All the stuff everyone else is saying is right. The Lou Bloom character is a creation of sheer genius, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance in the role is beyond superb. The movie edges right up to the boundaries of the horror genre, and is also savagely humorous. Nihilism can produce high art, when it’s done right.

Nightcrawler approaches the topical subject of the relationships between the media, business, and law enforcement in a way that eludes conventional pieties. It deserves NRx endorsement just for that. In its darkness are strung subtle threads of possibility, in the working out of abnormal but powerful imperatives — of a supremely cynical kind — comparable in their diagonal subversiveness to a re-animated Scottish Enlightenment on ketamine, with all progressive hope burnt out so radically it doesn’t even register as a question.

These impulses are avatars of what is coming out of the collapse — tough, consummately disillusioned, and exploratory things.

There are twin tracks into the gathering darkness, but horrorism is by far the more capable of feeding itself. (The chronic NRx call for ‘action’ is a symptom of malnourishment.)

Edge of Tomorrow is science fiction Groundhog Day, agreed. (It would make no sense to contest this, some scenes achieve near-perfect isomorphy.) Derivative, then, certainly — but this is a point of consistency. Duplication is, after all, the latent theme. Edge of Tomorrow works better because it has formalized the time-repeat plot-system in videogame terms. Death replaces sleep, as action drama replaces comedy, but the recurrence of time is captured more incisively by the Edge of Tomorrow maxim: “We should just re-set.” Further to be noted: Edge of Tomorrow actually has a story about the basis of its time anomaly — and not an especially risible one — while Groundhog Day doesn’t even pretend to.

We should just reset is not only videogame practice, but also the recommendation of quantum suicide, another practical Electrocene philosophy. The best fictional exploration of QS (of which I am aware) is Greg Egan’s Quarantine.

Videogame ideology and quantum suicide are praxial indiscernibles. In other words, their behavioral implications are equivalent. In both cases, the relation to self is made selective, within a set of virtual clones. Whenever developments — within one of multiple assumed timelines — goes ‘bad’ it should be deleted (culled). In that way, only the most highly-adaptive complex behavioral responses are preserved, shaping fate in the direction of success (as defined by the selective agency).

Recent discussions about Christianity and Paganism raise the question: what does it take for a system of belief to attain religious intensity among Westerners today? (Yes, this could be re-phrased in very different ways.) To cut right to the chase: Could statistical ontology become a religion (or the philosophy of a religion)? Quantum suicide terrorism anybody? This is a possibility I find hard to eliminate.

Edge of Tomorrow, therefore? A more significant movie than might be initially realized. (It’s monsters are also quite tasty.)

ADDED: Thoughts on Post-Rationalist religion.

It’s one of those movies you have to stick with — give up before you’re halfway through and you’ll have no idea what all the fuss was about, but make it to the end and you’ll know you’ve seen something memorable. The genre is becoming huge. It could probably be described uncontroversially as apocalyptic neoreactionary speculative drama. Gibson’s The Peripheral is self-consciously there. One obvious (and striking) movie comparison is Elysium. In its purest form, the genre goes to rightist places nothing else quite reaches.

It begins with a revolutionary-leftist frame, which is eventually broken on the wheel of irony (more or less occult). The more subterranean the ironization, the more comical the result. In this respect, Snowpiercer is more Animal Farm than Elysium — which is to say, a far more overtly reactionary work. “Order is the barrier that holds back the frozen death. … All things flow from the sacred engine.”

It follows The Heart of Darkness plot-structure — journey towards a source of dark enlightenment. In this case, ‘Kurtz’ is Wilford and (the Apocalypse Now replacement for Marlow) ‘Willard’ is Curtis, which seems quite blatant — but maybe that’s just me. The process is certainly comparable: the slow stripping away of liberal illusions over the course of a voyage into the machine-core of the real (‘the end of the river’, ‘the front of the train’) like a tender white pelt coming away under the action of a jungle-war combat knife. The Curtis-Wilford meeting at the end of Snowpiercer is Apocalypse Now-influenced even down to the psycho-cosmic / religious details of its theatrical Oedipalism and immersion into the myth of (Frazer’s) sacrificed king. Infantile rebellion against the cruelties of the realist order is metamorphosed not only into intellectual acceptance, but into an utterly ‘corrupting’ offer of consummate power and doom.

“We’ve seen what people do without leadership — they devour one another.” The cannibalism isn’t merely figurative. You’ve arrived at the front of the train (an Art Deco glory, btw.), “the eternal engine”, where the secrets of power are to be shatteringly revealed.

There’s one final step to take: “The gate to the outside world. It’s been frozen shut for 18 years. You can take it as a wall.”

