Weekend Reads (Nov 25): Elon’s Cybertruck, Horror, Christopher Nolan, Apple TV+
Recommended weekend reading for November 25, 2023.
Note: This weekend’s issue is a bit shorter due to the Thanksgiving holiday. If you celebrated, then I hope you had a wonderful time filled with friends, family, and of course, good food.
Also, I’m currently putting the finishing touches on December’s subscriber-only playlist and podcast. No spoilers, but it does delve into an older band that I became fairly obsessed with earlier this year. If you’re not already a subscriber, that’s easy to change.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
The “saga” of Tesla’s long-awaited — and much-ridiculed — Cybertruck is a perfect encapsulation of Elon Musk.
Deliveries were supposed to begin in 2021. It was supposed to be an off-roading champion and speed demon, modular but “literally bulletproof,” with a base price starting around $40,000. During the reveal, the unbreakable windows broke. In recent weeks, the Cybertruck has been widely mocked online for failing to summit a small dirt hill, having a dumb logo, looking ridiculous from behind, and panel gaps through which a much more reasonably sized car could drive. It cannot be sold in Europe, a huge market for Tesla, because it is too big and lacks life-saving crumple zones in the case of a crash. Tesla also said it retained the right to sue owners who resell their Cybertrucks within a year before quietly removing that section from its terms. And these are just the tidbits that have come out while the prototypes are in the hands of some of Musk’s most fervent fans. Elon Musk has tweeted about the Cybertruck 27 times.
All of this has led some people to wonder why the Cybertruck exists. The short answer is that the Cybertruck exists because it is the perfect Elon Musk car, the total embodiment of everything he is—a thing that tries to be a bunch of different things at once and is not very good at any of them, but, seems revolutionary and interesting if you look at it very briefly, only for just a second.
Paul Krause reviews Matt Cardin’s What the Daemon Said and attempts to explain modernity’s insatiable appetite for horror.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke penned his most famous philosophical treatise entitled An Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. In that masterful work, Burke articulated a dual nature of aesthetic psychology in humans – one aspect of mankind was a spirit seeking the beautiful and the other the sublime; the two spirits often clashed with each other. The sublime, Burke continued to elaborate, was premised on a sense of “dread horror,” passionate ecstasy often leading to pain and fright, a sense of insignificance and even the apprehension to death. Anxiety was a key component of the sublime. This sense of the sublime Burke also associated with traditional religion. The loss of religion in modernity hasn’t killed the sense and want for the sublime innate in humanity. Rather, it has caused the spirit of the sublime to morph into something else: horror.
I’m not a huge horror fan myself, but I do respect the genre. Setting aside the extremities (in terms of sex, gore, etc.) that often earmark the genre, some of the best horror often contains a surprisingly sublime, and even spiritual, aspect. (Not to mention the incisive cultural commentary.) In other words, it’s more than just shock for shock’s sake.
Christopher Nolan spent a lot of time on the physical release of Oppenheimer — which came out earlier this week — to preserve the theatrical experience, and ensure the film’s ongoing availability.
“The Dark Knight was one of the first films where we formatted it specially for Blu-ray release because it was a new form at the time,” he continued. “And in the case of Oppenheimer, we put a lot of care and attention into the Blu-ray version… and trying to translate the photography and the sound, putting that into the digital realm with a version you can buy and own at home and put on a shelf so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”
In related news, Nolan recently debunked rumors that he’s directing a James Bond film. But why would he directed a Bond film when he’s already done Tenet, which plays like a spy film, albeit with a very mind-boggling premise and approach? Or as Brendan Hodges describes it, “an art-house vibes-heavy blockbuster that pauses to ponder metaphysics and quantum agency” More:
Christopher Nolan’s impressionistic sci-fi action love-story is the most abstract, challenging, frustrating, uninhibited, dissonant, dude’s rock hell-yeah movie of his career. If Memento’s plot structure is the shape of a hairpin, Tenet’s is temporal spaghetti, full of narrative loop-de-loops to the point where cast, crew, and even Nolan himself couldn’t always explain his impenetrable screenplay. The Protagonist and Neil’s grim, beautiful romantic friendship — Tenet’s one anchor to raw emotion — is only made fully apparent in the precious final minutes. For a movie so concerned with rewinding time, it’s either idiotic or sheer genius that it’s almost uniquely designed to gain depths of feeling on rewatches that it can’t possibly have the first time around, reminding us that rewatching a movie is its own kind of time travel, and how a bar order of Diet Coke can turn from a symbol of intimacy into a totem of loss.
Although it initially left me feeling underwhelmed, I’ve come to really appreciate and enjoy Tenet, especially its first 30 minutes or so, from the Kyiv opera raid to the Protagonist’s lonely lighthouse exile to his meeting with Neil and the Mumbai assault. As I wrote in my review, “I’m still not sure how well Tenet holds together logically… but the characters’ actions and reactions sell it for me, and its relentless pace means I’m never not engaged.”
