Weekend Reads (Apr 23): “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Netflix Woes, Culture Wars, the Big Lie
Recommended weekend reading material for April 23, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
First, some related news: In addition to running Opus, I’m also an editor and writer for Christ and Pop Culture. I’m very excited to announce that we’re now accepting pitches for our Q2 features on the themes of conflict and peacemaking (which seem rather apropos given current world and national events). We’ve published some great features in the past, and I’m looking forward to our next batch.
Now on to the links…
I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I really enjoyed Everything Everywhere All at Once (though you can read my review if any doubt remains). It’s a movie with a lot on its mind, as evidenced by this recent interview with the film’s directors.
I think on the individual level, a lot of self-loathing has fuelled this work, like Charlie Kaufman’s, but also on a cosmic level the fact that every new scientific discovery that decentres humanity from its own narrative is pretty unsettling. I think it’s up to the philosophers and the poets and the storytellers to keep finding ways to turn that fear and trembling into a story that isn’t a crushing, you know… That won’t just make us all throw our hands up and give up.
The interview was conducted by Walter Chaw. If you haven’t read his review of Everything Everywhere All at Once, then I highly recommend doing so.
Related: In her review, M. V. Bergen discusses the movie’s perspectives on kindness and love: “[Love is] an intentional choice to inhabit the same place(s) as those we love, to make amends where needed, to bear witness, and to offer support and be responsible and responsive to them, even in ways that may not make sense to us.”
Also Related: A physicist explains Everything Everywhere All at Once’s take on the multiverse: “It’s such a powerful visualization, to not just break the laws of physics in this universe, but to have almost infinite choice of who you are. To escape yourself and become someone else.”
Also Related, Too: The members of Son Lux discuss the challenges of creating a soundtrack for a movie set in a multiverse: “You have to create a whole identity for the universe in order for it to be successful, even if you’re only there for a brief moment. That’s partly why it was such an outrageous amount of work. That’s also why it was rewarding.”
Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022 (its first loss in over a decade) and could lose as many as 2 million subscribers in the second quarter. As a result, the company’s stock plummeted, losing over $50 billion in value.
Netflix blamed the loss on their price hike back in January. Also not helping: the password-sharing by an estimated 100 million households worldwide. Netflix has always been pretty lax on password-sharing because it helped them grow, but they’ll probably begin cracking down on it as their revenue and growth slows. Netflix also announced the possibility of cheaper ad-supported tiers to discourage attritions.
Related: Stranger Things’ fourth season — its first part, anyway — will begin streaming on May 27. The series is one of Netflix’s signature titles, so it’s not surprising that Netflix would spend big money on it, to the tune of $30 million per episode. To give you some context, Everything Everywhere All at Once had a $25 million budget.
Speaking of beleaguered streaming services, CNN+ — the much-hyped service that featured exclusive programming and high profile hosts — will shut down less than a month after it started.
The decision was made by new management after CNN’s former parent company, WarnerMedia, merged with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery earlier this month.
The prior management team’s vision for CNN+ runs counter to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s plan to house all of the company’s brands under one streaming service. Some CNN+ programming may eventually live on through that service. Other programming will shift to CNN’s main television network.
According to some reports, CNN spent up to $300 million on CNN+ (with plans to spend a lot more) but only had 150,000 subscribers to show for all that money.
Nobody denies that The Simpsons is one of the greatest TV shows of all time. But do we truly realize how much The Simpsons — which, let’s be honest, peaked a long time ago — predicted and shaped our present world?
What is it about this show — a cartoon, now entering early middle age, from the same network that gave us such world-historic turds as The Chevy Chase Show, Alien Autopsy, and Temptation Island — that lingers in the poisoned well of our shared consciousness? I can’t remember the digits of my checking account, but I can recall various scenes from the first 12 seasons of The Simpsons with a clarity that would suggest they were my own cherished memories. There’s a joke among television writers — especially those working on animated shows — that “The Simpsons already did it,” which has become shorthand for the futility of an original thought in a post-Homer world. In its first decade, The Simpsons lampooned nearly every facet of the end of the 20th century and the horrors it wrought, in jokes that seem disturbingly prescient today: from the misery of corporate branding (“We can’t afford to shop at any store that has a philosophy,” says Marge) to the folly of the justice system (another of Marge’s droll observations: “You know, the courts might not work anymore, but as long as everybody is videotaping everyone else, justice will be done”). Even the eventual horrors of the Fox conglomerate were pinpointed by The Simpsons, in a joke dating from when Tucker Carlson was writing columns for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “The network slogan is true: Watch Fox and be damned for all eternity!”
