Posts Tagged ‘film’
“[They] would think that the truth is nothing but the shadows cast by the artifacts.”*…
How do AI models “understand” and represent reality? Is the inside of a vision model at all like a language model? As Ben Brubaker reports, researchers argue that as the models grow more powerful, they may be converging toward a singular “Platonic” way to represent the world…
Read a story about dogs, and you may remember it the next time you see one bounding through a park. That’s only possible because you have a unified concept of “dog” that isn’t tied to words or images alone. Bulldog or border collie, barking or getting its belly rubbed, a dog can be many things while still remaining a dog.
Artificial intelligence systems aren’t always so lucky. These systems learn by ingesting vast troves of data in a process called training. Often, that data is all of the same type — text for language models, images for computer vision systems, and more exotic kinds of data for systems designed to predict the odor of molecules or the structure of proteins. So to what extent do language models and vision models have a shared understanding of dogs?
Researchers investigate such questions by peering inside AI systems and studying how they represent scenes and sentences. A growing body of research has found that different AI models can develop similar representations, even if they’re trained using different datasets or entirely different data types. What’s more, a few studies have suggested that those representations are growing more similar as models grow more capable. In a 2024 paper, four AI researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued that these hints of convergence are no fluke. Their idea, dubbed the Platonic representation hypothesis, has inspired a lively debate among researchers and a slew of follow-up work.
The team’s hypothesis gets its name from a 2,400-year-old allegory by the Greek philosopher Plato. In it, prisoners trapped inside a cave perceive the world only through shadows cast by outside objects. Plato maintained that we’re all like those unfortunate prisoners. The objects we encounter in everyday life, in his view, are pale shadows of ideal “forms” that reside in some transcendent realm beyond the reach of the senses.
The Platonic representation hypothesis is less abstract. In this version of the metaphor, what’s outside the cave is the real world, and it casts machine-readable shadows in the form of streams of data. AI models are the prisoners. The MIT team’s claim is that very different models, exposed only to the data streams, are beginning to converge on a shared “Platonic representation” of the world behind the data.
“Why do the language model and the vision model align? Because they’re both shadows of the same world,” said Phillip Isola, the senior author of the paper.
Not everyone is convinced. One of the main points of contention involves which representations to focus on. You can’t inspect a language model’s internal representation of every conceivable sentence, or a vision model’s representation of every image. So how do you decide which ones are, well, representative? Where do you look for the representations, and how do you compare them across very different models? It’s unlikely that researchers will reach a consensus on the Platonic representation hypothesis anytime soon, but that doesn’t bother Isola.
“Half the community says this is obvious, and the other half says this is obviously wrong,” he said. “We were happy with that response.”…
Read on: “Distinct AI Models Seem To Converge On How They Encode Reality,” from @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
Bracket with: “AGI is here (and I feel fine),” from Robin Sloan and “We Need to Talk About How We Talk About ‘AI’,” from Emily Bender and Nanna Inie.
* from Socrates “Allegory of the Cave,” in Plato’s Republic (Book VII)
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As we interrogate ideas and Ideas, we might recall that it was on this date that the fictional HAL 9000 computer became operational, according to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey., in which the artificially-intelligent computer states: “I am a HAL 9000 computer, Production Number 3. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.” (Kubrik’s 1968 movie adaptation put his birthdate in 1992.)
“The public domain is the basis for our art, our science, and our self-understanding. It is the raw material from which we make new inventions and create new cultural works.”*…
From Nancy Drew to Animal Crackers to The Maltese Falcon, 1930’s greatest works enter the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026. Aaron Moss counsels us to expect celebration, confusion, and at least one Betty Boop slasher film…
The weather’s getting colder, the nights are getting longer, and Hollywood has decided Betty Boop would be more marketable as a serial killer. It can only mean one thing: Public Domain Day 2026 is upon us.
