#as opposed to it being an important and relevant political tactic that directly deals with the book’s themes but instead the other queer guy

[carelesscuriosity]

yeah this? sums up my feelings entirely. glad to see other people annoyed with these choices because jfc did the movie make some changes that actively made the story so much worse to the point I don’t even think the 3 hour cut would fix it. i was saying this to my friend as we watched it, but it felt kinda like they made the movie more palatable for straight/general audiences in a lot of ways. Like it was Love Simon-ified: cutting of all all other queer characters (ex the removal of Nora’s queerness), changing his parents to still-married, making the only other queer character a villain, Alex’s speech about coming out, the homophobia is limited to one or two characters who are asshole brother and old guy who “just wants to keep him safe,” refusal to engage with any of the political messaging of the original book, and a bunch of other little things. As someone who really enjoyed the book, the movie just felt like it sucked a lot of what was good out of the story.

So, in preparation of the movie coming out next month, I reread Red, White & Royal Blue. I just finished it, and then I rewatched the trailer for the movie, and tbh, I have some concerns.

The thing I love so much about the book is the emotion. Alex and Henry are complex people with deep emotions. Confident on the outside, but struggling and nervous and anxious on the inside. Sure, the trailer looks fun, but I'm really hoping the more vulnerable sides of Alex and especially Henry are going to be shown in the movie.

The trailer also makes it seem like Henry doesn't like Alex either, at the beginning? Like, at the beginning of the book, the fact that Henry never really started out their interactions with antagonism like Alex did stuck out to me so much. Henry himself even says it! We know that Henry liked Alex the whole time, and it's shown through the fact that he always tried to be civil while Alex was the one who started their conversations with snark and sarcasm. That's why Alex enjoyed the moments when Henry would let a bit of fight come out. That's why it was such a noticeable thing to Alex when Henry snarked back at him during his first visit to England post-wedding.

In the trailer, it makes it seem like in the beginning, Henry doesn't like Alex just as much as Alex doesn't like Henry, if not more so. Movie Henry seems so openly antagonistic towards Alex, especially in the cake scene, and tbh it just feels wrong to me. The failure to portray Henry's feelings for Alex and his reluctance to participate in Alex's antagonism like the book does (especially considering we were seeing Henry through Alex's pov) makes me worry about whether or not Henry's more complex emotions will be shown in the movie at all, and Alex's too for that matter.

Also, I noticed that in the scene where Alex and Henry talk in the kitchen at the palace during Alex's fisrt visit to England post-wedding, it seems like they took out what was important about that scene and replaced it with surface level antagonism and snark to really sell the whole 'rivals to lovers' thing or something. It's like they're trying to convince us that Henry sees Alex just as much of a rival as Alex sees Henry, when that's just not the case. In the book, that's the scene where Alex really starts to see Henry for the first time, even if just for a moment. Not the put together Prince of England, but the sleep rumpled, pajama-clad insomniac who just wants some ice cream.

In the move trailer, it shows Henry wearing a dress shirt and tie, and his tone is snarky when talking to Alex, when in the book, Henry is genuine and unsure of himself. This is another time when we see that Henry has never really tried to be antagonistic towards Alex out of nowhere. In the trailer, it seems like Henry is going to be acting in the opposite way.

I'm not saying the movie has to be a word for word exact portrayal of the book because I don't believe that. A good adaptation will inevitably have to change things, but it only works if the changes make the story better, or at least if they make sense. Right now, I can't see the benefit of changing Henry's character so much. The Henry that I saw in the trailer, at least at the beginning of it, honestly doesn't feel like Henry at all to me.

The last third or so of the trailer, especially the clip of (who I'm assuming is) Bea asking Henry if he loves Alex, gives me hope that they'll get into the more emotional sides of these characters, but tbh I'm still kind of worried.

