Reviews 2

Movie and TV reviews by a writer who learns a lot by analyzing the works of others.

Why I’m Going to Watch Season Two Despite The Two Glaring Stupidities That Ruined the Foundation Series

I read the initial Foundation trilogy years ago. But I don’t think the series failed because Foundation wasn’t a painstaking retelling of the books, unlike some who have read the series. I think it failed because it made two fatal errors: its writers created stories that ran directly counter to the message of the books, and it failed to deliver on the tremendous visual feast offered by a story about the fall of a galactic civilization (even worse, after making a promising start in doing so).

I reread the first book of the Foundation trilogy prior to watching the series because it had been so many years since my initial reading that my memories of it were just so much leaf litter in the compost heap of my mind. It was very evident after re-reading the first book that it would never make a successful movie as is. And it was just as evident that it had all the material needed to make a powerful, visually compelling TV series with very little effort.

The main theme of the book was that a scientist, Hari Seldon, has discovered a scientific way of predicting the future behavior of large groups of people. It was a combination of statistics and sociology with a sprinkling of superduper future math thrown in for good effect. It couldn’t predict the behavior of individuals or small groups of people, but that didn’t matter. In the massive movement of societies and peoples, individual efforts canceled out. The notion that history was a product of individual decisions and actions was an illusion. The decisions made by individuals were the product of huge, predictable social forces.

And having established that early on, the rest of the book showed the events leading to the Empire’s downfall and how the various decisions were the inevitable results of those forces.

These events often involved massive battles between splintered elements of the galactic empire with colossal weapons of the future, some of them atomic! (Foundation was written in the 1950s and it shows.) But such events tended to occur offscreen in Asimov’s novel, which worked because novels don’t have screens.

Instead most of Asimov’s story was revealed in lengthy dialogues between the characters in the stories, generally winding up with an incredibly smarmy psychohistorian explaining how things just couldn’t have worked out any other way. (Really, after a while you just wanted to punch a psychohistorian.) Think of it as the fall of a galactic empire discussed in “My Dinner With Andre.” At length.

So this could be really interesting and good, all sorts of intergalactic turmoil as the product of huge mathematically-predictable forces with the Seldon’s Foundation seeking to minimize the length and horribleness of the inevitable Galactic interregnum.

Unfortunately, the writers apparently read Foundation and missed the entire point of the book(s). They set Hari Seldon to the side after a couple of episodes and concentrated on Salvor Hardin, who was a major player in much of the book, a psychohistorian who is constantly amazed at how Seldon’s psychohistory keeps predicting how things will work out (and giving the Foundation the chance to ensure that they work out for best, most of the time).

But the Salvor Hardin of the series is an action girl and also The One. She is majorly gifted in mathematics, one of the few who can quickly grasp the intricacies of psychohistory, and she’s also brave and noble and sure enough, everything in the future of the galaxy hinges on her understanding and doing the Right Thing.

This runs completely, totally, indelibly counter to the whole concept of psychohistory predicting the behaviors of large groups of people and of individuals’ actions not mattering a hell of a lot in the mix. It’s a stick in the eye to Asimov and everyone who ever liked the books. It’s hard to see how it can’t be intentional either. If you’re smart enough to write a script, you’re smart enough to know that having a character who’s The One completely violates the intent of the whole psychohistory theme. Intentional or not, it’s so completely wrong.

As for the other stupid mistake, it’s a more fundamental thing related to great moviemaking. As I noted earlier, much of the “Foundation” novel consists of dialogue between two characters sitting in a room. Not exactly riveting visual drama there, but there’s an answer to that problem, and I thought Foundation the TV series had it. The answer is to show the battles, terrorist attacks, insane reprisals and so forth, all the pathetic but visually exciting stuff that goes on in wars, especially if you pump things up to the sort of wars that might occur in a technologically advanced galactic civilization. (Remember that last phrase, it will be important later. People who’ve already watched the series will know where I’m going with this, which is Terminus.)

And the creators of Foundation clearly understood this, up to a point. The early going was full of extremely well conceived and executed CGI to show what an advanced super-civilization might be like. Their vision of Trantor, the galactic capital, which is so huge that the entire bulk of the planet has been urbanified, with towers going up to the clouds and level after level going far below the ground, is breathtaking.