Regular observers of copyright law’s favorite holiday know the drill: on January 1, 2026, a new crop of creative works from 1930 (along with sound recordings from 1925) will enter the public domain in the United States—ready to be remixed, recycled, or repurposed into B-grade horror films and ill-advised erotica.
This year’s film class is stacked with classics: Howard Hughes’s aviation epic Hell’s Angels (Jean Harlow’s screen debut and, at the time, the most expensive movie ever made); The Big Trail, featuring John Wayne in his first starring role; Greta Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie; Bing Crosby’s film debut in King of Jazz; and 1930 Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front. There’s plenty of comedy too, including the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, Laurel and Hardy’s Another Fine Mess, and Soup to Nuts, best remembered for featuring an early iteration of the Three Stooges.
Among the standout literary works in the Public Domain Day Class of 2026 are heavyweights like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Edna Ferber’s bestseller Cimarron, and Evelyn Waugh’s champagne-soaked satire Vile Bodies. Children’s literature fans can look forward to Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, Watty Piper’s The Little Engine That Could, and Elizabeth Coatsworth’s Newbery Medal winner The Cat Who Went to Heaven.
Not to take anything away from Hammett’s Sam Spade, but it’s an especially strong year for female detectives—both young and old. The earliest Nancy Drew mysteries from 1930 hit the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026, as does the first outing of the genteel Miss Marple in Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage. Maybe they can team up to solve the mystery of why Hollywood is only interested in using public domain characters to make schlocky horror films.
In the world of comics and animation, two Disney shorts featuring early versions of Pluto are also set to enter the public domain. The future canine star first appeared as an unnamed bloodhound in 1930’s The Chain Gang before resurfacing later that year as Minnie Mouse’s pet “Rover” in The Picnic. He wouldn’t officially become Mickey’s dog Pluto until 1931’s The Moose Hunt—a film set to enter the U.S. public domain in 2027…
Read on for a rundown of more film, characters, and music that’s about to be more freely available: “Public Domain Day 2026 Is Coming: Here’s What to Know,” from @copyrightlately.bsky.social.
* James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
The Holidays are upon us, and with them, (R)D’s annual solstice hiatus. Regular service will resume on or around January 2; in the meantime (and in lieu of an almanac entry), two seasonal offerings.
First, a collection of pieces from JSTOR: “Winter Holidays“…
December means the winter holidays are upon us: Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, St. Stephen’s Day, and New Year’s Eve, with all your favorite wintertime traditions. Celebrate with some seasonal scholarship below. All stories contain free links to the supporting academic research on JSTOR. Happy Holidays!
And then, with your correspondent’s seasonal best, two timely tunes:
“That’s the artist’s job, really: continually setting yourself free, and giving yourself new options and new ways of thinking about things”*…
Further, in a fashion, to last week’s post on literacy (and post-literacy), Nathan Gardels alerts us to a conversation between Ken Liu and Nils Gilman, in which Liu suggests that, in a way analogous to the the camera’s ability to capture motion (and thus, transform storytelling), AI is emerging as a new artistic medium for capturing subjective experience…
For the celebrated novelist Ken Liu, whose works include “The Paper Menagerie” and Chinese-to-English translation of “The Three-Body Problem,” science fiction is a way to plumb the anxieties, hopes and abiding myths of the collective unconscious.
In this pursuit, he argues in a Futurology podcast, AI should not be regarded as a threat to the distinctive human capacity to organize our reality or imagine alternative worlds through storytelling. On the contrary, the technology should be seen as an entirely new way to access that elusive realm beneath the surface and deepen our self-knowledge.
As a window into the interiority of others, and indeed, of ourselves, Liu believes the communal mirror of Large Language Models opens the horizons of how we experience and situate our presence in the world.
“It’s fascinating to me to think about AI as a potential new artistic medium in the same way that the camera was a new artistic medium,” he muses. What the roving aperture enabled was the cinematic art form of capturing motion, “so you can splice movement around … and can break all kinds of rules about narrative art that used to be true.
