Folding Ideas

Folding Ideas is a series of online video essays on YouTube by Alberta-based documentarian Dan Olson.

Season 4

Man of Steel Redux [4.2]

I still feel the movie does a great job illustrating the inherently fascist nature of most superheroes, ironically while trying to tell a story about, ostensibly, the least fascist superhero. In fact, like The Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel seems to trip over its own feet on the issue, trying to simultaneously explain why Batman and Superman aren't mere psychotic power fantasies, but are instead deep morality tales about the need for role models and deities in human myth while presenting a story that totally makes Superman and Batman look like fascist frat boys who are good guys in only the loosest sense of the term. The Dark Knight Rises tells us Batman represents the same fascist power structures that have allowed the world to produce men like Bane and the world is better off without Batman, and then asks us to root for Batman as he restores the corrupt status quo and enshrines the destructive influence of the Batman into perpetual myth. Man of Steel tells us Superman is the good guy, and then demolishes Metropolis.

Superman never openly interacts with humanity in his own context. Only in the context of Zod. In fact, he never actually reveals himself officially to the populace at large in the movie. He reveals himself to the military and to Lois, but not to the public. His interaction with the public is almost entirely incidental or second-hand. Like, think about how this looks to those people out on the street. They don't know who any of these people are; it's just three invincible monsters fighting each other while the military shoots everyone. Superman means nothing to them. He's not friend, he's not foe, he's just a stranger. They try to resolve this theme by having the U.S. Military act as the stand-in for humanity; Clark presents himself to the military, he bros it up with soldiers, and it's soldiers who ordain him as acceptable. I get where they're going with that, but I'm sorry, no. The U.S. Military is not an effective proxy for humanity.

[Jor-El] knows that, no matter how hard he tries, he's still the product of a corrupt, doomed world, and nothing short of a full reset will fix that. The whole reason he withheld information from Kal was because he didn't want his son to grow up with the same ideological and cultural biases that ultimately doomed Krypton.

We are never shown the moment where, morally, spiritually, Superman is born. We're shown his physical ascent, when he gets the suit and learns to fly and outwardly becomes Superman. As bad as it is, we're shown his public ascent where he reveals himself. But we're never shown that critical moment where Clark goes "Sorry, Dad, I disagree. I can't stand by and watch people suffer while I have the power to help them." Does a Superman movie need to show that moment? No. But this one did. Every theme, almost every flashback points towards that moment where Clark decides to "be" Superman. Where he's given a legitimate choice to walk away or intervene, and yet that decision is never put up onscreen.

Season 6

On Context [6.7]

Batman vs. Superman is an all-consuming cultural behemoth, the purest incarnation of the tent-pole film. Possibly the last superhero movie of any real cultural importance, at least for the next 15 to 20 years, until the whole genre's inevitably resurrected after its equally inevitable death. Batman vs. Superman is inescapable. A quarter of a billion dollars poured just into production, with at least another quarter billion spent on marketing in all its flavors. In many ways, Batman vs. Superman is pristine - perfect, even. The preservation of screen direction is flawless, the continuity of action meticulous -- Multiple people were employed with the sole job of making sure Henry Cavill's sneer was just right every take so that it would cut together without issue. The computer-generated elements are so flawlessly photo-realistic, that you'd be forgiven for not noticing that there's more live-action cinema in WALL-E. It is an expertly sculpted puff of air. A dour, exhausting 150 minute ode to creative bankruptcy, Batman vs. Superman is the kind of movie that makes you question your faith in Cinema itself. Why did we ever care? On some levels, its existence functions as a commentary on the nature of audience. Is this not what we signed up for? A high mass, where we ritualistically recount the exploits of untouchable demigods in a detached language, intentionally posturing itself above the supplicants in the pews? "In the beginning, there was darkness, and then Joe Chill shot Thomas and Martha Wayne. Let us pray." You may have gathered this already, but I didn't much care for Batman vs. Superman- though like I said, in many ways, the film is perfect. It polished and buffed to a brooding shine. It is technically flawless in the way that only a quarter of a billion dollars can buy. The script is trash, of course, a trifling, joyless tour through plot cul-de-sacs and actions the characters take - or fail to take - for no internal reason other than to progress the meager plot. This sounds damning, but in truth it describes far more films than it excludes. Its true failing is spiritual, it is an empty vessel, it is a vast revival tent with nothing inside.

