subtle foreshadowing
what 'the substance' and 'a different man' can teach us about our dependency on technology
It’s officially Scorpio season, which means RUN! Just kidding (kinda). In today’s dispatch, we’ve got a breakdown of two iconic body horror films, my new favorite TikTok trend and an alarming report confirming Meta’s suppression of pro-Palestinian content.
Shoutout to the lovely Selleb Sisters for featuring my new gay sports hat in their killer newsletter and to the Liberty for taking home home the trophy!
Let’s get into it.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
I’m still in Key West, and there’s an amazing indie theater down here that has been my second home during my stay. They’re great. Anyway, I had the pleasure of seeing “A Different Man” alone one Friday night (lmao) and thoroughly enjoyed myself. In ADM, Sebastian Stan plays a depressed and disfigured man named Edward who elects to undergo an experimental procedure that removes his tumors to reveal, well, Sebastian Stan. He tells everyone he died, renames himself Guy and thinks he’s happy until Oswald (played beautifully by Adam Pearson) appears in his life, almost as if an apparition of his former self. Oswald is charming, charismatic, sexy and eerily has neurofibromatosis, the same condition that Edward/Guy once had, and moves through life undeterred by it. It’s a darkly funny film that deeply understands the absurdity of a place like New York - I laughed out loud more than a few times at the portrayal of the city and the characters who live there. A few days later, I watched “The Substance” which was as gory and silly and bloody as everyone promised, and even though I saw a few spoiler images on Twitter, I was still shocked for the finale of the movie. It was incredible, and like Hilton Als said, “could give a shit what you think, even as you can think of nothing else.”
These two movies are in dialogue. They’re both about the corrosive power of external validation and the core beliefs that we carry within ourselves, reinforced by the dominant culture and, presumably, our parents (though neither film shows us much about either character’s backstory). They’re also about perfectionism, and the misguided conviction that self-worth and self-esteem can be achieved by controlling the body. Or perhaps, more importantly, trying to manipulate how we look to others, even as we lose sight of what we look like to ourselves. The emergence of a false third self, valuable by imaginary measurements, but important to maintain despite the cost. Center to both films are compulsions and fixation and the real disease behind both, isolation. (I once heard someone say in a recovery meeting that the “ism” of addiction always comes back to “I separate me” and I try to remember that whenever I feel like muscling through the hardest parts of life alone.) The fear of bodily transformation, vectors of various gazes and beauty ideals are rampant throughout both films, but since they’re both only concerned with the standards of straight white culture, I honestly didn’t engage with it toooo too much. Instead, I thought more about how the films present a cautionary tale for our current relationship to wellness culture and presume technology as a restorative fix-all. The final acts of both films reveal people transformed into monsters of their own making by overly relying on solutionism to try and spiritually bypass the work they need to do to heal their own inner dysfunction.
Subtle Foreshadowing
There’s a new thing (meme? trend? throwback?) on TikTok these days where people turn catastrophic moments from their lives into comedy. There’s a woman hitting herself in the face with a piece of gym equipment; someone falling down a flight of stairs and one of the most spectacular tumbles down a hill ever recorded in modern history. Most of them are set to the song “QKThr” by Aphex Twin, and the organ-like sounds of the harmonium give the impression of a sad carnival, deserted fairgrounds, a clown resigned to its humorless life. These Toks are a descendent of the age-old “fail memes,” but with a lot less of the bro-oriented cishet aggyness that permeated much of the early culture of the social Internet. There’s more grace and humor, and gentle satire for the general state of the personal branded era of the social Internet. They’re also blood relatives of America’s Funniest Home Videos and that “*record scratch* *freeze frame* “Yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got here” meme from a few years ago, too.
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The editing style seems new to TikTok, as far as I can tell, and plays with time in a way that mimics post-fails ruminations: Did anyone see that? Am I OK? WTF just happened? How did I do that? Often times (if not all times) the subtle foreshadowing videos are outtakes from failed attempts to record themselves doing daily life nonchalantly for the purposes of making content. In that way, they’re similar to “talking” and unedited mukbangs, where people let the messy seams of self-documentation show, puncturing the glossy bubble of perfection and perfectly edited videos that permeate all of social media these days. There’s a bit of performance art to it — they’re still generated content out of their fuckup — but the format allows people to stay in control of the punchline.
Shadowbanning
There’s a great piece in The Intercept by Sam Biddle on how Meta’s policy chief for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora repeatedly flagged pro-Palestinian posts on Instagram for censorship. People have been speaking up about their experiences with corporate censorship for years — and TI was able to get access to internal documents confirming their reports. Jordana Cutler, a former senior Israeli government official, personally lobbied to delete posts that quoted novelist Ghassan Kanafani and organizations that have held protests on campus, among others. Cutler’s actions have raised great concerns about “a deep power imbalance inside Facebook when it comes to moderating discussion of a war that to date has killed at least 40,000 Gazans,” as Biddle writes. The implications are enormous and devastating. The tech industry is one of the most powerful forces shaping America, and as TNY’er recently reported, “it is wielding that power as previous corporate special interests have: to bully, cajole, and remake the nation as it sees fit.”
Juicy bits
October 20th is a new holigay! The city declared an annual New York Liberty Day to commemorate our WNBA champions (!!!!!!) who brought New York City its first basketball title since 1976. The MNBA could never, clearly!
The rise of worker-owned media is one of the brightest spots in the media blighted landscape. DeezLinks has a nice run down of the upstarts, including Channeling faves HellGate and Hearing Things, created by ex-Pitchfork GOATS like Julianne Escobar. There are also some interesting new corporate-backed magazines, including the glossy A Fucking Magazine (funded by dating app Feeld) and drippy Ice Magazine (funded in part by WeTransfer).
Does Crumbl hate Black people or do Black people hate Crumbl? I don’t know who will win this flame war but I am so thoroughly entertained.
Tourmaline’s new biography of Marsha P. Johnson has a release date!
A brand new issue of Acacia Magazine just dropped — it’s a gorgeously designed political and cultural magazine that publishes pieces about/by/for the Muslim left “to reclaim our own narratives and imagine alternative futures.” Edited by Hira Ahmed with creative direction by Arsh Raziuddin.
A Scorpio (SZA) interviewing a Gemini (Kendrick Lamar) is a genius pairing.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading. And as always, let me know if there’s something you’d like to see me cover. You can email me at jennydeluxe@gmail.com or reply directly to this newsletter. I’m trying to grow this baby while keeping it accessible to everyone so if you feel motivated to become a paid subscriber, you’re helping me add new features like audio interviews and new columns.
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