ADDED:

Post: Snowpiercer Almost Gets There http://t.co/ygaHbcMlUg C'mon @Outsideness, Hollywood is not going to give us a proper rightist movie

— SOBL1 (@SOBL1) December 26, 2014

Interstellar‘s narrative architecture is composed of a deep cosmic space-frontier story, and an occult communication story, bolted together by a time loop. (Plug.) The involvement of Kip Thorne reinforced the seriousness of this framework. (Thorne’s explorations of cosmological warping are a marvel of advanced modernity.) Nolan is, in any case, a director who knows things — or at least suspects them, enough to stretch his audience. As a piece of contemporary myth-making on an epic scale, the achievement of Interstellar is formidable.

The movie envisages a future of roughly Greerian dreariness, in which Moon Hoax theories have become official doctrine, earnestly promoted by the educational apparatus. Shutting down the high frontier is an overt ideological project, as the state directs its cultural energies into making America, once again, a nation of farmers. (In this endeavor, it will find plenty of cooperative apparatchiks at a one-step remove from my Twitter TL.) It is thus, as Scharlach has noted, a lucid Tech-Comm critique of extreme Terran regression. Engineers are no longer wanted. The scene in which the young Murphy Cooper’s half-witted school teacher innocently regurgitates official doctrine on this subject is a minor masterpiece in itself.

Cooper’s intense love for his brilliant daughter ‘Murph’ is troweled on thick, but it is inextricable from the sublimity of her intelligence. His love for his stolid corn-growing son is dutiful (and delicately portrayed), but his love for Murph is mad and immense, because it touches upon vastnesses beyond the stars. It is human emotion only as a proxy for twisted cosmological process — trans-galactic voyages and time-implosion.

When Cooper’s fellow astronaut Brand is forced to confess that her love for a stranded space-pioneer is involved in her decision to prioritize a visit to the planet where he was lost, she insists “… It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” Cooper responds cuttingly, “You know, it really could.” Within the arc of the script, this coldness is repudiated, but it is too perfectly stated to be entirely dismissed. It’s a Nolan movie, and there are loops within loops.

The robots are superb (even if the movie’s dominant romantic superhumanism keeps them in their place).

Above all else, the spectacular formulation of an extraterrestrial occultism is where the movie’s ultimate greatness lies. It is getting far too cramped here — on this rock, and in our brains — so we’re called Out. The scenes of the outer solar system, the murderous environments beyond, and the hyper-dimensional spaces in which our locked-in time intuitions come apart, are all realized with soul-rending magnificence. “Our species was born on the earth,” Cooper says. “It was not meant to die here.”

It might be human triumphalism that sells Interstellar to its audience, but this is a movie aligned with the distant Outside.

As philosophy, Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective is deeper than Wagner, because it holds tighter to the integral obscurity that is the ultimate object of horror. Where Tristan und Isolde finally reaches musical resolution and release into eroticized extinction, True Detective ends inconclusively, with a puzzle. Cohle and his old cop partner Martin “Marty” Hart, who has earthily absorbed Cohle’s acid nihilism throughout the previous seven episodes, switch stances momentarily in the closing scene. Recalling a previous conversation about the stars, Marty observes that in the night sky “darkness has a lot more territory”. Cohle corrects him — “Once there was only darkness. It looks to me as if the light is winning.” Following a long, soul-excruciating season in the shadows, the show’s nihilist fan-base were only dragged back from the brink of insurrection-level rioting at this point by a single, residual suspicion. In a cosmos where consciousness is the realization of hell, can the triumph of the light be interpreted as anything except torment strengthening its grip?

Has there ever been a TV series with a density of high-culture references comparable to this? Outside in is extremely biased on the question, since it largely shares the same reading list, and some of the links are closer still. Cohle is the closest thing ever heard on popular media to the voice of our civilization’s night. (That the name “Matthew McConaughey” would have meant nothing to me a year ago is by now a scarcely comprehensible fact.)

Could it have pushed deeper into the darkness? Certainly. Noir conventions are compromised by a stratum of unquestioned moral securities, which the show’s literary philosophical heroes, Ligotti, and even Brassier, still share. The crimes Cohle and Marty encounter are — in the end — inane, finally destituted of metaphysical challenge, and attributed to perpetrators worthy of a meat-shock slasher flick. The philosophical and religious gulfs of the dialogical overlay are unable to find an object that stretches — or even sustains — them. The next step into abstract horror demands a non-subjective abyss.

If these figures are even remotely accurate, they portray a phenomenon — and indeed a catastrophe — that would have to be considered a fundamental determinant of recent world history. Given the scale and rapidity of dysgenic collapse suggested here, skepticism is natural, and indeed all-but inevitable. (The proposed rate of decline seems incredible to this, radically inexpert, blog.) It should nevertheless be reasonable to expect counter-arguments to exhibit the same intellectual seriousness and respect for evidence that this paper so impressively demonstrates.

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraint goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Since the topic regularly re-surfaces, it seems worth recording Paxton’s formulation as a reference point, especially as its emphases differ significantly from those this blog (and its critics) have tended to stress. An important conclusion of Paxton’s study is that no purely ideological account of fascism is able to capture what is an essentially historical phenomenon, which is to say a process, rooted in the degeneration of democracy. (Wikipedia offers some background on his work.)