There's some evil buried in you and your institutions
The Zone of Interest, Malignant, Upgrade, and AJJ
It really feels like winter is over, which is probably bad, but certainly feels good in the moment. I always preferred one marshmallow now to two later.
Let’s just dive right in. This is the media round-up, where I (Josiah) tell you about all the media I’m producing, watching, reading, or listening to.
New from me
This was a fun week. At the beginning of the week I wrote my first essay on my main Substack since August last year. I want to get back to regularly writing actual articles/essays/blog posts, as much as I like doing these round-ups. These aren’t necessarily the best example of my prose since I usually don’t even proofread them lol. (For instance, I wouldn’t say “Lol” in an actual essay).
I published the essay on Monday. It’s based around the observation I made last week after watching Barbie (2023) that the diegetic appearance of Mattel reminded me of the “Pizza Turnaround” ad campaign from Domino’s in 2009. If you want me to elaborate on that comparison more, you can find the essay here.
On Wednesday, I released an episode of Fruitless that I’ve been excited about for a month or so. It’s one of the episodes that my vague references to “exciting stuff happening” was referring to. The episode is an interview with one of my favorite political commentators and podcasters, Luke Savage. If you’re unfamiliar, he’s a columnist for Jacobin, author, and co-host of Michael & Us, a podcast he does with Will Sloan that started out about going back on Michael Moore films during the Trump era, seeing how well they aged, but has become about politics in film more broadly.
I started listening to Michael & Us in 2017 or 2018. I’m not exactly sure. I know it was because of Luke Savage’s appearance on the podcast, Citations Needed, to talk about the weird influence the West Wing (the TV show) had on liberal politics and the Obama administration. I got especially hooked on their podcast because, when a transfered from community college to a private college, I had to take a class on Michael Moore.
That sounds like a made-up right wing thing to slander colleges. “Do you know what they’re teaching in those school? My son took a class about Michael fucking Moore.” It’s a little less ridiculous than it sounds. For new students and transfer students at Simpson College, you had to take a course to make sure you knew how to write an essay, knew the basics of MLA, APA, Chicago style, etc., and could read a syllabus. These courses were taught by almost all of the professors. Since the whole point is just to make sure you know how to take a college class, the subject doesn’t really matter and professors could teach one about whatever subject they wanted. There was a Star Wars one, for instance. Stuff like that.
There was one adjunct that taught the only one that was set online. For reasons related to my tumultuous life at the time (long story, I was married at the time, I would end up separated during that same fall 2018 semester), the only one that worked for me to take was the online one, and it happened to be about the films of Michael Moore. So, while watching through those and having the mixed feelings I think most people on the left will have watching Moore’s movies now, I went back to the first few episodes of Michael & Us frequently to get some ideas for essays, etc.
All this to say, Luke Savage is one of the guys that I was reading and listening to during the early days of me discovering leftism. The opportunity to interview him was beyond cool. You will likely notice a bit of my nervousness at the beginning of the episode, which you can find here by the way.
I have some other fun episodes coming next week. Until then, I decided to “unlock” a Patreon episode from last month: the Idiocracy episode. So if that episode sounded interesting to you, but you weren’t willing to sacrifice the extra few bucks to listen to it, it’s now here: check it out.
Film
I didn’t watch a ton of movies this last week, but the ones I did watch have given me a lot to chew on.
I’ll start with the big one. Last night, I finally got around to going to a theater (a real one! in the real world! i actually left my apartment!) and seeing The Zone of Interest (2023).
This is a film that had been hyped up a ton for me. I’d heard a lot about it. The aforementioned Will Sloan has been talking really positively about the film. Alfonso Cuarón has called it the most important film of the century, which is an insane thing for the director of what I would call the most important film of the century (Children of Men) to say. I’d heard it was devastating. I knew the central conceit of the whole thing. And yet, even knowing what I was getting into, it hit me like a freight train.
If you’re unfamiliar, the film follows the family of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. However, the film never depicts the Holocaust, and remains almost entirely in the household of Höss, sometimes in offices or bureaucratic settings, but never does the camera enter the camps. Instead, what we see is the normal, even at times charming, daily life of Höss and his family.
The great achievement of the film is sound design. While normal scenes of children playing in the yard or Höss and his wife, Hedwig, smoking a cigarette and talking play out for our eyes, our ears catch distant gunshots and distant screams. In the foreground, we watch what appears to be a normal family, but if we look in the background, we see the large wall dividing the home from the camp, and the crematorium chimney pouring out smoke periodically.
Glazer does an excellent job with this balance. There’s just enough for us to sometimes forget what Höss does, focusing instead on Hedwig and her desire to make a good life for her children, and then something will shatter it. For instance, Hedwig abruptly gets irritated with a housemaid and mumbles that her husband could scatter their ashes across the countryside.
