But What If the Billionaire Spaceships are a GOOD Idea?

The three faces of the Billionaire Space Race: Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk

Watching the current Billionaire Space Race, I have multiple reactions. I grew up reading science fiction, so privatized spaceflight isn’t new to me. But depending on whose interpretation you favor, we could be facing a massive dystopian folderol—the position favored by much of Blue Twitter—or the dawning of a new Golden Age. Unfortunately, there’s too much at stake to gamble now.

I remember reading, clear back in the 1980s, thrilling narratives of privatized spaceflight and the potential risks and benefits. Ben Bova springs immediately to mind, though countless other authors whose names I’ve forgotten also addressed the topic. Many saw privatized space travel as a libertarian extravaganza, the opportunity for flourishing human ingenuity. Bova’s Welcome To Moonbase fired my imagination with its ambitious public-private partnership.

Yet I cannot remember this vision, without remembering the other great libertarian space spitball: Star Wars. Though George Lucas depicts an autocratic one-party state, replete with Nazi-fetish costumes and ominously clicking heels, he depicts a remarkably hands-off economy. Darth Vader’s relationships with Lando Calrissian, Boba Fett, and Jabba the Hutt bespeak his galaxy’s defining economic ethos: don’t cross the state, and we’ll let you do whatever you want.

To emphasize the Star Wars economy, consider The Last Jedi, when Finn and Rose visit Canto Bight, the Monte Carlo-like carnival that dominates the movie’s middle third. Finn is initially besotted with public displays of wealth, and almost forgets his mission. Rose sees through the grotesquerie and demonstrates the planet’s moral bankruptcy. The movie not-so-subtly encourages us to see the parallels between that scene, and today’s widespread inequality.

Conventional leftist commentators have carped how today’s Billionaire Space Race proves American and EU capitalists have too damn much money. The three billionaires competing for bragging rights, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sir Richard Branson, have so much combined wealth that they could literally defeat world hunger without even noticing the outlay. Why, the commentariat asks, aren’t they competing to accomplish that?

Compelling as this argument seems, I can’t wholly support it. Because of the amortized cost of research and development, many large-scale technological innovations start out prohibitively expensive. Cars, airplanes, television, even the computer or smartphone you’re using to read this essay, were once exclusive playthings of the obscenely wealthy, condemned by populists as dangerous disruptors of good, honest values. The complaints have a redundant quality.

The three faces of the Star Wars economy: Darth Vader, Lando Calrissian, and Boba Fett

Equally importantly, the pressing terrestrial concerns which our Space Racers are purportedly ignoring—global warming, mass poverty, resource depletion, and authoritarian violence—will also be punishingly expensive. Currently, the American and British governments (where our Space Racers live) are bogged in partisan arguments about whether global warming even exists, while huge tracts are literally on fire. Conventional centralized solutions aren’t exactly forthcoming.

During the Cold War, America took pride in its research universities, scientific think tanks, and NASA. We considered spending taxpayer dollars and private grant money on these pursuits worthwhile. Then the Cold War ended, and we changed our minds about science. Capitalists decided they’d rather keep their money, and their pet legislators agreed. Now our economy resembles Bespin, rather than Moonbase.

Changing our economic presumptions would be time-consuming. We didn’t arrive at today’s economy with one tax bill or regulatory scheme, and we won’t fix today that way either. Our Star Wars protagonists didn’t bother fixing Bespin’s economy, and made only symbolic gestures on Canto Bight. Sure, the underlying system was a problem, but it wasn’t what was attempting to kill civilians at that exact moment.

Instead, like President Kennedy did when rallying America around the proposed moonshot, we have the potential to unify world citizens around flashy, high-profile technological wonders, like putting a billionaire on Mars. Perhaps, the spectacle will subsidize the necessary but unsexy quest for other solutions, too. Like how DARPA invented the Internet, and me becoming a blogger was merely a side effect.

Don’t misunderstand me. Trusting and utilizing these billionaires and their private empires might be expedient, but we can’t expect them to deliver us salvation. We have to address our problems, collectively, through economics, philosophy, and the state. Piggybacking our hopes for technological solutions on the Amazon moonshot doesn’t preclude us demanding reforms to our badly broken system.

But, like our parents and grandparents, why not tie this moonshot to other attempted remedies? Things could turn out awful, but things are awful now, and wishing for better background noise is wasteful when we have challenges right here. Maybe everything will turn into Star Wars. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll turn into Moonbase.