Season 8

A Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades of Grey [8.1]

Now, without getting too deep into the weeds I want to acknowledge that fantasy fiction, erotic fiction, playing with ideas and scenarios that blur the lines of consent or even step right over them, aren't strictly illegitimate as subject matter. Most of our fiction involves scenarios that we would never want to actually experience, whether that be getting caught in a gunfight, or trapped at a cabin in the woods with a killer, and the idea that some people find non-consensual sexual scenarios thrilling is maybe not as weird as it's often painted. Christine Love's visual novel "Ladykiller in a Bind" is a text that delves quite far into scenarios of dubious consent for the purpose of both titillating and challenging the audience. [...] The game opens, however, with a reminder that fiction is a means for people to explore ideas and scenarios in ways that are safe, or at least safer. In a video game, you effectively have the ultimate safe word. You can exit the program at any time and it will stop instantly. It's like the fuzzy pink handcuffs; they're not real, they're just toys. They look and behave close enough to real handcuffs, but the key is just for show. It's actually less convenient than just using the lever. In most situations, someone wearing them can pretty effortlessly get themselves out. They are a form of performative fiction; they are the illusion of danger. They are a safer way to explore the sensation of restraint, of loss of control. But that isn't to say that they are truly safe. You can still wear them too tight, you can still ignore warning signs, and you can still end up in an awful position that does lasting damage. Similarly, fiction provides us a way to explore ideas and scenarios that would be hazardous, traumatizing, or both, in real life. Fiction is a way to practice intense emotional states, but that doesn't make fiction harmless. It still impacts us and, indeed, impacting us is the entire point. This is why critics argue that the subject of fictional non-consent can still be handled more or less ethically, an issue that comes down to framing, something that Fifty Shades routinely fails at, and fails hard.

[It] needs to be acknowledged that a huge chunk of the backlash to Fifty Shades stemmed from and manifested as rampant misogyny and an assault on the public visibility of female sexuality and sexual agency, with many, many people using legitimate criticism as a springboard to mock "mommy porn" and the very idea of women finding anything erotic if it didn't conform to strict male-centric ideas of feminine sexuality. In this context, it's not even weird to consider that a certain component of Fifty Shades's success can be attributed to a collective political act of defiance: women publicly embracing the book, not for its quality or even because it suited their tastes, but because of what its success represents in a culture that generally sees pornography for women as both setup and punchline.

[There's] this appeal to seeing characters that the audience has already formed a parasocial bond with in synthesized scenarios and novel circumstances. At a certain point, characters cease to require their context to be whole, and in fact become their own context, and subsequently the fun comes from taking them and moving them around; playing with them in a variety of different styles and scenarios... In this way, fan fiction is the literary evolution of childhood play: taking disparate toys and bringing them together; an almost instinctive exercise in creative synthesis. It is not a mystery that fanfiction appeals to so many, because it is naturally what stories pursue: the meeting point between the familiar and the unexpected.

The book doesn't manage to balance sexy danger, but it also refuses to embrace the danger-danger that it creates. There is a potentially legitimately decent erotic thriller, or even erotic horror somewhere inside the subject matter, but Erika Mitchell seems convinced that living in constant fear of your sexual partner's temper is just what a kinky sex life looks like.

There's a lot of nuanced argument over the idea of 'show don't tell'; like we can come up with all kinds of examples where just telling the audience what's going on is actually pretty effective, and then we could get into further debate over whether or not those examples are still supported, or themselves support visual or environmental evidence that shows the thing we're being told, and thus it's all a combination of showing and telling... But this right here, Christian Grey just saying it's a big deal that he's never had in his sleeping bed instead of his sex bed, this right here is the poster child for the kind of limp storytelling that leads to getting your writing back from the editor with 'show don't tell' written in big red letters in the margin. We are told that this is a conflict; that this is all outside Christian's comfort zone, but that conflict is supported by absolutely nothing else. As a result, this point ends up falling into a hazy space where it's not a satisfying parallel between the two characters because the stakes are so disproportionate, but it's also not just cute banter, because there's clearly supposed to be weight to it in the cinematic language.

This is the kind of moment that encapsulates why this movie stuck with me in the way it did. Moments of talented, subtle filmmaking, in the service of material that just does it no justice.

It's kind of the bottom line here: the film is surprisingly well made, with a deliberate artfulness for a movie that still, ultimately - isn't very good. It's watchable, and it has its distinct highlights and craft and skill There are scenes and moments that are good, even great, but the whole is still less than the sum of its parts undercut by fundamentally flawed source material.

A Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades Part 2: Things Go Downhill Very Quickly [8.3]

The cover for Fifty Shades Darker features the Venetian mask that Ana wears to the Grey's masquerade ball in Chapter Six. You'd assume the masks are thematically relevant to the rest of the book like Fifty Shades Darker is about the masks we wear, the idea of persona, and the exaggerated or false versions of ourselves we create for different environments and scenarios. Congratulations, you just put more thought into metaphor than the author.

That right there? I didn't cut that. It really just straight-up cuts between two nearly identical close-ups that are only offset by a slight angle. This movie was in theaters.

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Saying that the movie has at least managed to rise above the source material is, in this case, damning with faint praise. The film-makers don't exactly deserve Oscars for having the good sense to drop the scene where Anna is blown away that Christian has given her an iPod with twelve songs on it. This book takes place in 2011.

