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- [00:01]
A
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- [01:46]
B
Welcome to the Compact Podcast today. Today we'll discuss Graham Platner's victory in the Maine Democratic Senate primary, Canada's new AI for All program, and the horror films, obsession and backrooms. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schillenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So the guy with the Nazi tattoo is the Democratic Senate nominee for Maine. Jeff, are you cheered by the victory of this working class hero?
- [02:24]
C
More or less, yeah. I mean, I'm not, you know, necessarily a fan or don't actually see him as a hero, but I do think it, it shows the Democratic Party establishment is increasingly unable to keep control over what happens. And I think that's overall a good thing. We saw it with Mamdani. The party establishment clearly didn't want him and wasn't able to mount a credible alternative. And so in this case you see a pretty similar pattern playing out in terms of Platner's clear messiness and problematic tattoos and various troubling antecedents. You know, his sort of Reddit posting history. You know, all of this seems like it, it repeats pattern that we saw the GOP go through with Trump coming into power. And I mean you can also think back pre Trump to all of these kind of weird, there's like this history of these weird candidates who kept getting elected and who kept winning primaries in, you know, the Years before Trump, most notably, like, this. This, like, bizarre woman who, if you recall, I can't remember her name actually, but she had this video where she had to deny that she was a witch. You know, she.
- [03:57]
B
Like Christine o'. Donnell.
- [03:59]
C
Yeah, so. Right, right. Christina o'. Donnell. So. So there were these signs already within the party that it was unable. That the party establishment was unable to control the primary process and get its favorite candidates through. And you had all these very messed up candidates who ended up being. And in fact, like, I'd say some of them were more. More messed up than Platner in the sense that it wasn't. I mean, I'm not even sure anybody remembers what exactly like, Christine o' Donnell stood for or how she ended up. I think maybe she was just, like, vaguely seen as the Tea Party candidate or something. But, you know, Platner, he's not, you know, whatever. We can go into all of his positions and, you know, whether he's LARPing as working class because he's actually from this sort of prep school background, you know, he's essentially this kind of downwardly mobile bourgeois figure, which I saw some post that was pointing out this is like, kind of a common pattern in Maine. These, like, guys whose family has a summer home there, but then they just decide to sort of stick around and work on the lobster boat. Yeah.
- [05:13]
B
Goes full townie.
- [05:15]
C
Yeah. And so, like, anyway, there. There may be something to that. You know, maybe there's a contingent of other downwardly mobile prep school guys who are gonna line up behind him. I don't know. But the point is, I think the. The pattern that seems most significant to me here is the Democrats failing to control the primary process and not being able to get their favored. And by the Democrats, I mean the party establishment, which clearly kind of threw everything. You know, this New York Times expose on Platner's, you know, romantic history was. Was pretty remarkable as a demonstration of the paper serving as a. An organ of party establishment discomfort with this particular candidate. It was kind of strange, you know, me too, you know, kind of zombie, me too type set of allegations that, like, you know, he made some of his former girlfriends feel uncomfortable by raising his voice and stuff. And, like, this is supposed to be some sort of, you know, damning, damning expose. And then what's. What's also remarkable as an aside, is that you suddenly saw, like, Republicans seizing on this New York Times MeToo article and being, like, shocking that. That, you know, the Democrats would have this candidate who was mean to his girlfriends but in any case, I think it's. So there's a lot of weird stuff going on around this. But, you know, the overall pattern I think is, is significant is the Democrats are increasingly unable to control the primaries, and that's overall a healthy thing, just as it was in the GOP when they were unable to squeeze Trump out because it showed a certain vitality of democracy, even if we don't like the results. And the basic situation in the Democratic Party is that the party has successfully stifled attempts to, you know, challenge establishment control in repeated presidential elections. That's part of how you ended up with the senile Joe Biden, is how you ended up with Kamala Harris. And, you know, this party, the, the Democratic Party will never be healthy as long as it. And, you know, necessarily saying the Republican Party has ended up in a healthy place as a result of Trump kind of breaking up party establishment control. But I do think that it's been a more robustly democratic process within, within the gop, which has not been the case in the Democratic Party for quite a while. And so it would be good if we see more of these, whether we like them or not, sort of problematic figures who the party establishment doesn't like managing to break through anyway and win primaries. Because at some point the, the dead hand of this extremely hated establishment needs to be. Needs to be broken and a more kind of vital democratic culture needs to be revived within the Democratic Party just for the, whether you're a Democrat or not, just for the health of democracy and the country as a whole. So, overall, yes, I celebrate the Nazi tattoo guy with the problematic dating past winning the primary because it's just another. I mean, for the same reason that I celebrated Mamdani beating Cuomo despite not being the hugest fan, just because it's a. It. It shows that you can still defeat this extremely sclerotic and moribund, you know, in some cases, literally moribund party establishment. And more of that has to happen.