A terrorist attack on Trantor that is the harbinger of the coming galactic interregnum is beautifully realized, brilliantly taking full advantage of the visual opportunities. There is also some good space war imagery early on. But about midway into the series, something awful happens. The Foundation arrives on Terminus, an unsettled world far from the galactic empire.

Given the visual intelligence I expected great beauty of some sort here. After all, the scenes for Terminus were shot at great expense at the Canary Islands, at a cost of $millions, probably. A far cry from early zero-budget Dr. Who “alien” landscape scenes that were shot in a local quarry pit, and which looked like they were shot in a quarry.

Except that… that’s EXACTLY what we got. Yes, the people who made Foundation spent MILLIONS to go to the Canary Islands to shoot in a landscape that doesn’t look all that different from the old Dr. Who quarries. Don’t believe me? Take a look:

But it doesn’t stop there. Those of you who have been reading my blog and reviews religiously (all none of you, in short) will know that I despise cheap science fiction dystopias, and that SF movies and TV shows are swarming with dystopias, precisely because they are so cheap to make. Here’s my post on the topic.

Well once they had their crappy, quarry-like set on “Terminus” the producers of Foundation could NOT RESIST, they went right to the cheap dystopia trope of people in rags hitting and shooting one another in really underlit scenes in the middle of a bunch of tents and shacks. They had guns that fired laser blasts instead of bullets, but that was about it. Don’t believe me? Take a look:

And about those tents and shacks. Yeah, Terminus is supposed to be a brand new settlement on a remote planet, you have to figure it’s going to be something short of the Emperor’s palace on Trantor. But the society of the Empire is much farther advanced from us than we are from paleolithic hunter gatherers. And yet the tech that’s used to build the settlement, and the resulting settlement, are pretty close to what we have now in terms of tech. It’s almost like someone said, “We can use the equipment we used to build the set as part of the set!”

Don’t believe me? Have a look:

To put this in perspective, suppose you were planning to set up a farmstead somewhere off the grid. You’ve got plenty of available resources, access to all the farming tech we have now. Would you then wind up scratching in the soil with a sharpened stick and doing all the labor involved in planting and harvesting crops by hand? And would you live in a hut made of local trees or bamboo or whatever?

You know you would not. You’d have tractors and backhoes and rototillers and so forth and lots of gas to run them so you could farm crops more productively. You’d have solar cells to collect the sun’s energy and provide you with electricity. You’d have satellite internet to communicate with the world. You’d be living in a very large nylon tent at first, but fairly quickly you’d have a wooden shack of some kind built, wired for electricity from the solar cells and with some kind of heating and AC tech, a window air conditioner at the very least. And your shack would have windows or at the very least transparent film, but probably windows. And you’d have plumbing of some sort, at least a porta-potty, more likely a sump.

Your lifestyle and your tech would be far, FAR past that of a paleolithic hunter/gatherer, as a matter of course. A paleolithic tribe that came across your farmstead would be frightened and amazed. They would not know what to make of you, but would probably assume you were a supernatural being of some sort because of your ability to control loud, stinky machines.

But Foundation asks us to believe that the settlement on Terminus wouldn’t have much at all in the way of tech that would amaze us. My suspicion is that for galactic empire level farmsteads, the crops would virtually grow themselves and the buildings might do the same. They’d be comfortable, connected multi-story buildings, at least on par with and in many respects far better than a modern McMansion. It would be far beyond anything we could build

It’s just a failure of imagination on the filmmakers’ part, and hardly a key one. But a failure in keeping with the general failure of making Terminus into a cheap B-movie dystopia instead of a futuristic interstellar empire settlement.

The key failures in Foundation were the failure to understand the central concept of the story, psychohistory, and to write a character that runs directly counter to that central concept. It was just blindingly stupid.

And the way the show, after some brilliant visual imagination, fell into the dullness of B-movie dystopias when the story moved to Terminus was disappointment on a stick. They spent MILLIONS to go to the Canary Islands and replicate the look of a stinking Doctor Who quarry!

Season Two of Foundation is coming soon. And I’m going to watch it, Ghu help me. But not with any sense of hope. I just have curiosity about how the showrunners will deal with the string of criticisms that have been launched at the show: will they stop doing stupid stuff? I honestly don’t know. Sure, they fucked up psychohistory and they did a deep dive in cheap dystopia land when we got to Terminus. But the visual beauty of the early episodes showed that they have the will, and most of all, the BUDGET to create ground-breaking science fiction.