“In the dramatic arts, it was just assumed that because you had to perform in front of an audience on the stage, that you had to follow certain unities to make your story comprehensible. The unity of action, of place, of time. You can’t just randomly jump around, or the audience wouldn’t be able to follow you.
But with this motion-capturing machine, you can in fact do that. That’s why an actual movie is very different from a play.
You can do the reaction shots, you can do the montages, you can do the cuts, you can do the swipes, you can do all sorts of things in the language of cinema.
You can put audiences in perspectives that they normally can never be in. So it’s such a transformation of the understanding of presence, of how a subject can be present in a dramatic narrative story.”
He continues: “Rather than thinking about AI as a cheap way to replace filmmakers, to replace writers, to replace artists, think of [it] as a new kind of machine that captures something and plays back something. What is the thing that it captures and plays back? The content of thought, or subjectivity.”
The ancient Greeks called the content, or object of a person’s thought, “noema,” which is why this publication bears that name.
Liu thus invents the term “Noematograph” as analogous to “the cinematograph not for motion, but for thought … AI is really a subjectivity capturing machine, because by being trained on the products of human thinking, it has captured the subjectivities, the consciousnesses, that were involved in the creation of those things.”
Liu sees value in what some regard as the worst qualities of generative AI.
“This is a machine that allows people to play with subjectivities and to craft their own fictions, to engage in their own narrative self-construction in the process of working with an AI,” he observes. “The fact that AI is sycophantic and shapeable by you is the point. It’s not another human being. It’s a simulation. It’s a construction. It’s a fictional thing.
You can ask the AI to explain, to interpret. You can role-play with AI. You can explore a world that you construct together.
You can also share these things with other humans. One of the great, fun trends on the internet involving using AI, in fact, is about people crafting their own versions of prompts with models and then sharing the results with other humans.
And then a large group, a large community, comes together to collaboratively play with AI. So I think it’s the playfulness, it’s that interactivity, that I think is going to be really, really determinative of the future of AI as an art form.”
So, what will the product of this new art form look like?
“As a medium for art, what will come out of it won’t look anything like movies or novels …They’re going to be much more like conversations with friends. They’re going to be more like a meal you share with people. They are much more ephemeral in the moment. They’re about the participation. They’re about the consumer being also the creator.
They’re much more personalized. They’re about you looking into the strange mirror and sort of examining your own subjectivity.”
Much of what Liu posits echoes the views of the philosopher of technology, Tobias Rees, in a previous conversation with Noema.
As Rees describes it, “AI has much more information available than we do, and it can access and work through this information faster than we can. It also can discover logical structures in data — patterns — where we see nothing.
AI can literally give us access to spaces that we, on our own, qua human, cannot discover and cannot access.”
He goes on: “Imagine an AI model … that has access to all your data. Your emails, your messages, your documents, your voice memos, your photos, your songs, etc.
Such an AI system can make me visible to myself … it literally can lift me above me. It can show me myself from outside of myself, show me the patterns of thoughts and behaviors that have come to define me. It can help me understand these patterns, and it can discuss with me whether they are constraining me, and if so, then how. What is more, it can help me work on those patterns and, where appropriate, enable me to break from them and be set free.”
Philosophically put, says Rees, invoking the meaning of “noema” as Liu does, “AI can help me transform myself into an ‘object of thought’ to which I can relate and on which I can work.
“The work of the self on the self has formed the core of what Greek philosophers called meletē and Roman philosophers meditatio. And the kind of AI system I evoke here would be a philosopher’s dream. It could make us humans visible to ourselves from outside of us.”
Liu’s insight as a writer of science fiction realism is to see what Rees describes in the social context of interactive connectivity.