Darker isn't really the start of a second major arc. It's just the ongoing stream-of-consciousness compulsive writing of someone more concerned with maintaining their online status, their presence and dominance in a community, than they are with the actual story that they're telling. Once you approach Master of the Universe and its derivatives as, first and foremost, serial fiction as public performance, it all snaps into sharp focus. Suddenly, you understand why there's a helicopter crash that is effortlessly resolved a few minutes later when Christian just walks in the door. Why the principal antagonist of the film, the stalker that was given a tremendous amount of visual weight during the introduction, is dealt with off-screen at the mid-point of the film and never seen again. The movie tries, though. Half-heartedly, but it tries. They flipped the conflict with Jack and the conflict with Leela in order to try and create some element of escalation since, you know, gun. But that's about as extreme as it gets with adaptational changes. There's still almost half the movie hanging off the back end of the climax.

If you put in the legwork of digging out all the parts and filling in the blanks, the answer is that [Christian] wants a sex slave who doubles as a replacement mother. He selects subs who look like his dead mom, who he refers to throughout the books as "the crack whore", expects them to clean and cook, wants them to be sexually available at all times, and they just have to let him beat them really, really, really hard with a belter cane. And that's actually about it. He just wants someone he can whip with a belt whenever he's angry or frustrated or horny who otherwise does whatever banal thing springs into his head and generally mothers him when they're not in sex mode. That's not intense kink so much as it's the profile of a serial killer.

Erica Mitchell thinks that all power exchange is equally immoral, proposes that engaging submission and domination relationships will damage you to the point that you can only be cured by true love, and doesn't differentiate between Christians narcissistic, oedipal psychopathy and other forms of power exchange.

[While] part of me is disappointed because "the crack whore -- my birth mother" is such a transcendentally awful phrase that I was really looking forward to watching a human try to act it out, I'm not particularly surprised that it was changed. This change almost certainly came as a mandate from Universal. A reader for the studio had to go through the books and make a bunch of notes for necessary adaptational changes, and top of the page was, "You cannot use the phrase, 'the crack whore' to refer to Christian's birth mother." It may feel like I've overused that clip, but it's deliberate. I can't really adequately explain just how repetitive and mean-spirited the books are, so this is the best way of communicating that essence. This line right here is the soul of the Fifty Shades books:
I'm a sadist. I like to whip little brown-haired girls like you, because you all look like the crack whore -- my birth mother.

Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor [8.5]

The reason I dislike [summary videos] so much is that they are often a form of anti-intellectualism operating on the attitude that ignorance is purity, that an understanding of culture that rejects metaphor, that rejects the symbolic and clings to the literal, is more true. It is part of the process of denying art the capacity for meaning. Now, that's not to say that all of these reject metaphor in its entirety.
"As an attitude, anti-intellectualism is not usually found in a pure form, but in ambivalence -- a pure and unalloyed dislike of intellect or intellectuals is uncommon."
It is rare to find someone who will entirely reject the idea of approaching film broadly from a thematic or metaphorical point of view, but all too common to find people who will lightly sneer at the actual attempts to do so and suggest that it's overthinking things. And by "suggest," I mean they will say it in exactly those words. This is a consistent feature within modern film criticism which, taken on the whole, is in a distinct phase where the loudest voices in film discussion are incurious, proudly ignorant, and approach plot as a problem to be unpacked and solved.

Lena doesn't start the movie innocent. There isn't a state of grace to fall from, and she doesn't return home as Campbell's Warrior, Lover, Emperor, Redeemer, or Saint. Indeed, "Annihilation" asks a far more challenging question: What if you return home and you're different, but you're still just you?

The purpose of ambiguity is to frustrate the audience, to deny a clean sense of diegetic closure and thusly force engagement with the metaphorical. Most ambiguous endings make perfect sense if you read them thematically, and nine times out of ten, the diegetic answer is obvious once you approach the ending from this direction. If you approach the final shots of Annihilation thematically, the meaning of this moment is very obvious. But if you resist a thematic reading, then you're going to get caught up in weird nonsense circles asking if the Shimmer is an alien terraforming device, as though the next movie, Annihilation 2, is going to be a bunch of rainbow aliens coming down in spaceships, getting into gunfights with Aaron Eckhart. Okay, let's be honest, Gerard Butler.

The opening monologue ruminates on the idea of cancer as immortal, cells that have had their self-destruct code turned off. Healthy, productive cells die, while toxic, deadly cells live forever, consuming, devouring, absorbing and corrupting. This extends into the metaphor as an irony. Why is it that everything we live for dies while our pain gets to be immortal?