And the story writing, except for that ONE LITTLE THING has been, if not great, at least halfway entertaining at times. So there MIGHT be some reward for watching Season Two. We shall see. Literally.

Virtual Revolution: A Hidden SF Movie Gem That’s The Real Thing

The term hidden gem gets used a lot nowadays for films that everybody knows about but maybe hasn’t won any Oscars. I however have found a real hidden gem. It’s a 2016 science fiction flick called Virtual Revolution (aka 2047: Virtual Revolution) very much in the cyberpunk noir genre. I thought was going to be a crappy video game movie. I’m here to tell you that Virtual Revolution is not a crappy video game movie. It’s just ABOUT a video game, or rather, an improved video game technology.

Amazon Prime link. Rents for just three bucks if you don’t have an Amazon Prime account.

It is not a great film in the sense that Everything Everywhere All At Once is a great film, but it hits way above its budget and the expectations I brought to the movie after delving deep into Amazon’s Prime video SF catalog to find it. It’s an hour and a half of fun, thought-provoking B movie cyberpunk noir action.

The lead character is Nash. He is a detective/mercenary who is helping a large video game company track down terrorists who are killing people and doing other bad things to oppose the video game company. They think having everyone engaged in virtual reality instead of real reality is a bad thing.

The world of the story is a standard neoliberal corporatist nightmare that we are currently living in, the major difference being that video game tech has become so immersive that you can’t tell it from real life while you’re jacked in, and the fact that 80 percent of the world’s population is on universial basic income (UBI). (Granted, these are major differences.) It’s a video game player’s dream world, indeed.

The jacked-in gamers on UBI are called the Connected and they spend almost all their waking hours playing. People like our hero who have jobs but spend their spare time gaming are called Hybrids. And I’m guessing people that never play the video game are called people.

The totally immersive video game play is the weakest element in the movie. It’s either a bunch of people dressed in medieval clothing and LARPing around in the woods or it’s Mechwarrior 3 style urban warfare against the mechs. The videos are done in live action except for CGI mechs and dragons and they just don’t measure up to the depth of the world-build they’re a part of. I blame the budget. Mind you, the visual are far better than most B-movie SF flicks, they’re just not on par with the story. Whereas the cyber noir of the movie’s reality is on par with Blade Runner (and looks an AWFUL lot like it, except some of the background visuals are better than Blade Runner’s).

Sexy times are also very real in the game, as is demonstrated when Nash kills a terrorist who is online. The terrorist is a huge overweight guy lying on a padded couch with a metal ring around his head (his virtual game connection) totally unware of what’s going on in the real world. Our hero puts a bullet through the guy’s skull as he lies there, then dumps the corpse and puts the virtual game connection over his own head so he can become the character and spy on the terrorists in game. When Nash is in-game he’s a slender beautiful naked woman lying in bed with two other slender beautiful naked women. Sexy times have clearly been had. If there’s no difference between reality and the sensations you get in the virtual game I think the games appeal is fully explained.

Most of the movie consists of Nash going after the terrorists while Interpol (representing government in the movies) goes after the terrorists and also Nash and frankly anyone they encounter, bullying and threatening everyone in the manner of noir movie cops.

Nash’s interactions with the Interpol agents, the terrorists, his hacker friend, and the big corporation he works for constitute the bulk of the movie, along with a few gaming sequences. Between action sequences Nash tries to figure out what’s going on and also moons over his girlfriend who died a couple of years ago under suspicious circumstances, circumstances so suspicious that he cannot figure them out despite being a detective.

In fact, I’m not sure if Nash ever actually figures anything out in the movie. Mostly people explain things to him. Often they are lying of course, and Nash knows this, he’s a true noir detective, but he never can figure out who’s lying about what. Let’s face it, he’s not a very good detective.

Most especially, the terrorists tell Nash that his corporate sponsor was responsible for his girlfriend’s death and his corporate sponsor tells Nash that the terrorists killed his girlfriend. Nash gets this confused, dreamy look afterward that’s supposed to be him thinking, but he mostly just looks confused.

Almost all the useful and difficult work of detecting the terrorists is actually done offscreen by Nash’s hacker friend, who is also Nash’s dead girlfriend’s brother.

Superficially it just seems like dark and mysterious window dressing for a standard futuristic cyberpunk noir world, but the underpinnings of the world are fascinating and complex and unusually well thought out.

