Category: Uncategorized
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The Pitt and the Simplicity of Complex TV
ER is back only it isn’t ER! At least, not according to the producers of HBO’s The Pit, which combines the tried-and true format of the iconic medical drama of the 90s with 24’s temporal/episodic gimmick, each episode occupying an hour of an absolutely WILD shift at a Pittsburgh emergency room. The effect is uncanny:…
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Clifi Will Not Save Us – Turning Narrative Theory on its Head
On climate fiction, or clifi: Perhaps the underlying message is that you’re supposed to entertain the reader, but more and more, I greet the question with a weary smile-grimace that reveals the skull of me that’s likely to be buried in the ground sometime in the next twenty to thirty years. The search for hope…
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Terrorism Through a Glass Darkly
Years ago as I watched my way through Black Mirror for the firs time I remember being struck by the second episode of the first season called “White Bear.” Before writing this I considered rewatching it, but what stuck with me about the show had less to do with the aesthetic minutiae and more to…
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Antichrist Superstars, from Gregor Mendel to Damien
The First Omen isn’t very scary. At least, not as a horror film typically is. It is basically not suspenseful and the scenes that are supposed to elicit horror and disgust are hamfisted and borderline pornographic. When it comes to the nuts and bolts of how the horror genre works, I look (reluctantly) to Stephen…
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More Like Optimus SubPrime, or Why I Might Start Hating Robots
Big news for nerds this week as bonehead Elon Musk has moved us closer to our rendez-vous with the mechanical abomination called Optimus. Pictures and videos circulated on Twitter, where I saw them and scrolled past, not wanting to engage these images and suggest to the algorithm that I might earnestly be interested in these…
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Babies Having Babies/Reproduction without Sex in Alien: Romulus
The new installment in the Alien franchise is pretty good. Spoilers begin….. NOW. There were good things (proper vibes, look, and sound, characters/performances throughout), there were bad things (resurrected Ian Holme) and a few fucking weird things (why are we getting another xenomorph baby thing? Isn’t this too close to the end of Resurrection, albeit…
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Nayling Cli-Fi
I just had the pleasure of reading Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea and Tusks of Extinction. Both were extremely interesting and accessible examples of cli-fi/sci-fi and I’m excited for more long-form work from Nayler, who is uniquely able to deliver narratives that engage nonhuman characters and issues of interspecies communication and embodiment as…
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Cli-Fi in Celebration of Anthropocentrism?
I recently finished Debbie Urbanksi’s spankin’ new After World. It was a wildly ambivalent experience in the best possible way. Caution: spoilers ahead. Urbanski is writing as an AI writing as a person, and the schtick works pretty well: human sounding except when it isn’t, a rival intelligence keeping us aware of when the AI…
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Resistant Characters, as in, Alexia
The next part of my dissertation is about affect and character, so naturally I am putting the focus on Alexia from Julia Ducournau’s Titane, a film about a mysterious, murderous woman who is impregnated by a car. In her bouts of violence and her truly bizarre attempt to avoid detection by police in the aftermath…
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The Relations within the Productive Forces: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant
Aside from Resurrection and those insipid Alien v. Predator flicks, the prequels to Alien find themselves on the margin, critically and according to fandom. This is sad, for a number of reasons, but not beyond understanding: why does the crew of the Prometheus travel in a shiny future spacecraft while the crew of the Nostromo…
Signs of Life 