(Also, side-note, I hate the fact that June's character was cut entirely. She was there for Alex when he needed her, and her character gave us more insight into the complexities of the first family. She showed us that kids of divorce can see things differently when it comes to their parents, and as a child of divorce myself who has had differences of opinion with my sibling, I loved seeing that in the book with June and Alex. And, of course, there was her whole dynamic with Nora. I hate that she won't be in the movie at all. I hope they don't also cut the fact that Nora is queer.)

I don't know, I was skeptical of the movie at first after just seeing the teasers (though, tbh, I'm always skeptical of book to movie adaptations at first. Maybe it's the Percy Jackson fan in me), but after the trailer came out, I had more hope. Now, after rereading the book and having all the details fresh in my mind, I'm worried again. I know that trailers are made of clips that often times make more sense in context, so I hope the movie itself gives us more than the trailer implies. It makes sense that they'd want to mostly show the happier, more fun sides of things in the trailer so people will want to watch the movie.

I get that they might just be trying to go for a fun, not super deep, silly, comedic movie kind of vibe, but tbh, as fun and silly as rwrb is, it's also so much more than that. Some of my favorite parts of the book are the more serious parts. The parts where we see Alex and Henry's anxiety and insecurities. I really hope the movie shows at least some of these moments.

I'm definitely still going to watch the movie once it comes out, but I'm kind of concerned about how the story, and especially the characterization of the characters, is going to be portrayed. Hopefully, I'll end up being concerned about nothing. The last third of the trailer suggests that this will be the case, and I really hope it is!

I think the movie can still be enjoyable even if it doesn't show us the deeper and more nuanced sides of these characters, but can you blame me for hoping to see the reason why I fell in love with the book in the first place, the deep emotions of these characters, portrayed on screen?

(Tbh, I kinda lost track of my thoughts here. I think I'm concerned about Henry's drastic change in character more than anything else. It's easy to believe that there are more emotional scenes in the movie that we haven't seen hints of yet because obviously they can't show everything in the trailer. Henry's characterization, on the other hand... we've been shown two different clips of him that explicitly imply that he will be much different than the Henry we see in the book, at least in the beginning. Again, context is everything, so maybe it'll make more sense in the movie, but I can't imagine what context could be given to make those clips of Henry character accurate. And tbh, imo, there's no excuse for replacing soft, pajama-clad Henry in the kitchen scene with a dressed, snarky version of him)

(Also, the election isn't mentioned at all in the trailer? Tbh I think the book could have integrated the political parts a bit better than it did, but I still enjoyed it, especially at the end with election night. I guess if they set the movie in current day, an election won't make much sense, but the election and the stress and responsibilities that come with it add so much to Alex's character, and I honestly hope it's still included in the movie)

[queernuck]

DSA West Point: Soothing the Nomadic War Machine

Recently, a West Point cadet (now Army officer) was shown wearing a Che t-shirt, and in other photos displaying a message reading “Communism Will Win” written inside of his hat. Various members of twitter have called it all sorts of things, from psyop to radical, but an analysis of it that understands the meaningful material conditions of leftist consciousness as expressed in the actions necessary to become a soldier, to be one, to continue as one, and moreover as one going to and graduating from West Point makes clear that there is an unresolvable tension between being an officer graduating from West Point and being in any meaningful sense revolutionary, and that it rather presents an appropriation of leftist ideologies, leftist discourses, by the war machine of the state as part of its nomadic structure separate from that of the government itself. 

