As a follow-up on some of my hospital thoughts, another part of my experience was actually leaving the place. I arrived around 10:00 pm on a Tuesday and left about 40 hours later. All things considered, that’s not an overly-long stay. However, as I left the parking lot and drove toward the 110—as merging on to a freeway is the most LA way to be reminded you’re back in the real world—I felt incredibly disoriented.

It’s not just that time seems to stand still, but because of the sterile and ubiquitous nature of hospital rooms, I could have been anywhere. Returning to Los Angeles felt like I’d warped into another world after spending nearly two days staring at the same off-white walls, watching repeats of Law and Order: SVU and listening to my roommate repeat the same Christian affirmations on his phone for hours on end.

There have certainly been two-day stretches where I haven’t left my apartment before, but I’m always reminded of where I am by the helicopters overhead, the cars honking from the intersection, the customers of the plumbing store loading materials into trucks in the parking lot outside my window. I can haul my laundry upstairs and have a pretty decent vantage point of Koreatown from the top. I could lie in bed for days on end and still know I’m in LA.

In the hospital, it’s different. All I hear are asynchronous beeps, all I can see out the window—if there is one—is a concrete parking garage. The news on TV reminds me that LA is out there, somewhere, having car chases and traffic jams, but from my vantage point it might as well be Mars. I didn’t realize it until I left, but I was slowly going crazy while I was stuck there.

It makes me think of everyone who has extended stays in these places, or the elderly living out their terms in the death-care equivalent. People who have no connection to the world outside of four, unchanging walls, stuck in the places the rest of us don’t have to be reminded they exist in. We have such a deformed view of what care entails in this country, and I doubt it’s going to get any better anytime soon.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum, New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin imagined a future where only wealthy people would be able to travel and ‘those of lesser means’ would only be able to experience the world through a VR headset. He goes on to talk about how that might create a divide between rich and poor. Jesus Christ.

It’s quite obvious how the chess pieces of technology, corporations, capital, violence, and governance are being aligned right now to create a future where the majority are ruled with a generally automated iron fist by the few. It’s the plot of endless sci-fi stories, but what comes to mind is Elysium, where the rich build themselves a giant space station as the rest suffer on a burning Earth patrolled by robots. What’s also evident is that those who aren’t quite wealthy, but live comfortably above most, are generally in favor of this divide, even though it would likely see them stuck holding the short end of the stick with the rest (see: Ross Sorkin and the entire NYT op-ed section).

There’s a good chance it is too late to do anything about it. While groups of people who lean left politically exist in the United States, they’re predominantly in urban areas and proportionally tiny compared to the population at large—a population that believes capitalist neoliberalism is ‘left-wing.’ The type of change required to do anything about wealth disparity—via reform or revolution—is simply impossible. In turn, the country will be forced to look on as the people are robbed, their food supply poisoned (or, eventually, lost), and any reaction brutally policed by stalkers and thugs using AI surveillance. (Even at the local level, despite outrage from the people who elected them, city councils are voting in favor of building data centers everywhere.)

Meanwhile, the wealthy and their fans will go on to have discussions about how they’ll be perceived as all of this violence against humankind continues unpunished. The United States has probably passed any point of anyone in power having to deal with any kind of consequence for any action whatsoever. We can’t even properly handle cops standing around for hours during a mass school shooting, much less force the release of the Epstein Files. This country has volunteered itself into submission.

China might be able to reframe the balance of power in the world and possibly diminish the role of capitalism in the future, but the United States will surely burn itself to the ground—and as much of the world as possible—before that happens.

(Like everyone else, I review the films I see on Letterboxd, but I write about movies as a general idea here.)

Zach Cregger has made a Resident Evil movie and it looks awesome. I’m a big fan of both Barbarian and Weapons and have always enjoyed the games when I’ve played them, so I’m pretty stoked on this. Will it win Best Picture? No. Will it be fun as hell? Probably.

