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.

Sailer on The Imitation Game:

Amusingly, the movie portrays estrogen as suddenly making the tech genius unable to program a computer. As two defenders of the conventional wisdom that Turing was hounded to kill himself put it, “And if you take the testosterone away, then the brain will become muddled.” But this bit of unintentional crimethink has evaded most reviewers.

(Also via Singapore Airlines.)

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.

Singapore Airlines is awesome to a preposterous degree — a fact that might feed into the recent outburst of reactionary curmudgeonry about mass air travel (which I need to track down). It was an opportunity to catch up on some movies I’d missed. The most notable of these was Snowpiercer (highly recommended).

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.”

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This documentary movie is superb. It has China, cyberpunk saturation, metaphysics, horror, humor, and the most extreme immersion in absolute sarcasm as a strategy of elusive dissidence ever realized in any medium. Every dimension of production is executed brilliantly, and the screenplay is a masterpiece (it’s a text I’d be almost ready to kill for right now). It’s probably not an easy cultural object to get hold of, but it’s seriously worth the effort.

SoBL on the Running Man prophecy:

Here is the set up: 2017, world economy has collapsed, natural resources, food and oil are tapped, America had an economic cataclysm, the Big One hit California, a totalitarian police state (Cadre) exists with heavy security at airports, cultural activity is heavily censored except for the broadcast reality competition game shows. Most of America seems to live in squalid, third world conditions, there are political prisoners mixed in with regular prisoners, there are re-education camps, heavily armed helicopters are used to pacify rioters, but there is also a small number of people living a decent life with nice apartments, travel options, and spiffy clothes. There is a play on patriotism. Los Angeles has shiny towers and plenty of squalor with armed police members everywhere, resembling a Brazilian city. That is pretty horrifyingly close to today.

The most prominent problems with Interstellar have already been capably discussed, so it’s not worth spending much time going back over them. The basic catastrophe scenario has more gaping holes than a Hawking cosmology, and is in fact so ludicrous that it quite neatly takes itself out of the way. The framing ideology is romantic superhumanism, which might even count as a positive for some (although not here). The musical score (by Hans Zimmer) was wildly overwrought. All-too-typically for Hollywood, high-pitched emotional extravagance was shamelessly indulged. Despite all of this, it was a great movie.

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.

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How can a movie this preposterously stupid also be so peculiarly awesome?

“It’s like all the things that make me human are fading away.” (140 is the key.)

Scarlett Johansson has somehow become the icon of intelligenesis catastrophe. One thing should certainly be indisputable: this one is a far superior vehicle for such cosmo-twisted blonde dehumanization fantasies than last year’s execrable schmaltz-blitz Her. (An additional data point.)

Perhaps even more than print, the movie industry has epitomized the macromedia (few-to-many, or broadcast) model of cultural distribution. In two penetrating articles, Hugh Hancock examines the impact of electronic games software and impending virtual reality technology on film production. Extreme change seems inevitable.

As with any social process touched by computers, the basic tendency is to decentralization. By down-streaming productive potential into ever-cheaper digital systems, the ability to execute complex media projects is spread beyond established institutions, encouraging the emergence of new agents (who in turn stimulate — and thus accelerate — the supportive techno-economic trends). Since the Cathedral is primarily a political-media apparatus, which is to say a post-theistic state church reproduced through the effective delivery of a message, these developments are of critical importance to its functional stability. It seems the unfolding crisis is destined to be entertaining.

Linking this on Twitter catalyzed a far more animated discussion than I had anticipated. Fundamental question: Is Bane NRx?

Outside in has no settled position on this (yet), and hadn’t expected to need one. A tentative proposal though: The League of Shadows is so radically neoreactionary it doesn’t relate to the Left as a political option, but solely as a mindless pathogen — as germ warfare to be guided against a decaying social order. That militant leftist activism will produce nothing but ruin is an assumption held so firmly it doesn’t require explicit acknowledgement — and the movie audience has to tacitly identify with this analysis for Bane’s strategy to make any sense. The Left is a disease, and therefore a potential bioweapon.

To try to work something like that outside a movie, it would really be necessary to be the functional equivalent of the League of Shadows (manipulating mainstream politics dexterously, from above, or beyond). It’s probably agreed that NRx isn’t there yet … unless what we see hides something else.

ADDED: In the Twitter chat, it has pointed out that my understanding of the background story is profoundly confused (especially regarding Bane’s troubled relationship with the League of Shadows). Hopefully, by the time people have finished with me in the ensuing comments thread, I’ll have been properly schooled. This (suggested by @CineRobert) might help.