Unfortunately rather than reveal those underpinnings point by point as Nash investigates the terrorists, early on they’re all explained in a simple expository dump by Dina, Nash’s contact at the video game corporation.

Here it is:

Dina: I don’t like Interpol hanging around our business. We are allies, but we are not friends.

Nash: How’s that?

Dina: We pay the authorities the taxes they need. They pay the Connected a universal income. And the Connected pay us to use our ‘verses. It’s all a matter of balance.

Nash: But isn’t it expensive for the government to pay everyone’s universal income?

Dina: No. The amounts are relatively low. They pay them rent, a little food, and for the connection. If you remember in the old days, they used to have to pay for health care, retirement fund and unemployment insurance. Now they have to pay much less and for not as long. The Connected rarely live past 40. They’re obese, underfed, no health care, poor hygiene. What do you expect? Don’t fool yourself. If the politicians want to keep things the way they are, it’s because they benefit from it.

End Exposition

It’s the worst writing because it’s a simple expository dump rather than more subtle development. It’s the best because it reveals that writer/director Guy-Roger Duvert actually thought about what the future might be like to come up with this movie. I think Duvert didn’t think it through completely, but that he thought it through as much as he did in a science fiction B movie is amazing.

The world explained in the expository dump doesn’t make sense on its own. With people barely making it to middle age and spending most of their time video gaming, having few or no personal real world interactions, the birth rate has to be crashing hard while the death rate is going up. This implies a major population crash, implies it so hard that you need an explanation as to why it’s not happening. Which we get none of.

The fact that nothing is being done to change these conditions imply strongly that those in power favor a major population crash. As Dina said, “If the politicians want to keep things the way they are, it’s because they benefit from it.” (I would replace the term “politicians” with “oligarchs” because in the US and most countries, the politicians are mere tools for the wealthy oligarchs.) Which fits in with some lefty speculation (and some on the right, too) that our current oligarchs favor a population crash: if they don’t need us, why should we be allowed to exist?

It could be that all this is meant to be inferred by the reader. But given the way they laid out the basics of the society in exposition I don’t think we can make that inference.

It’s a shame that Duvert didn’t think the story through in that respect because in doing so he missed a wonderful opportunity for some delicious irony, and the French do love their irony. Duvert thought they had created an ironic ending, and he did, just not nearly as ironic as it could have been.

And in order to explain that, I’m going to have to spoil the living hell out of the ending of the movie. It’s a pretty good B-movie so I strongly recommend watching it first. It’s free for Amazon Prime subscribers now and it rents for three bucks for all others. Other than that, it’s Yo-ho-ho time.

SPOILER ALERT!!!! SPOILERS AHOY!!!!

REALLY I MEAN IT! IT’S A GOOD MOVIE, DONT LET ME SPOIL YOUR FUN!

In the movie, someone rats on the virtual revolutionaries, including where the revolutionaries are while they hack the virtual world into nonexistence thanks to Nash. When the Connected hear of this, a crowd of them storms the virtual revolutionaries’ hacking site and kill all the revolutionaries dead with their bare hands. This is the irony the movie intended. Nobody expected the Connected to do anything but lie there as their virtual worlds are destroyed. You know, the thing they like better than health care, living beyond age 40 and having a personal life of any kind, including a personal sex life.

Turns out they LOVE their virtual world a lot more than they loved their old lives in the real world. Imagine, enjoying a virtual life that feels like real life where you are effectively immortal, physically and sexually attractive and feel no pain if you don’t want to and do nothing but go on grand adventures with your buddies between bouts of getting your fuck on.

The Connected did not want to be saved. They would rather reign in heaven than serve in a late-stage capitalist hellscape. You know, the world YOU live in right now, where most people work in cubicle farms, stand behind sales counters, fry food at fast-food restaurants and do all the other shit jobs that barely pay enough to keep us housed, fed and clothed, and DON’T pay enough to keep us healthy. THAT world. Can you blame them? (Could you blame you?)

That’s the irony. The people the revolutionaries want to rescue not only don’t want to be “rescued” but will give their lives not to be “rescued” to lead the lives we live right now. And it’s absolutely great irony.

My further irony is this: suppose we take that whole population drop thing into account in the movie. If the oligarchs are using the virtual gaming environments to quietly kill off middle class and lower class people, what the Connected did when they attacked the revolutionary hackers, was kill the people who were trying to keep them from being genocided.

