#Do you also think your uncle cop is a good person? Because they're not lmao it's not possible

[justonefeather]

What's wild to me is that the pay rate around a small city in Maine is the same as around Boston for the same jobs. Then for the same price (or less!) as your shitty 1 bedroom in the suburbs with broken appliances and health concerns that your landlord ignores, you can get a nice 2+ bedroom IN the city that includes heat!!!!! Like. Genuinely What The Fuck

[baltimorebullets]

This week I saw RUMOURS (2024) and THE LINE (2023), which means talking about POLITICS, FUTILITY, COMPLIANCE, and MASCULINITY!

RUMOURS (2024) - I really don't know if comparing this movie to Apocalypse Now (1979) is astute or obvious or big "Guy Who's Only Seen Apocalypse Now: Getting big Apocalypse Now vibes from this" vibes. They're both dream-(or NiGhTmArE-) like, they're both about the futility of individual action among immense power. We're rolling with it.

So when I encountered Apocalypse Now in an academic setting, it was in a media class, not a political science class, so when we talked about Vietnam Syndrome, we talked about it within the framework of, like, what vulnerably and failure meant to the patriarchal identity of the US versus the "public aversion to American overseas military involvements" that Wikipedia talks about. There are, obviously, deeply narcissistic aspects to centering white and/or American and/or man pain within narratives about the Vietnam War, but I think there can be value in looking into the mirror and having some real self-accountability.

(Which is also a problematic statement. Even while maintaining the concept of borders and citizenship, which is, like, whatever, why is the GI more self than the American who abstained, who fought (and died) against the war, the Vietnamese-American refugee, the abandoned children of war. There are people, artists, among them, with vital perspectives on what the Vietnam War means.

One aspect, I think, is that it can be eughh a bit challenging to objectify someone's experience and trauma as A Learning Opportunity, from the outside. There's a quote from, I think, a Holocaust survivor, but for the life of me I cannot find the source right now, so to paraphrase: "I don't like writing about, because people don't like what I have to say about it."

Second is how it can play into a sort of... one of the good one fantasies, where, again, the voyeur can take their guilt and empathy and use it to mentally separate themselves without having to follow through materially. Like, me, personally, my grandfather was trained Marine who didn't make it over to Vietnam only because they called the whole thing off too soon. And my other draft-eligible uncle had hepatitis. I feel zero obligation to maintain my family military legacy, but I don't think I'm doing anyone but myself any favors by distancing myself from it, especially given that, you know, one of my baby cousins just enrolled at West Point. Which in itself is yet another testament to exactly how much good the US has done in correcting itself. LMAO)

Anyway, to refocus. If Apocalypse Now is a trippy nightmare, Rumours is a dream. It's beautiful, hazy, glossy, glowing, romantic, fucking funny. It ends with the world on fire, with the G7 world leaders wearing mylar blankets as capes, giving a terrible speech, the whole reason they were meeting in the first place.

Rumours is a very careful kind of apolitical that doesn't immediately feed into conservative fantasy but does still encapsulate the kind of pointless circlejerk all this shit can be. Or feel like. Or be. If you're a vulnerable person, it sure as fuck can feel like there is not a single solitary thing moving anywhere ever, and no one cares, and it's all just noise. If you're a person who has ever so much as a laid a pinky on The Systems, the noise starts to make a bit more sense, or at least have a rhythm. And you know people are trying. And that sometimes shit takes time for a reason.

... but are they really? As we really? To borrow a few words from my man Tyler:

Black bodies hanging from trees, I cannot make sense of this (Uh) Hit some protest up, retweeted positive messages (Uh) Donated some funds then I went and copped me a necklace I'm probably a coon to your standard's based on this evidence Am I doin' enough or not doin' enough? I'm tryna run with the baton, but see, my shoe's in the mud I feel like anything I say, dawg, I'm screwin' shit up (Sorry)

Like, you cannot tell me that I'm wrong for feeling guilty about every aspect of my existence, something that is, ultimately, propped up by being an American. But is it productive? Fine. Fine. You caught me. The guilt of privilege lives on within me, and it is still not productive nor helpful.

Which is all very therapized of me.