The arrival of new technologies is always disruptive to familiar ways of seeing that were cultivated from within established capacities. Letting go of those comforting narratives that guide our inner world is existentially disorienting. It is here that art’s vocation comes into play as the medium that helps move the human condition along. To see technology as an art form, as Liu does, is to capture the epochal moment of transformation that we are presently living through…
Is AI birthing a new art form? “From Cinema To The Noematograph,” @kyliu99.bsky.social and @nilsgilman.bsky.social in @futurologypod.bsky.social.
See/her the full conversation:
See also: “O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!“
* Miranda July
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As we observe, with William Gibson, that the street finds its own uses for things, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that perhaps the pinnacle of cinema’s ability to capture motion was released: the most famous the the six films of Ben Hur, “the Charlton Heston version.”
At the time, Ben Hur had the largest budget ($15.175 million), the largest sets, a wardrobe staff of 100, over 200 artists, about 200 camels and 2,500 horses and about 10,000 extras.
Filming began on May 18, 1958, and didn’t wrap up until January 7, 1959. The film crew worked between 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week.
The chariot race scene lasts for nine minutes in the finished film and Miklos Rozsa’s film score is the longest ever composed for a film.
– source
“I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others. In the 19th century it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the 20th century.”*…
… and few filmmakers have been as fluent as the remarkable Walter Murch. In the context of a review of Murch’s recent book, Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, John Lahr offers an appreciation…
Walter Murch , the film editor and sound designer Francis Ford Coppola has described as ‘kind of like the film world’s one intellectual’, has what he terms standfleisch. He has spent most of his almost sixty years in the film industry standing his lanky frame in front of various editing consoles. ‘Why do surgeons, orchestra conductors and cooks all stand to do their jobs?’ he asks in Suddenly Something Clicked, a piñata of ideas and anecdotes about his life and work. It sheds light on his forensic craft, his distinctive way of thinking about editing and the making of many of the major films he’s worked on, including Apocalypse Now (1979), the Godfather trilogy (1972-90), The Conversation (1974), American Graffiti (1973) and the 1998 recut of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
To Murch, who has won three Academy Awards and been nominated for six more, film editing is a sensual ‘full-body’ experience: ‘a kind of dance, a choreography of images and sounds in the flow of time, forged in movement, eventually crystallising into permanence’. This embrace is a kind of erotic surrender to the unique metabolism of each story and its performers, a way of ‘drenching yourself in the sensibility of the film to the point where you’re alive to the smallest details’. ‘To watch Murch at work,’ Michael Ondaatje writes in The Conversations (2002), ‘is to see him delve into almost invisible specifics, where he harnesses and moves the bones or arteries of a scene, relocating them so they will alter the look of the features above the skin.’ The Conversations, a book of interviews with Murch, grew out of his work on the film version of Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient. ‘Most of the work he does is going to affect us subliminally,’ Ondaatje writes. ‘There is no showing off here.’ In the filigree of image and sound there comes a moment when, Murch says, he disappears into the film: ‘The shots, the emotions, the story seem to take over. Sometimes – the best times – this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that – it just created itself.”’