- [09:39]
B
Yeah, I want to take a bit of a victory lap for my own victory, not Platner's, because I wrote an article for the New York Times this spring focusing on Gavin Newsom, but mentioning Graham Platner. And I guess the Times titled it for Democrats, the era of the girl, dad and male ally is over. And as I wrote in the piece, Newsom and other Democratic figures have embraced an unapologetic, some might say toxic form of masculinity. And this, this kind of observation came to mind again after, during Platner's campaign, you had Jennifer Welch the progressive podcast star saying, you know, everyone's talking about toxic relationships and tattoos. I don't give a F if somebody had a toxic relationship. I myself have been a toxic girlfriend. I've had toxic boyfriends. That's part of the human experience. You know, Welch is someone who's been on the New Yorker Radio Hour. You know, she's kind of, you know, interviews and is photographed with Brad Lander, the New York progressive Democratic House candidate. So she's, you know, kind of highly respected kind of member. You know, you mentioned the kind of the Republicans embracing me, too. I don't know what Jennifer Welch's past statements were in the MeToo era, and so I won't pretend to characterize her views on that, but she's certainly embedded in a social and political context that was foursquare behind me, too. And things are changing. I think they're changing in the Democratic Party not purely because of the desire to seek political advantage. In Platner's case, I think there's actually a sense in many quarters in the Democratic Party that the party has to find specifically straight white men, ideally straight, white Christian men, as some Democratic partisans have said, and it needs to back them. And further, that those men need to kind of lean into a toxicity that will broaden their appeal and sort of assure their authenticity. So that's. I think that's amply demonstrated by Platner's. When. In the. In the response to it. I don't. I don't myself maintain that, you know, Platner's toxic elements per se endear him to the electorate. I mean, it's obvious that they aren't just qualifying for Democratic primary electorates. But I think it's notable that a lot of people within, you know, Democratic and progressive circles see almost see Platner's scandals as a point in his favor and something that will appeal to voters, whether or not that's the case.
- [12:46]
D
Yeah, because they're rediscovering populism. They're like, oh, when you stop using this managerial language and this careful PR framing, it actually connects to people. Let's give that a go. But it struck me what you were talking about. Is he really working class, or is he one of these downwardly mobile PMC types? I think that really matters because this is how the direction that labor went in the uk, where the most radical wing is exactly these kinds of people. But they're like, I'm working class. But because culture is so much more obvious in the UK than it is for you guys, it's so hard to tell. Class in the US and Canada. Really difficult. I can't because I don't know. Now I can because maybe I've been in the UK for too long. You know, you can tell that these people are not working class in that, in that older sense. They're not like Eddie Dempsey or something like that where he's on Sky News and he's like, all right, what we've got to do like this. And they have. And like the things that they care about are not the sorts of things. Like no, like ex doc worker was like waving Palestine flags in high school or in whatever. You know, it was like this very specific kind of person. I've seen it so many times where they're like downwardly mobile but they're like happy about it. Oh yes. Now I, I, no one's going to play the privilege card on me. So I'm like, I'm untouchable. I'm not privileged. I'm, I'm the real deal. But their cultural capital is, remains very pmc. And I find that, I actually find those types to be the most dangerous because they appear to have like, they appear to speak for the working class, but it's a, it's a facade. At the end of the day, I don't think they actually really get it because they don't know what it's like, like to, you know, have cement floors or whatever. Like it's, I think it like fundamentally changes you. I don't know, maybe that's my, maybe that's too standpoint theory, but I don't know. I'm highly suspicious. I'm not, I'm not nearly as. I mean, maybe it's good to like, you know, shake things up a bit and to shake up that kind of managerial stuff. But is it really, or is it a performance? Is it like, oh, we're going to be populous but like performatively, but still at the end of the day, have the same kind of PMC liberal kind of concerns and maybe we'll throw in a couple of things that seem really edgy.
