture—the infrastructure of shared social and material substrates that both the one and the many call upon to act. But he still has the magic urinal cake, the fulcrum and lever by which he is super empowered.

Like a bad haircut, dosing the water supply with mutagenic hallucinogens seems cool in high school, when we are naive enough to dream that control is simply a matter of centralization and that shocking the dupes out of their somnambulism is something they will high five us for afterwards. But while portrayed as some sort of systems-disrupting black swan herald of a “new age,” maybe Starker—and the film itself—just represents a dance around the collapse of any sort of shared systems of meaning. After all, at the climactic moment when Starker releases the mutagen, the end credits roll. Were not shown what comes next—just the end of the now.  

Jonathan Lukens is a cultural worker from Atlanta. His work has been shown at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, played through omnifarious speakers, and published in The Atlantic, Design Issues, and The International Journal of Design in Society.

”The story is about a grandfather and his three grandchildren. They have to choose between good and evil where good represents the god Svarozic who is the son of the god Svarog. The evil represents the master of anger. His name was Bjesomar. The purpose of these stories is to find the meaning of what one’s heart desires.” - quote source and images found thanks to Notes From A Superfluous Man. 
You can view the complete art from this book here. 
Below are a few additional artworks by the artist..  Illustration for Mira Boglic's Suma Od Koralja - Zagreb, Nasa Djeca  Illustration for Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić - Stribor's Forest, 1981

Pepe Tesoro / May 26, 2021

If you are even mildly interested in science fiction criticism, chances are that you have bumped into Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” Written at the tail end of the long 1950s golden era of sci-fi film, the text is a bold and keen examination of a genre that wouldn’t receive serious criticism for quite a few years, especially in its cinematic form. Sontag, always motivated to engage with the marginal and seemingly worthless aspects of her culture, was one of the first voices to address the wild popularity of disaster and monster movies during an era that defines the genre to this day.

It may seem, though, that Sontag’s central insight was pretty trivial. These movies, for her, represented an expression of a historically specific transformation to a permanent human anxiety towards death, intensified to a qualitatively new level after the horror of concentration camps and the reality of nuclear weapons. This was the result of “the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the 20th century,” explains Sontag, “when it became clear that from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life not only under the threat of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost unsupportable psychologically—collective incineration and extinction which could come any time, virtually without warning.”

It is important to stress, especially today, that the intensification of the fear of extinction and global catastrophe was not just a matter of an increase in potential victims; it was also the new technological sophistication of the means of that destruction. After World War II it became clear not only that humans were able to destroy their own species in a matter of seconds, but also that the new menace of instant extinction was a direct result of human scientific inquiry and the advancement of industry.

This pretty much encapsulates the ambivalence towards science in 1950s science fiction. In these early genre movies, a scientific advancement or weapon test gone wrong almost always initiates the plot. In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), a monstrous prehistoric lizard preserved inside the ice is set free by a series of atomic tests in the Arctic. In an almost identical manner, the giant beast of the quintessential kaiju film Godzilla (1954) is awoken from a dormant state in the bottom of the ocean by the deployment of nuclear weapons. In both of these movies (and in many others, like 1954’s Them! and 1957’s The Amazing Colossal Man), collective destruction is the result of unpredicted consequences of human scientific development that awaken a deadly power that not only surpasses but also often precedes human existence, and which breaks down conventional power structures. Here human responsibility is diluted; there are no discernible culprits and everyone is equally a victim. But there is also the idea of a pre-existing geological determination of human extinction that eerily relates to today’s anxiety about our biological vulnerabilities in the face of environmental collapse.

Godzilla, 1954

There are many themes that can be extracted from 1950s sci-fi movies, from the early postwar tensions of gender dynamics in American society to a sometimes not-so-obvious subtext about racial inequality, to fear of revolution in the face of the decolonization of the Third World and, most prominent, the ghostly menace of communism. There is also a near ubiquitous obsession with depersonalization or, quite literally, “alien”-ation. As Sontag sees it, the mythology of possession has been historically related to animalistic traits, as an overdose of passion and animal instinct, but now it seems that the true fear “is understood as residing in man’s ability to be turned into a machine.” This is the case of productions such as 1960’s Village of the Damned or the fantastic Jack Arnold classic It Came from Outer Space (1953). In both these films (see also 1958’s I Married a Monster from Outer Space), some alien race or entity possesses human hosts or recreates human-like bodies to communicate with us—or to infiltrate our society. This trope (which had the added benefit of being budget-friendly) encapsulated the modern fear of losing human passions and emotions, such as love or solidarity, to the advancement of a cold, sober, and technocratic rationality.

