Plur1bus: Milk is people! Episode five review

"Milk is peeeeeople!", as Charlton Heston might holler to an earlier generation of cinemaphiles. 

The latest episode of Plur1bus, Got Milk?, delivered the goods, with fabulous and unexpected twists and turns. 

First, the hive evacuated the entire city of Albuquerque (what a weird name) to get away from our favourite anti-hero, Carol, who pushed her personal pirate what's-her-face for information on how to undo the great joining. Not cool, Carol: the hive viewed this as harm. 

They needed ‘space’. 

The show hilariously replicates patterns of emotional abuse, just on a global scale. Carol’s selfish, willfully inconsiderate, even abusive, while the hive is unctuously accommodating, suicidally pacifistic and agreeable to a fault. 

The show contrasts these two diametrically opposed personality types: the selfish individual and the altruistic collective. Both are flawed, and the show doesn’t pull any punches in depicting each at their worst. Well. Carol could actually be even more awful; she’s not acting like a psychopath or malignant narcissist, which would be the true opposite of the codependent. 

But to what end? What’s the POV driving the narrative? 

Time will tell, but three things to keep in mind: first, the codependent hive is doomed from an evolutionary POV, while Carol is not. True, it will take time for predators to multiply enough to impact the population, but the hive lets itself be prey, so there will be no cap on predator expansion. Have you ever met someone who was endlessly self-righteous in their pacifism, to a smug, suicidal degree? That’s the hive. 

Second, the hive has a biological imperative to infect every human (including Carol), a process that killed over 800 million people. I suppose you could contrast that with selfishness killing billions throughout the course of history, but within the confines of the show, the death toll weighs heavily against the hive so far.

Three, Carol’s not as awful and selfish as a selfish person could be, while the hive is ridiculously codependent. Carol is not a compulsive liar, fraudster or serial killer. That would be the real flip side of the coin, but the show doesn’t go there. As such, the deck is decisively stacked from the get go.

Other than the city evacuation, the other big surprise is a truly horrific reveal: remember those 800,000,000 who died when the virus was downloaded? Well, they’re being ground up, liquified, and served up in milk cartons to the hive for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Ew.

Of course, this makes total, pragmatic sense: the hive refuses to harm anything, even bed bugs. Their only defense is avoidance, so they can’t kill animals for food. They can’t kill insects that eat crops. Their idealism is absolute: they even free lions and tigers that then prey on hive members. Because moral superiority. As such, a readily available food source (dead people) would be very valuable, as it has no ethical cost. 

What happens when the Eaters of the Dead run out of dead bodies to feast upon? 

They’ll have to subsist on what crops they can grow without harming anything, anything at all, which will be… challenging. 

My guess? Some people are going to starve. Not that the hive will mind, it sheds hosts like Stalin sheds Kulaks and I shed skin.

So, all in all an excellent episode. I wasn’t expecting the hive to go no-contact with Carol. I also hadn’t, but should have, predicted the hive would eat the dead. 

What’s next, Vinny? 

I’m looking forward to more twists and turns. 

The Baker’s Dozen might be put off by the hive eating the dead, possibly making Carol new allies. 

If Carol is able to find a way to break the hive connection, the show could go in a whole new direction. Would the hive, threatened with dissolution, become less passive? It might let individual members be eaten, but what if the entire collective is threatened? Whats it’s biological imperative? Why does it have to spread to everyone, unless it is to neutralize all possible resistance? Because the biological imperative it has shown so far is a one-way abnegation ticket to extinction. 

If the show goes on long enough, I suspect aliens might arrive in a colony ship, ready to turn humanity into their eager and willing slave labour force. I predict invaders will be human in appearance, principally because prosthetics would look cheezy, and wouldn’t fit with the show’s overall vibe. Star Trek this is not. Perhaps the aliens seeded humanity on earth in the first place, in the distant past. That’d be an easy, quick exposition drop.

So far, the show has presented everything in a very grounded, plausible manner (as much as an instantaneous communication hive mind is realistic). 