Many soldiers do not support Trump as president, just as many did not support Obama, nor Bush before him. However, the massively reactionary response seen to Obama’s election in public statements made by military personnel was matched with Obama’s emphatic continuation of Bush’s imperialist aspirations, with the same sorts of actions, the same sorts of violence that defined Bush’s beginnings of the Iraq war. Even in opposing Trump, some veterans have described a “duty” to their nation that they use to figure Trump as sort of an Oedipal father, one they kill in order to enter a unity with the mother of the State, the mother that they reach through the mechanisms of the United States Army as a war machine. In spite of the rapidly changing neoliberal aesthetics of the 21st Century, the concentration of the US Military has remained relatively singular, expanding but moreover expanding in a predictable fashion: much like the Army’s expansion into Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam war, it has seen expansion into Yemen, Pakistan, and most dramatically Syria, among other nations. The Army officer in question in fact wrote a defense of American intervention in Syria using concepts from Gramsci in order to discuss the specific material circumstances of support for Kurdish forces by the US Army. This is not, by any means, a blow against the American War Machine, just as there is no contradiction found in the use of Deleuze as a theoretical influence by the IDF, little irony in the acknowledgement by the Army of the effectiveness of Maoist guerilla tactics. These are not claims of ideology in themselves, but in fact displays of the nomadic character of the war machine and the ways in which it reshapes itself, the way in which it characterizes 21st century experience.

These moments, too, echo the means by which American forces supported right-wing death squads in South America during the 1980s under Reagan, and how war machines figure into analysis of drug trafficking and distribution to the present day. While the conceptualization of spaces as “Narcostates” in a sense is worth exploring, these states-within-a-state must be understood as tied even more directly to the concept of a war machine, more meaningfully understood as one, than other sorts of states in an incredibly important fashion. This is because the larger structure of the state only exists in a shifting, nomadic fashion brought on by the structures of demand in drug markets: as economic conditions change, in order to continue finding the land, the farmers, the workers necessary to produce a certain sort of production, there is a reliance upon conditions created by neoliberal deprivation, there is a continual shifting topology-unto-topography that is navigated by the war machine of the cartel. Dealing with shifting structures of leadership, networks of distribution, trends in consumption, one has seen the means by which cartels that previously specialized in cocaine move into distributing heroin, in response to the shift of American demand from pharmaceutical opiates to cheaper heroin. This is not to say there was a time where heroin was not a lucrative business, but rather that the larger apparatuses of production were not as well-developed specifically because there was not the producing of a site of production on the side of the market, there was not a heroin market the size of that now found in America. The means by which these groups often have amicable, passing relationships with other sorts of militaristic groups, relationships that do not have a particular political character to them, and move within a state in a manner that obviously requires the apparatus of the state to appear, but moreover requires maintaining a relationship of a certain antagonisms, a necessarily nomadic existence, results in the specific characterization of cartels as war machines.

In many ways, gangs also present themselves as war machines, nomadic upon the corners and cross-streets of cities and towns, working within larger apparatuses of black-market commerce in a fashion that eventually blurs the line between the legal and the illegal. Money Laundering is a lucrative business, and it requires an eventual turn into “clean” money such that it may in turn be invested into commodities, real estate, “safer” stores that can in turn produce a sort of productive interest, making up that lost during the laundering process and far more. In effect, one can discuss how the contemporary character of gangs (and the aesthetics thereof) develop a sort of postmodern consciousness of capitalism, a kind of consumption that relies upon ostentatious resignification of luxury and a lifestyle of capitalist development that is not tied to the state’s flows of control, but instead the nomadism of the war machine developed through the gang. The shifting of tactics, of markets, of means of distribution seen in gangs reflects an acknowledgement of what markets reflect, what trends are matched with what substances, what sort of socius may be expressed within a gang. In Gucci Mane’s autobiography, he talks at one point about how he was a habitual ecstasy user, and this was long before references to ecstasy and molly were common in rap. Similarly, while Houston and other “Dirty South” rappers have been drinking lean for decades, the larger trend (derided as “trendsipping”) is at least relatively recent, linked largely to the simultaneous popularity of a number of Atlanta rappers such as Future, Young Thug, and Migos. 90s New Orleans and Memphis rappers even talk about heroin, not only selling it but snorting it themselves, something that seems befitting the 90s but which would seem out of place for many who seek to distance themselves from the stigma attached to heroin specifically. There are acceptable indulgences and unacceptable ones, all tied to what sorts of businesses are conducted by those involved in criminal activity. Drug dealing can coexist with robbery, which can coexist with arms dealing, which can coexist with club promotion, all of which can be appended to money laundering and so on. It is not particularly the aesthetics of “wars” and “soldiers” that make gangs war machines, although these are important parts of the larger ideology of nomadism at hand. Rather, these are shorthand expressions of how a certain relationship with the sustaining of a gang involves shifting loyalties, the need to maintain a certain sort of affinity across the changing topologies of neighborhoods and state lines.

