Man, this week went by fast.
It’s chilly and somber outside. It rained all night last night. I woke up earlier than I wanted to this morning because of a knot in my shoulder muscle, but it does feel good to have a head start on the day.
I’m no longer sick, which is nice. I’m fairly certain what I had last week was COVID-19 because I lost my sense taste for a few days. Regardless, it feels good to not be coughing my guts out every day.
This has been a really fucking weird week online. If you weren’t paying attention to Twitter this week, you may have missed the baffling attempt by a handful of conservative publications and popular right wing accounts to try to make Sydney Sweeney’s boobs a culture war issue. No, this is not a joke.
Apparently, Sydney Sweeney—by being a conventionally attractive blonde woman hosting SNL last Saturday—is defeating wokeness.
I don’t know, man.
There isn’t really much to say about this. It’s incredibly funny, for sure. It represents a certain fever pitch of the culture war now; ’wokeness’ has always been a semi-meaningless term, but now it’s entirely a signifier without a referent.
If I do my best to try to divine the meaning here, I think these anti-woke articles are vaguely claiming that “the Left’s attempt to redefine beauty”—having more diversity, saying that actually fat people can be beautiful, being okay with dress that doesn’t conform to traditional gender expectations, etc.—is being challenged by a conventionally attractive woman hosted SNL.
There’s a couple things I really love about this insane worldview. The first is that it feels like the anti-wokeness discourse has completely transcended to a level of self-sufficiency. What I mean by this is it’s pretty apparent the whole wokeness obsession on the right is just the most recent variation of conservative talking points I’ve heard my whole life: it was anti-political correctness then, or cancel culture a few years later, or anti-social justice warrior, or “everyone is so easily offended these days”. But ‘wokeness’ has evolved because, prior to now, it was always about ‘triggering the libs.’ It was about pointing to examples of liberals or leftists getting mad about some identity or representation issue, some offensive quote from a famous figure, and then saying they’re being overly censorious and being unable to enjoy things.
Prior to now, there was a bit of a cultural ecosystem to the anti-wokeness stuff. It was reactionary, in both the literal and political sense of the term. The old way the Sydney Sweeney discourse would have played out is that one or two fringe liberal columnists trying to have a hot take would say something about how having a young, conventionally attractive, blonde white woman hosting SNL is trying to appeal to white supremacy or volkish iconography or whatever. This would rightly be called silly, but conservative media would latch onto it and go “The left is trying to cancel blonde women now!” And then we’d have a whole online discourse cycle about that for a few days, mostly built up of arguments where leftists say “This isn’t a position I hold” and right wingers say “yes, it is, I saw it on Libs of TikTok.”
This time, we can see the wokeness discourse doesn’t even need an initial over-zealous left winger to kick it off. It’s completely self-contained. They don’t even need to make up someone who is mad about this. It’s so trite by now, that it’s basically shorthand. They can just skip the whole process of aggregating Tweets from overly zealous online progressive teenagers. They don’t need that now. They can just go “Yeah, this thing I like is defeating wokeness.”
Which is wild when you think about it, and leads to the other part I find incredibly funny about all this. It’s becoming more and more apparent that anti-wokeness is also a way to intellectualize liking things. This is especially obvious with Sweeney discourse. You don’t need to put all these culture warriors on the couch to deduce that what they’re trying to do is find some intellectualized way to say they think she’s hot and they like looking at her. That’s it. That’s what’s going on here.
Which is a really special kind of neurosis, isn’t it? You can’t be attracted to a very famous actress, or enjoy a movie, or like a song, unless it’s an attack on wokeness. It’s working backwards. It’s not starting from something the left doesn’t like and then doubling down on it; it’s finding something you like and then saying “the left hates this.” It makes me think of a quote from Phil Christman’s essay collection, How to Be Normal, which I reference way too much.
The same intellectual inertia that leads people to say, with no guilt and no expectation of judgment, ‘James Bond movies are my guilty pleasure,’ tends to lead American cultural critics to define their own preferences by defending them, to construct whatever we like against a snobby, dominant enemy. We are Americans; our national myth is Footloose. None of us can enjoy our pleasures till we think someone wants us not to have them.