Höss is stationed under Adolf Eichmann—the official who would eventually be tried in Jerusalem, and become the origin for Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil.” This is an important part. While Eichmann represents the desk murderers and those who are able to compartmentalize and disregard the evil they participate in by the separate of bureaucracy, Höss is the guy carrying out the orders. His compartmentalization and justification looks different because of this. There’s a deep separation between who he is on one side of the wall, and who he is on the other side of the wall, and yet that separation is illusory. The evil cracks through. He mixes ash into the garden to fertilize the soil. We know where the ash comes from.
I’m not sure if I should say more than this because there are moments in the film that are difficult to put into words, and I almost feel like I’ll ruin them by trying to interpret them. I’ll say, for those who have seen it, the scene with the subtitled piano notes almost brought me to tears, and I have difficulty putting into words why.
If you can see this one in theaters, you should. If you do end up watching it once it comes to streaming or whatever, I would highly recommend watching it with headphones or nice speakers. So much of the film relies on the sound design, which your home TV likely won’t be able to capture (unless you’re a nerd with expensive audio shit, which I don’t).
I have yet to see most of the big films from last year, but from what I’ve heard of Oppenheimer and Killer of the Flower Moon, the theme of complicity seems to have been a massive aspect of last year. Even Barbie, in a more cartoonish sense, is somewhat about complicity—the whole initial crisis is Barbie realizing that the dolls have played a part in patriarchy, etc.
Moving away from The Zone of Interest, this last week I also watched two movies about having something evil stuck in the back of your head: Malignant (2021) and Upgrade (2018). I’m also going to spoil both movies, so if that bothers you, go ahead and just skip to the end of the film section.
Malignant may be my favorite film from James Wan. I like most of his movies, but I’m also a bit cold on them. Saw is fine, The Conjuring is fine, etc. I don’t love either as much as a lot of people do. But Malignant is entirely on my wavelength.
It rejects a lot of trends in horror right now. It is over-the-top and pulpy, gruesome and incredibly weird. By being so big and campy, it ends up being weirdly better at being a movie “about trauma” or whatever like so many horror films try to be now. I genuinely didn’t see the big twist coming and, despite the film being really goofy and intentionally funny, I found it genuinely pretty disturbing.
What seems like a supernatural force or maybe some hack case of “multiple personality disorder” is a parasitic twin who can take over the protagonists body, and who had been buried in the back of her skull, with years of psychologists trying to make her forget her evil sibling buried in her body. It’s genuinely horrifying and, for me, hits a lot of what makes good body horror. I appreciate the weird blurring of supernatural, psychological, and material/physical. In a way, it ends up being all of these at once.
Ultimately, the chief fear behind the film is the concept of some evil aspect of you, beyond your own control, buried and capable of taking over. The fear of your own evil capacity. There’s a suggestion that this evil comes out of an aspect of you that has been rejected by people around you (the mother calls the parasitic twin an “abomination”); the mother has a moment where she tells the twin that she was wrong to reject him and not love him like a son.
Nevertheless, even if there’s some deep, infantile (in the Freudian sense) explanation for this evil, the protagonist must overcome it and take control back. There is a moral responsibility, no matter how understandable it is, to fight it.
I don’t think there’s a perfect one-to-one parallel for what the parasitic twin is supposed to represent. I’m saying evil right now, but I’m certain you could project a lot of other readings onto it. You could probably frame it as a reactionary film under Robin Woods’ lens on horror. But I am really interested by this notion of an understandable and sympathetic evil, that nevertheless is an evil.
Upgrade is an interesting movie to compare to Malignant. Similarly, the film relies on the realization that there is an evil thing in the back of your brain—literally. In the case of Upgrade, it’s a small AI chip that gives a quadripalegic man the ability to control his body again. As the film unfolds, we eventually find that the AI has been independent for a while and has orchestrated everything in order to take over the protagonist’s body.
This thing is an incredibly fun action film, but it also has a deeply Cronenbergian interest in the merging of the body and technology. It ends on a note similar to Videodrome—I half-expected to hear the AI say “long live the new flesh.” It’s got such a brutally cynical ending, even showing us a happy ending before telling us that the chip is just showing the protagonist this so that he can live in a happy fantasy and not worry about controlling his body. The post-human stage has begun.
If we think about this in the McLuhanian way Cronenberg would, it ends up being a weirdly similar film to Malignant. This to say that if technology is an extension of ourselves, this AI represents an evil buried in us, slowly becoming manifest in our technology, and slowly taking control of us.