Some Thoughts on the “Cat Person” Controversy

In September of 1989, an episode of sitcom Family Matters featured Rachel, a young author, selling a manuscript based on her brother’s family. Her brother’s family recognize themselves in the story, and are outraged by the negative depictions. They perceive Rachel as highlighting their worst characteristics for a hasty sale. Rachel spends the episode explaining how fictioneering works, and gradually making peace with her brother’s extended family.

For context, this was Season 1, Episode 3, so something the writers’ room presented early. Presumably they wanted to remind their own families that, though they used personal experiences as story foundations, they didn’t mean anything literally. Something relevant must’ve happened in Hollywood around that time, because six months later, a Golden Girls episode featured Blanche spitting outrage when she saw herself depicted in her sister’s Jacqueline Susann-like sexploitation novel.

Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person,” a 2017 New Yorker story about a dysfunctional May-late August relationship, regained currency this week. Alexis Nowicki, a Brooklyn book publicist, published a Slate article claiming the story appropriated significant portions of her life, including her college relationship with a much older graduate student. This despite, Nowicki admits, never meeting Roupenian. The Twitter commentariat started circling like buzzards, as it does.

The occasional bomb-thrower claims Roupenian transgressed somehow by using somebody else’s story. I even saw the word “plagiarism” misapplied. But these were outliers, the people Mick Hume calls “full-time professional offense takers.” The largest fraction of audience responses involved wisecracks about the appropriateness of Nowicki’s response. Since when, these respondents (many of them writers) asked, is it wrong or inflammatory for writers to fictionalize other people’s stories?

My favorite responses to Nowicki’s article ask: what responsibility do writers have in fictionalizing stories that aren’t theirs? We all, as writers and readers alike, understand humanity through other people, and therefore process difficult or morally ambiguous situations through stories. When our personal experiences don’t provide the necessary narratives, we turn to others’ stories. We all do it, but what moral onus does it place upon us?

Ernest Hemingway

In high school, my teachers frequently treated fiction and poetry like crossword puzzle clues. American Literature classes particularly repeated this. Authors, especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald, were treated like cypers from the past. Like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, we needed to apply our decoder rings to unlock the concealed meaning, which was always one-to-one. Literature wasn’t presented as art to mull over and live with, but a message to understand.

Perhaps you’ve heard that wheezy advice frequently given to young authors: “write what you know.” We assume that authors only create work by fictionalizing their personal experience, then we reverse-engineer such experience onto others’ work. I’ve always distrusted this advice, since it implies you can’t understand anybody’s experiences except your own. After all, Stephen Crane didn’t need to fight in the Civil War to write The Red Badge of Courage.

According to Nowicki, Roupenian admitted writing her story in an MFA workshop, and sending it into the New Yorker slush pile, where literary fiction usually goes to die. For whatever reason, it struck a chord, and the editors bought it, propelling a young graduate student into the ranks of luminaries like David Sedaris and Jamaica Kincaid. Then, because Roupenian addressed emotionally loaded topics, her story quickly became a lightning rod for cheap online outrage.

I’m reminded of 2016, when online critics, including friends of mine, willfully misread a Calvin Trillin ditty. Or January, 2020, when firebrands responded to an Isabel Fall story, without apparently reading past the title, with such ferocity that the author needed psychiatric treatment. In each case, audiences “decoded” literal, singular messages from these works, like reading Hemingway in 11th-grade AmLit, giving the works one, singular, invariable meaning.

Worse, like Rachel’s family or Blanche, these audiences seek the most negative, adversarial meaning. They project their insecurities onto, not the work, but the author, attributing malicious intent rather than the desire to write compelling fiction. The Family Matters and Golden Girls writers’ rooms shared this premise, presumably because their own families thought they’d recycled family drama. Which perhaps they did, but not malevolently.

Alexis Nowicki, like those TV families, wanted everyone to know her story wasn’t as toxic as that depicted in fiction. She recalls her relationship with “Charles” fondly, but distantly, like many college relationships. But like those families, Nowicki’s self-defense imputes authorial intent onto Kristen Roupenian. She sees Roupenian’s writing not as art, but as journalism. In doing so, she diminishes art’s psychological impact, and makes other minds less real.

lmao no one better try to come for me when i write this toxic ass relationship in this book. y'all better use critical thinking skills and realize that i'm doing it on purpose for catharsis and call it a day

— joelle wellington (@joelle_welling) July 9, 2021

Steampunk and the Next-Wave Revolution

Aleksandr Boguslavsky, director, Abigail

The walled city of Fensington has managed to protect itself against the pestilence racking the outside world, but at great cost: Inspectors demand constant random infection checks. Anyone showing signs of illness get bundled into dark sedans and whisked away. Young Abigail watched the Security Division abduct her scientist father, calling him infected. Now a young adult, Abigail feels the first stirrings of infection inside herself.