How heavy is this editorial heavy-lifting? Murch, of course, has done the maths. In the tale of the tape, Apocalypse Now is the undisputed champ. A single frame of 35 mm film weighs ‘five-thousandths of an ounce’; a reel of film – eleven minutes of picture and sound – weighs eleven pounds, or a pound a minute. By that calculation, the 1,250,000 feet of film shot by Coppola weighed more than 14,000 pounds or, as Murch puts it, ‘seven tons of film that had to be broken down, boxed, catalogued, put in accessible racks, moved around from editor to editor’. The average ratio of footage shot to footage used in a feature film is 20:1; the ratio for Apocalypse Now was 95:1. Over four years, Murch and his team got the film down from 236 hours to 2 hours and 27 minutes. This is as much bushwhacking as editing, finding the film’s story as well as its grammar, a feat Murch also accomplished for Coppola in The Conversation, which he restructured and essentially rewrote by cutting a third of the scenes…
… If Murch is full of wonder at film’s storytelling possibilities, the inventors of the moving picture were not. ‘The cinema is an invention without a future,’ Louis Lumière declared. The cinematograph, which he invented with his brother, Auguste, was a camera that recorded, developed and projected film onto a screen (one of the first being a bedsheet in a Russian brothel). Thomas Edison, though more interested in sound than image, developed the Kinetograph (an early motion-picture camera) and the Kinetoscope, which projected images that could be seen through peepholes. The breakthrough, which turned a 19th-century novelty into the 20th century’s only new art form, was the arrival of montage in 1901. The transition from one shot to another transformed motion pictures from a literal medium into a psychological and poetic one. Movies could now jump back and forth in time and space, ‘the cinematic equivalent to the discovery of flight’, as Murch sees it. Out of its illusion of naturalistic flow – 24 frames a projected second – a new grammar of seeing and of storytelling evolved: close-ups, dissolves, long shots, fade-outs.
‘“Filmic” juxtapositions are taking place in the real world not only when we dream but also when we are awake,’ Murch wrote in his book from 1992, In the Blink of an Eye. This explains why audiences find edited film a surprisingly familiar experience. Every blink is a thought. Every thought is a cut. In support of this belief, Murch quotes John Huston: ‘Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look back at that lamp. Now look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You blinked. Those are cuts. Your mind cut the scene. First you behold the lamp. Cut. Then you behold me.’ In cinema, Murch says, ‘at the moment you decide to cut, what you are saying is, in effect, “I am going to bring this idea to an end and start something new.”’…
… Murch jostles between metaphysics and neurology in his discussion of film editing, but biology is his link to theorising about sound design. Hearing develops four and a half months after conception. ‘We luxuriate in a continuous bath of sounds: the song of our mother’s voice, the swash of her breathing, the piping of her intestines, the timpani of her heart,’ he writes. ‘The almost industrial intensity of this womb sound’ is about 75 decibels, ‘equivalent to … the cabin of a cruising passenger jet’. After birth, however, sound is gradually demoted. ‘Whatever virtues sound brings to film are largely perceived and appreciated by the audience in visual terms. The better the sound, the better the image.’ This fusing of sound and image is a sleight of mind in which the brain projects dimensionality onto the screen and makes it seem as if it had come from the image in the first place. ‘We do not see and hear a film, we hear/see/hear/see it.’
By his own admission, the phenomenal success of The Godfather triggered a revival of the metaphorical use of layered sound. Murch’s masterstroke of sound design was the addition – not indicated in the original script – of a rising metallic screech, as if from an overhead train, as Michael Corleone prepares to assassinate Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. ‘The rumbling and piercing metallic scream,’ he writes, ‘is not linked directly to anything seen on screen, and so the audience is made to wonder at least momentarily, if perhaps only subconsciously, “What is this?”’ Because it is detached from the image, the scream becomes a clue to Michael’s state of mind; it comes and goes, then grows louder and louder until he finally pulls out his gun. After he shoots, the sound stops abruptly.
‘Even for the most well-prepared of directors, there are limits to the imagination and memory,’ Murch writes. ‘It is the editor’s job to propose alternative scenarios as bait.’ In Apocalypse Now, the sampan massacre and, more important, the restoration of Captain Willard’s narration to the final script are down to Murch. ‘Willard is an observer – he is our eyes and ears in this diabolical landscape – and for most of the journey, until he gets to the Kurtz compound, he is a mostly silent passenger,’ Murch explains. ‘The audience judges character by comparing words spoken with actions taken, but if there are few words and fewer actions, the character has to emerge from somewhere else: out of an interior, quasi-novelistic voice.’ Following this editorial impulse, Murch dug out Willard’s voiceover from the original screenplay and recorded it himself, ‘lacing it selectively over the first half-hour of film’. His pitch worked. Willard’s voiceover was reinstated (as rewritten by Michael Herr), a crucial adjustment that spoke to the accuracy of Coppola’s dictum that a film director is the ‘ringmaster of a circus that’s inventing itself’.