- [15:02]
B
Maybe there's a certain parallel. Yeah, maybe this is a strained comparison, but George W. Bush came from super elite background but had a much more populous style and was really perceived as a populist figure, much more populist style than his father did. And he kind of, in his way of speaking, in his manner of dress and in the cultural markers he adopted more generally distance himself from the Kennebunkport pole of the Bush identity and kind of Leaned into this down home Texan identity. He talked about his problems with drugs and irresponsibility and how he found the Lord and met a good woman and put his life back together. And I think Platner is trying to maybe construct a narrative that's something like that. Bush did not pretend to a working class identity, but he did adopt kind of anti. Sort of elite cultural markers. Yeah. People said that Platner had attended a prep school. And then I finally bunced into this, stumbled across someone saying he had attended, however briefly, something called the Hotchkiss School, which I don't know the exact rankings of American prep schools, but my impression is that's really one of the most prestigious. I remember that being one of those names with a certain cachet when I was at Princeton. These guys who were, you know, more aware of how everything worked than I was, you know, that's the kind of school they had attended. So, yeah, I mean, is he downwardly mobile? Yeah, he's. I mean, he's. Maybe. If there were a sequel to Metropolitan, you know, Whit Stillman's film about downwardly mobile prep school kids, you know, you would see one of the characters, you
- [17:07]
C
know,
- [17:09]
B
I think one's named Nick, going out to his family's vacation home in Maine or the Cape or whatever and kind of becoming a dock worker and starting to drink beer out of bottles or cans and wearing T shirts and other things. It'd be kind of fun to see, I think. I think Collins will probably beat him, but who knows? It looks like. It looks like a close race. So,
- [17:43]
C
you know, Tom Townsend in Metropolitan is already, you know, he's a Fourierist. So he's already. You could already imagine him as a sort of.
- [17:52]
B
He is a proto. He's a proto Chapo dude.
- [17:57]
C
But of course, he's. He's from the upper. The sort of downscale Upper west side, this interloper. But yeah, he, you know, you could imagine his sort of Fourierist campaign to, you know, maybe that. That Upper west side congressional district that's currently being heavily fought over between. I can't remember who all the candidates are, but, you know, a number of colorful characters.
- [18:27]
B
That's incredibly easy to.
- [18:29]
C
Throwing his hat in the ring as a Fourierist.
- [18:32]
B
It's incredibly easy to see a couple of these guys attending a DSA meeting and getting in trouble for violating some kind of health or speech protocol and kind of going through an excruciating but fairly obscure cancellation cycle. Anyway, in other news, Canada has announced an AI for all plan AI for All and all for AI Mark Carney. He's trying to, I guess, lay out a safer, more responsible approach to AI than the one you see in the kind of savage landscape of laissez faire America. Is that right, Ashley?