Via NextDraft.
I can’t believe I’m only just now learning about Neocities, which evokes the glory days of the older DIY web before Facebook, Twitter, et al. rose to prominence.
For Díaz, and so many others on Neocities, the platform provides a space that isn’t organized to be consumed and indexed. Rather than a constantly rushing river of information, Neocities sites are like homes where users fix them up, spend time on them, and invite others to visit. While there is an overarching tag function to look through sites, networked socializing isn’t put front and center like with so much other social media. Instead, these sites network with others via slower communications such as email or site comments. Díaz tells Polygon, “A cool thing about Neocities is that it has some optional social features like following and commenting, so some folks reply to the entries when I update. I’ve even got emails from readers playing a game I covered and telling me about it!”
Psychologists attempt to explain why we tend to remember music more easily than seemingly more important details.
Even if you aren’t a musician, you can still have an intuitive understanding of music from how often you experience it. “We don’t necessarily read our favorite book or watch our favorite film as many times as we listen to our favorite music,” Jakubowski says. “Even non-musicians have really accurate musical memory. It’s not that they are deliberately trying to memorize the piece of music, they’re just getting exposed so much that they become musical experts in a different sort of way just because of this incidental exposure to music [that’s] really prominent in our world today.”
As someone who grew up in the Church during the ’80s and ’90s, and did their fair share of culture-warring, this recent article by Hannah Strickler Anderson really resonates with me.
As a young culture warrior, I was getting a hit of righteousness. I needed to know that I was a good person, and waging the culture wars was a great way to convince myself and those watching me. It was a way to convince God, too, I think.
But like any other drug, self-righteousness needs an ever-increasing supply. Every hit demands another. And when you’ve come to love the rush, you very quickly become addicted until the only thing you know how to do is fight.
Sean Feucht has made a name for himself by holding a series of praise and worship events in defiance of COVID mandates. It’s tempting to dismiss him as a mere grifter, but there’s a popular and long-held theology behind efforts like his.
While Feucht insists his worship gatherings are protests against restrictions on church gatherings, his rallies have been held in places like Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Kenosha, Wisconsin — sites of prominent BLM protests that often turned into showdowns with police.
These sites are important to Feucht because to him they reveal a spiritual disturbance (not to mention the media attention already focused there). Feucht’s gatherings gain a double-valence concerning who the spiritual enemies are: both governmental leaders who would place restrictions on church gatherings and those protesting racism and police brutality.
More than a third of all American voters, and more than two-thirds of Republican voters, still believe in the “Big Lie,” i.e., that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Sarah Longwell interviewed a number of Trump supporters to better understand why they still believe in the conspiracy theory.
The exact details of the story vary—was it Hugo Chávez who stole the election? Or the CIA? Or Italian defense contractors? Outlandish claims like these seem to have made this conspiracy theory more durable, not less. Regardless of plausibility, the more questions that are raised, the more mistrustful Trump voters are of the official results.
Perhaps that’s because the Big Lie has been part of their background noise for years.
Longwell claims that the “Big Lie” has now become a test of Republican allegiance. If that’s the case, then our political climate isn’t going to improve any time soon.
From the Blog
A congressional candidate recently claimed that Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” was not a classic ode to youthful rebellion but in fact, was a defense of traditional American values. Which is just the latest instance of politicians misunderstanding and twisting songs to their own ends.
In these cases, as well as “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” you have politicians simply ignoring the plainest, most obvious interpretation of the song in question, and overwriting it with their own. We all do this, of course. We’re all very good at ignoring inconvenient facts that get in the way of our enjoyment of things, whether it’s a popular song’s darker meaning, a beloved artist’s troubled history, or the economic impact of streaming on musicians’ livelihoods.
However, what makes this cluelessness easier to understand — but also more frustrating — is the extent to which Republicans have demonized popular culture, and rock n’ roll in particular, for its pernicious effects on society. Instead of encouraging a thoughtful and critical engagement with pop culture, they’ve often encouraged self-righteousness, condemnation, and outright rejection.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, sneak previews, and podcasts. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.