Suddenly Something Clicked was conceived by Murch as a ‘three-braided rope – theory, practice and history’, a sort of intellectual high-wire act of technical expertise and personal anecdote. Like Murch himself, the book is unique. It’s designed for the reader to play with. Want to read Maxim Gorky’s reaction to seeing his first motion picture? Or see Orson Welles’s lost 58-page memo to the Universal Studios executives who took control of his production of Touch of Evil? Or hear the six pre-mixes and the final mix of the helicopters landing to ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in Apocalypse Now? Or watch an animated restructuring of the scenes in The Conversation? QR codes beside the text provide detours into these subjects and more. Similarly, there are chyrons of adages from other filmmakers and artists – ‘fortunes’, Murch calls them – at the bottom of every even-numbered page, intended as a kind of dialectical chorus to counterpoint or contradict his opinions. His high-spirited advice to film editors holds true for his readers: ‘Good luck! Make discoveries!’…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Every Blink,” from @lrb.co.uk.
As his book(s) on film and editing would suggest, Murch is generous in sharing his insights. That’s true too at a more personal level, as he’s made time to advise and mentor younger, less-experienced filmmakers (as your correspondent can attest).
Apropos Coppola’s characterization of him, Murch is a man of wide interests– to many of which, as reported in “Walter just knows stuff” (source of the image above) and “Transits, Translations, and Secret Patterns: When Lawrence Weschler Met Walter Murch,” he’s made important contributions. Oh, and he’s also a literary translator.
* Walter Murch
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As we juxtapose, we might spare athought for an earlier cinematic pioneer, Hal Roach; he died on this date in 1992. A film and television producer, director and screenwriter, and founder of the namesake Hal Roach Studios, he was active in the industry from the 1910s to the 1990s. He is best known for producing a number of early media franchise successes, including the Laurel and Hardy franchise, Harold Lloyd‘s early films, the films of entertainer Charley Chase, and the Our Gang (AKA, “The Little Rascals”) short film comedy series.
“It is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.”*…
Sydney Sweeney is an actress who gained early recognition for her roles in Everything Sucks!, The Handmaid’s Tale, Sharp Objects, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Reality, Anyone but You, and Madame Web. She received wider acclaim for her performances in the drama series Euphoria (2019–present) and the first season of the anthology series The White Lotus (2021), both of which earned her nominations for Primetime Emmy Awards.
But in a way that’s quite apart from her art, Sydney Sweeney has also emerged as an avatar of, a heroine of sorts to, right-wing culture warriors.
B. D. McClay has a thoughful essay in The Lamp on this divergence…
… The life of Marilyn Monroe yields a few lessons for those who would follow in her footsteps. One, don’t marry a playwright. Two, get paid. No current-day actress has taken this second lesson to heart like Sydney Sweeney, whose tousled good looks are practically designed to make people underestimate her. Sweeney understands that being an object of sexual fantasy involves a hefty dose of contempt—and says, If that’s the game, I’m going to make some money off of me, too. She’s under no illusions that if her career is left to others, she’ll be cast in parts she finds interesting. So if she sees a script she likes, she funds it herself. To get money, she sells stuff: bath soap that supposedly contains her bathwater, jeans, ice cream.
And if these products are advertised in ways that are a little tasteless, or a little offensive, that means that people will talk about the ads, and that talk means sales, and those sales mean, in the end, more checks for Sweeney. Asking whether or not Sweeney knew that a jeans ad campaign with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” would activate the very weird and very horny portion of the Internet that has made her into a symbol of anti-wokeness misses the point. She would have done it either way. That is, I imagine that Sweeney regards her crew of weird, horny right-wing fans the same way she probably regards any group of fans: as wallets.