- [19:26]
D
Yeah. So my spider senses were tingling, as I like to say when I see this, because I. I follow the news in, like, five different countries. So it just so happened that I was. I listen to Times Radio every morning and there's an announcement that says, oh, the UK is going to have this national supercomputer. We're gonna have safe AI for all. And I don't know if that was the exact words, but it was very, very similar kind of wording. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. I highly doubt, you know, they'll. They'll put it, you know, these things are. These agendas are solutions in search of problems. So, you know, there might be actual problems that they were like, oh, I'm just going to solve all these problems. But, you know, it's an agenda that's already sitting on a shelf somewhere. And what confirmed this for me is I'm listening to Canadian radio and I hear Mark Carney announces a new national AI strategy, a new AI plan for all prioritizing strengthening data protections and safety online. I was like, ah. And the way that they were describing it was almost identical. So that tells me that there's some kind of. And I'm going to try to explain this in a way that doesn't sound conspiratorial, because these things are quite banal and they happen all the time. You have these. And I apologize for my sniffling, I've got a cold. You have these strategies that are developed in, like, the OECD or in at the UN or something like that, and coalitions of countries will adopt them all at the same time, and they will sell them differently in their various countries because, as I said, their solutions in search of problems. And this is exactly what's going on here. So, as I suspected, it's part of a. Well, the deeper kind of roots of it is in the oecd, which has been looking at this kind of stuff since way back in 2016 and released some, like, AI principles and so on. But the idea is, and this is where you should start being very suspicious is this idea of, like, a trustworthy AI, this a safer, more trustworthy AI, because obviously they're going to realize, I'm sure they have realized that as more and more searches are getting routed through AI, this offers an opportunity to control Information in a far less traceable way than when you manipulate Google searches. And that is not a conspiracy. That is like you for a long time, if you tried to Google certain controversial issues, the top results explicitly attempted to kind of curate your experience in a particular direction. So you have this opportunity to do that with AI without, you know, without that, that trail that makes it quite so obvious. So all this stuff about like a trustworthy AI and all this is highly concerning because obviously there's a deep, deep concern for control of information. A suspicion that the Elon Musk's of the world, if you give them too much power over these technologies, not unfounded suspicion, but in particular, I mean if, if Elon Musk was like pro trans rainbow flag waving, they wouldn't care. But because of who he is. You know, there's this enormous concern, just one example, this enormous concern that these people are, are having too much control over information. They want to have obviously that kind of control. And then the other thing too is part of this policy is increasing the adoption of AI and certain education around it. And this is not just in Canada. This is part of the kind of broader international strategy without. And it's very interesting because it is, you can tell these kinds of agendas are many, many years in the making because the data is coming through now. Is it even the case that AI increases productivity to the extent that it did that, that people thought it would. I meant to say, you know, when it first came out, people were like, you know, even I was like, hey, this new tool is a great way to like cut down a word count. That's what I thought. And now it's like so embarrassing to have used AI to cut down a word count because I thought that's all it was doing. No, it was like inputting all of its silly little AI isms. And you know, people wind up spending so much more time trying to get rid of the aism. So that you can see this was a human that did it because no one's. And actually as I was trying to research this, I could not find an article that wasn't written by AI. And I wasn't going to just, you know, go off the information in an AI article because I don't know, has a human checked this? So you know, you, you can't simply like think, oh we're going to build this economy on it and so on with totally ignoring the actual usage in the world.
- [23:52]
B
Yeah, I, I hear from editors pretty frequently of people who are, you're receiving articles. Maybe it's accepted by someone else in the organization, or maybe there's a powerful reason to run the article, but it seems to have AI artifacts. It's not something you can definitely establish, but maybe it has an AI feel. So then a great amount of time is devoted to attempting to humanize the prose. And there's an issue there. It's not really saving that much time in those cases.
- [24:32]
D
Yeah, because at the end of the day, you want to know that a human hand was on this, right? Because we know that these machines are not infallible. And as I was just explaining, highly vulnerable to manipulation. So, you know, nobody. That's why people don't want to read AI stuff, because it's like, I can't trust this information anymore. I can't trust you anymore. So this is why, you know, all of this hype around it is going to die down. But they're just going ahead full, full, full steam ahead. Like, you know, like there's no difference between humans and, and silicon. You know, we'll just swap one out for the other. It's all the same, you know, because that, this is how they want humans to be, just this undifferentiated mass. And the annoying thing is that they're not. But here you go, you have this opportunity to make this undifferentiated mass of data and use that instead, and they just love it. They just love it. It offers this opportunity to kind of push humans out of the process and to have some predictability. But as it turns out, that's simply not the case. Or maybe it is, but it's predictably wrong.
