Give "The Bride!" A Chance

Beyond Cringe

I've seen a few critically panned films where I can appreciate everything the critics pan about them. 'Dumb and Dumber Too' comes to mind, as does 'Wonder Woman 1984' and I feel "The Bride!" deserves its criticism. But I'd recommend seeing it, regardless, as I would those other films.

So I'm going to begin to make this case by talking not about 'The Bride!' and yeah, Maggie could have written a movie title with less stylization so it wasn't tedious to write about her movie, but by talking about one of the greatest books of the 20th century, possibly ever. Catch-22.

Catch-22 is critically acclaimed and commercially successful. It's title and central joke has made it into common vernacular "a catch-22" for any lose-lose situation, a polite and literate way to tell someone they are fucked. 

But Catch-22 is dense and not only dense but enjoyable*. There is easily a whole semester that can be done on Catch-22 and the various characters presented to us, Yossarian and Orr of course, Nately, Clevenger, Doc Daneeka, Major Major Major, Milo Minderbender, Chaplain R.O. Shipman (in my edition) are all fascinating windows into institutional psychopathy. If there were only two texts to assign students to make sure they don't fuck everything up, it would be 1984 and Catch-22. If I could only assign one, it would be Catch-22. Why? Because in Catch-22 the enemy is calling from inside the house. 

There is something extra about Yossarian vs the US Air Force fighting an abstract fascist threat, that doesn't come across in Winston Smith vs Big Brother, perhaps because Soviet UK is counterfactual.

Anyway, here's the catch with Catch-22, not the eponymous catch, but the catch is that Yossarian and the central cast of fly boys are misogynist cads, (this point is the '*' on 'enjoyable' above)  to extract the value of Catch-22 a reader needs one of two things: the least practical thing is to bowdlerize the text, rewrite an edition with all the casual misogyny removed, this may be what George Clooney's TV adaptation is like, I have zero need for, nor interest in an adaptation of Catch-22. 

The most practical thing, is to simply get beyond the misogyny in order to extract the incredible, satirical, institutional analysis that few works of literature can compare to.

"The Bride!" is not great, it is dense, it is a dense hot mess. It is also very "cringe" an expression that itself is becoming self-descriptive. I think we need to accept, that not many people are good at expressing themselves, a good many people are low in self-awareness. Low self-awareness goes hand in hand with stepping into the arena, and expressing something and "The Bride!" is certainly a something, and I think if you see it, you will be cringing in sympathetic embarassment at the opening monologue, the very try-hardness of it that is antithetical to the Grunge aesthetic and early 90s feel this movie mostly employs. 

My recommendation is to just cringe it out and get the fuck over it, like the "vvvvvtttt vvvvvtttt vvvvtttt" noise that Robocop never stops making when he walks, the worst character and characterization in "The Bride!" being Mary Shelley, will sadly, just keep coming back, and I too wish it didn't, but somebody, perhaps many somebodies, thought it was a good idea, and it remains.

Consider though, that at some point, someone will download this movie and simply edit Mary Shelley out, and then maybe people freed of cringe reactions (not entirely, but mostly) will critically pick over all the stuff that remains in there, it will be revisited, inevitably, by video essayists and given that video essays are as prone to herd mentality as initial reviews, "The Bride!" feels like a candidate for reevaluation, and I think you can skip the normal 12 year half-life, forget the 90 million budget and wide theatrical release, forget the cringe and look at what is there.

Good Disconnect

2013's "Man of Steel" could be instantly improved by cutting out the entire prologue, the "fall of Krypton" action sequence where Russell Crowe struggles across an alien planet to put his infant son in a spaceship with his wife and see him off. 

In the same way, I would instantly improve "The Bride!" by cutting out everything prior to Christian Bale's first scene as The Monster. A good decision, a promising decision Maggie made, was to advance the Frankenstein Timeline, albeit not into the present day, but 1930s United States.

This solves a lot of story problems, we have the monster as the catalytic agent to get the plot going, you can even follow directly on from Guillermo Del Toro's recent adaptation of Frankenstein. The monster's fear of eternal life in crushing solitude has come to pass, it is excruciatingly painful for the monster, and he is here, now, because there is a mad scientist with a lab that could possibly do what Frankenstein would not for the monster.