Steampunk, as a genre, is frequently antimodernist, highlighting a premature collision between technological modernity and traditional culture. I sometimes pooh-pooh American steampunk, which often reeks of naïve pastoralism. But this Russian confection has a different ethos. Coming from a nation whose administration has been accused of assassinating dissidents, this movie’s antiauthoritarian heart feels brave, and openly tries to kick the Putin Administration in the balls.

One chance encounter shows Abigail that the Inspectors’ reach isn’t as universal as she’d thought. The state’s power, she discovers, depends on citizens’ compliance. The centralized state rewards conformity and mediocrity. Citizens willing to obey get rewarded with stable, undistinguished, middle-class jobs. But Abby is dissatisfied going along to get along; she demands to know where the Security Division took her father.

In some ways, this movie demands comparison to the original Star Wars. Abigail, blessed with the first glimmerings of supernatural power, seeks guidance, and discovers an underground resistance to the empire’s well-paid fatalism. Even the corps of masked Inspectors attack and die with the persistence of Imperial Stormtroopers. The visual design also recalls Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley, with its flamboyant spellcasters and carnival swamis.

Like those franchises, director Aleksandr Boguslavsky uses atmospherics, turning the physical space into a character. Boguslavsky turns the narrow, medieval streets of St. Petersburg, Russia, and Tallinn, Estonia, into spaces packed with terror and wonder. Fensington’s draconian mayor has greywashed the city, but the magical underground has built their own community, brightly lit, lush in color, and brimming with life. Now they have to defend it.

Unlike Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter, though, Abigail doesn’t find a resistance prepared to uphold brave humanistic values or support the transcendent. Fensington’s magical underground has become paranoid and insular, and fallen under command of Bale, a sultry-eyed, Robert Pattinson-like demagogue. Bale is charismatic and intense, but also fixed and dogmatic. Before long, Abigail realizes the resistance is as authoritarian as the government it resists.

Abigail (Tinatin Dalakishvili) makes her stand against the evil Inspectors, in Abigail

This movie’s CGI grandeur and retrofuturistic design help expound a very real conundrum in which many youth find themselves today. Abigail wants to recapture the sunlit optimism she experienced with her father, a world of nature and allegory and possibility. But she finds herself caught between two conflicting powers which have more in common than either acknowledges. Both will force her to forego her dreams, or else get her killed.

On one level, this story is very Russian. Historically, Russia and its CIS satellites have found themselves torn between conflicting absolute theories: tsarism versus Bolshevism, mafia capitalists versus secret police. In choosing between official or illicit authoritarianism, Russians have, for over a century, been forced to choose which denial of human individuality they prefer. Never free, they’re only allowed to choose which boots they have on their necks.

Yet this experience is, I suggest, not specific to Russia. As conventional religions, economies, and governments have proven themselves inadequate in recent years, the alternatives which arise to replace them have served to concentrate power, not spread it. The re-emergence of small-f fascism in multiple nations reflects the ways “free” citizens have to select which illiberal, antidemocratic force they prefer ruling their lives.

Abigail prefers another path. Guided by her absent father and his clockwork talismans, she proposes that salvation lies outside Fensington’s walls. She offers to show Fensington’s magical underground a truth hitherto unimagined: wide, sweeping vistas under blue skies. The symbolism isn’t subtle. But she can’t escape the city’s habituated limits alone; she needs other wizards’ solidarity. She needs them to step out in faith.

The fact that Boguslavsky made this movie in English bespeaks his global ambitions. (His mostly Russian and CIS actors have their lines dubbed by American voices.) Fighting battles like we’ve always fought them, Boguslavsky says, ties us to outcomes we’ve already seen. We need new approaches, and equally importantly, we need new leaders, untethered to their own glory. We have to step outside our own walls.

Boguslavsky’s grown-up fairy tale has the potential to inspire future generations to change. It also challenges us to accept the uncertainty and wonder that come with taking back our own destiny.