- [25:37]
C
But I mean, isn't it the case that these companies have too much power? And I don't necessarily endorse this particular document or whatever from Canada, but I wrote something about, about what I called zombie cyber libertarianism a few weeks ago for the substack. And I do think, unfortunately, a lot of concern about the state's covert or overt involvement in information technologies in recent years, in my view, unfortunately, tends to cash out as basically the view that tech, I mean, it, it's, it's zombie cyber libertarianism. Because once the view, and I remember when people, you know, not particularly of any, any specific political persuasion, just seem to believe that if you just let, you know, Google have as much power and, and control as it, as it wants, then it's fundamentally a benevolent thing. And so basically we just need, you know, it's, it's a kind of laissez faire for tech specifically. And I mean, nobody really has this rosy view of tech companies anymore anyway. And you know, for whatever sort of liberal worries about Elon Musk, you can find conservatives who think, you know who. You can find many, many right wingers claiming that anthropic is run by, you know, communists, literally, like I just go on X. And you'll find many, many, many, many posts saying, and Dario Amadei is a communist and things like this. And so nobody actually trusts these companies anymore for all kinds of different reasons. And yet there does seem to still be this default idea that well, if we just remove the hand of the state from these operations, then somehow it will spontaneously produce better society or something like this. So I don't know, I find I'm just sort of increasingly wary of these sorts of, you know, without necessarily wanting to endorse this particular position. I'm, I'm just. Because, I mean in part because it's like, okay, well, Google manipulated the results, but what does it mean? Or sorry, the state, you know, coerced Google into manipulate. So what does it mean that these results were manipulated? What would be the non manipulated version of them? Is there any, you know, there's some kind of dream of some purely neutral, you know, it's essentially the fantasy of the market, right? It's, it's the dream that facilitates some sort of purely neutral exchange. And you know, it's exchange of ideas rather than goods, although, you know, that's problematic. But you know, this is the sort of early Silicon Valley ideology, right, that, that these, these tools should be fundamentally neutral arenas of exchange of, of ideas, of non tangible goods, let's say. And that if you just kind of let them alone, you know, laissez faire, then they will just produce this kind of perfect Hayekian spontaneous order. And I just, I find the, you know, while I may find this sort of AI governance proposals dissatisfying, I also find the critique dissatisfying because it's like, well, so if the, if the state just steps out of this, which is kind of inconceivable anyway, insofar as the state is already integrated so deeply with all of these technologies really from the beginning, then it will somehow just generate the spontaneous, benevolent, democratic, you know, small d democratic order that we will understand to be free and legitimate. I don't know, I'm not saying I have a solution, but my fear is that the skepticism of these AI governance proposals simply cashes out, or it's hard for it not to cash out as a kind of zombie cyber libertarianism where the assumption is, well, if we just get the state out of this, then somehow the results will be more, you know, authentic and will again embody this Hayekian spontaneous order of pure neutral exchange. Do you see what I'm saying? So I guess, like, I'm sort of both dissatisfied with the proposals and with the critique of the proposals.
- [30:22]
D
Yeah, I agree. And I did say, like, for good reason. You know, it's not like there's not a reason to be deeply suspicious of these companies, but I think the reason that they are deeply suspicious is not even the one that they should be, you know, because he's like, not on their side. He's got this kind of populist spin. He's a thorn in their, in their side, this sort of thing. Not because for all the reasons that you've just said, but I think it's still worthwhile to point out that what they want to do, I mean, it's. Maybe it's not worthwhile because it's too obvious, but like a safe and trustworthy state AI, these things are. This is an oxymoron. This is not anything that, that can come up and solve this kind of problem. And it's. If anything, it's. It's much, much worse. But I don't know, like, if the only thing that we can do, I mean, like, I don't know, thinking about it, maybe this is the sort of thing that states ought to do. Because what is it that we want states to do when it is far too expensive to compete with the Elon Musk of the world. I keep saying Elon Musk, but obviously Sam Altman would be a better example with these, these sorts of enormous kind of quasi monopolies. Then you want the state to step in and attempt to kind of break that up and have, and. And invest to the extent an individual wouldn't be able to. And then we'll have more competition and, you know, a lot of bad ideas competing with each other is better or two or something like that. So, you know, maybe we'll get to a point where we've got our state AI and our Grok and our Anthropic and our ChatGPT. And eventually one hopes they will lead us back to some humans arguing and then we can make up our minds.