Here’s the kicker, though: I love Resident Evil. I don’t mean the IP or any of the specific games. I mean the original movie from 2002 starring Milla Jovovich. I enjoy all of its 100-minute runtime. I can totally admit it’s 100% a bad movie. It’s a bad script with terrible acting and some really awful special effects. Yet still, I love it. It’s a guilty pleasure.

There’s been online discourse of late saying there’s ‘no such thing‘ as a guilty pleasure, or we need to take away the shame of it. (NPR even took a look at the brain science behind the concept.) I would argue the middle ground is where we should land as a society—yes, there are guilty pleasures, but we should also not fear any kind of public shame for indulging in them.

The innocence of guilt

I think a person should be proud to admit they have a guilty pleasure in art or culture because at least they’re admitting to understanding the idea that there are echelons of these things produced in terms of meaning and substance. If you say a Marvel movie is a guilty pleasure, you’re admitting you understand that it’s corporate franchise slop written at a fifth-grade level designed for nothing more than a dopamine rush, but you just don’t care. And that’s fine. It’s the understanding that matters.

I’m not always watching arthouse films. Hell, Bad Boys II is a piece of capitalist copganda and I love the shit out of it. But I know that Michael Bay wasn’t setting out to ask societal questions when he had Will Smith dodging boats in a Ferrari while speeding across a Miami bridge. He just wanted to throw boats at a car on a freeway.

However, I can say that movie, or Resident Evil, is a guilty pleasure because I know there are arthouse movies out there that Ask Serious Questions About Life, that exist because a filmmaker wanted to make us leave a theater with a new thought or idea about the world around us. I know that, while entertainment can be fun and relaxing, art and the concepts that creatives process during crafting a film or writing a novel is where we actually discover things about our humanity. Any moral quandary posed by a Marvel movie has been vetted by the CIA, while a David Lynch film will leave a person wondering what morality originates from.

Go for it

I have a friend here who is a very good, serious artist. I was at her place once staring at this massive painting of a tree she had splayed out across the floor of her entire apartment. In the corner, her television showed one of her streaming accounts and all of the ‘Recently Played’ section was filled with episodes of one reality show or another. I asked about it and she proudly said she loved it all—she could work with them on in the background, not having to worry about her attention being distracted by something heavy or some plot point she had to pay attention to. Also, they were just entertaining. It made sense.

She and I both know plenty about Serious Art, but also that there’s plenty of reasonable occasions to indulge in whatever bullshit might exist for the sole purpose of vapid entertainment. I tend to think the issue of American culture is that we’re increasingly being pushed in the direction of that void of uncaring, incompetent slop. Stephen Spielberg and John Williams teamed up to create one of the most iconic films ever made in Jurassic Park, which is now just a recurring CGI-fest of absurdity and nonsensical plot lines. Our entertainment is getting dumber, and our society is culturally worse for it.

I think the danger of a guilty pleasure lies in not knowing that it is one, or why it is one. To not understand that the new Avengers movie and Zodiac might both star Robert Downey Jr but the latter is a significantly different type of film is a kind of cultural illiteracy that I think we’ve generally waded into as a society, and instead of trying to right that wrong, we’re trying to take away any stigma about the shame of preference—even though that preference is nothing to be guilty about, but understanding the holistic nature of why culture matters to humanity is an inherently important and valuable part of life experience.

I spent some time last week at LACMA with Christian Marclay’s The Clock—which I’ll write more about after tonight when I spend as much time as possible at the 24-hour screening—and was consistently annoyed by how many people felt perfectly fine to maintain ongoing conversations or take their phones out to text someone in the theater. But, much like most third spaces these days, art museums are not immune to the degrading notion of the social contract.

Since movie theaters re-opened after Covid-19 restrictions were lifted, I’d say about one-third of the films I see have had someone take out a phone for one reason or another during the show. (I will say most of these happen at AMC chain theaters.) This ranges from taking a photo of the screen (mostly the title card) to texting to scrolling a dating app or Instagram. I’ll always react in some ways—a glance to asking politely to saying, Turn your phone off aloud. The responses I get have varied from being ignored to having people tell me to fuck off.

