It has been one of those work weeks where everything just does not turn out right. I had basically zero free time to write and the free time I did have was spent destroying my endorphin receptors with BF6.
YouTube Obsession
Don’t you hate when the algorithm throws you an absolutely vile corner of YouTube and it’s somehow a very popular channel, just absolutely thriving off the misery of other people? Well, recently a short in my feed depicted drone footage of addicts while AI David Attenborough talks about “Tweekers in their natural habitat” like its a nature documentary. It’s not funny, it’s incredibly weak and worst of all its horrifying.
Then you read the comments and realize that the people who love this stuff are complete idiots.
Yes, Sue, that’s the fucking “joke.”
This is 90% of the comments: Repeating words they hear.
This one is especially baffling: It appears that the channel has disappointed this viewer in the past (By, I assume, not objectifying sick people enough) and was, perhaps, about to seek out more rewarding tweaker videos before he saw this trash. Apparently, Laphil1969 has discerning tastes not dissimilar to a young Jeffrey Dahmer by referring to slum voyeurism as “Golden.”3
These people, take time out of their day to stop scrolling (A titanic effort these days) and comment on these sick videos, rather than just admit they are terrified of homeless people.
And look, if you enjoy these videos just go and kill yourself.
Watching
Continuing down my Abel Ferrara hole with 1998’s New Rose Hotel. Based on a William Gibson short story, the film is, technically, cyberpunk. Despite this, the film has very few cyberpunk/Blade Runner visual elements so adhered to the genre; The movie just looks like 1998.
The choice to eschew the tropey visual ques of cyberpunk is such a masterful subversion of audience expectations. What it’s saying is that all those horrifying things we see in cyberpunk depictions (extreme isolation, endless surveillance, corporate ownership of everything, parasocial yearning) are all here now, in 1998. There is no trade off for a spectacular future with space colonies and cool flying cars, just the same world we live in now with just more of our autonomy removed by corporate slavery.
Then there’s the acting. If Willem Dafoe is the ‘straight man’ in your movie, then your movie is qualifiedly insane. Christopher Walken is acting through the muthafukin roof, so much so that even when he’s not on screen, I found myself thinking about Christopher Walken.
And then there is the curious choice to hire Asia Argento. The child of Dario Argento, Asia is not a good actress. After watching the film, it becomes clear that she is the perfect person for this role because she has been repeatedly sexually objectified in film since childhood. Zero identity, no true sense of self, masks for every conversation only rarely does her true self slip to the surface in brief, rapturous seconds, as if gasping for a deep breath.
It was in one of these moments where Asia slips away into something truly great where I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s odyssean recounting of the 1998 AVN Awards show Big Red Son. Taking place over a weekend in Las Vegas (“The least pretentious city”) the essay describes the lecherous characters that thrive in an industry designed to feed male loneliness, pockmarked by DFW’s trademark endnotes (some notes are long enough to qualify as essays in and of themselves). It is in one of these endnotes that we receive an anecdote about an LAPD officer and his curious obsession with porn:
…the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was “the faces,” i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized “fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl” sneer and became, suddenly, real people. “Sometimes — and you never know when, is the thing — sometimes all of a sudden they’ll kind of reveal themselves” was the detective’s way of putting it. “Their what-do-you-call… humanness.” It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors — sometimes very gifted actors — go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: “In real movies, it’s all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.”2
Hecuba’s detective’s explanation is intriguing, at least to yr. corresps., because it helps explain part of the deep appeal of hard-core films, films that are supposed to be “naked” and “explicit” but in truth are some of the most aloof, unrevealing footage for sale anywhere. Much of the cold, dead, mechanical * quality of adult films is attributable, really, to the performers’ faces. These are faces that usually appear bored or blank or workmanlike but are in fact simply hidden, the self locked away someplace far behind the eyes. Surely this hiddenness is the way a human being who’s giving away the very most private parts of himself preserves some sense of dignity and autonomy — he denies us true expression. (You can see this very particular bored, hard, dead look in strippers, prostitutes, and porn performers of all locales and genders.)
But it’s also true that occasionally, in a hard-core scene, the hidden self appears. It’s sort of the opposite of acting. You can see the porn performer’s whole face change as self-consciousness (in most females) or crazed blankness (in most males) yields to some genuinely felt erotic joy in what’s going on; the sighs and moans change from automatic to expressive. It happens only once in a while, but the detective is right: The effect on the viewer is electric. And the adult performers who can do this a lot — allow themselves to feel and enjoy what’s taking place, cameras or no — become huge, legendary stars. The 1980s’ Ginger Lynn and Keisha could do this, and now sometimes Jill Kelly and Rocco Siffredi can. Jenna Jameson and T.T. Boy cannot. They remain just bodies.
This is the truest definition of parasocial. We are so starved for genuine human connection that the brief flashes humanity we see on a grainy VHS porn become “electric” moments. So of course it would take a porn director like Ferrara1 to capture these “slips” of authenticity from Asia Argento. (I have to point out that New Rose Hotel and DFW’s original article, Neither Adult, Nor Entertainment, both released in September 1998. Crazy bit of synchronicity.)
New Rose Hotel is not a movie about our dystopian future, it’s about our dystopian now
Reading
Playing
Listening
Other Notables
** Shitty Post (I actually have a lot to say about this. I really want to blame the Dark Souls genre of video games making it seem ok to min-max every aspect of your life, including your body.
**
2 Also, I have to point out that this is such a beautiful and effective use of the word “suddenly.”
3 Though, I’m not entirely convinced that these aren’t all just chatbots.