[No] matter what the diegetic answer may be, the symbol has taken on meaning through its association with each of the characters. Where it came from is irrelevant next to what it indicates. The impact individuals have on one another, how we become impressed into each other and entwined, the ways that we see ourselves, our fates, in complete strangers, a cycle of exchange without beginning or end.

A Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades Part 3: Freed [8.6]

I was actually able to find a copy of Master of the Universe 2 with the blog notes still intact, which makes for a fascinating read, injecting the context of public performance back into the text. Like, it’s wild to see that, at the exact moment publication was assured, every outstanding plot thread is either dropped or resolved. The entire main plot is resolved in the next chapter after the announcement, and the three after that are mostly various characters explaining things to Bella and back-filling the majority of the plot holes. And you’ll be happy to know that the legacy of Fifty Shades Freed as a hastily written fill-in has been preserved in the film version. Sadly, they didn’t preserve the parts where the American characters talk like a middle-aged English woman.

[Safe Haven, the 'first draft' of Fifty Shades is] revealing, because it sets out patterns in Mitchell’s writing that can be seen repeating throughout the rest of her work, elements that remain fixed in place even after edits or adaptations, the critical one being this: Anna is not the self-insert of Fifty Shades, Christian is. This is part of why I find Safe Haven fascinating. The first fanfic wasn't Bella's point of view, it was Edward’s -- an Edward that is controlling, demanding, petty, and easily angered. Through adaptation, though mutation from Edward to Christian, these are the personality traits that stay intact. The screenwriter is replaced and given a mandate to preserve the accuracy of the books, and what’s the thing that survives the process? Dumbass arguments about an email address, where Christian uses his power to get pointless concessions out of people in a way that improves nothing, but makes him happy because now people are doing his bidding.

Freed is basically a low budget James Bond knockoff, like if instead of having a whole bunch of wild gadgets, a car chase, a boat chase, and a fight on a helicopter there was instead a gadget, a car going over the speed limit, a boat, and a fight.

Hey, isn't it weird how whenever Ana breaks tiny, inconsequential promises like "I'll come straight home after work" or "I won't take my top off on a topless beach" it’s deemed worthy of derision and punishment, but when Christian breaks his promise to get rid of a loaded handgun that he keeps in an unlocked drawer in their home, it's fine because it totally turned out Ana needed a loaded handgun?

Part of what makes a thriller great is watching a convoluted plan come together. A good thriller has a plan that’s complicated and maybe even a little bit wacky but there’s this deep satisfaction from watching it all fall into place. This... is not that.

From a filmmaking perspective this movie just makes the previous movie all the more confusing, because it’s not like they were adapting Fifty Shades Darker before Fifty Shades Freed was written. The books were done. You could read the whole thing and know how it ends and work towards a conclusion instead of ending Fifty Shades Darker on the same abrupt I-have-no-idea-where-I’m-going-with-this note that Mitchell did when she finished Master of the Universe in 2010. I don’t know why they didn’t make that change, why they decided to try and do a literal adaptation and then cut it for something just as bad.

The books are, and remain a contentious piece of literature for the way they muddy the line between kink and abuse, replicating and reinforcing abusive and potentially deadly relationship dynamics. The movies are a nominal thematic improvement, but despite good changes to characterization and some light plot restructuring, the movies ultimately hew too close to the books and in turn inherit almost all the original structural problems. While the first movie shows a surprising amount of creative talent and effort, the second and third are notably devoid of creative energy, with long stretches where the lead actors seem irritated to still be there.

Season 9

The Snyder Cut Does (Not) Exist [9.10]

Typical, routine, boring reshoots consist of correcting eye lines, maybe redoing a few lines or a bit of action to make it all flow. Maybe a subplot is dropped during editing and a new minute or two of dialogue is written to patch the gaps left behind, or test audiences don't understand why a thing happens, so a quick insert is created to make it more obvious. Or maybe in the case of Suicide Squad, in addition to being six hours long, the producer decides that Steppenwolf is now going to be the villain of Justice League, so you now need to rewrite and reshoot everything in your movie that directly involves the antagonists. These more dramatic instances in recent years are films that are in some state, real or imagined, that the studio considers to be dire, whether they consider it to be unmarketable, or possibly actively bad. The released version of Fantastic Four is abysmal, but the Trank cut was probably not in and of itself any better, because the Trank footage... isn't good. It's worth noting here that while the theatrical cut of Justice League is substantially different from the state of the film when Snyder left, no one has disputed that the core plot remained untouched. I mean, it's still a sequel to Batman v Superman. There are still the fundamental problems with the way that Snyder tells a story that were unlikely to just suddenly disappear, especially when Snyder himself has talked a lot about how much dropped footage was set-ups for later movies. What I'm saying is the Snyder Cut almost certainly had very real problems.

The list of cut characters, including Atom, Elinore Stone, Nuidis Vulko, Darkseid, Desaad, Martian Manhunter, and Heggra, points to a movie suffering from all the same problems as the films that preceded it: overstuffed with set-up and cameos at the expense of pacing, payoff, and plot.