This is, of course, the case of the much-discussed Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), mostly considered an anti-communist metaphor. But without disregarding the common interpretation around McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the film can also be explained as an expression of greater anxieties about modern dehumanization. As M. Keith Booker puts it, the anti-communist metaphor is available, but “is also perfectly consistent with the content of the film to read the interchangeable pod people as representative of conformist forces within American society itself.”

Countless interpretations are available in these particular visions of catastrophe, but I’d like to focus on the complicity of cinematic spectacle in defusing the threat of catastrophe itself. Sontag herself was wary of science fiction’s fascination with destruction and collective incineration, and appropriately points to the ways in which these films encapsulated the fear of collapse in a satisfactory hour-and-a-half-long narrative, where the good guys always win and the apocalyptic menace is symbolically defeated. Not only could you go on with your life without fearing the bomb, but you could also enjoy the mesmerizing spectacle of the bomb in the glow of a cinema’s film projector. These symbolic solutions more often than not include some form of technological messianism, because even when the problem is caused by science, the threat is almost always defeated by science (Godzilla, 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, 1956’s Earth vs. The Flying Saucers). 1950s science fiction was simultaneously fearful of unleashing scientific advances but also placed its utopian hopes in technology. We enjoy the spectacle of not just crumbling buildings and fiery towers but also of the dissolution of social hierarchies and the incursion of the extraordinary into the monotony of daily life. (The disaster movie genre originates in sci-fi, particularly 1951’s When Worlds Collide and 1953’s The War of the Worlds.) Because at the end, all returns to normal: the scientists save the day, the hero gets the girl, authority is restored.

But these films offer more than mere utopian aspirations focused on technology, or the naturalizing of spectacular violence. The depersonalization inherent in these films often leaves traces of a yearning not so much for technology but for human connection and solidarity. In this sense, I’m personally fascinated by an obscure and low-budget film (Roger Corman’s second sci-fi production) called The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955), in which we are presented with a weird and ghostly ranch, inhabited by a stereotypical patriarchal family, in the middle of the spectral landscapes of the southwestern American desert. After the impact of an extraterrestrial artifact, the ranch is rapidly haunted by the incorporeal presence of an alien spirit that takes control of, first, the animals, and then attempts the same with the humans.

Once again, we are presented with the familiar theme of alien mind control, which turns humans into lifeless machines—no budget needed. But this time the alien encounters a surprising obstacle to its plan: it seems especially difficult to take control of humans when they are bonded by love. In an unexpected speech at the end, the father of the family tells the alien that the secret of human survival is quite simply love and connection, or, as the mother says: “you would never find a human alone.” Other details of the film point to this idea of care and solidarity. For example, the seemingly mute and terrifying servant of the family is revealed in the end to be a war veteran suffering from heavy trauma; the father, a fellow soldier, had taken this traumatized man under his protection from a society that mistakenly deemed him dangerous after feeding him to the machinery of war. 

The message is all-too-naive and corny to the modern eye. The question is, though, why do we deem positively portrayed examples of love and affection as something unbearably corny and naive? Speaking about our contemporary cultural sensibility at large and not merely about 1950s science fiction, it seems that today we are totally desensitized to the most extreme images of violence, but the mere representation of unconditional love might make us sick. The technocratic utopianism that runs through 1950s sci-fi cinema has infested not just our fiction about catastrophe, but our narratives of survival and endurance at large. In this sense, a weird oddity like The Beast with a Million Eyes can be seen as a genuine instance where apocalyptic destruction is resisted not by our machines, but by human connection.

These movies don’t necessarily contain a secret revolutionary agenda; we must remain skeptical about the potential of fiction to reconnect to any utopian desire, considering the widely differing receptions and political interpretations that different people bring to the same cultural products. But the overpowering cultural sensibilities that lead us to cynically dismiss messages of connection and solidarity as unsophisticated and credulous, our collective ways of reading fiction and art, can be inverted. I experienced this realization in a recent re-watch of James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). Having seen the movie only once as a teenager, I thought about it as just another militaristic and frenzied spectacle of violence. All I remembered were burning buildings, bullets flying, and the splattering of giant bugs’ acidic blood, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover a compelling tale about teamwork, motherhood, and love, where a bunch of nobodies and outcasts are able to overcome the terror unchained by mindless corporatism through cooperation and quite literally caring for each other. 