To be fair the genocide method is the kindest, pleasantest, bestest genocide method ever. But the goal is the same: get rid of a whole class of people, in this case based on economic class rather than religion or nationality. The Connected are unwittingly enabling their own genocide.

Now, that’s irony. You know damn well Duvert would have made the point if he’d thought of it.

The final irony, in the movie, is that knowing all that he knows, Nash decides to give up on real life and become one of the Connected. Of course, he’s been used just as badly if not worse than any ordinary worker, by almost everyone in the movie. The Corporation used him to kill terrorists without being directly implicated in the murders. Interpol tried to use him to spy on both the revolutionaries and Synteris. Maybe even his real-life girlfriend was using him, if she was working for Synteris as Dina claims. The only people who weren’t using him were his friends in virtual reality. It was pretend comradeship, perhaps, but it felt just like the real thing, and it was more real than the real thing, as it turned out. (Nash also had a girlfriend in-game, which may have had something to do with his decision.)

Because Virtual Revolution has been thought out as well as it has, and because it has been willing to play with some truly revolutionary and dangerous ideas, it is one of those rare SF B-movies that is the more rewarding the more you think about it.

Think about all the reviews you’ve read of movies where the reviewer has said, “This is a fun movie to watch if you just go along for the ride and don’t think about it.”

This movie, you can profitably and enjoyably think about. High praise indeed. This movie deserves a lot more recognition than it has received. Maybe it doesn’t deserve to be America’s number one movie the way Haley Reinhart deserves to be America’s number one singer, or the way electro-swing deserves to be America’s number one musical genre, but still, it deserves a LOT more attention than it has gotten.

Take us out with a noir jazz cover of a revolution-themed song, Haley!

Viewing The “Impulse” Episode of Dimension 404 Through Socialist Glasses

Being a socialist and writer is a lot like being Rowdy Roddy Piper in the cult movie “They Live.” You know, the one where the world is secretly ruled by reptilian aliens and Roddy has sunglasses that let you see the aliens, and also the secret messages disguised as entertainment that they use to make the human populace docile and useful to them. Messages like “Obey” “Work” and “Consume.” In short, a ridiculous SF concept that only a brain-dead cretin would ever mistake for real life.

I do not believe in reptilian aliens, but ever since the scales fell off my eyes about capitalism, I’ve seen a LOT of hidden propaganda for what it is, sometimes in the most innocuous sources. It’s very much like wearing those “They Live” glasses. Call it “Socialist Glasses.”

Which brings me to the Impulse episode of the Hulu series “Dimension 404,” the final episode of season 1. The review will totally spoil it, but it’s propaganda hidden inside badly written SF, so I just don’t care. If you care, watch the show before reading this. I did, ghu help me.

In Impulse, Val “Speedrun” Hernandez is a dedicated First Person Shooter gamer who is good enough at it to compete and win in tournaments, at least the local ones. But she can’t defeat “Killdozer” who is a Big Name gamer who happens to be at the local tournament in Chino, her town. She blows off some responsibilities including a job interview with a catering service set up for her by her hard-working, self-sacrificing, loving Dad to play in the local tournament, where she beats everyone … but Killdozer, who ganks her good.

This changes when a mysterious man named “Kojima” offers her a special energy drink that cranks up her performance to crazy levels, she discovers after she tests it. But it comes at a cost, the “snapback,” which means that after you take the drink you lose all your memories of what you’ve been doing under the influence. In the test case, Speedrun takes just enough Impulse (the name of the drug) to snapback shortly after she has spent several hours racking up high score after high score on her favorite game at a video arcade. (PC games and arcade video games are kind of interchangeable in Impulse, which is kind of confusing. Leads me to think the writers of this episode were not deeply familiar with gaming.)

The next day is the finals of the big tournament and Speedrun still has a shot at the finals, so she impulsively gives Kojima $500, which is all the money she has, for a half-gallon jug of Impulse.

At the finals she’s taking slugs of the Impulse, but then, so is Killdozer, and she just can’t beat him. I think we all know where this is going, and sure enough, Speedrun swigs down a ton of Impulse and defeats Killdozer, winning the big tournament.