Earlier this month, I wrote about Coyote vs. Acme, an live-action/animation hybrid that was controversially shelved by Warner Brothers despite being fully completed and garnering high test scores. Warner Brothers has since reversed course, meaning we might actually get to see the film, which Amid Amidi has seen, and loved.
Anyone who knows the track record of hybrid animated films with classic characters knows that this road isn’t exactly paved with gold. If I want to be frank, there’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit and then there’s everything else.
After seeing the film, I’m ready to rewrite my list. Dave Green’s Coyote vs. Acme isn’t merely good or above-average — it is SUPERB! In a Looney Tunes film, you expect gags, laughs, slapstick, and broad visual comedy, and this film delivers on that promise in the most satisfying ways possible. But you know what you don’t expect? Feeling so deeply for a character that you have to hold back tears. This is as rich a psychological portrait of a cartoon character that has ever been put onto film and it delivers the kind of emotional gut punch that in all my years of loving Looney Tunes I never believed was even possible.
I hope Amidi’s right, and Warner Brothers releases this into theaters. Based on everything I’ve read, they’ve got a potential hit on their hands.
Via Manton Reece.
Eric Deggans argues that Apple TV+ is “the streaming service with the best shows you have never (or, at least, rarely) heard of.”
Certainly, this doesn't apply to all their shows. TV fans know Ted Lasso, the unassuming, earnest comedy that has been nominated for 61 Emmy awards. And The Morning Show, the occasionally bonkers, often-maddening drama featuring big names like Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell and Jon Hamm. Dickinson, a stylized look at the life of 19th century poet Emily Dickinson, was the first Apple TV+ series to win a Peabody award. And, of course, the film Coda won three Oscars, including Best Picture.
But there is a universe of programming behind those big-ticket shows that rarely gets the same amount of pop culture traction, likely because many people don't hear enough about them. And even as some critics grouse about Apple TV+ raising its subscription fees by $3 per month — arguing they don't offer enough classic shows as “library content” to justify the price hike — I think there are lots of original series packed in their lineup that many viewers haven't yet considered.
My son and I are currently watching Monarch, and we’re enjoying it so far. It’s more serious than I was expecting, but so far it works in a slow-burn sort of way. And the casting of father and son Kurt and Wyatt Russell to play the same character in different eras is *chef’s kiss*. Severance is an absolute classic (season two can’t arrive soon enough) and Foundation is a solid space opera series. I didn’t love the first season of Slow Horses as much as I thought I would, but I still want to watch the subsequent seasons when I have time.
Back in August, my friend Jake tweeted out a long thread that exposed the connections between a purportedly conservative organization and a pseudonymous publisher of racist and pornographic content. His followup article explains why this is more than just an online controversy, what it says about Christian political engagement, and how it relates to some recent high-profile conversions by one-time skeptics.
You actually can’t build a political alternative purely off being anti-woke or even “anti-left.” You need something positive and specific and concrete.
The moment you specify what that something is, a choice will have been made: You will either take the side of the vitalists, tacitly denigrating the weak in the process and endorsing something other than the Christian vision of sexuality or you will take sides against the vitalists and with the “slave mortality” taught by Our Lord.
What you can’t do is form business partnerships with Nazi pornographers in the name of advancing a Christian political vision.
Shortly after Jake posted his original thread, I wrote the following: “Everything is now a culture war in which compromise is unthinkable; cultural power and influence are all that matter. But as evidenced by someone like Raw Egg Nationalist, that sort of thinking can lead to a conclusion that’s both silly and dangerous: that the best way to defend and promote your lofty ideals is by digging deeper and deeper until you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, tweeting out Nazi memes and publishing pornography.”
From the Blog
My ’90s Christian alternative music nostalgia went into overdrive this week thanks to this video of MorZan — the reunion of Mortal and Fold Zandura — performing their first show in, well, decades.
Back in July 2022, Jyro La Villa and Jerome Fontamillas took to social media to announce that they were resurrecting their old bands — Mortal and Fold Zandura — as a new entity called MorZan. That news might not have meant much to many of you, but for ’90s Christian alternative music fans like myself, it was tantamount to, say, The Smiths getting back together.
I really can’t explain how much Mortal’s music affected me in high school. They were one of the first explicitly Christian bands that I heard who made music that was, well, cool. Or as I wrote in my review of 1993’s Fathom, Mortal “proved to me that Christians could make music that was aggressive, intense, and yes, even ‘dark’ without sacrificing their spiritual convictions and beliefs.”
I’ve also discussed Mortal and Fold Zandura’s music in a couple of previous podcast episodes.
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