As for me, personally? I like Sydney Sweeney, in a vague way that doesn’t mean I have any interest in her movies. I just have a lot of respect for actors who don’t ever say no to a check (see, Orson Welles). The other side of libidinal contempt is feel-good pity, but there’s nothing pitiable about Sweeney either. Some girls are born connected, some girls are born pretty, and some girls are born smart. Two out of three isn’t so bad. But her cultists are another story. Aside from the obvious—adopting Sydney Sweeney as a cause allows them to post pictures of her in underwear with plausible deniability—what’s going on there?
The “Ballad of Sydney Sweeney” goes like this: “They” wanted to exterminate beautiful busty blondes. “They” put ugly people in ads (sometimes). Now, however, here comes Sydney Sweeney, ending wokeness once and for all. The implication is that at some point in the past ten years, it’s been disadvantageous to be a curvaceous babe. The only sense in which that is true has not changed: Sweeney keeps showing up in ads in bras that don’t fit. But never mind that; thanks to Sweeney, it is now legal to be hot. The hot people have come out from the places where they’d been driven into hiding by the uggo police. Now they frolic freely in the sun. Very touching.
Meanwhile, the anti-Sweeney in this drama is Taylor Swift. Swift and Sweeney have been pitted against each other by spectators, including Donald Trump: Swift, who represents woke, is no longer hot; Sweeney, anti-woke, is hot. (Out with the old blonde, in with the new.) Like so many statements about both Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, or, for that matter, by Trump, this one has no tether to reality, but it’s how a certain type of person wants things to be. There’s a level of personal betrayal at play here. Swift, who stays out of trouble, avoids politics, doesn’t do drugs, rarely seems out of control, and sings about love, was the crypto-conservative icon of an earlier era. Eventually, it turned out that she was not one of them. Their Brünnhilde was within another ring of fire. Now all their hopes are pinned on Sweeney.
Does something about this scenario feel a little off to you? Not to sound like I’ve woken up from a coma, in which I have languished since 1992 after hearing Dan Quayle rail against Murphy Brown, but when exactly did making cleavage great again become a conservative cause? Somebody with the combined memory powers of (let’s say) three goldfish can easily imagine an alternate present in which Sweeney and her cleavage were an object of outraged conservative disdain. In this other world, Sweeney is attracting rage-filled press over her horror movie [Immaculate] in which (I’m told) she plays a nun who bashes a baby to death. But in this world, these people don’t even get to do that. All rage provides is free marketing.
The people who are slavering over Sweeney will cheerfully confess to motivations that are gross enough. They like her because she’s white, busty, blonde, thin, and blue-eyed, but it seems like the white part might be the most important trait. To them, Sweeney represents things being right with the world; she’s the hot cheerleader to their collective star quarterback. (Among her many crimes, Taylor Swift’s engagement to a woke-for-football fellow, whose name I can’t recall, surely ranks pretty high on the list.) She’s the human embodiment of A.I.-generated pictures of beautiful white families, on a farm, reading the Bible, captioned, This is what they took from you!
Intriguingly little of this fandom has anything to do with Sydney Sweeney, the actual person, her professional life, or her public statements. When Doreen St. Félix, a writer for the New Yorker, had the temerity to call the American Eagle ad (and Sweeney, by implication) “banal,” the immediate reaction was to try to get her fired by digging up tweets she had written more than ten years ago and accusing her of racism against white people. One wonders whether what really set them off was St. Félix’s pointing out that Sweeney dyes her hair blonde: “Her blondness, like a lot of adult blondness, is a chemical thing masquerading as natural only to those most gullible in the population, straight men, who don’t know, and don’t care to understand, how much of so-called natural female beauty is constructed.” As both St. Félix’s piece and the subsequent backlash illustrated, the idea that Sydney Sweeney might be marketing herself undoes the illusion of the naturally beautiful girl who attracts attention and fame for doing nothing. Her fans miss all the things Sweeney herself clearly is—a smart businesswoman and an ambitious artist—because in her advertisements they see only a sleepy-looking fantasy object. Do any of these people even know that Sweeney makes movies? It’s an open question.