And when she snaps back into reality, she’s sitting in a rocking chair in a bathrobe looking kind of frazzled and worn out, with a baby in her arms. And it’s 12 years into her future, a gritty dystopian post-apocalypse in which she’s had several children by her husband and she’s the sheriff of her suburban cul-de-sac neighborhood, which is about all we know of the post-apocalyptic world except for the Radioactive Dragons, who are fearsome cannibals who raid places like cul-de-sacs for snack foods.

The cul-de-sac is now way run-down, with its central circle of asphalt covered with folding chairs and people living in tents as well as the houses, and a row of port-a-potties constitute the communal sanitary facilities.

Speedrun has apparently done worthwhile things while under the influence of the Impulse, because her husband and children love and adore her and the people of her cul-de-sac respect her (she’s the sheriff, after all. I’m betting she did some awesome Impulse-enabled killing of bad guys prior to the snapback).

Unfortunately, after the snapback she’s a teenaged gamer locked into the body and the responsibilities of an adult, which she hates. It’s very understandable. Her life is ceaseless toil, whether it’s childcare or cleaning up the port-a-potties or guarding the gates. To be fair that seems to be everyone’s life in this awful, awful future world.

(Toilet cleaning is not something sheriffs usually have to do, but if you waste even a minute thinking about the “logic” of this dystopia you are spending way more time thinking about it than the writers did. Its only purpose is to make a point, which is the reason why they including a humorous montage of her having no fun at all cleaning out the port-a-potties. No I am not kidding.)

On top of everything else, she has to keep her snapback secret, because everyone hates gamers who’ve taken Impulse (they call them “Pulsers”) since they blame Pulsers for the collapse of civilization. (Honestly, don’t think about it, it will only make your head hurt.) When they find one who’s overdosed and snapped back and they don’t have any useful skills, they toss them out of the community where the Radioactive Dragons will kill and eat them.

So of course after a while with the constant drudgery with few if any rewards, Speedrunner decides she’s a Pulser and leaves a note about how she loves everyone and stuff but has to run away because the plot requires her to. (OK, she didn’t say that was why, but still…) In the desert wasteland she finds a somehow undiscovered bottle of Impulse and keeps it because being able to fight at super speed is even more useful in real life, where you really die if you lose.

Eventually she looks at a drawing one of her children made and gave to her, showing a smiling Speedrunner stick figure with a gun in one hand and holding her daughter’s hand with the other helps Speedrunner realize she loves her family and has to go back and help those cuddly little devils survive in their post-apocalyptic hellhole cul de sac.

Yes, she has understood that Love justifies a lifetime of drudgery.

When she gets back the Radioactive Dragons are back, too, and about to kill and eat the cul de sac. (Zero points if you guess the leader of the Radioactive Dragons is Killdozer.) The is the occasion for an heroic, Impulse-assisted redemption by Mom. The end.

Now like most viewers I figured this was just adult/boomer banging on young adults/millenials for preferring video games to real life and playing them a lot. “Stop being a lazy-ass gamer and take yer responsibilities seriously, ya useless bum!” is the lesson of the story. And it is… superficially. And that’s what’s so wonderfully evil about the writing on this episode. It hides its real intent, its real message, under a superficial message that is easily detected and neutralized by its targets.

No young adult or millennial is going to go for any of that stupid Boomer bullshit about gaming. They’ll ignore it.

But there’s another, deeper message hidden in the story. And it’s that the loving relationships you have with spouses, family and friends is a justification for endless drudgery. That’s what the lesson of Speedrun returning to the cul de sac is after finding her daughter’s drawing is all about. That particular message has NOTHING to do with gaming. Gaming is just the cover. Gaming’s irrelevance hides the very relevant message that “you will spend the bulk of your awake and aware lifetime in endless drudgery, but it’s OK because it’s redeemed by the love of the people who will benefit from your drudgery.”

Which Impulse portrays as your family, friends and neighbors. And that’s where my Socialist Glasses sounded the red alert. Because in the real world, who’s the greatest beneficiary of your lifetime of endless drudgery? Is it your family, friends and neighbors? No, it is not. It is your capitalist bosses, most especially it’s the capitalist millionaire and billionaire oligarchs who are the beneficiaries of EVERYONE’S lifetimes of endless drudgery. And they don’t give a rat’s ass about you or any other member of the 90 percent.

Impulse never brings this point to the surface. It does not want viewers to ask any questions about it. This is the message that they want viewers to accept and not think about, because once you start thinking about such things you’re a less useful slave.