Which leads to another question: if the hive is connected irrespective of distance, does that mean the transmitters, who are also part of the hive, are in communication with the hive on earth? Is it a pansolar-system, or pangalactic, hivemind? 

Does it drink Pangalactic Gargleblasters?

Something for Carol to inquire about in future.

It’s worth noting the questions that Carol is NOT asking. The hive cannot lie, so the show will have to avoid areas of inquiry that would give away future plot points. If she doesn’t ask easy and obvious questions, then that’s probably the direction the show is going.

Whiplash: A full throated defense of verbal and emotional abuse

Aspiring drummer and prodigy Andrew (Miles Teller) joins Terence Fletcher’s (J.K. Simmons) elite jazz class at the prestigious Shaffer Conservatory in New York City. Andrew dreams of being the next Charlie Parker. Fletcher turns out to be a tyrannical and emotionally abusive perfectionist. But it is to a purpose, and serves to push Andrew to his limit and beyond.

It’s an agenda driven film by an angry filmmaker a strong point of view and something to say. I felt it was reminiscent of The Hateful Eight.

Spiritual kin.

Dear driven Andrew wants to achieve greatness, and willingly lets Fletcher subject him to pure hell in order to get there. He even chucks his directionless girl friend overboard so he can dedicate more time to music.

Because music über alles!

Shaffer is an elite school. Best in the country. And Fletcher's class is the best in Shaffer. Students are ‘free’ to quit. And yet, they’ve invested lots of money to attend, and it is the path to employment, so… not so simple.

Now, I entirely understand the necessity to push people at elite institutions. The toughness serves a purpose, and that is especially true in the military. If I am going to be sent into combat, I’d need significant toughening up first. Why? Because without it, I would not only get myself killed, but I’d let down my comrades, my team mates, and get them killed as well.

So there’s a necessity for this.

But once you accept the filmmaker’s message, what does that lead to?

We work in a globally competitive marketplace, where people with a much higher cost of living must compete with those in areas with lower ones. Jobs in my business are sent overseas on a regular basis.

Capitalism is competition. It’s like nature: the best ones win, the lesser ones die off and become extinct. So to survive, companies must push employees. Hard. That's the message of every Tiger Mom and Marine Drill Sergeant. It’s also the message of Terence Fletcher, more to the point, Damien Chazelle.

If you don't want your job to go abroad, you'd better be great.

But how do we achieve greatness?

Why, we just got the answer from the movie: tough love, aka emotional and physical abuse.

Fletcher (the writer / director's mouthpiece) lays it out for us in a monologue:

"Parker's a young kid, pretty good on the sax. Gets up to play at a cutting session, and he fucks it up. And Jones nearly decapitates him for it. And he's laughed off-stage. Cries himself to sleep that night, but the next morning, what does he do? He practices. And he practices and he practices with one goal in mind, never to be laughed at again. And a year later, he goes back to the Reno and he steps up on that stage, and plays the best motherfucking solo the world has ever heard. So imagine if Jones had just said: "Well, that's okay, Charlie. That was all right. Good job. "And then Charlie thinks to himself, "Well, shit, I did do a pretty good job." End of story. No Bird. That, to me, is an absolute tragedy. But that's just what the world wants now. People wonder why jazz is dying."

It's good, if blunt, dialogue. The film is full of it.

Whiplash is a full throated roar to bring basic training to every workplace. Why? Because if we don’t, we’ll fall behind. We’ll be out-competed. Other societies are pushing themselves as hard as they can, and only the most ruthless will survive.

The cost of this approach is not skipped over: students break down, they cry, and one even commits suicide. As a result, the worry-wart administration and the coddler-brigade intervene. The teacher is sanctioned and driven out.

A safe environment is restored.

Yay. Butterflies and flowers out of bums.

But in the last few seconds of the film, this narrative is inverted.