(I was at the AMC Burbank 16 for a movie once and the guy next to me asked a woman in front of him who had been texting for five minutes straight to please put her phone away and she turned around and replied, “You talked all during the previews so why don’t you kiss my ass.” Absolutely bonkers response.)

These aren’t limited to corporate screenings, though. While it’s far less frequent than what happens at a chain like AMC, I’ve seen phones out at screenings for American Cinematheque or even Tarantino’s notoriously anti-phone theaters (the New Beverly and Vista). These people risk being kicked out, or even banned, from theaters just to check their Twitter feed.

Now, part of this could be just screen addiction and the fact humanity seems to have been consumed by an inability to leave the digital world for any meaningful amount of time. But I think one of the consequences of how Covid was both handled and politicized is that the country became divided on whether or not it really gave a shit about anyone else at an individual level. (We know now that any excuses about masks were bullshit as we see ICE agents and cops masked up all the time for their thuggish actions and that the entire conservative and fascist side of the population doesn’t have any central ideology other than to ‘win’ at whatever talking points are dominating the news at any given time.)

The increasing individualism that has been chipping away at how we treat others in social spaces, whatever the root causes may be, are reflective of a growing resentment toward one another while the country we share continues to decay in a storm of corruption, greed, and outright lies by those in positions of power. This is all by design, and sometimes I just want to escape the madness by going to the movies, and now there’s a constant reminder of what is happening in society as a whole.

The new Polaroid anti-AI, pro-real-life-interactions ad campaign is pretty great. While advertising in general is a menace of a media system, any dialogue we’re having in public about AI—or digital addictions in general—is important to keep front-and-center, as we seem too eager to stray from the idea of our basic humanity being at stake. (It is interesting how some responses to the campaign discuss the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of data centers and how any corporate dialogue against AI is hypocritical, which is understandable but I feel on the wrong side of the subject.)

The AI debate as a whole kind of annoys me, but I do find value in dialogues centered around our collective humanity and what that means, because I think it should be the central focus of all this. The potential impact of AI (or advanced LLMs, whatever you want to call them) could touch on just about every aspect of modern civilization—but there’s no way I’m gonna trust those who could profit from this saying it’ll all be, ‘for the better.’

On the industrial side, it’s not that automation is usually a bad thing in regards to pushing civilization forward, but when it comes to economics, it can create turmoil if the system society exists within doesn’t look out for its people. If computers run the show and we still live under a capitalist system, how do the economics work out as jobs could disappear from media to healthcare to shipping? Silicon Valley openly jokes about a permanent underclass, but that’s a very real possibility if the current economic model remains as all resources are funneled into technological development as opposed to human services.

Creatively speaking the whole thing is a fucking joke. The outright theft of the collective cultural history of humanity in order to create heartless visuals and sounds is criminal—both in the law of the land and the law of nature. Anthropic destroying rare books because it’s the easiest way to scan them to train AI models is so on-the-nose evil it wouldn’t make the script of a blockbuster movie. The things that make us human—the tangled relationships between ideas, labor, production, and objects—are being completely disregarded for this idea of creating a future that embraces a new era of subjugation and control instead of growing into a state of egalitarianism.

I think that’s the most enraging part of all of this. Regardless of what part of the AI debate is being scrutinized, the human benefits are largely abstracted and obfuscated—there are quips about the end of money or a complete reformation on how we work, but no dialogue about how those processes might actually work to benefit people. No one can convince me that those who are fully invested in AI as the future aren’t some of the most evil people to have ever lived, looking out only for their own stake in a hyper-violent, automated future and willing to dispose of not only everything we’ve collectively created since the dawn of time but also a majority of the lives on earth for the sake of a few dollars.