- [32:06]
B
Who here has seen Obsession in backrooms? The sensational commercial successes, notifications, so much commentary. The, the new horror films.
- [32:18]
C
I have seen both.
- [32:22]
B
I have seen one.
- [32:26]
C
I assume you've seen Obsession online. Yes.
- [32:31]
B
You've seen clips, articles.
- [32:35]
C
I assume what I want to. What I want. Matthew to say is that he's actually only seen back rooms. He wrote about obsess. He wrote on heteropessimist horror for Compact about obsession. But like Slavoj I, he writes about movies without having seen them.
- [32:52]
B
Yeah, it should be a journalistic point of pride or. I mean, it's. The most aristocratic approach to journalism is to refuse to actually read or watch anything you're commenting on or inform yourself on any political topic. But to read and watch things purely for pleasure, just as leisure, from which you extract no work product. That would be the true kind of aristocrat of the soul when it comes to journalism. But I am, yeah, sadly more of a drudge. And the thing that I wrote on is the thing I watched. Yeah, for us. I, you know, for podcasts, haven't read the compact over the last week. Do so you can subscribe. You'll get the first month for just $3. It's a great deal. And you can read my piece on heteropessimist horror. So I discuss obsession, which really describes a young man getting his wish, which is for this girl he has a crush on to be totally devoted to him and date him. He gets his wish and it's terrible. And I see this as one of a number of filmic reckonings with the trend of heteropessimism. That's a term coined by Asa Saracen, a feminist theorist, but it's not just a term. It's a phenomenon that's observable in our society. As you'll see in many hand wringing articles, young people are dating less, they're having less sex. This isn't established at a national statistical level, but I think there are reports that suggest high school dances are declining in popularity. When people get married, they're getting married later. Fewer people are getting married. According to the projections of Lyman Stone, a widely cited demographer, about a third of young people today will never have been married when they reach age 45. So people are getting more alienated from relationships. The overwhelming majority of these people are heterosexual and that's the kind of relationship from which they're increasingly alienated. So we see a move away from this along with a rhetoric critiquing heterosexuality as, you know, oppressive or just cringe worthy. Overly constraining comes most prominently from the left. And that's the only currency that this critique has in mainstream prestige discourse. But that critique is present as well on the right with things like the men going their own way movement. This is one kind of element of the manosphere. And they're the kind of people who would say things like, better to have a robot with which you can satisfy yourself, then unite yourself to that detestable creature, a woman. Unthinkable.
- [36:15]
C
Well, then there's Nick Fuentes's position that heterosexual relationships are gay.
- [36:23]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a really good kind of concise expression of this sort of masculinist heteropessimism. Yeah, that's, that's very on, on point from him in terms of summing up the view of that cohort. So that was my take on Obsession. Read it online backrooms. I have failed to construct a Jizekian reading on the basis of my total ignorance.
- [36:56]
C
Yeah, so I do think, obviously these movies are paired because they're both by young directors. I believe Obsession. The Director is what, 25 or 26, is that right?
- [37:08]
B
Something, something like that. Yes, very good.
- [37:12]
C
But then backrooms. The director is, I believe, 20 or 19 even.
- [37:19]
B
Yeah. So it would have, I mean, would have almost have been a minor when all this got going, you know, the production of the film. Right.
- [37:28]
C
So these films are, I mean, they're interesting and I suppose like slightly encouraging in that there are box office hits that are, you know, essentially like relatively low budget independent films by new directors. So I can't help but find that somewhat encouraging for the culture.
