Weekend Reads (February 1): 2024 Pop Culture, “Calvin & Hobbes,” David Lynch Tributes, Toxic Fandoms
Recommended weekend reading material for February 1, 2025.
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Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
As some of you might know, I’m the owner and one of the editors of Christ and Pop Culture, and we just published our year-end recaps of 2024. Unlike other publications, these aren’t “best of” lists, but rather, lists of the pop culture that we most enjoyed in 2024 for a multitude of reasons, be it their spiritual themes, enjoyment factor, or well-made construction and crafting. I contribute several items of my own, including a review of the delightfully absurd Hundreds of Beavers.
Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez was one of 2024’s most acclaimed films, and has garnered 13 Oscar nominations, including “Best Picture.” However, the film — which is set in Mexico but was directed by a Frenchman — has received criticism for its lack of Mexican cast and crew, as well as its depiction of Mexican culture. In response, a group of Mexican filmmakers have released a short film indulging in French stereotypes.
Titled Johanne Sacreblu, the short, helmed by Mexican trans woman Camila D. Aurora (a.k.a. Camiileo), spans 28 minutes and has become something of a hit on Letterboxd, where it’s been logged as watched by nearly 18,000 users as of this writing. In terms of reviews on the platform, its current weighted average rests at 4.6 after just over 16,000 ratings. The film is notably about France, the home country of Emilia Pérez director Jacques Audiard, but was made in Mexico, and only stars Mexican performers.
Related: The star of Emilia Pérez, trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, issued an apology after older social media posts denigrating Muslims, George Floyd, and Hollywood diversity came to light.
Steven D. Greydanus returns with another one of his in-depth comic breakdowns, and it’s a doozy, a classic Calvin & Hobbes strip from October 1990.
In this strip Watterson is at the peak of his powers, and he accomplishes something extraordinary, telling a lucid, moving, sentimental story using only images, without a single word balloon or word of text. Silence is important in comic strips, but it’s relatively rare for an entire Sunday strip to forego dialogue completely — and very rare to do so with this level of emotional power. The effect is akin to the best dialogue-free Pixar animated shorts, or even the indelible, wordless four-minute “Married Life” montage sequence from the prologue of Pete Docter’s Up.
Watterson’s cartooning technique in this strip is masterly, from well-chosen hypothetical camera angles and shrewd cropping to slight but significant adjustments in (what I am going to go full pedant and call) mise-en-scène to effective use of shot size and silhouette.
Bill Watterson really was the greatest.
The ScreenAnarchy staff reflect on David Lynch’s legacy and influence.
Lynch’s features and many, many shorts, spread out across nearly 60 years, showcase such a unique mind, that his name has become shorthand for a particular narrative and style of film and story. Perhaps since ScreenAnarchy’s main focus is on genre film, that we feeling the passing of this singular artist most keenly. So much so, that we’ve put together a reflection on his work. Our writers share their memories of Lynch’s work, the effect it had on us, the range of his influence, and how we will carry and share his work in the future.
The David Lynch tributes keep rolling in: Jeffrey Overstreet reflects on the surprisingly spiritual aspects of Lynch’s work, beginning with Twin Peaks.
The slow revelations of a terrifying spiritual warfare taking place in the hearts and minds of those characters inspired rich conversations about what we believed about worlds beyond what we can see or touch. While Lynch’s fantasy was unlikely to be popular among evangelical Christians, whose sensibilities tended to be too sentimental for such a complex and painful drama, and whose were uncomfortable imagining God at work beyond their own narrow definitions and presumptions, I found Twin Peaks to be deeply rooted in the realities revealed in Christian Scriptures — particularly the letter to the Ephesians, in which we are told that “our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
In light of a silly controversy surrounding the recent teaser for this year’s Superman movie, John Walker pleads with everyone to ignore over-zealous, entitled fans.
I don’t mean those who engage with media by playing, watching, or reading with a desire to find enjoyment: I mean those who believe they are in a relationship with the work, that there’s some sort of two-way communication going on. These inverted parasocial relationships, where the audience believes itself in authority over the subject, are having a grim effect on culture. We’ve reached a position where a director is immediately defending himself against an onslaught of wildly inaccurate and frankly concerning criticism from those who believe themselves in charge of how an unreleased film is supposed to be. And, as a consequence, those with the money are starting to believe this madding crowd needs to be heard.
I didn’t realize that last year marked the 25th anniversary of The Faint’s breakout album Blank-Wave Arcade. Boing Boing’s Lee Keeler interviewed frontman Todd Fink about the album and the band’s history.
The Faint arrived at a wonky time in synth history: too late to be considered Devo, but too early for the tidal wave of Hot Chips and LCD Soundsystems. They were just doing their own thing, making black jeans sweaty in every town that they played.