It goes without saying how pressing and important these attitudes towards violence and solidarity are for us today, in an especially dark and apocalyptic time. I don’t want to indulge in nihilism with an infinite series of examples that offers little to no hope that humanity’s utopian desires and survival instincts can be diverted away from delusional technocracy and towards an aspiration for greater mutual help and cooperation. But if movies about the end of times can be useful at what may be the end of the world as we know it, we may be required to reeducate ourselves and (re)train our sensibilities to forsake the scathing modern cynicism that excretes from this cult-like adoration of technology. We have to search for better answers, better utopias—based on working together and loving one another.  

Special thanks to David Sánchez Usanos.

Pepe Tesoro is a philosophy PhD student from Madrid. You can follow him at @pepetesoro.

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Eve Tushnet / May 12, 2021

I came to Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, thirty years after its 1991 publication date, expecting sharp sociocultural observation and maybe some economic critique. After all, Coupland, who said that his generation was “sick of stupid labels,” inadvertently coined the self-effacing generational moniker under which my cohort has labored.

But Generation X is something stranger than a novel of social observation. It is a scrappy, almost zinelike collage of images, marginal text, and patchwork narratives, making it feel like a back issue of a magazine that never quite existed. It’s full of incisive nouvelle slang: “McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.” Coupland provides all the expected pleasures: lostness, drifting, downward mobility, a surfeit of irony and anti-politics; and over it all the fading shadow of global thermonuclear war, which still haunts the imaginations of this last generation of Cold War kids.

But Coupland’s characters long more for sublimity than for 1950s-style industrial and familial stability. They’re haunted not just by the mushroom cloud but by the monastery. Reading Coupland’s debut novel, you’ll be reminded that seminal Gen X lit includes not just Jay McInerney’s moral tales but Donna Tartt’s 1992 divine-madness pulp masterpiece The Secret History.

Generation X is about three friends, Andy, Dagmar (a man), and Claire. Their platonic cuddling and aggressively retro aesthetic create an odd, lightly ironized, closety vibe. A novelist more concerned with our moral life would explain this atmosphere: perhaps through parental divorce, which played such a huge role in the national psyche of the ’80s and ’90s. Divorce defines the cultural landscape of Generation X. As one of the marginal comics by Paul Rivoche puts it: “Don’t worry, mother… If the marriage doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced.” The atmosphere of divorce, its ever present possibility, shapes these characters’ contingent and uncommitted life—but it doesn’t define their psychological backgrounds. Unlike in much Gen X fiction (including McInerney’s Story of My Life and The Secret History), our hero’s parents are still married.

In 2019, the divorce rate hit a record low, as did the marriage rate and the childbirth rate. Divorce and the experiences of “children of divorce,” which shaped so many books and movies in the 1980s and 1990s, play a much smaller role in our cultural landscape now that nobody’s getting married or having children in the first place. This shift has not exactly reduced the ambient level of instability and precarity. The covert intensity with which Andy and his friends cling to one another, the mingled hope and guardedness in their promise-free love, is if anything even more striking in our current relationship moonscape.

The place of gay people and gay longings has shifted in a far more significant way since 1991, and here Generation X does feel even more retro than it’s trying to be. But although there are clues to the narrator’s sexuality for those who would like clues (it’s no coincidence that Claire’s awful boyfriend calls him “Candy”), Coupland doesn’t pathologize the unspoken quality of Andy’s sexual longings. Andy’s reliance on dreams and hints suggests an extended adolescence; that’s part of the experience of the closet, but it’s also something he can share with his friends, opening him to them as well as limiting him.

Andy and his friends are bracingly aware that they won’t do as well as their parents. I remember answering the phone when I was in middle school and finding myself in a poll: “Do you expect to have the same level of financial security as your parents, or greater, or less?” I said, “Less,” of course, with a suppressed duh. Doesn’t everyone expect less? And yet Andy and his friends live in their own bungalows, right next to one another. (Andy’s from Portland but fled to tend bar in Palm Springs with Dag; Claire sells Chanel at a luxury department store.) They don’t need housemates. They have pets! Who do you know, who isn’t rich, who can afford their own rental and a pet? There’s a chapter in here titled “Quit Your Job.” I enjoyed that slogan, but thirty years on, in the middle of the gig pandemic, I also thought, Gosh, remember when people had “jobs”? Andy and his friends come from the middle class or higher, true; they’re also part of a generation that could feel the floor tilting under them—even if they hadn’t yet slid all the way off. They’re able to choose between the service industry and a soul-crushing job with health benefits. We should all be so lucky!