On that note, I will finally say—welcome to the media round-up, where I (Josiah) tell you about all the media I’ve been producing, watching, listening to, and reading.
The State of the Union
Typically I do a “new from me” section here, but there is nothing new from me this week. So instead, since this seems to be a politics heavy newsletter this week, I wanna talk briefly about the State of the Union.
This was one of the weirdest SOTUs I’ve watched. It was getting hyped in the press in the days leading up to it. This was going to be Biden’s appeal for a second term, essentially. And I think it was successful at doing that, but it also left me with a gross taste in my mouth.
Let’s start with the positives. It was really funny. Biden took an aggressive approach toward the Republicans, who were trying to disrupt his address the whole time. In most cases, he essentially did crowd work on them and laughed at them. This is an approach I wish more Democrats would take. It was nice to at least see the illusion of conflict rather than the irritating appeals to decorum and unity that Democrats have been using for years now. He got his zingers in, and they weren’t particularly cringy or overtly workshopped via committee ahead of time.
He even tapped into some real populist sentiment, aping Bernie Sanders a bit but occasionally qualifying it with praise for capitalism. It was a weird line, but it felt good to hear a president rant about billionaires a bit. Do I believe he’s gonna do much about them? No, not really, but it felt nice to hear!
That being said, they’re also really sticking to the line about the economy being better than ever. I understand the Biden administration’s desire to point out their successes, but this economic improvement over the past few years hasn’t really been felt by those at the bottom. And I don’t even really mean the cripplingly poor and destitute (although them as well, of course). I’m saying even lower middle class or really anyone who works for an hourly wage has had a really rough few years. My rent has gone up a ton. My wage hasn’t grown much, and groceries have become more and more expensive. Making payments on my private student loans still take up a ton of my income. I’m not a rare case. If anything, I think I have it easier than a lot of people since I live in a city with a comparatively low cost of living. If I’m struggling, I can’t imagine how bad things are for someone with a service job living in a major city right now.
Moving away from my faint and qualified praise, let’s move to where he really blew it. Now, saying he blew it can mean a few different things depending on what you’re focused on, and I think pundits tend to blur two of these together. There’s 1) the pragmatic and electoral angle, which is supposed to be semi-removed and focused on electability—did the SOTU help or hurt his ability to get elected? And then there’s 2) the political and moral angle. As in, do I think what Biden is saying or doing is good or bad?
How this gets blurred sometimes, is leftists tend to criticize politicans from the latter perspective, while a lot of political commentators tend to criticize politicans from the former and tend to make jabs at leftists for not being pragmatic enough. There’s some truth to this, and I think a good political analysis would look at both of these things, but they are different. If you are running for office in a rabidly racist region, it would be politically smart to be racist, but I would still think that’s vile on a moral level. I would say too many of the core political values have been compromised in the process of campaigning. Ultimately polticial power needs both of these: it needs to be pragmatic enough to get in power, but it also needs to actually fight for something.
All of this is to say, that I think Biden did a good job giving a speech to get elected, and some of the early polling seems to indicate that that's the case. I have no idea whether these polls will stand the test of a few months, but right now it does seem that those who watched the SOTU left it with a more positive impression of him.
That being said, he did the usual baffling attempt at triangulation on Israel-Palestine as is to be expected. There is the attempt to create a port in Gaza to bring humanitarian aid in, which sounds good until you think about it longer than five seconds. “So you’re continuing to give weapons and support to the people doing the genocide, but you’re going to give some food to the people getting genocided to make it fair?” What’s chilling about this is the way that such a bare minimum move was too much for the Republicans, who didn’t stand or applaud at Biden saying he would try to negotiate a brief ceasefire to release the hostages. This is the state of our politics right now: those who feel weird about genocide so they come up with strange middle-of-the-road proposals, and those who just fucking love genocide. They want all Palestinians dead. They basically just say that now. I don’t know who I have more contempt for on this—the people who are doing more and more elaborate things to avoid facing reality, or those who have a clear-eyed view of reality and just choose evil.