A look is exchanged between teacher and student. It signifies realization: Andrew has emerged through the crucible, fully realized, and has achieved true greatness. He sees the rightness of the erstwhile villain’s actions, and the teacher is vindicated. The worry-warts and school administration are revealed as simpering weaklings standing in the way of greatness, holding people back from achieving the heights they dream of.

That’s the whiplash.

And from a film making point of view, it's brilliant. It works, and it breaks the 'Save the Cat' structure that has become so ubiquitous. The entire movie is building to that revelatory, nonverbal exchange. 

So you have a choice: either you can have greatness through 'emotional and physical abuse', or you can give up on greatness in order to avoid the harshness of 'tough love'. 

And yes, I used the more click bait version in the title. Because blog hits. D'uh.

The two sides in the film both have built-in defense mechanisms, starting with slanders: you’re either an abusive tyrant (and I imagine a few other appellations, probably the catch-all 'Fascist') or a simpering weakling, a 'worthless, friendless, faggot-lipped little piece of shit whose mommy left daddy when she figured out he wasn't Eugene O'Neill, and who is now weeping and slobbering all over my drum set like a fucking nine-year old girl!’ Mr. Fletcher such a charmer.

Honestly, I just want to see him teaching actual nine-year olds. Maybe in the sequel: Terence Fletcher Goes Grade School. Get them while they're young, right? In fact, excellence starts in Kindergarten. Fletcher's speech practically writes itself. 

After all, what's emotional trauma and a few suicides if it gives us another Bird?

The real kicker? The icing on the ideological Ayn Rand cake? 

The omission: there is not a single woman in the class.

Because I guarantee you, if you change genders, it’s not the same movie.

Plur1bus review

The Pur1bus debut is slick and fascinating high concept television: humanity downloads instructions for ai virus sent from 600 light years away, and promptly accidentally infects itself.

Because of course it does.

If you’ve read The Hot Zone, so far, so believable.

The show centres around Carol (Rhea Seehorn), a cynical and disillusioned writer of romance novels who holds her own audience in complete contempt, who is immune to the virus. Everyone else hits pause, jitters in place, and then becomes part of an interconnected, altruistic hive mind.

It's happy happy joy time, which doesn’t sit well with our anti-heroine. She loses her partner in the great virus download. Some 870 million others also died... not that Carol really gives a shit about them.

One of the main themes underlying the drama is the battle between selfish individualism and selfless collectivism. 

We all know what side Elon will be on.

Carol doesn’t really care about anyone… except her romantic partner. She’s willing to shove aside, or even drive over, anyone who gets in her way if her partner is at risk. 

Shortly after the altruistic virus takes over (it’s fittingly spread by mouth to mouth kisses... and less so by surreptitiously licking donuts), a White House representative talks to Carol through her TV set. The spokesman, the (former) Secretary of Agriculture (or something), tells her that everyone got a infected by a virus from outer space. No alien invasion. 

Just happy people!

The hive mind then ships to Carol someone from Israel who resembles her romantic ideal. The hive wants Carol to be happy, you see. 

It’s totally selfless.

It’s also sensitive: when Carol explodes in rage at Romantic Substitute, the hive goes into shock and 11 million people die. 

Talk about Emo. 

It reminds me of that episode of Star Trek where Spock is infected by happiness spores.

Carol asks if there is anyone else who is immune, and it turns out there are a dozen, 5 of whom speak english. 

So they organize a get together in Bilbao, Spain, and we see just how different individuals can be. Carol is sorely disappointed by this pack of unnotables. The most eccentric, and narcissistic, is a young man who’s already assembled his own harem, and flies in on Air Force One. 

Not the kind of person Carol was hoping to sync with. 

But is she any better?

As a social experiment contrasting individualism with collectivism, it’s fun. The collectivism, however, is so extreme and complete, I wonder how much dramatic fuel can be wrung out of it. Carol needs to be exceptionally dysfunctional for the show to work. 

Happiness, after all, writes white on a page.

The most interesting direction I can see is to lean into Carol’s efforts to thwart the aliens. She’s correctly determined that it’s up to the uninfected to save humanity.

Why? 