From a political perspective, [releasing the Snyder Cut] is seemingly a lose-lose for Warner Bros. Like, okay, either the Snyder Cut sucks just as bad as Batman v Superman, being the same bloated, incoherent mess as Snyder's other two Superman movies, or it's amazing. If the movie isn't particularly good or it's even only kind of slightly better, then they look like suckers for spending tens of millions of dollars finishing a movie that only the most hardcore fans and cinephiles will care about. If they finish and release the Snyder Cut and it's amazing, then they look like the dumbasses who ruined a movie, and the people who made that decision then get fired, and the people who would get fired are the same people who currently get to decide if it ever gets released.

If Snyder has self-funded completion of his version of the film, it would still be a compromised version, owing to scenes that remain unfilmed, the lesser resources available when self-funding the finished work, and it will remain a hilarious setup for now-cancelled sequels and spin-offs, but it will probably at least be a really interesting comparison.

Season 10

The Art of Editing and The Snowman [10.1]

The film has gained substantial notoriety for being... a complete forking mess.

[While] these issues are going to intersect several different elements of filmmaking, from the camera work to the script, filmmaking is symbiotic to the degree that flaws or failures in one area will impact the ability for others to do their jobs.

From what I understand, Jo Nesbo’s approach to the serial killer genre hews closer to black comedy. Not outright farce, but definitely a bit absurdist because, well, serial killer fiction is a bit absurd. The idea of a murderer whose calling card is a sinister snowman is inherently silly, but the film plays it 100% straight, resulting in numerous moments in the film where the soundtrack ratchets up the tension while the camera lingers on a frowning snowman. I actually laughed out loud in the theatre when the film pulls a fake-out leading up to Katrine’s death. She leaves her apartment and glances at a regular, three-tier snowman with a carrot nose, before the camera swings around to reveal to the audience that on the back side it’s actually a Sad Evil Snowman! BWAAAAAH!!! It’s a very, very funny moment, but I’m not sure the movie agrees.

A movie primes the audience’s expectations of itself, and how that manifests here is that there are so many baffling cuts and creative decisions that it’s hard to tell which are deliberate stylistic choices and which are just errors. Random unmotivated jump cut! The movie is so full of inconsistencies in its basic structure that it inadvertently trains the audience to notice inconsistencies that they would probably overlook in a better film.

It’s not really a game of cat and mouse, but a game of a plastic surgeon recklessly murdering a whole bunch of people, and the police who are too stupid to catch him because they don’t bother to collect evidence.

So that’s The Snowman, or at least a lot of The Snowman. It is both infuriating and fascinating because it’s actually pretty rare to see a film in this condition. Typically if something were this incomplete it just wouldn’t get released at all, but instead we get to witness the end product of the spiral of an unfinished movie. Because of what they failed to shoot, the filmmakers needed to cut more than just what was missing, taking deep bites out of everything else in the film, resulting in a relentless parade of things that just don’t quite line up.

In Search of a Flat Earth [10.4]

They don't want those complexities to exist, and by talking about them, you make them exist. It's a form of magical thought: talking about police brutality wills police brutality into existence. A disruption of the status quo is seen as a disruption of the natural order. The problem they see is that no one has made those people shut up. That is what they want: someone to come in and make those people shut up and go away, to put things back "where they belong".

And there is a temptation to engage on that level, to confront all the material ways in which they are just wrong, and it largely does not work. And what's unique about QAnon is the degree to which it doesn't work, the degree to which the movement is immune to evidence. All reactionary movements are in tension with reality, a tension that eventually results in a psychological crisis, and belief systems like QAnon are the endpoint of that crisis, the point where reality itself becomes an enemy. Because ultimately it's not about facts; it's about power. QAnons are not otherwise empty vessels who believe one wacky thing. They have an agenda. QAnon, what it accepts, what it believes, is driven by the outcomes it justifies.

The reason they aren't more bothered by Q constantly getting things wrong, why they aren't more bothered by the extreme inconsistencies and outright contradictions, by the claims that are just materially wrong, is because it gives them power over others who are bound by something as weak and flimsy as reality. They claim to be against corruption while hanging their hopes on an openly corrupt man, and that naked hypocrisy is the point. They will effortlessly carve out an exception because it makes them exceptional. They engage in wild hypocrisy as an act of domination, adhering to something demonstrably untrue out of spite, because they believe that power belongs to those with the greatest will to take it, and what greater sign of will than the ability to override truth? Their will is a hammer that they are using to beat reality itself into a shape of their choosing, a simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where they are right, and their enemies are silent. They are trying to build a Flat Earth.