There was also a spat regarding immigration between the Marjorie Taylor Greene and Joe Biden during the SOTU. This is building off a whole ordeal the last few months where Republicans have decided to throw their yearly fit about the border, and Joe Biden responded by writing an incredibly regressive and right wing immigration bill. If you’re charitable to Biden, you say he was calling their bluff. If you have a brain, you would say Biden thinks immigrants are expendable and that he knows that stoking xenophobic fear can be a smart electoral move. I’m more convinced of this as of last night, when he responded to Greene screaming about Laken Riley by agreeing that Riley was “an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal” and that thousands are killed by “illegals” every year. He used this to go back to defend his border bill, adding a caveat that while he wants to strengthen the border, he won’t refer to immigrants as “poison in the blood of the country.” Man, what a perfect indictment of the Democratic Party: “we will do the xenophobic policy, but we won’t be openly chanting blood and soil.” Great.
I keep thinking, also, about a slip of the tongue he made toward the beginning of the speech, while discussing January 6th, where he said, “We must be honest. The threat to democracy must be defended.”
It’s essentially the thesis statement of the DNC. They don’t give a shit about democracy. They don’t give a shit about the very real threat of fascism. They want to use it to get elected. The threat is necessary.
The trouble is the threat is real, and I don’t know what to do about that. I know they are using the very real dissolution of democracy in this country to get elected, and then not really using that power in defense of democracy. Every four years, the Democrats hold our democracy hostage; hold us over a lion’s den and go “well you don’t want the lions, do you?” And they’re right. I don’t want the lions.
Film/video
I added video to the title just because I watched the Schrader interview on the Adam Friedland Show and it was really funny. I wanted to mention that. As it goes on, it gets funnier and funnier how clearly embarassed Adam is with his own shtick which Schrader is not amused by. A handful of times he makes a typical, juvenile joke and then just put his head in his hands while Schrader stares at him.
Aside from that, I watched some pretty solid movies over the week. Last weekend, I had a great time binging some movies. I watched and really enjoyed the Jackie Chan classic, Police Story (1985), as well as an alright giallo, The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972). As with a lot of giallos, the actual plot falls out of my head after a few days, but the soundtrack will be stuck in my head for weeks.
I watched the French new wave classic, Hiroshima Mon Amour, which I wish I’d watched earlier. I found it incredibly moving. After that, I watched Yugoslav black wave film, Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, and then Jean Rollin’s The Iron Rose. I found The Iron Rose a little less engaging than some of Rollin’s other films, although still enjoyble. I think I wanted more horror or shock than it provided. I may need to revisit it while in a different mood.
Later into the week, I finally got around to Asteroid City, which I found incredibly moving but for reasons I can’t really articulate. Reactions to the film have been mixed, and I can see why, but for some reason, I think the film’s weird coldness gave it more emotional weight for me, while other’s found that coldness to be, well, cold.
I’ve also been returning to Motern Media’s films in preparation for a future project. I watched Adventures in Cruben County, one of the first films from Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh. If you haven’t watched an Motern, this is not a good film to start with, but it’s fun to dive into the primordial matter of Motern while they were still developing their style.
Lastly, I watched All My Friends Hate Me (2021), which I found pretty funny and incredibly anxiety-inducing. It’s sort of a social horror movie. A horror of manners. It’s not really horror, but it plays a bit like one—it follows a friend meeting up with old childhood friends, and essentially posits “what if every anxious and self-deprecating thought you have is just actually true.” It was genuinely disturbing despite not being a particularly shocking movie. It tapped into a lot of my worst fears. I really liked it, but I didn’t enjoy watching it.
Okay I’m done
I don’t really have anything to report regarding music or reading. Haven’t read much this week, and I have been listening to the same music I mentioned last week. So I think I’ll wrap up here.
See you next week!