Because the hive here is completely incapable of defending itself. It won’t slap a bug that’s biting them. It won’t kill. In other words, if there are bed bugs, it will let the vermin breed and feast on the hosts until they die of blood loss. That’s how extreme the altruism here is. They will let lions and tigers out of zoos, and just accept people being eaten by these predators as a cost of doing business. Or being virtuous. Whatever.

It's like some kind of extreme, Heinleinian or Randian caricature of altruism. Yes, there are some people out there (like Madonna) who spout half-baked, naive, altruistic peacenik slogans such as 'violence never solved anything'. (Really? Have you checked with the Phoenician  Carthaginians? Oh wait, you can't: the Romans slaughtered their armies, razed their city, and sold those who were left into slavery. Seems to me they solved their rival problem with an awful lot of thoroughly genocidal violence. As Tacitus wrote: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace." Dare I mention aboriginals? No? Too soon?) But these are the exceptions. 

Heinlein famously despised altruism, saying that it was 'self-deception, which is the root of all evil'":

"Gratitude: An imaginary emotion that rewards an imaginary behavior, altruism. Both imaginaries are false faces for selfishness, which is a real and honest emotion."

and: 

"Of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them to make a choice - if the choice looks like a 'sacrifice' - you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness... the necessity of deciding between two things you want when you can't have both."

That's right: altruism is the worst: it was behind The Holocaust, the witch trials, slavery, the Robber Barons, cryptocrime, tech oligarchies, dictators, and most vile of all, The Salvation Army. 

Personally, I think unrestricted selfishness, which gives birth to bigotry and greed, are behind the vast majority of suffering. Sure, sometimes a fig leaf of justification is pinned atop, but it's not often the underlying motive. Rudolf Hoess wasn't driven by 'concepts of altruism'. 

There are worse concepts that twist the world.

But hey, that's just me.

I can only wait for the show's underlying ideology to unfold with bated breath.

Within the narrative set up by Vince Gilligan, however, we can immediately see a core flaw in the hive's altruistic nature. The show's deck is naturally stacked that way. Given how grounded the show is with its presentation of events, I’m not sure we’ll ever actually see aliens arrive, but that's what would reveal the game. 

The virus is a very clever, clean weapon: it’s turned humanity into a codependent hive mind that’s incapable of self-defence, an entirely willing and exploitable workforce, determined to please anyone who still has a POV. 

In other words, when alien invaders do arrive, humanity will do everything the aliens want. The aliens don’t have to fight anyone. All the infrastructure, along with the workforce, will be captured intact. No loss of productivity. 

Like codependents servicing their favourite narc.

Will the show go in that direction? I have no idea, but it seems the most logical path. 

We'll see if the hive mind starts preparing for their arrival.

Otherwise, what on earth are all these hivers doing with their time? We see them cleaning up the detritus caused by the virus download, but beyond that? Everyone knows what everyone else knows. Individuality is gone. There are no specialists, because everyone is. What need then is there for entertainment? Gambling? Vanity products? Tchotkies? Education? Crime? Military forces? Police? 

So much is rendered obsolete by the virus. 

The problem here is that I’m not sure the answers will be interesting.

The Hegseth and Trump Comedy Hour

Hegseth had all of America's generals flown to Quantico for a top level pow-wow, and what a wow it was. 

Heggie wants to remove all rules of engagement and unleash the full lethality of the US military on its enemies, FAFO and all that. 

Megamacho, man! 

Those restrictive rules about bombing innocent people were just killing the whole Conan-crush-your-enemies vibe Petty Pete's going for.

And no more fat generals!

Finally, the military is getting its priorities straight. Screw drones, satellites, cyberwarfare, and all that nerd stuff! Time to get back to basics and lop some heads off!

The two-handed sword will be replacing the assault rifle, and if the chicks can't lift it, well, it is what it is, brah. Hegseth also told the generals their new imperative: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women."