All of this demands the eventual return to the ideology of the American War Machine, as expressed in the American military: being a socialist or communist in a military that takes part in genocidal action on a global scale, that participates in imperialist occupation and which relies upon a structure of self-sufficiency, a sort of relationship to the state that makes it tower over certain figurations of the state, is not subverting the structure of the war machine. It is merely showing the ways in which schizophrenic affinities of late capitalist politics and analysis can be leveraged even in defense of a supposed socialism. The reaction to an Army Ranger turning out to be a socialist among reactionaries is to blame Obama, to point to any number of incoherently evoked ideological structures (antiblackness, homophobia, McCarthyism) and a defense by the DSA of the Army as if it were still one of forced conscription, one where a meaningful discontent was matched with rebellion within the ranks, the formation of reversals of state power into war machines of their own. War machines moving within the Army is not new; it has been part of postmodern developments of gang affinity, it was the original inspiration for motorcycle gangs, and in fact was reflected in the Young Lords intentionally getting themselves sent to the brig in order to attempt to start mutinies onboard American aircraft carriers. However, the rhizomality with which the current American army operates allows this maneuvering: Gangster Disciples can come together in the same army that contains entire units willing to pose in front of a Lightning Bolt flag placed directly below the American flag. While the former denotes a lack of allegiance to the state, a sort of nomadic maneuvering-within that is a kind of ironic acceptance of material conditions within capitalism, a Žižek-esque development of it to its most radical conclusion, the other is an acceptance of the ideological conditions, the exact sort of allowed-violation that the prohibitions of the Army attract, the exact kind of violent ideology that the Army draws in. That the nomadism of the Army itself is not lessened, weakened, made incoherent by this is an effect of its own nomadism, and the means by which entry into it cannot meaningfully be said to be resistance to it.

At an especially relevant moment in American ideological discourses, when the figuration of a notable protest against antiblackness and its expression in police brutality has intentionally been shifted by both fascist and neoliberal structures into a discussion of free speech, one that requires and is strengthened in both major invocations by the presence of a “veteran” able to lend a certain sort of fetishistic affirmation of a political action, the very means by which one joins, serves within, and leaves the military must be considered. That so many of those who are speaking for “#takeaknee” would consider themselves patriotic, that there is a signifying prerequisite to any discussion of the subject which lies in a deferential acknowledgment of “patriotism” and “respect for veterans” and the specific apparatus of veterans as “fighting” or “protecting” those “rights” is an appropriation of discourse not unlike that of a West Point cadet justifying American intervention through the writing of Gramsci. All of this relies upon the shifting ideology, shifting aesthetic, shifting figuration of the American military as a nomadic war machine, and it is through analysis of other forms of nomadism across the topologies of late capitalism that we can correctly figure this as part of a larger anticapitalist critique.

[jasonwentcrazy]

Decomposition: The Ultimate Stage of Bourgeois Thought

By Guy Debord

"Guy Debord calls himself a filmmaker. Member of the Situationist International, of which he was one of the founders in 1957. For a long time, the responsible party for the publications of the SI in France. Also now and then involved in the different activities of this organization in several countries where situationist agitation was propagated, notably in Germany, England and Italy (sometimes calling himself Gondi or Decayeux). In 1967 published The Society of the Spectacle. The following year, a figure among the leaders of the most extreme current at the time of the troubles of May 1968. Following these events, his theses acquired a great influence in European and American ultra-Leftism. French. Born in 1931, in Paris." -- Autobiographical note in detourned style for the Champ Libre edition of The Society of the Spectacle.