The Best Horror a Dollar Store Can Provide

Nigel Bach, writer/director, Bad Ben

Fat, happy Tom Riley thinks he’s scored a major coup: an enormous suburban New Jersey house, scored at fire-sale prices. He expects to flip the property for a profit, though his plans appear vague. The house has other goals, though, including isolating him from the basement, and punishing him if he wanders past the fenceline, which borders on the Pine Barrens. When he disobeys the house, he finds something he didn’t expect: a small, shallow grave.

First-time auteur Nigel Bach apparently shot this movie entirely by the seat of his pants. He had a beat sheet, but no script, and his all-volunteer crew dropped out right before shooting. He uses a found-footage style that excuses the low-res image that comes from shooting over half the movie on his iPhone. This movie could’ve descended into irredeemable silliness, but Bach avoids that outcome by embracing his shaky, amateurish side and having fun.

Tom has a distinctly ambivalent relationship with his house. He lives in it during the renovation, even sleeping in the previous owners’ armchair. But he mocks and disparages the former owners, especially their displays of overt religiosity, and he throws their family Bible in the trash, thinking religious displays will hurt resale value. He’s especially baffled that the previous owners vacated the premises so quickly that they left all their furniture. Seriously, who does that?

Another thing Tom can’t understand: what’s with the dozens of security cameras? Every room but the bathroom has motion-sensor cameras, providing constant, digital surveillance of everything that happens. It’s almost like the previous owners distrusted their own house. But as furniture starts moving itself, blocking his access to the basement, he starts wondering whether having thorough documentation might help. Because something has a message for him, if he can figure it out.

If this sounds very Amityville Horror, you’re right. Like that movie’s George Lutz, Tom buys a house, but quickly realizes it owns him. The implications are distinctly Freudian, and Ben, the spirit plaguing Tom’s house, represents a manifestation of suburban home-owning id. This representation isn’t even concealed, as much of Tom’s investigation turns on his basement and attic. Secrets lie concealed in the parts of the house that everyone has, but avoids ever looking at.

This film mimics the beat sheet of The Blair Witch Project, a film I disliked. Yet I feel much more warmly toward Nigel Bach and his production. Maybe it’s because he didn’t court the same puffed-up publicity that Artisan Entertainment sought; Bach just released this shoestring baby to streaming services and trusted the audience. Or maybe it’s because Bach, and his character Tom Riley, aren’t so damned self-serious; they understand their situation is campy, and go with it.

Tom Riley (Nigel Bach) checks his security cameras in Bad Ben

Let me emphasize that campy aspect. It’s impossible to escape this movie’s goofy, low-budget quality. Besides Tom Riley, the only onscreen character is a poorly glimpsed shadow in a few shots. To provide exposition, Tom occasionally talks into his cell-phone, and keeps extensive iPhone video logs. He lampshades how artificial this is, admitting his actions make no sense. But we, the audience, understand the purpose: he doesn’t realize he’s a character in a shoestring movie.

Playing Tom, extemporizing his terse, impatient monologues, Nigel Bach is clearly having so much fun that he visibly has difficulty keeping a straight face. Unlike Heather Donohue, who needed in-story justification to explain weeping into the camera, Bach plays Tom with eye-rolling extravagance. To Bach, this movie is a middle-age passion project, a fun activity to occupy spare time, like retooling a Volkswagen. He has no pretense of art or commerciality, he’s just having fun.

Importantly, Bach’s attitude has infected his audience. Despite being only lightly scary, his infectious joy has turned this movie into a veritable indie enterprise. He’s crowdfunded six sequels, none of which has had an official release, instead shuffling straight to streaming with minimal fanfare. Horror movie fans have embraced his low-fi, mostly bloodless camp, and paid for more. Maybe we like Bach’s themes of suburban ennui. Maybe we’re having as much fun as he is.

Don’t enter this movie expecting jolting scares or blood-curdling terror. Though Bach cultivates nagging dread, and two or three well-placed jump scares, this movie mostly isn’t some unstopping chill-fest. Rather, it’s an experiment in narrative, an attempt to recreate a legitimate moviegoing experience with a cash-on-hand budget. It’s flamboyant, artificial, and sometimes stilted. It’s also just plain fun. Nigel Bach invites us on his passion project, and at the end, we’re glad we came along.