Season 11

The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall [11.1]

Abstraction is, counterintuitively, very efficient. It allows a movie to be about a lot of things simultaneously by letting symbols bleed into one another. The movie pinballs between war, classism, police brutality, the criminalization of youth culture, Thatcherism, generational trauma, commodification of art, and the home-grown fascism of the nations that bragged about beating the Nazis, and it's able to do this pretty fluidly.

In "Goodbye Blue Skies", the Union Jack shatters into pieces. For all its bravado and bluster, English nationalism is just blood in the gutter. Soldiers sent to war don't die for their country, they just die. The boys beat the Germans and came home just in time to build atom bombs. Symbols shift and merge and break apart, juxtaposed and contrasted in order to create an impression of their interconnected relationship in a way that is difficult to do using mere words and, core to the theme of the piece as a whole, no one, specific thing is the load-bearing cause. There is no singular source of the sickness in society that isolates us from one another, that suppresses us, that brutalizes us, that exploits us. They are all just bricks in the wall.

Basically, it's impossible to engage with something like The Wall, even sarcastically or disingenuously, without leaving a lot of yourself on the table as a result. What you fixate on, what you think is silly, why you think it's silly, these are all revealing. And that's not to say you need to love The Wall or even like The Wall or, you know, you're a phoney or a poser or shallow if you don't. It's just that, defending that position is going to demand emotional honesty.

You don't just make something like this on accident in an afternoon. This would've taken weeks, if not months, to coordinate. [...] [There's] writing, recording, props, costumes, all of which you can cut a lot of corners on -- and make no mistake, the corners here are extremely cut -- but there's a floor. Certain things are still going to take all week, no matter how half you ass them. So on some level, you have to care. You have to care a lot to commit to this amount of work. And that passion, y'know, it can come from just really loving The Wall or just really hating The Wall or feeling like you have a lot of stuff to say about it... but it's gotta come from somewhere.

Doug wants to be a film-maker. He wants to make art, but he can't because he's a fundamentally incurious person who isn't much interested in what other people think or feel and all his ideas boil down to "What if Batman met Mario?".

Like The Room, [Nostalgia Critic's The Wall is] a deeply cynical product made by a fundamentally untalented man, bored by the idea of personal growth, building so many layers of self-protective irony that it becomes unintentionally revealing. [...] Doug is utilizing The Wall as a showcase for his own ideas, his own lyricism, his own jokes, his own singing. The video is him strutting his stuff as a film-maker. So while some of it is about The Wall, for the most part the further you get into it, the more it just shifts to just being about Doug.

The criticism, which Waters is directly engaging with in Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, is that this arrangement, school as a pipeline to industry, means that what is taught in school and how it is taught will be dictated by industrialists, by corporations. The school system, then, becomes nothing but a systematic reshaping of children into ideal workers: obedient, compliant, and narrowly trained in only what is needed for the job. It is a reduction of people to exploitable labour, to uniform bricks in a wall. It is critical of the fundamental ordering of society. "Why should these institutions, rampant with abuse and steered by corporate ghouls, be given so much power over us? Why, especially, should they be given so much power over children?" [...] This continues to resonate with people to this day because regardless of not corporal punishment has been abolished and more idealistic pedagogies have prevailed, institutionalized school is still an institution and will never be an unalloyed good. It will always be vulnerable to corruption, to abuse, to manipulation, and the question of whose agenda is served by the structure and material must remain an eternal debate.

The statement is that the inhumanity of the system, its goals and methods, are ultimately homoousian, of the same stuff, as the inhumanity that leads a system to load humans into cattle cars.

I think it’s one thing to describe The Wall as whiney or juvenile, to say in effect that it encapsulates a really teenage mindset, but it’s quite another to accuse the creators of being disingenuous, ego-tripping fakes who milk imaginary problems for pity. I don’t think you can make that accusation and then turn around and insist that you liked it fine, and made a love letter to its creative vision. That’s the kind of thing that you say about something you just really don’t think very highly of at all.

The song Comfortably Numb, retooled as Comfortably Dumb, is where things start to really wander off topic. It’s not really about The Wall but it’s kinda about Doug’s relationship to The Wall, and to media in general, and it’s probably the most honest song Doug put into the project, almost certainly not on purpose. Nominally it’s about the pacing of the film, and Doug reiterates once again that he thinks Roger Waters’ opinions are the illegitimate whining of a millionaire, but it’s also Doug saying he doesn’t understand and he doesn’t care to. The movie is challenging and he just doesn’t have any interest in engaging with it on its own terms. He has become comfortably dumb. [...] I don’t know if it works as self-deprecating humor because I don’t think it’s comedically true, I think it’s just true.