The two main centers of “modern” culture are Paris and Moscow. The styles originating in Paris (the majority of whose elaborators are not French) influence Europe, America and the other developed countries of the capitalist zone such as Japan. The styles imposed administratively by influence all the workers states and also have a slight effect on Paris and its European zone of influence. The Moscow influence is directly political. The persistence of the traditional influence of Paris stems partly from its long-entrenched position as professional cultural center.

Because bourgeois thought is lost in systematic confusion and Marxist thought has been profoundly distorted in the workers states, conservatism reigns both East and West, especially in the domain of culture and customs. This conservatism is overt in Moscow, which has revived the typically petit-bourgeois attitudes of the 19th century. In Paris it is hidden, disguised as anarchism, cynicism or humor. Although both of these ruling cultures are fundamentally incapable of dealing with the real problems of our time, relevant experimentation has been carried further in the West. In the context of this sort of cultural production, the Moscow zone functions as a region of underdevelopment.

In the bourgeois zone, where an appearance of intellectual freedom has generally been tolerated, the knowledge of the movement of ideas and the confused vision of the multiple transformations of the social environment tend to make people aware of an ongoing upheaval whose motivating forces are out of control. The reigning sensibility tries to adapt itself to this situation while resisting new changes that present new dangers. The solutions offered by the retrograde currents ultimately come down to three main attitudes: prolonging the fashions produced by the dada-surrealism crisis (which crisis is simply the sophisticated cultural expression of a state of mind that spontaneously manifests itself wherever previously accepted meanings of life crumble along with previous lifestyles); settling into mental ruins; or returning to the distant past.

In the first case, a diluted form of surrealism can be found everywhere. It has all the tastes of the surrealist era and none of its ideas. Its aesthetic is based on repetition. The remnants of orthodox surrealism have arrived at the stage of occultist senility, and are as incapable of articulating an ideological position as they are of inventing anything whatsoever. They lend credence to increasingly crude charlatanisms and engender others.

Setting up shop in nullity is the cultural solution that has been most visible in the years following World War II. This solution includes two possibilities, each of which has been abundantly illustrated: dissimulating nothingness by means of an appropriate vocabulary, or openly flaunting it.

The first of these options has become particularly famous since the advent of existentialist literature, which has reproduced, under the cover of a borrowed philosophy, the most mediocre aspects of the cultural evolution of the preceding three decades and augmented its mass-media-based notoriety by doses of fake Marxism and psychoanalysis and by successive announcements of more or less arbitrary political engagements and resignations. These tactics have generated a very large number of followers, avowed or unacknowledged. The continuing proliferation of abstract painting and its associated theories is another example of the same nature and scope.

The complacent affirmation of total mental nullity is exemplified by the recent neoliterary phenomenon of “cynical young right-wing novelists,” but is by no means limited to right-wingers, novelists, or semi-youth.

Among the tendencies calling for a return to the past, the doctrine of Socialist Realism has proven to be the most durable, because its indefensible position in the domain of cultural creation seems to be supported by its appeal to the conclusions of a revolutionary movement. At the 1948 conference of Soviet musicians, Andrei Zhdanov revealed the stake of theoretical repression: “Haven’t we done well to preserve the treasures of classic painting and to suppress the liquidators of painting? Wouldn’t the survival of such ‘schools’ have amounted to the liquidation of painting?” Faced with this liquidation of painting and with many other liquidations, and recognizing the crumbling of all its systems of values, the advanced Western bourgeoisie is banking on total ideological decomposition, whether out of desperate reaction or out of political opportunism. In contrast, Zhdanov — with the taste characteristic of the parvenu — recognizes himself in the petit-bourgeois that opposes the decomposition of 19th-century cultural values, and can see nothing else to do than to undertake an authoritarian restoration of those values. He is unrealistic enough to believe that short-lived local political circumstances will give him the power to evade the general problems of this era, if only he can force people to return to the study of superseded problems after having repressed all the conclusions that history has previously drawn from those problems.

