Sometimes
late at night
when I’m three inches away from my piercing, blue computer screen in my dark loft, I have a moment of halting, out-of-body existentialism. I recognize that there’s something deeply unsettling about how I must look.
The glow of the screen lights up my unmoving face, mouth ajar, dead eyeballs consuming the eldritch vastness of the internet through a firehose. Movies like Red Rooms affirm to me that - yes, the internet is perhaps the greatest feat of human engineering - but it has also jarred humanity onto an aberrant timeline, away from the purity of our path before.
Thematically similar films like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair interrogate similar ideas, but while World’s Fair finds the beating heart underneath the creeping nihilism of the internet, the whole point of Red Rooms is to explore the corners of technology and the internet where there is no heart, no empathy, no humanity. At its mildest of moments, what is the value of a joke told by an A.I. assistant? At its most extreme, what can the power of the internet offer to a psychopath?
Apropos of that, I saw a short video the other day that explained psychopathy in a disarmingly plain way. Imagine a person waking up in the morning. They look in the mirror; a desire rises within them. “I could really go for some sushi.” They don their clothes and public accoutrements and make their way down their apartment stairs to the street below. They begin their walk to the sushi restaurant.
Along their walk, they encounter the aftermath of a car accident. A woman kneels, holding the bloodied body of a small child in her arms. She is wailing, five feet away from our observer. They stare until a thought enters their brain. “Yeah, sushi sounds perfect.”
They return to their apartment with their sushi in tow. The face of the wailing woman returns to their mind’s eye. What was going on with her? What was that? Eventually, they’re in front of their mirror again, studiously mimicking the pained expression of the wailing woman.
Anyway, killer movie. Two or three virtuosic scenes of flawless filmmaking and perfectly executed motifs throughout. Able to be analyzed through a dozen different lenses for days.
Supremely endercore.
Sometimes
late at night
when I’m three inches away from my piercing, blue computer screen in my dark loft, I have a moment of halting, out-of-body existentialism. I recognize that there’s something deeply unsettling about how I must look.
The glow of the screen lights up my unmoving face, mouth ajar, dead eyeballs consuming the eldritch vastness of the internet through a firehose. Movies like Red Rooms affirm to me that - yes, the internet is perhaps the greatest feat of human engineering - but it has also jarred humanity onto an aberrant timeline, away from the purity of our path before.
Thematically similar films like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair interrogate similar ideas, but while World’s Fair finds the beating heart underneath the creeping nihilism of the internet, the whole point of Red Rooms is to explore the corners of technology and the internet where there is no heart, no empathy, no humanity. At its mildest of moments, what is the value of a joke told by an A.I. assistant? At its most extreme, what can the power of the internet offer to a psychopath?
Apropos of that, I saw a short video the other day that explained psychopathy in a disarmingly plain way. Imagine a person waking up in the morning. They look in the mirror; a desire rises within them. “I could really go for some sushi.” They don their clothes and public accoutrements and make their way down their apartment stairs to the street below. They begin their walk to the sushi restaurant.
Along their walk, they encounter the aftermath of a car accident. A woman kneels, holding the bloodied body of a small child in her arms. She is wailing, five feet away from our observer. They stare until a thought enters their brain. “Yeah, sushi sounds perfect.”
They return to their apartment with their sushi in tow. The face of the wailing woman returns to their mind’s eye. What was going on with her? What was that? Eventually, they’re in front of their mirror again, studiously mimicking the pained expression of the wailing woman.
Anyway, killer movie. Two or three virtuosic scenes of flawless filmmaking and perfectly executed motifs throughout. Able to be analyzed through a dozen different lenses for days.
Supremely endercore.
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