Okay, so this whole segment is just Doug venting about people being mean to him on Twitter. It is completely disconnected from The Wall, not even a tiny bit about the movie, it’s just Doug using the veil of alter ego to express an otherwise authentically held belief. And that’s honestly a charitable reading of it. Because otherwise... otherwise, you’re saying that a criticism of Thatcherism, the of rigid enforcement of Christian norms, the violent suppression of political dissent, of a rising home-grown fascist movement, criticisms that predate the AIDS crisis but would hold true well into the 80s as governments decided it was unofficial policy that AIDS was a divine punishment and a solution to their "gay crisis", you’re saying that all that... isn’t substantively different from people yelling at each other on the internet over Batman movies.

Cringe. There’s no other word for it. This makes me cringe. It’s embarrassing.

Kinda the buckwild thing here is that if there were less effort put into this, if the substance was otherwise exactly the same but there wasn’t a companion album on sale for money, there wasn’t an entire end-to-end abridged recreation, if there were just one or two songs and a bunch of lazy jokes about the movie being really pretentious, then I don’t think this would compel people in the way it does? There’s an effort on display that is its own form of earnestness, and it just all falls flat, because it’s just no good. It’s trying to be impressive without being vulnerable. And simultaneous to that, it’s pissing on a really earnest piece of art specifically for being vulnerable. And to see this all played out against the backdrop of a movie from a band that is decades and decades and decades old, well outside Doug’s normal wheelhouse, with no clear indication of why this particular movie, this album, is something that Doug feel is worth this much effort? It’s a baffling product.

Season 12

Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs [12.1]

Rules must always be evaluated for their power to oppress. This is a blind spot to crypto enthusiasts because they just assume that they're the early adopters, they're the ones who will have power, they're the ones who will get to set the rules, and they're the ones who will do the oppressing.

It's a movement driven in no small part by rage, by people who looked at 2008, who looked at the system as it exists, but concluded that the problems with capitalism were that it didn't provide enough opportunities to be the boot. And that's the pitch: buy in now, buy in early, and you could be the high tech future boot.

A different system does not inherently mean a better system. We replace bad systems with worse ones all the time. We replaced a bad system of work and bosses with a terrible system of apps, gigs, and on-demand labour. So it's not just that I oppose NFTs because the foremost of them are aesthetically vacuous representations of the dead inner lives of the tech and finance bros behind them, it's that they represent the vanguard of a worse system.

I think the thing that normies don't "get" about NFT bros is their dedication, the staggering volume of capital they already control, and how deeply rooted they are in the culture of the people who operate the platforms we all use every day, and that alone is a good reason for people to pay attention. They have a lot of money and a lot of clout they can use to try and make Fetch happen.

Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins [12.2]

So I’ve been getting bombarded with these ads on YouTube lately, all the hustle culture, passive income, work from your garage, goulash of multi-level marketing, investment scams, cryptocurrency, and business guru nonsense. You know the stuff:
"Here outside my garage. Just bought this new Lamborghini."

"Want to know the best way of making a big income online? It's making a lot of small incomes online."

"I'm here within 400 feet of an elementary school to prove the haters wrong and to tell you about an unmissable business opportunity."

"If you give me your money, I will use my magic powers to guarantee 500% APY."

I said one of my goals in this was to test the ethical boundaries of the system, but -- shockingly -- the system doesn't have any.

Season 14

About That Idris Elba Gold Documentary [14.1]

Gold is at once a practical and useful metal, but also a social construct, an ideoform that connects its actual uses and various imposed social meanings. Any comprehensive answer to the question "what is gold?" unavoidably carries an emotional component, and that is a complex thing to unwind.

There is a narrative around gold that starts in its physical properties but balloons into its own collection of cultural signifiers, its own mythology, and any thorough discussion about gold will inevitably intersect technology, colonialism, war, and climate change. So when we talk of gold we’re really talking about three distinct yet entwined things, all sharing a name: gold, the element, gold, the narrative, and gold, the commodity, and it is this last one that is the subject of our conversation today.

The doc then very awkwardly frames gold as a liberating force for black miners:
Idris Elba: But with gold comes power, and those gold miners, they knew that.
Because you see… gold, by being so useful, gave the miners a bargaining chip. By withholding their labor, and denying the country access to the gold… really, the black community was empowered. It’s a subtle re-framing of a labor strike not as the withholding of labor, but as the withholding of product. An inert mineral is stealing the valor of labor unions. It’s very weird.

By saying ‘here is what happened then, and here is what is happening now’, the text argues that mining companies have fixed the problem. That’s already wild on its face, but even within the doc it’s absurd. One is a serious, politically charged conversation dealing with the subject of race and systemic exploitation; the other is about the quirks of driving a $5 million RC truck for a day job. The argument does not land at all, but the documentary just moves on with an entirely undeserved confidence that it has tackled the subject of race in the global mining sector.