Before I broke up with my last therapist, I remember telling her that I feel like she has me on palliative care — nothing was changing, nothing was going to change, and it was good enough to change the framing, to con me out of my anger and frustration and the friction it causes. But the thing about palliative care — the thing about the stupid fucking speech these bozos are trying to pull together the whole movie — is that it does actually improve outcomes. Framing and communication are actually important. Especially when there's nothing tangible to put in the tank. It feels so shitty to be part of the tapestry that is American imperialism and it's the end of the world and it's our fault and everything we do is futile or actively makes things so, so, so much worse and we still have the responsibility to see this shit through.

(But isn't that also the fantasy? If Apocalypse Now is yet another war movie feeding the masculine masochistic urge to be the arrow-cum-comet shot by some force, some God behind them, somehow both righteous and blind, does Rumours — or what I'm choosing to take from it, since it is very much an apocalypse movie ushering on a new dawn — simply sell a softer version of that paternalistic fantasy, where the obligation to at least try to cleaning up after ourselves gets conflated with being The Natural Order of Things, Or Else? Shit, I dunno. Even talking about therapy, the reality is my mental health improved because my material life improved, and trying to swallow what CBT has to say arguably made shit a whole lot worse for a hot minute there. There are some real limits to rhetoric.)

Anyway, good movie, pretty movie, liked it a whole lot.

THE LINE (2023) - So to keep talking about war movies, you know that whole thing about how a war movie can't ever actually be an anti-war war movie, because to be good movies, they're always too damn cool to be able to sell the point? I think The Line kind of proved that point.

Maybe it's a side effect of staring Alex Wolff, who did a fine job, but if I see Alex Wolff, I'm thinking about Hereditary -> Ari Aster -> ✨💐🐻 MIDSOMMAR 🐻💐✨ which is like. Perhaps unfair. But a thing about me is, I love a story about cults. Indoctrination. Things going on behind closed doors. One part nosy, one part outsider-looking-in syndrome, one part, as Plath put it:

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars — to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…

Shockingly, I had to Google the full quote, where I found a lot of people talking about the literal safety angle which. Yes. Of course yes. There were far too many literal fraternity brothers at the showing I went to and I: did not care for the vibe at all. But the aspect that's stuck with me is the feeling of the available female experience being so fenced in, and it being so impossible to be a neutral presence, or a trusted presence. Do I need to explain this further? I like cooking more than I like football 🏈, but that's about as far as I go when it comes to meeting expectations. There's has to be something better, more exciting, more real, somewhere, please, god, let me out, let me in.

Of course, the reality is that most men, most masculine spaces, are not actually that much of a revelation.

The university I went to was not a very Greek-life forward one, and it wasn't pit-of-vipers competitive, either. But it was elite. But also, like, not elite enough to not make it kind of cringe to call it elite. But—

Point being, I did think that The Line did a respectable job depicting the reality beneath the romance of exclusivity. Most of these people are not particularly impressive or interesting. The relationships can be shallow, or convenient, or an annoying obligation. The privilege of being in that room can be a punishment. You put up with so much fucking bullshit for a few lines on your resume and names to put in as references, and it can still all fall apart for you, or not matter at all for the next guy.

... but, like, there are still reasons why people buy into the myth. There's a scene really early on, where Wolff's character explains that his fraternity is important because he's building relationships, and that's more important than his shitty GPA, and, like, listen. He's not entirely wrong. It's a bit of a cope, to use the modern parlance, to tell yourself that fraternity brothers as a whole are completely washed when it comes to genuine intelligence and ability — that they aren't also genuinely ambitious and frustrated by dead weight — but that can very much be a secondary strength when it comes to staying on the path to success. It's a whole immature, vulgar, emotionally draining system based on shallow promises, but people keep showing up for a reason, beyond simple stupidity, and IMO that's where The Line fell flat.

But that also brings us back to the question up top: Assuming we are in fact not supposed to like most of the characters, or want in on what they have going on, how would you make that "better" without putting a shine on it? ... Is it just me, looking at this going, "lol, gross, no thank you, wasn't falling for that one again, anyway"? The aforementioned frat bros at my viewing were pretty thrilled with the movie; did they feel like it was an accurate representation? If yes, is a "haha, fuck that shit" kind of representation or a "haha, the good ol' days" kind of representation? I didn't ask. Sometimes being an anonymous listener is good motivation to sneak right out the back door, too.