We Have to Talk: Un-Cannes-y Valley
PrEPing for the Preppers
Welcome to We Have to Talk, a fortnightly newsletter in which Sam and George exchange their most pressing and ridiculous reflections on pop culture. Subscribe to get a hot mess of tepid takes directly into your inbox, twice a month.
This week, George takes the Fury Road, Sam visits a bathhouse, and both decide to reheat some Baudrillard.
G: Bonjour, Sam. I have, as evidenced by my shameless promotion on social media, just returned to London from ten days at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. What I managed to see this year ranged from very good (Kinds of Kindness) to absolutely dreadful (The Substance), but my main takeaway this year was that even at Cannes, everyone seems to be losing their minds.
I wrote in my Mastermind round-up about some of the insane behaviour I witnessed in screenings - journalists yelling at each other, looking at their phones and even recording the screen - and to my horror, this has followed me back to London. While watching Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes on Monday night at Vue Stratford (my first mistake), I had to withstand the interminable chatter of a group of lads in the row behind me. They quite literally did not stop yapping for 145 minutes. It was baffling: would they not rather just be at the pub?
I’m obviously not the first to notice the recent deterioration of cinema etiquette, but I hadn’t yet witnessed it as badly as I have in the past two weeks - and at a prestigious film festival, no less. Any ideas on what’s to blame for the deconsecration of the movie theatre, Sam – is it streaming? The pandemic? Jack Antonoff?
S: Croissant, Poutine and Boulangerie to you too George, and welcome back! I am sorry to hear that France’s prime exports of insouciance and insults were flowing freely during your trip to the Croisette, but true indifference is famously only forged in the country’s Aloof Region, so at least you were getting the good stuff.
Anyway, to take a circuitous route to the heart of your question about the deconsecration of the cinema, won’t you walk with me a while to the Japanese bathhouse currently found on stage at the English Coliseum, as part of Spirited Away: The Musical? I totally wore out the original film as a child, so much so that returning to it has felt a bit too much like an obligation, and I harbour a slight resentment that one of Miyazaki’s least political films was the first to really cross over to the West. But during the jaw-droppingly impressive stage adaptation I was struck anew by how the bathhouses’ denizens – in a world of true magic and enchantment – were so quick to debase themselves in return for gold, glitter and geyser-steam baths. Each character is in some way on the make in an enterprise they all acknowledge to be rotten, unfair, and evil, all while the patrons of the bathhouse gobble up bath tokens, banquets and even the bathhouses’ workers in their insatiable pursuit of comfort and luxury. It really brought home how craven and immoral the inducements of consumerism slowly entice us to be. Chihiro’s horror at seeing her house-flipping, stop-market speculating parents reduced to literal pigs by their own greed really cut me to the core as, from time to time, I too adore to stick my head in the trough.
Maybe this has something to do with this behaviour you’re observing in the cinema; no longer entranced by the magic of shadowy figures dancing across the bright wall of a dark room, the world of today is entirely suffused with images as every app, platform and online store you once shared your email with for a 10% discount vies for every second of your attention. Images and videos are to be paused, bookmarked, collaged, rewound, memed and looped so that practically anything we want to see is available whenever, wherever and however we want. To a viewer, art and advertising can feel indistinguishable, but to a boardroom, the latter is vastly preferable; a great artistic encounter may herald a satisfying moment of contemplation, but an advertisement is only the jump-off point for an exciting new acquisitive adventure! The consumer has supplanted the director in the driver's seat of our mediated time, lest the director try to keep our attention too long and leave us less time for purchases. And so all imagery is debased to the level of “aesthetic,” and almost everything collapses into the consumerist sludge of a purchasable, shareable “lifestyle” … he complains as he mulls over copping a t-shirt from the brand new La Chimera x SCRT capsule collection [PAID LINK – just kidding!!]
Now that the idea of humbly submitting to the demands of the artist in their cinematic domain seems unfathomable, the multiplex has become a godless wasteland of chatting, soda-chugging, and two-screen wielding consumers demanding their god-given right to maximise their minute-to-minute consumption. And truly? Your description of the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes screening seems a fittingly hellish locale for Furiosa to roll her apocalyptic war truck into. I know you saw the film out in Cannes; any thoughts?
G: It’s loud! Every rev of an engine in Furiosa is felt deeply in the bones, which I would hope snatches back the eyeballs of anyone considering a second screen - it was certainly my most well-behaved screening during Cannes. I thoroughly enjoyed the way Furiosa expands the Mad Max universe with intricate lore and world-building, and the daring way it unfolds into a thoughtful fable on myth-making. Mild spoiler incoming, but towards the end, foregoing a climactic battle scene, George Miller opts for a meta-narration explaining that Furiosa’s story is being told in-universe as an oral history, which provokes questions about what hope and hero-making looks like in a corrupt world.