The form (and even some aspects of the content) of this Socialist Realism is not very different from the traditional propaganda of religious organizations, particularly of Catholicism. By means of an invariable propaganda, Catholicism defends a unitary ideological structure that it alone, among all the forces of the past, still possesses. But at the same time, in a parallel operation designed to recapture the increasingly numerous sectors that are escaping its influence, the Catholic Church is attempting to take over modern cultural forms, particularly those representing complicated theoretical nullity (“spontaneous” painting, for example). The Catholic reactionaries have the advantage over other bourgeois tendencies of being able to rely on a permanent hierarchy of values; this inalterable foundation enables them all the more freely to push decomposition to the extreme in whatever discipline they engage in.

The crisis of modern culture has led to total ideological decomposition. Nothing new can be built on these ruins. Critical thought itself becomes impossible as each judgment clashes with others and each person invokes fragments of outmoded systems or follows merely personal inclinations.

This decomposition can be seen everywhere. It is no longer a matter of noting the increasingly massive use of commercial publicity to influence judgments about cultural creation. We have arrived at a stage of ideological absence in which advertising has become the only active factor, overriding any preexisting critical judgment or transforming such judgment into a mere conditioned reflex. The complex operation of sales techniques has reached the point of surprising even the ad professionals by automatically creating pseudosubjects of cultural debate. This is the sociological significance of the Françoise Sagan phenomenon in France over the last three years, an experience whose repercussions have even penetrated beyond the cultural zone centered on Paris by provoking some interest in the workers states. The professional judges of culture, seeing such a phenomenon as an unpredictable effect of mechanisms with which they are unfamiliar, tend to attribute it to mere crude mass-media publicity. But their profession nevertheless obliges them to come up with some bogus critiques of these bogus works. (Moreover, a work whose interest is inexplicable constitutes the richest subject for bourgeois confusionist criticism.) They naturally remain unaware of the fact that the intellectual mechanisms of criticism had already escaped them long before the external mechanisms arrived to exploit this void. They avoid facing the fact that Sagan is simply the ridiculous flip side of the change of means of expression into means of action on everyday life. This process of supersession has caused the life of the author to become increasingly more important than her work. As the period of important expressions arrives at its ultimate reduction, nothing of any possible importance remains except the personality of the author, who in turn is no longer capable of possessing any notable quality beyond her age, or some fashionable vice, or some picturesque old craft.

The opposition that must now be united against this ideological decomposition must not get caught up in criticizing the buffooneries appearing in outmoded forms like poems or novels. We have to criticize activities that are important for the future, activities that we need to make use of. One of the most serious signs of the present ideological decomposition is that the functionalist theory of architecture is now based on the most reactionary conceptions of society and morality. That is, the temporarily and partially valid contributions of the original Bauhaus or of the school of Le Corbusier have been distorted so as to reinforce an excessively backward notion of life and of the framework of life.

Everything indicates, however, that since 1956 we have been entering a new phase of the struggle, and that an upheaval of revolutionary forces, attacking the most appalling obstacles on all fronts, is beginning to change the conditions of the preceding period. Socialist Realism is beginning to decline in the countries of the anti-capitalist camp, along with the reactionary Stalinism that produced it, while in the West the Sagan culture is marking a depth of bourgeois decadence beyond which it is probably impossible to go and there seems to be an increasing awareness of the exhaustion of the cultural expedients that have served since the end of World War II. In this context, the avant-garde minority may be able to rediscover a positive value.

Part Two of Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action by Guy Debord, June 1957