- [37:50]
B
Oh, totally, yeah, totally. Because, I mean, especially, you know, as has been much discussed, this was the same weekend, you know, these films were competing against something called Mandalorian and Grogu, which is a Star wars film. And it's just, there's something so ridiculous and depressing about this kind of constant recycling of this kind of rotting horse flesh. Ip like, oh, man, this is great. We've got the, you know, if you love Mandalorian and if you love Grogu, whatever those things are, we're bringing them together in the latest installment of Star wars, this cutting edge thing.
- [38:34]
C
Right. Ironically, because Star wars is all about, you know, the little guy against the Empire. And I, I never wrote this, but I was going to write something about the Star wars prequels called, you know, the IP Empire Strikes Back or something like that. And, you know, it really is, it's, it's remarkable that the, I think the culminating scene of the last installment, the Rise of the Skywalker, I read as almost an allegory of this whole situation because essentially, you know, there's this battle against these, these sort of zombified Sith warriors, you know, which have been entombed on this obscure planet and are Waiting to be awakened. So this is already. Okay. You're just like, reviving this old IP for another, you know, for another turn. And then. And then, you know, the. The. The rebels strike back by resuscitating their own sort of dead stock of like, you know, just kind of pulling it all out of the warehouse. So suddenly Lando Calrissian shows up, you know, for this culminating scene. And so it's. I mean, it's incredibly depressing just because the. The culminating scene of the movie, as I read it, is just an allegory of, again, this kind of bizarre situation where culture has just become this stock of. This. This stock of IP that can just be kind of trotted out repeatedly. So anyway, it's encouraging to see these. These films, these sort of upstart films, as successful as they are. I thought they were. They were sort of a study in contrast in my reading obsession, I thought was a very. It was one of these very tightly structured horror films. It just. It was. It was effectively plotted and. And worked in that way. And it was not a particularly original conceit. Ultimately. You know, it's. It's sort of the. The Monkey's Paw, you know, sort of be careful what you wish for type of story. The thing that was perhaps notable about it and, you know, in a sort of Zizekian sense is, you know, you can argue that it. Its basic notion is, is that, you know, love is this kind of bizarre parasite that takes you over. And, you know, the. The reading would be, you know, yes, this is actually just what sort of normal love actually is. But, you know, what there has to be is a. For that to work, there has to be an identification with the parasitization. And if you compare this to another, I'd say inferior movie where the allegory was, like, a little too over the top and it had other weaknesses. But together, which is this horror film, I believe, from a year or two ago, about this couple who moved to this, you know, move out of the city to this more rural location, this more kind of secluded house, and they start sort of physically merging with each other. And so a lot of the drama comes from these Cronenbergian body horror sequences where their bodies are just starting to enmesh with each other. And so then it turns out that, you know, they live in this place where there's this, like, bizarre substance bubbling up from under the ground that they've come into contact with that causes this to occur. And. But, you know, obviously you can read it as this sort of allegory, but Then the thing it does is that eventually, you know, initially this is experienced as horror, but then they eventually decide to identify with this, this parasitic, monstrous entity that has taken them over. And it does start with this kind of heteropessimist theme of like the, you know, particularly the male character being a sort of underachieving loser type, the woman being the more, you know, career successful member of the pair and you know, her being really invested in the relationship and him being kind of depressive and disengaged and unable to commit. And so, you know, in order for that problem, that deadlock to be solved, this parasite comes in. This kind of body eating parasite comes in and sort of forcibly merges them. But then what you do have in the culmination is this identification with this alien process that has taken them over. And so what's notable in Obsession is that you don't in fact the final moment, spoiler for people who haven't seen it involves this disidentification, you know, the character whose brain has been hijacked by this sort of monstrous parasite imposed on her through this wish fulfillment, this sort of primitive wish fulfillment technology, you know, in the final scene is just looking around in horror at the bodies strewn around and is completely disidentified with the process that has, has taken her over and has kind of precipitated this entire sequence of events. So it's a film in which, you know, in the end you are and, and you've mostly identified with the male protagonist who is unable to own his own wish. Right. Once his