In this way, all three of the movies I’ve talked about here are about a sort of compartmentalized, segmented, and repressed evil slowly being made manifest: in The Zone of Interest, an active but compartmentalized evil in the workplace slowly invading the home and saturating daily life; in Malignant, an evil we are born, dark impulses and dark desires for vengeance, hidden from sight, buried in the skull, but slowly becoming manifest; in Upgrade, a hidden evil made manifest through our technological capacity, and the loss of human agency to our own tools.
Maybe after thinking on this a little more I can expand this comparison to an essay. Or not. We’ll see. Also I watched The Commuter (2018), a movie about Liam Neeson on a train getting roped into a conspiracy. It was fine.
Reading
Still haven’t done a good job reading. Didn’t have the energy to work on The Melancholy of Resistance this week. I did, however, make some more progress on Ramp Hollow, which will eventually be a Fruitless Bookclub episode, so I’ll save my thoughts for then.
I did read an interesting Substack piece from Kristin Kobes Du Mez about a recent Atlantic article that mentioned her book, Jesus and John Wayne. It was kind of an interesting reflection on this weird hostility a lot of people have had to the book. In general, there’s this attitude from a lot of people that books like Jesus and John Wayne or the miniseries Shiny Happy People are too harsh against evangelicalism. I think Du Mez’s response to this is good.
Our books are indeed popular, as far as academic books go. But in crafting the argument that coverage of evangelicalism is “too negative” and that “the whole story” isn’t being told, Fea neglects to mention the scores of books evangelicals write about themselves for themselves. Don’t be fooled. These books outsell all the “negative” takes by an order of magnitude. Tune into Christian radio, and you’ll here nothing but glowing reports of evangelicals “doing the Lord’s work,” wherever they go.
Jesus and John Wayne and The Making of Biblical Womanhood became bestsellers not because a secular public couldn’t get enough of “evangelicals behaving badly.” They became bestsellers because evangelical readers themselves found them and said, “this is true.” After decades of being fed only one narrative—all of the positive stories and celebrations of how they, more than anyone else, were “doing the Lord’s work,” tens of thousands of evangelical readers found in our books accounts that resonated with their own experiences.
Listening
I’ve mostly been listening to the same stuff as usual. However, this morning, I had the impulse to listen to AJJ—one of my favorite bands for a long time, although I haven’t been as obsessed with folk punk in the last few years like I used to be.
I have a hard time explaining what it is about AJJ that has stuck with me so much. Part of it is that I have an edgelord impulse at times, and AJJ has a lot of the edgy and in-your-face lyrical style. Often the lyrics feel so over-the-top, melodramatic, and intentionally upsetting that you get a sense it’s self-aware. I think it is. Looking over their broader discography, there’s this tension between a misanthropic and nihilistic worldview on one hand, and also a genuine humanistic impulse. As time goes on, this misanthropy and nihilism becomes more obviously a product of neurosis—impulsive thoughts and sense of depression at the state of the world, politically, spiritually, interpersonally, etc.
It’s intentionally edgy at times, but I actually believe he comes at things from a genuine moral seriousness. Especially as time goes on. He also captures a certain emotion of childhood—the opposite of the innocence of childhood, and more that darkness of childhood. His lyrics point to abuse in his childhood pretty frequently, and that sense of violated innocence really permeates a lot of AJJ’s music. Listen to “Getting Naked, Playing With Gun” to really feel what I’m talking about.
To make this whole round-up feel connected and intentional, I’ll point to the song “People II: The Reckoning” and these lyrics:
But there's a bad man in everyone, no matter who we are
There's a rapist and a Nazi living in our tiny hearts
Child pornographers and cannibals, and politicians too
There's someone in your head waiting to fucking strangle you
There is an evil bured in our heads, in our institutions and our technologies. But AJJ’s pessimistic songs like this are also countered by a sort of blindly optimistic humanism that guides AJJ’s genuine moral impulse. In the song “People,” there’s these lyrics:
People are wasteful, they waste all the food
People are hateful, and people are rude
But God, I love some people sometimes
Because people are very, very special
And people are impatient, and they don't know how to wait
People are selfish, and people are prone to hate
But God, I love some people sometimes
Because people are the greatest thing to happen
And toward the end of the song:
People are my religion because I believe in them
People are my enemies and people are my friends
I have faith in my fellow man
And I only hope that he has faith in meI said I have faith in my fellow man
And I only hope that he has faith in me
I said I have faith in my fellow man
And I only hope that he has faith in me!
How do these two impulses work? How do I believe in an inate evil inside people—a capacity for monstrous behavior beyond our comprehension—and also believe that humanity is and can be more, and that people are “the greatest thing to happen?”
I don’t know. I’m okay with that contradiction.
See you next week.