Dotty Donnie wants to unleash Hegseth's no-holds-barred military on the 'enemy within', and he's not talking about self-improvement, introspection, and overcoming our internal handicaps. No, no, no: he means training US troops on Democrat run war zones...sorry, I mean 'cities'.

Well it's about time!

Donnie's not worried about facing off against China, or Russia, or terrorists, or drug runners, or alien invasions. Nope! Trump's 4D chess playing mastermind has sussed out the most perfidious and high priority enemy of all: Democrats! 

Their villainy is endless! Why, these traitors don't wear uniforms, so you can't just shoot them on sight, you have to ask if they're Democrats, or get some ID or something. What a pain in the butt; they're just deliberately making things difficult.

Have they no decency, sir?!? 

Done with Gunn: Franchise fatigue and the diminishing returns of transgressive content

The Guardians of the Galaxies movies were a superhero genre revelation. They were fun, punchy romps with lots of heart. Centred on a gang of dysfunctional misfits, the characters were well realized, and the actors had great chemistry.

The Guardians trilogy are, and remain, my favourite Marvel Cinematic Universe films. 

I’ve enjoyed some of the others (Lookin' at you, Ironman in a cave!), but none blended humour, action and heart so perfectly.

Gunn has since switched over to Marvel’s archrival, DC, and is revamping that entire universe, like some kind of quirky Creator Celestial.

I greatly enjoyed the first season of Peacemaker. Idiosyncratic fun with a likeable, earnest (yet homicidal) anti-hero.

Gunn’s Suicide Squad also landed solidly with yet another collection of dysfunctional, lovable yet homicidal goofballs out to (reluctantly) save the world.

I’ve never felt that Gunn was a good fit for the boy scout in blue tights. 

Gunn is superb with quirky, flawed characters. He loves pushing boundaries with humour (Super). He likes to dip into the gross (Dawn of the Dead, Slither). But… he’s never, it seemed to me, to be the go-to-guy for mainstream DC heroes.

My take on DC heroes is admittedly dated. In my era, they were squeaky clean paragons of virtue, earnest fighters for justice, true heroes to their core. 

They weren't people so much as ideals to live up to and emulate.

Having watched the first few episodes of Peacemaker Season 2, I’m not keen on what Gunn’s doing with them. The ‘Justice Gang’ makes an appearance, and… they’re awful. Repellant, obnoxious, arrogant, and misogynistic frankly. Green Lantern is an ass, Hawkgirl isn’t much better, and that third guy, the less said the better. 

I gather this iteration of GL is well known as such, but it was still deeply off putting.

Not, mind you, because they weren’t funny. 

Or that there aren’t people like that.

Or that it didn’t make sense. 

It was, there are, and it did. 

If it was a different universe, a satirical universe that subverts superhero expectations, like, say, where heroes are hollow shills for corporate powers, I’d love it, just as I love The Boys. 

And that is the problem: Gunn’s DC Universe is almost indistinguishable from Amazon Prime’s The Boys: ribald, corrupt, cruel, hyper-violent, gross and self-absorbed. 

If I want to see how power corrupts, and watch people trying to survive in an awful, horrible, corrupt world, well, that’s what I watch The Boys for. 

It’s not what I’d like for Justice League characters.

It's not, in my view, the brand. 

It takes the brand promise, rips out the heart, takes a dump on it, and then drops it on top of a sundae and calls it delicious.   

True, the DC heroes of yore were totally unrealistic in their moral purity, but that doesn’t mean I want them deconstructed in their own brand. 

Satire's great, I love satire, but I don't want LOTR to be a self-satirical parody. I don't want my Star Wars self-satirizing, I don't want Indiana Jones meta, and I don't want Star Trek to be a post-modern satirical critique scripted by Foucault. 

That's what parodies and satires and Galaxy Quest are for. Different, if subordinate, brands where the meta can live without tarnishing the original.

I can name another real-world institution that’s lost a lot of its former majesty of late, and absolutely all of its moral authority; that damages the office, smears the brand, annihilates the ideals and leaves us ashamed. 