The most powerful image of the precarity of these characters is not their withdrawal from romance or their bartending jobs. It’s nuclear war. When the novel was released, in March 1991, the Soviet Union still existed. It’s set in 1990, the year after the Berlin Wall fell. The old game of brinksmanship was rapidly changing its rules, and nobody knew how it would end. Dag is obsessed with the mushroom cloud; he accidentally covers Claire’s bungalow with radioactive rocks; he closes one of his many “end of the world stories” with “the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven doors that you’ve been imagining since you were six.” Nuclear war is an ever present memento mori: a reminder that you’re a target, that political forces you can’t hope to affect may turn you and everybody you know into glass. 

But nuclear war also offers the promise of a totally different future. Maybe things won’t just keep going the way they have been. Maybe apocalypse will bring revelation. Dag’s vision of the mushroom cloud ends in communion and a kind of confession. His nuclear fantasies express deep-rooted fears, but also a longing for the ecstatic shattering of the self. Nuclear war would not just crack open the self-protective carapace of irony: the persona. It would not only be the ultimate shared experience in an atomized and alienated world (“We Will All Go Together When We Go,” as Tom Lehrer reminds us). It also represents the white-hot moment when loss becomes total. And it’s in this loss, a kind of mutually-assured asceticism, that Coupland’s characters hope to discover some form of transcendence. That’s vague, and it’s vague in the novel; maybe it has to be vague, because, having left the ornament and doctrine of religions behind, Andy and Dag and Claire have little idea what other shape transcendence might take.

We see this in their stories. One of the unexpected delights of Generation X is the way it turns the postmodern obsession with narratology into a game. The three friends constantly tell each other “bedtime stories,” with various rules and conventions. This is part of their self-protective irony (it’s not me, it’s not my heart). It’s part of the zine aesthetic of the novel, and it fits the characters’ directionless lives; no individual plotline can be sustained for very long. But Coupland makes this shared storytelling feel loving and genuinely communal. It’s a sincere statement that they may view their own lives as pointless and meaningless, but they want to hear their friends’ stories. There’s an uncynical lightness to the storytelling, which lets these characters reveal their secret desires as if at a slumber party, flashlights under their chins.

And so we get Claire’s fairy tale of the spaceman who persuades a girl stuck on the backwater planet of “Texlahoma” to give her life so he can get back to Earth. He’ll revive her, he promises. Her sisters know it’s a lie. But they still let her go to her ecstatic death: “And together the two sisters sat into the night, silhouetted by the luminescing earth, having a contest with each other to see who could swing their swing the highest.” This is a tale of deadly romance, appropriate for the sex-kills era. It’s a tale of economic marginality. But it’s also suffused with longing for the unknown, even if the journey into that black, star-studded expanse will kill you. And it’s a hint that death, at least symbolic death, may be necessary in order to touch the stars.

Claire is also the one who tells the most direct parable of asceticism. She tells this story soon after her sketchy grifter friend, nicknamed Elvissa, runs off to be “a gardener at a nunnery.” Dag says, “I don’t buy it”; but Claire retorts, “It’s not something you buy.” Generation X, in Generation X, shelters neither in the certainties of the ’60s revolt nor in the post-Great Recession certainties of the millennials, but in irony and delay. Elvissa’s flight suggests an unsheltered alternative. Not the convent—that’s too much certainty or the wrong kind—but something convent-like: some ascesis, some mystery, some intelligible loss and unintelligible gain.

Right after Elvissa leaves, Claire tells a story called “Leave Your Body,” about “this poor little rich girl named Linda.” Linda’s parents break up when she’s a kid; she becomes a “charmed but targetless” woman, restless and unhappy. And then in the Himalayas she learns about “a religious sect of monks and nuns… who had achieved a state of saintliness—ecstasy—release.” Linda accepts the sect’s strict rules (though it’s important to the generational portrait that they’re not the rules of kashrut or the catechism) and begins seven years of fasting and meditation. She misunderstands. She makes what is literally a fatal error, due to her ignorance of the Himalayan discipline. And yet that doesn’t mean she fails. The ultra-American’s quest ends not in humiliation but in mystery: even in her folly, she found the doorway.

This is Coupland’s attitude toward all his characters’ longings. He lavishes attention on their bright and curlicued foolishness, but he never holds their hopes in contempt. He suggests that they may someday find whatever it is they’re seeking, even if they never understand it. This is an unfinished book; it defined a generation by our unfinishedness.

Eve Tushnet is the author of two novels, Amends and Punishment: A Love Story, as well as the nonfiction Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith. She lives in Washington, DC and writes and speaks on topics ranging from medieval covenants of friendship to underrated vampire films. Her hobbies include sin, confession, and ecstasy.

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