wish is fulfilled, he's horrified by it, so he's unable to identify with or own his own wish. And so there's this kind of. And then it ends with the female main character who's been sort of brain hijacked throughout the story, you know, suddenly free of that curse and just completely alienated from her own experience. And so there, you know, I think it does very effectively portray that sense of, of a kind of unability, inability to identify with these. And again, I think together does demonstrate this as well in the, the main character, particularly the male protagonists kind of enemy and inability to identify with or invest himself in his own relationship. And, but, but then that, that problem is solved. Like the horror, you know, motif ends up solving that problem in a monstrous and disturbing way. In, in Obsession that problem is never solved. And so we end up with this experience of radical alienation and, and solitude in the final moment. Backrooms. I I'd say is, is much less of a successful story. It's Really a film that is. Is based on a spatial conceit, you know, coming out of this. And you know, the other fascinating thing about it is that it, in terms of the sort of economy of culture is that it comes out of this 4chan post of the, you know, this, this sort of creepy image of this abandoned, you know, seemingly kind of corporate office space with these, these sort of yellow walls and carpets and, and, you know, so turns this. And, you know, the Juan reading would be it. It sort of turns these, this space into some sort of metaphor of the unconscious. It becomes, it's, it's a little bit like Tarkovsky's great films Stalker and Solaris, both of which. And I mean, it's also kind of about wish fulfillment, right? Both of which use a kind of spatial conceit. In the case of Stalker, this kind of irradiated disaster zone. In the case of Solaris, this strange planet where it becomes this. The space becomes a kind of screen onto which desire can be projected and you know, wishes can be fulfilled in various ways. And the, the, the backroom space which the main character sort of discovers under his. Under the store that he owns is, Is, you know, serves a similar kind of function. It becomes this kind of strange projection of the unconscious, of unconscious wishes. And so it does actually have to do with kind of desire and wish fulfillment as well. And so to that extent, I think they're both about this kind of alienation from this alienated experience of desire. This experience of desire as fundamentally kind of alienated and externalized. And so they're similar in that respect. But I'd say that backrooms works better as an aesthetic than as a narrative. And, but, but in a way, the other thing that I thought was interesting about it is that it's kind of a. It felt like a very Gen Z sort of. Or maybe the director being 19 or 20 is Gen Alpha. I'm not sure thing where it's really about. It's also about culture as just this kind of hodgepodge archive of random. And this is the other kind of weird thing about it that the director was born in around 2000, but it's set in 1990. And there's clearly just this fascination with the aesthetics of that era, which obviously we've seen in other, other major cultural properties. You know, if you think of like Stranger Things said a few years earlier before that, that, you know, people are just fascinated with the aesthetic, you know, and particularly younger people who didn't live through those times are, are evidently just fascinated with the aesthetics of that era. And so that's I think part of what's going on here. And that I think narrative sort of breaks down because it ends up just being this opportunity to kind of explore this weird archive. And it's also interesting to me that the whole thing is set in and beneath the furniture store because there is some sense of culture as just furniture. Like that all of these kind of aesthetic motifs that it draws upon are. It's that all of them are just kind of things lying around kind of in everything is background. It's not clear what, you know, even sort of the protagonist. It's kind of unclear who the protagonist of this film is. Whether it's the main character who owns the furniture store or his therapist. In some sense both of them are kind of this background objects, background object of the others lives. And so nothing. There's kind of no center to it. There's no, again, it's, it's about alienated disidentification. So I think there's no real strong identification, there's no real narrative. It's just this kind of purely refractory kind of branching out and sort of endlessly wandering through this weird dead archive of, of culture. So it's sort of, I'd say kind of a failed film conceived as narrative, but is kind of a fascinating document in terms of how it enacts that relationship to culture and the cultural archive.
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And with that, thanks to Jeff, thanks to Ashley, and thank you listeners. For more go to compactmag.com subscribe also please. If you enjoy this podcast, consider giving to our summer fundraising campaign. Compact is a 501C3. Your tax deductible donation allows us to build on our success and offer you more of what you love.
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