I Don't Know James Rolfe [14.2]

I am far from the first person to ask the question "who is James Rolfe?" James is, by reputation, personally extremely offline, he values his privacy and sees social media as a distraction from his craft, tries to keep his personal life personal. That is an admirable quality, but it’s also not a hard line. Obviously I’m holding his self-published autobiography. Whatever secrecy James enjoys by not dropping selfies on the 'gram every day he makes up for with infrequent, but overwhelming trips into his personal affairs. He may not go often, but when he goes, he goes big. And maybe that is why it has wormed its way into my brain.

There were many people putting out the same kind of material as James, but his film-making background gave him a critical advantage in the early days of YouTube. Simply owning a digital camera and having a basic grasp of audio separated him from his competitors filming on webcams. James Rolfe was perfectly positioned and, by coincidence, struck an iron he didn’t even know was hot.

The shocking thing, really, is how absent the Nerd is in the book, to the point it’s hard to articulate how little weight is given to the subject. You learn more about what James thinks of the film Wavelength than you do about his thoughts on the web show that is, holistically, his twenty-year career.

If Wavelength could be said to have a core theme, it would be reflection. The film uses boredom and frustration to force the viewer to engage. A wandering mind is, in its own way, an intended response. The viewer is compelled to reflect on their role in proceedings, their role as a viewer. The movie, in essence, holds a mirror up to the audience. In cursing the time lost, and in describing their tortuous experiences, even the most checked-out students unknowingly engage with the film’s ideas. That is the unique power of Wavelength. Even in rejecting it, the viewer learns something about themselves.

It takes work to be a clown. James has skills as a performer, his ability to suppress his self-consciousness and yell, scream, fart, and vomit for an audience isn’t to be downplayed. Do you have... any idea how hard it is to get mad on camera? There’s a whole instinct of embarrassment, of self-preservation, that you need to bury in order to sit alone in a room and howl at full volume for an audience that doesn’t even exist! They can’t see you, the real you, sitting on the floor of your basement debasing yourself for them! They’re just phantasms off in the future that are going to consume some ghost of you spewed out at them by their phones as a crass homunculus of photons and digital audio!

James states that, in 1997, he got into "the kind of music you don't hear as much on the radio", like Metallica". Metallica... Metallica, in 1997, was one of the biggest bands in the world, every weirdo nerd our age had a Metallica phase in the mid-90s, I had a Metallica phase in the mid-90s. Just to seal the absurdity, he name-drops "King Nothing", a Top 10 single on the U.S. Hot 100 from an album that was Number One in eighteen countries in a decade where people still bought albums! If you wanted to communicate the irony of a character in a film -- someone with a self-mythology of outsider status while ultimately being no less in-step with extremely mainstream tastes, you would drape the character in a Metallica t-shirt. An editor would've caught this immediately.

He insists throughout that he was just a bystander, and doesn't really contend with the fact that if you point a camera at someone, and they turn to the camera and go "Hey, check this out!" before jump-kicking a light fixture until it explodes, you are a participant!

Is this the fruit of obsession? Is this where compulsion takes us? Are the damned and the damnable all doomed to wander to Home Depot? Building something "kinda the same" isn't enough. A half-assed, cynical replica isn't enough, if you build it out of malice you inject it full of all your own prejudices, it ends up bad for reasons you’ve created, and it tells you nothing. James’ board is planed and square, so my board must be planed, squared, and sanded, taken seriously, a good faith replica, not just a joke.

In a spiritual sense James has trapped himself on the couch: his access to the capital resources needed for larger projects is dwindling and his sensibilities as a filmmaker are too myopic to appeal to an audience that isn’t humoring him, telling him that Rex Viper is cute and they’re just glad he’s having fun. In a more literal sense, James has trapped himself on the couch because the room is just too small. I had heard this before, but I find that just saying it or looking at frame grabs doesn’t do justice to the realities of physical space, so I did the thing any normal person would do and built a 1:12 scale diorama of the Nerd Room.

The conclusion of the video is muddled, just kinda wanders between a few different ideas, but the intent is clear: it’s a reflection on just how far James has come, and an aspiration of just how far he has to go, a phase of his life coming to an end just as conclusively as this dragon being torn out and replaced. That metaphor crumbles to bitter ash when you realize that the dragon didn’t really go anywhere; it was displaced all of thirty feet, from sitting inside the water fountain to standing beside the gate of Fox Chase playground. In a way The Dragon in My Dreams is itself a brutal metaphor for James’s career: James is a calcified dragon whose films have barely changed between high school and middle age, uprooted from VHS and transplanted thirty feet away in HD.

We don’t have the James Rolfe, we have a crass homunculus of James constructed out of photons and wavelengths, delivered to us through our screens, a codex of symbols we can interpret but never fully know, and in that void between the real and the perceived, impose meaning, compelled by what we’ll never know.

Anyway, what you need to do to progress is confront your insecurities and accept that you're not a filmmaker, either.

External links

Folding Ideas quotes at the Internet Movie Database
Folding Ideas