Gwen Berry, the Flag, and the Nature of Ceremony

The photo that made Gwen Berry (left) infamous.
With DeAnna Price (center) and Brooke Andersen

This weekend, during national trials for the Tokyo Olympics, the Women’s Hammer Throw event mattered for the first time, probably, ever. Gwen Berry, two-time gold medalist at the Pan-American Games, finished third, qualifying for the Olympics. But during the medal ceremony, Berry, who is Black, didn’t participate in the National Anthem, turning instead to face the crowd.

The Usual Suspects flipped their wigs, of course. Matt Walsh, Meghan McCain, and Ben Shapiro used their mass-media platforms to shriek, sometimes incoherently, about Berry’s horrendous travesty. Representative Ben Crenshaw went on the Former President’s favorite news network to demand Berry be ejected from the team. Wypipo Twitter, hardly a bastion of nuanced deliberation, turned downright ugly in its condemnations, and frequently racist.

(No, I won’t link their Tweets. They don’t deserve the oxygen.)

In my ongoing quest to better understand American conservatives, in terms they’d use to describe themselves, I spent time performing what rhetorician Peter Elbow calls “the believing game,” taking another person’s position seriously and respecting it, without trying to debunk it. Conservative allegiance to ceremonies of Americanism have long baffled me. Yet after some consideration, I’ve had some possibly helpful insights I’d like to share.

The pundits outraged over Berry’s demonstrative refusal are, unsurprisingly, the same pundits outraged over Colin Kaepernick kneeling. These same pundits also complain whenever news re-emerges that grade school children aren’t universally required to perform the Pledge of Allegiance daily. Fox & Friends, where Representative Crenshaw aired his demands, also complained, during the Obama Administration, that President Obama was inconsistent and frequently sloppy in returning military salutes.

(Executive protocol doesn’t require Presidents to salute, but many do so out of good taste.)

To outsiders, these forms of demonstrative Americanism appear entirely ceremonial. That is, people perform these actions simply because we perform these actions. Yet to their loyalists, the ceremonial quality isn’t empty; the ceremony gives it mass. Like a priest speaking the words of institution, and thereby transforming inert bread into the Body of Christ, ceremonial Americanism transforms the person in the ceremony.

Remember when the Former President hugged an American flag at CPAC, to thunderous applause? Progressives and liberals derided the action. Yet for the Former President’s intended audience, this action had significant weight. Ceremonies like saluting the flag, singing the National Anthem, and speaking the Pledge of Allegiance, make the ceremony enactors more American, a state that needs constantly renewed.

Would critics have been happier with this older photo of Gwen Berry? Who can say?

If we’re honest, liberals and progressives understand this impulse. Even unbelievers want someone with official standing to officiate their weddings, because the ceremony, not the sentiment, makes the marriage. Likewise, progressives trust the Courts, a bastion of ceremony, to enforce laws justly. Consider how important it is to dress appropriately, use people’s official titles, and rise or sit without hesitation.

Observance of ceremonial rules, in other words, matters. The only difference is which ceremonies different groups honor. The progressives who claim they don’t understand the outrage over Berry or Kaepernick’s non-participation in flag ceremonies, would understand altogether if, say, one of Former Guy’s indicted advisors addressed an enrobed judge by first name inside a courtroom.

Ceremonies like the National Anthem, or “all rise,” gain their authority because, like religious liturgy, everyone performs them together. A stadium facing the flag, hands on hearts, stops being, temporarily, massed individuals; they become united in purpose. Individuals stop existing, provisionally. For the moment we’re singing “Oh Say Can You See,” we briefly no longer exist.

Therefore, protests like Berry’s or Kaepernick’s also gain substance from ceremony. By disrupting the unified performance, they drag us back into ourselves during our moment of ecstatic transport, making us again, unwillingly, human. They ask us whether the mass to which we’ve surrendered our individuality actually deserves such ceremonial acclaim. They force us to be conscious during a moment of unconsciousness.

This defiance of rules matters in sports, an activity defined entirely by rules. Obscure rules like the Fair Catch Kick don’t inhibit football; the rules make the game. Like standards surrounding the National Anthem, the individual disappears into a regulated world and is fleetingly transformed. Therefore, maybe it shouldn’t surprise us when lovers of the rules hate seeing others honoring the rules selectively.

Because some people desire to disappear, briefly, into ceremonial unity, reminders of human finitude disturb them. Again, for them, the ceremony isn’t emotion; it literally transforms and renews their American natures. Like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, breaking them loose prematurely stops them becoming whole. No wonder they’re angered by displays like Berry’s. They’ve been denied their renewal.