Quentin's Weeknotes 9/29/18-10/5/18
This week
I watched Mohawk, a historical supernatural movie set in colonial New York, and featuring Indigenous protagonists. The movie follows a Haudenosaunee Mohawk man and woman and their English lover as they try to escape from a sadistic band of American soldiers hunting them through forested Iroquoia. Given that plot, it would be easy for this movie to get b-movie silly, but the director, Ted Geoghegan, frequently slowed things down and lingers over faces, trees, and landscapes, giving the movie an almost dream-like and contemplative quality. There is a supernatural and horrific element, but the real horror is colonialism, and the violence that it required and requires. The production design suggests a low budget, but within those constraints it was really well made and well acted, especially its Haudenosaunee/Iroquois and other Indigenous actors. The script was co-written by none other than Grady Hendrix, author of Horrorstor (a horror novel designed like an Ikea catalog) and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, both of which are wonderful and worth your time.
- I read this strange story by Ryan Lizza about the Nunes family, Iowa, dairy farming, and immigration. It’s a complicated and bizarre story, made more bizarre by Lizza’s role in it. Essentially, the vitriolically anti-immigrant and pro-Trump congressman Devin Nunes’s family (and primary campaign staff) run a dairy farm in Sibley, Iowa that is likely completely staffed by undocumented immigrants. The story involves Wells Blue Bunny Ice Cream (“The Flavor of the Heartland”!), anonymous surveillance, ICE, pig blood rendering, and the ubiquity of White SUVs. Honestly rivetting and thought provoking.
- I listened to Double Negative, the new album by Low. Low has been a band for 25 years(!) and though their style has changed periodically, the constant has been the haunting and gorgeous harmonies of Alan Sparkhawk and Mimi Parker. On Double Negative, that constant sound has fallen into a dark recess of modulation, audio processing, and gated distortion. The resulting sound is eerie and strange, without only the occasional surfacing of human voices to give any certainty. I’m obsessed with the record, particularly as our hot summer here in Oneonta moves into a crisp and cloudy Fall. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvEozu4Obfs&w=560&h=315]
- I tried (and mostly failed) not to watch the slow moving car-wreck of American jurisprudence.
- I watched The Endless, a strange and creepy movie from the makers of Resolution, another strange and creepy movie. The basic plot is that two brothers who escaped from a UFO death cult when they were teenagers discover that the cult’s compound and membership are still alive and active. They decide to visit, partly out of boredome and dissatisfaction with their new lives, and partly out of curiousity as to why everyone is still where they left them. The gradual and ultimately only partial unveiling of the mystery, makes this the kind of ambiguous, well-made sci-fi horror movie that is both really exciting to me, and exceedingly rare.
- I read Sarah Gran’s creepy novella Come Closer, which is a gripping yarn about demonic possession, love, and feminism.
- I read Adam Serwer’s depressing but truthful article “The cruelty is the point”. His basic argument is that shared cruelty is an animating form of solidarity and joy among conservatives in the US. He links up the smiling faces in photos of lynch mobs in the 1910s and 20s, laughter at a woman who was sexually assualted at political rallies, and the zealous glee of supporters of family separation into a kind of trans-historical lifeboat that keeps them from facing what Serwer calls “the lonliness and atomization of modern life.” This short essay made me go back and read a longer piece by science-fiction author and marxist China Mieville “On Social Sadism” which is much more dense, but perhaps more incisive. I will leave only this quote, but it’s worth your time to read the whole thing:
By contrast, there is something distinct about social sadism in modern capitalism, and in neoliberalism in particular. This is surplus cruelty in a specific sense, sadism supererogatory in relation to the – conjunctural, contested – ‘functional’ requirements of the system, a social formation characterised by the hedged, reversible, embattled but well-documented historical shift away from social punishment as overt– the qualification is crucial – spectacular, sanctioned, performative cruelty.
and perhaps more ambiguously, but hopefully
We build against sadism. We build to experience the joy of its every fleeting defeat. Hoping for more joy, for longer, each time, longer and stronger; until, perhaps, we hope, for yet more; and you can’t say it won’t ever happen, that the ground won’t shift, that it won’t one day be the sadisms that are embattled, the sadisms that are fleeting, on a new substratum of something else, newly foundational, that the sadisms won’t diminish or be defeated, that those for whom they are machinery of rule won’t be done.