Sometimes, it’s nice to have an aspirational moral paragon to look up to, who really is what they appear to be, rather than actually being a malignant narcissist presenting a hollow, idealized façade.

I may get back into Peacemaker, he’s a fringe anti-hero, after all. Superman? Maybe when it's on TV for 'free' (with cable or a base subscription).

Funny enough, I've tried watching the latest season of Gen V, and... it hasn't really caught me. I couldn't remember the characters or what happened in season one. It's funny, topical, and well crafted, but the gross out elements now feel less transgressive and shocking than tired and obligatory. 

Shock value is inversely proportional to the amount you use it. 

There are two kinds of realism in art. One grows from love — the kind that looks at ideals and says, “Let’s see what they cost, let’s see how they survive.” That kind of realism deepens myth; it doesn’t sneer at it. It accepts that goodness is hard but worth striving for. 

The other kind grows from exhaustion, or pride, and rolls its eyes and says, “Only fools believe in heroes.” That doesn’t reveal truth; it corrodes it, mistaking cruelty for depth and mockery for insight. 

The first kind makes us ache for the light; the second leaves us dimly proud of thinking there is none.

And that, perhaps, is where I find myself weary. I don’t mind seeing my heroes struggle, bleed, or even fail. I mind when the storyteller enjoys humiliating them, when sincerity becomes the only writer sin.

The longer a franchise goes on, and even more frequently after the original creative voice has long departed, the more extreme it becomes. People love novelty, and over time, the initial story engine starts to squeak and churn out stale material. So characters become more bad ass (actors are always pushing for memorable moments for their character, and these have to become more and more extreme), they become more inter-related, prequels expand on popular story arcs, undermining the original show and changing its meaning, making everything smaller and smaller and more and more interrelated until it becomes a black hole and sucks in all meaning. All that is left is the churn.

Steven Spielberg once said that the stunts in Indiana Jones movies had to get more and more extreme, with each movie out doing the last, until it practically became a bugs bunny cartoon. 

George Lucas started out with a big galaxy: Luke wasn't related to Vader, Leia wasn't his sister,  Anakin didn't build C3P0, and so on. 

James Bond ultimately became the brother of Blofeld. 

Over time, writers want to imbue everything with meaning. Han's last name is Solo? We can explain that! Yet this is a universe with names like Screed, Skywalker, Sidious, Grievous, etc. Did everyone have a silly, narratively appropriate moniker applied to them as a grown up? Do they know what the word Screed means? Because apparently Solo means solo. Do people titter and snicker at all these on-the-nose names? 

Talk about sucking the fun and the mystery out of it. 

Ambitious writers want to make their mark, to change the original franchise to suit their own sensibilities. Making changes to Franchise DNA is the ultimate victory, for them! And this makes sense, to a degree: a franchise must evolve with the times or lose viewership. 

But it also erodes the dramatic integrity of the show(s). 

The Rules for programs set in the real world are stable: physics don't change over time for police procedurals or daytime soaps (are any of those left?). But they do in sci-fi and fantasy, where magic and technology are toffee, warping and changing to fit the desires of the latest writer's room. 

Why nix a great story just because the show's Rules Bible says it can't happen? 

And that makes sense, to a degree, but if you do it often enough, you wind up with no rules to speak of at all, anything goes, and then it's just blatant fan service. 

Which... is also fine, if that's what you want. Fan service can be fun, it's designed to be. 

It's also the dramatic equivalent of a sugar rush junk food. 

When Ned Stark got decapitated (oh, sorry, spoiler), it was truly shocking, even expectation subverting. The Red Wedding massacre (oh, whoops, another spoiler) was well executed, but not shocking. The destruction of the sept (oh, who cares) was staged in an epic fashion, well directed, well acted and scored, but... I found it hard to care. It was more 'here we go again' than 'holy crap'.

Is slaughtering characters all you've got? 

Who's left to care about?

Perhaps, if you've seen forty superhero movies and TV shows (and many a reboot), you've seen them all.

Franchise fatigue is an inevitable sign of aging... Soone or later, you stop caring.