It did occur to me that Impulse’s hidden message might not have been planted deliberately. It could have been a trope buried deep in the psyches of the capitalist-influenced writers who had no idea what they were doing.

Frankly, considering the general shoddiness of the writing I could easily believe this. The writers do not seem capable of such subtleties as burying a hidden message to work undiscovered under an easily-dismissed surface message.

Except that a lot of stuff in the series is a little too on-point for me to buy that it’s unintentional. In the beginning she irresponsibly ignores a JOB interview, and doesn’t pick up her grandmother, forcing her father to, causing him to almost lose his JOB. (Why is the father in jeopardy of losing his job for fulfilling a family obligation? Another unasked question we’re supposed to ignore.)

Then there was the port-a-potty cleaning montage. It was presented as humorous, but as one who has scrubbed toilets on occasion, there’s nothing innately funny about stinky, unsanitary, disgusting work. But it also presented the message, “Sure, being responsible means you will at times have to do literally shitty jobs, but just whistle a happy tune or something while you work, you lazy bum. Eventually it will be over and people will respect you for being a responsible toilet cleaner.” (This never happens in real life, but that’s the message, alrighty.)

In a world where crappy low-paying jobs don’t pay enough to keep people housed and fed, where medical bills are the most common cause of bankruptcies, you need SOME reason to keep the workers working, and isn’t love and family just the best reason ever? Division of labor? Excess profit? Workers ripped off? Don’t think about it, remember LOVE AND FAMILY LOVE AND FAMILY LOVE AND FAMILY.

In fact, why is everyone having to work so hard and so constantly in the cul de sac community? Sure, raising kids is time-consuming work, but it can be shared out. Once again, thinking about the division of labor in the cheap papier-mache future imagined in Impulse is not rewarding. (Also if a community has to run from half a dozen bad boys to delay being eaten, how has it managed to survive at all? Don’t think about it!) The more you think about this crappy show the harder it is to take anything seriously.

But you don’t have to take the message about love and work and responsibility seriously because you aren’t supposed to think about it at all. Just accept it along with the “entertainment.” Being hidden makes the message all the more effective.

And the thing is, Impulse is hardly the only bit of entertainment to slide these hidden messages that serve capitalist bosses into entertainment programming. Pro-capitalism messages are baked into much of entertainment programming as well as political commentary. (It’s typically easier to see in the political commentary.)

Soon I’ll write a review of Virtual Revolution, a French film that, for all its flaws, has a lot more thought-provoking message for viewers.

In the meantime, get yourself a pair of Socialist Glasses. They can enliven even crappy hackwork like Impulse. Even if it is a little scary to put them on and see all those oligarch messages concealed inside the entertainment.

Tribes of Europa:

The Second

Pile of Corpses

Right out of the gate Netflix’s Tribes of Europa had a major issue for me. It’s a dystopia. It makes no bones about being a dystopia, and I generally avoid dystopias like the plague (which often shows up in dystopias). I do so mainly because they tend to have cheap budgets and somehow always wind up consisting mostly of a bunch of people in rags running around shooting and beating each other up endlessly. Here’s an essay on the topic if you’re interested.

I got sucked into Tribes of Europa because it promised two things I like: it had a budget and it seemed to have had some decent world-building behind it. So it might have an interesting plot line and interestingly developed tribes and therefore actually be interesting, unlike most dystopia-themed SF which automatically includes all zombie movies and TV shows.

But after watching the first episode I had to give up the series. It did have a budget. Some of the sets were nice. And not everything was people in rags traipsing around in the woods shooting and beating up on each other. It had well-developed cultures for the tribes.

But the first episode the series quickly devolved into lots and lots of well-developed tribes shooting each other and beating each other up in the woods dressed in rags of various sorts. I’m not saying the rags didn’t have significance to the wearers but it still amounted to the same thing. Piles of corpses everywhere. People beating each other senseless. And the major plot line, it soon became evident, would consist of chasing after a McGuffin.

I think that what did it for me was the second “pile of corpses” scene. Piles of corpses are important to dystopias, being signifiers of how dystopian everything has become. Can’t even put away the corpses! They could do that even in medieval times, just watch Monty Python’s Life of Brian’s “bring out yer dead!” scene for a great example. But I felt the second pile of corpses scene was just… piling on.

I was glad to leave the Tribes of Europa to fight over their McGuffin endlessly. I have better things to do with my time then watch their squabbling. When come back, bring story.

I should have known better.