They started out as an emo guitar band: there were lilting vocals and jagged Brit-pop riffs and Spock haircuts. Then in 1999, they molted. And nobody expected the guys who hung out with Bright Eyes and Cursive to suddenly start wearing matching turtlenecks and showing up with octapads.
Blank Wave Arcade marked a clear point of disruption for these young men from Omaha; they were going through some shit and coped by making fun Eurobeat trash. And hey, eastern Nebraska is not usually known for its dance floor culture, which is part of what makes Blank Wave Arcade the consistent treasure that it is today.
If you didn’t live in Lincoln or Omaha in the early ’00s, then I don’t think I can explain just how big The Faint were, especially after 2001’s Danse Macabre was released. At that time, every Faint concert was an Event for me and my friends, and I have very fond memories of trekking up to Omaha to see them play in the Sokol Underground.
The Faint are playing in Omaha on April 3; I might have to go see them for old time’s sake. Also, a “deluxe” edition of Blank-Wave Arcade will be released on March 14th. And just for the record, “Worked Up So Sexual” is still a total banger.
Earlier this week, China’s DeepSeek upended the tech world, promising to deliver advanced AI at a fraction of the cost and resources used by previous AI companies like OpenAI. But now OpenAI’s hopping mad, claiming that DeepSeek stole their data.
It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company.
[…]
OpenAI and Microsoft are essentially now whining about being beaten at its own game by DeepSeek. But additionally, part of OpenAI’s argument in the New York Times case is that the only way to make a generalist large language model that performs well is by sucking up gigantic amounts of data. It tells the court that it needs a huge amount of data to make a generalist language model, meaning any one source of data is not that important. This is funny, because DeepSeek managed to make a large language model that rivals and outpaces OpenAI’s own without falling into the more data = better model trap. Instead, DeepSeek used a reinforcement learning strategy that its paper claims is far more efficient than we’ve seen other AI companies do.
The schadenfreude is so very thick here.
Of all of the tech bros out there, writes Caitlin Dewey, the one that’s probably regarded with the most fondness is Myspace’s Tom Anderson.
Today’s tech founders live largely to extract and hoard: more profits, more influence, more data. I think of the image of Musk, Zuckerberg and others at Trump’s recent inauguration. I think, too, of the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen’s claim that mega-successful entrepreneurs are also entitled to public adulation. Nothing is ever quite enough for these people; the trend line must always go up. That Myspace Tom defied that mandate and fucked off to Hawaii feels unusually decent, if not straight-up heroic.
Via Pixel Envy.
80 years have passed since the horrors of Auschwitz, and yet, one pressing question still remains.
When we talk of industrialised killing, we don't just mean the scale of it, vast though it was. We also mean the sophistication of its organisation: the division of labour, the allocation of specialist tasks, the efficient marshalling of resources, the meticulous planning that was needed to keep the wheels of the killing machine turning.
Those same newsreels show well-fed Nazi guards, both men and women, now in allied custody.
What was the nature of the moral collapse that turned this horror into a normality for the Nazis who ran these camps, a normality in which mass murder became, for them, all in a day's work?
Via 1440.
When the truth of the Holocaust came to light, General Dwight D. Eisenhower supposedly said, “Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses — because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”
Sadly, I fear we are now living in a time when plenty of bastards, aided and fueled by social media, feel emboldened enough to start making the very sort of denials that concerned Eisenhower. We must always be ready and willing to push back and call out such foolishness for what it is.
Peter Wehner writes about Donald Trump’s cult-like hold on American evangelical Christians, who voted en masse for Trump in 2024.
What is psychologically intriguing is how bracing and electrifying a figure Trump is to many evangelicals. It is as if his disinhibitions have become theirs. Parents who disapproved of their children saying “damn” are now enthralled by a man who says “motherfucker.” Those who championed modesty and purity culture celebrate a thrice-married serial adulterer who made hush-money payments to a porn star. Churchgoers who can recite parts of the Sermon on the Mount are inspired by a man who, on the day he announced his candidacy for reelection, promised vengeance against his perceived enemies. Christians who for decades warned about moral relativism are now moral relativists; those who said a decent society has to stand for truth have embraced countless lies and conspiracy theories. People who rage at “woke cancel culture” delight in threats to shut down those with whom they disagree. Men and women who once stood for law and order have given their allegiance to a felon who issues pardons to rioters who have assaulted police officers.
“Psychologically intriguing” is one term for it. Another one might be “heart-breaking,” especially when I see religious individuals who condemned Bill Clinton, “secular” society, and moral relativism when I was a kid now trip over each other in their race to kiss Trump’s ring and lick his boots.
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