To your point on consumerism, though, a strange thing happens at the end: the credits are overlaid with footage from Mad Max: Fury Road, for which Furiosa is a prequel. I saw a generous tweet saying this was George Miller’s way of reminding everyone of his last masterpiece, but the cynic in me saw it as the film justifying itself for paying audiences. As in: look! This is existing IP, remember?
Maybe that’s just the inevitable place we’ve arrived, as films battle smartphones for our attention. You make a salient point on the consumer replacing the director, and I think it speaks to a wider illusion of individual control over content consumption. Urban living and email jobs leave us feeling time- and cash-poor, so every purchase needs to feel ‘worth it’ - which maybe explains why people look at their phones rather than just leave the cinema altogether. But that then makes me think of something author Eleanor Catton said when promoting her brilliant tech-thriller Birnam Wood: "Going online is not an innocent act. It's an act of deep complicity." Phone time feels like ‘me time,’ but we’re also buying into a system that exploits our time, money and data for profit. And when the world eventually looks like Mad Max, it’s the Zuckerbergs that will have escaped to their lovely underground bunkers with our help, and we’ll be stuck fleeing motorcycle bandits in the desert.
Fear not, Sam: at Cannes, I finessed my skills of finagling my way into industry parties, so we’ll find some way to skip the line. Most of the billionaire bunkers are in New Zealand anyway, so whoever’s on the door will probably be a cousin.
S: Glad to hear it, George. Any chance you’ve got some of those cousins knocking around in Hawaii too? One of the things that most rankles about the underrepresentation of gay men amongst tech CEOs is that societal breakdown seems likely to occur on the other-side of my in-progress twink death, so I’ll be far too weather-beaten to charm and wile my way into the slim pickings of the Altman, Thiel and Cook bunkers. Surviving the apocalypse is a young gay’s game, so I’ll be forced to face the water wars with as much strength as my feeble bones can muster. And with that, the scales fall from our readers’ eyes as they realise this newsletter is just a dark money-backed pipeline to drive our youthful, hot readership towards Peter Thiel’s underground bunker for blood-harvesting. The jig is up!
G: Indeed. Catch you on the Fury Road, Sam!
S: See you in hell, George!
From the Drafts:
Did you hear there’s life on Mars? Romy Mars to be exact, daughter of Air frontman Thomas Mars and Sofia Coppola. Her delightful debut single, Stuck Up, just dropped and I can’t get it out of my head. (S)
Unfortunately, Hunter Schafer vaping on the Cannes red carpet was very validating. (G)
Spotted: Keira Knightley looking low-key fabulous at a photography book launch earlier this month. Honestly, one of the world’s truly sublime chins. (S)
At one of the Cannes parties, I light-heartedly compared Noémie Merlant’s new film The Balconettes to an episode of Broad City. Another journalist in the conversation simply said: “Oh, nooo. It wasn’t like that at all. It was more like an Almodóvar film.” Was I silent, or was I silenced? (G)
To be honest, a frociaggine sounds like a delicious small plate and I kind of assumed the Pope had the Faggot Pass already. He’s a man in a robe and a glamorous hat carrying an inordinate amount of guilt and a dislike of condoms. Talk your shit, sis. (S)
Grasping at fumes, Chet Hanks has declared yet another White Boy Summer. Keep playing the hits, King! We up! (S)
Did a double-take on the overground yesterday when I thought I saw a girl wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Bell Pepper’. Turns out her jacket was just partially concealing the letters of her Girls on Top ‘Isabelle Huppert’ tee. (G)
New privately-educated brunette British actress just dropped: Freya Allan, who I thought was just fine in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Wikipedia tells me other alumni of her alma mater, Headington School, include Emma Watson and Ghislaine Maxwell. (G)
Is there a NORAD flight tracker but for under-sea submersibles carrying billionaires? Suddenly I need one. (S)
The Week that Was:
Sam is watching: Nowhere by Gregg Araki, which now feels like a lost relic from a much cooler time. He didn’t lie when calling it “Beverly Hills 90210 on acid”.
George is reading: Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna, following a group of late-20-somethings trying to find meaning in their East London lives under the squeeze of rising rents and precarious employment. At every mention of London Fields, the Spurstowe or Dalston Superstore, I am Alexa Demie: “wait, is this fucking [novel] about us?”
Sam is listening to: The fantastic new DIIV record, Frog in Boiling Water. A perfect soundtrack for an immiserated nation during a miserable election cycle.
George went and saw: A bunch of movies. I’ll let my Letterboxd do the talking.