There is, however, some subtext here, too: These particular people, who are, I regret to say, not all men, need Sweeney to be elevated so that they can go back to cultivating a particular kind of lustful derision. They are owed women whom they can view as stupid bimbos. To the extent that they have been deprived, it’s not because hot people were made illegal. It’s because their moral disapproval, no matter how disingenuous, doesn’t matter anymore. If the vogue in women’s clothing was, for several years, loose and unsexy garments, strictures promoting modesty have little to do with it.
So these people are deprived not only of the chance to ogle but of control. Neither their approval nor their disapproval can move the needle. The only thing that can is conjuring up the idea of a phantom lib, outraged and disapproving, and hoping some real people will come along to play the part. This type of resentment politics is the only card they really have: Look at how they despise you; make them mad, drink their tears! There’s always a professor somewhere who has said something inflammatory and stupid to back up this assertion.
But who cares? Really. Who cares? At last, to own the libs, we can admit McDonald’s tastes good, have fun at the movies, and post pictures of beautiful women in advertisements. But we already could do all of those things. It’s just that McDonald’s is junk, the movies are junk, and those advertisements exist to sell us junk.
There is a familiar type of maneuver that one can expect in response to articles like this, which says little about Sydney Sweeney but a lot about horny racists who are too online. It is to pretend otherwise: “How can you say that about Sydney Sweeney?” St. Félix commented, correctly, that these people wish “to recruit [Sweeney] as a kind of Aryan princess,” which was presented by others as a case of her trashing Sweeney herself as an Aryan princess. After pretending that this article is attacking Sweeney, the field is open to sift through the writer’s old work, old tweets, relationships, and so on. If the writer is female, one can also expect looks and hypothetical fertility calculations to enter into the mix.
It might sound paradoxical to say that Sweeney’s worst fans adore her because they hate women, but it’s true. (Also, they don’t adore her.) There is always a young blonde to attach yourself to, and an older blonde to throw away. As long as Sweeney does nothing to alienate them, they will continue to hype her up; if one day she endorses a politician they don’t like, then it will be time to start talking about how she’s washed (or whatever slang has replaced “washed” by then). What they really want, besides the Fourth Reich, is a world in which women are either objects or invisible, disposable or essentially private.
That world does not exist, nor has it never existed. The A.I.-generated family has to be generated by A.I. because there are no photographs of this sort of idyllic life, with an angelic and eternally youthful wife untouched by reality or work. That is just the product of half-remembered Norman Rockwell paintings and Abercrombie & Fitch ads. Indeed, most of the imagination here is really an endless series of ads, slowly distilled into one giant advertisement, one Sydney Sweeney is not even in. It’s a tape that simply says RETURN over photos of cheerleaders and imagined past prosperity. Like most advertisements, this one is selling poisonous trash people don’t need that can only be produced at a human cost that is too high. I suggest not buying…
The selling of Sydney Sweeney: “The Uggo Police“
* George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
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As we ponder personae, we might send commercially-viable birthday greetings to another “beautiful blonde” actress, Gwyneth Paltrow; she was born on this date in 1972. Born into the business (the daughter of filmmaker Bruce Paltrow and actress Blythe Danner), she had a long and successful career as a film star. But in 2017, she “stepped back” from acting (though she still ocassionaly appears) in order to focus on her health-wellness-lifestyle-fashion business Goop (out of which, she has recently spun a new fashion line, GWYN). Goop has grown into a formidible company selling a wide range of products, and hosting “wellness summits” and conventions. It has also faced broad criticism that faced broad criticism for marketing products and treatments that are harmful, described as “snake oil,” based on pseudoscience, and lacking in efficacy.
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