This is good, this is great, just the take-off was fucked with the Mary Shelley framing device that introduced convoluted metaphysics that split the sauce that was to be the thesis of the film. That decision didn't come out of nowhere, in the 1930s movie "Bride of Frankenstein" the framing device is that Mary Shelley in 1818 told her storm-sheltering companions "but wait there's more" and the same actress that plays Mary Shelley, plays "The Bride." But I digress.

The point being that the monster is a deep and mostly coherent character that I would guess, Christian Bale whole-assed in preparation for the role. He is a monster we are already familiar with from all the adaptations that came before. We know his plight, his monstrous appearance has plebs assume the worst of him, to treat him like a monster until he lives down to their expectations. He has to run and hide to survive and he does so all alone, and has been doing so since the death of Victor Frankenstein in the events of the book.

I am hard pressed to think of a movie, that better captures the disconnect between sexes of a romantic courtship/puppy love phase. The general problem with onscreen romances, be they Pride and Prejudice, Emma, When Harry Met Sally, 10 Things I Hate About You, Along Came Polly, Love Actually etc. etc. is the coherence. So even when Ben Stiller is an uptight insurance executive and Jennifer Anniston is a manic pixie dream girl, they are manufactured to go together.

What I found most interesting in "The Bride!" and it was likely on-accident, is that it depicts a man commissioning a woman for himself from an artist through a process that is essentially random. He gets what he gets, and I suspect what happened, was that Christian Bale the actor was given a lot of creative control when it came to realizing his monster, and Maggie Gyllenhall likely through incompetence struggled and never overcame the problem of fleshing out the bride as a character.

What we get, is an onscreen courtship where a man and a woman don't understand each other, talk past each other, project onto each other, aren't listening to each other, are both slaves to their own egocentricity. 

This is interesting. It's interesting to watch, even if it is hard to like, and even if Maggie cannot stick the landing.

Obviously, I am making an appeal to ignorance, I have not conducted a census of romantic movies, I haven't seen Gone With the Wind and I haven't seen Maid in Manhatten. I am generalizing out that most rom-coms in particular, are formulaic with a particular trope being that the lovers know they have found the right person because they are "seen" by the other. I once walked into a room where some people were watching a Rom-com I couldn't identify for you today. I can't even recall who was in it. All I saw was female hands opening an envelope(?) and pulling out a watch. I said "so that's the watch she always wanted as a child..." or something, and one of the viewers remarked "how did you know?" I knew because the formula was well established by the time I was 15. 

The onscreen relationship you see in "The Bride!" isn't even close to Sandler-Barrymoore romcom 50 first dates. The basis of that movie is that the lovers 'see' each other even though Barrymoore loses her memory of Sandler every day.

Even Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I understand to involve minimal direction for the cast coming from Larry, and has at its center for the first 6 seasons, a dysfunctional but loving marriage, doesn't give us the same disconnect because at some level, I suspect Cherryl takes Larry's direction.

The deconstructive solution, seems simple to create an authentic disconnect between lovers - isolate two writers such that they are projecting and reacting, not choreographing. 

I am not ready to conclude that Maggie Gyllenhall is an incompetent director and writer, even if "The Bride!" is largely incompetent as a film. The main source of doubt, are my doubts that the writing challenge is theoretically surmountable. That in "The Bride of Frankenstein" is a character to be fleshed out is the next most interesting thing about "The Bride!" this may have been the vortex under which we have the directorial energies circling to give Bale the room to be this experimental male lead, trying to maintain his characters integrity, while being open to whoever the bride reveals herself to be, while succumbing to the temptation that she might be a tabla-rasa and that she might wish to be, whatever he wants her to be.

That's interesting.

Feminism Problems

Kant being recently on my mind, the 'original' "Bride of Frankenstein" as a character is a means, not an end. She is not a fully formed character but a plot device, she is there to scream in horror at the monster, even though she herself is a monster, compounding the monster's own horror of his existence. The "Bride of Frankenstein" is iconic, what it isn't is very good. As a sequel it is more akin to the modern phenomena of "Dune: Part 2" or "The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug" and "The Hobbit: Enough Already" where a book is adapted into multiple films. 

The 1931 Frankenstein movie, took a bunch of liberties with the source material, maybe because of run-time constraints, maybe because the studios didn't give a damn. For example it isn't Victor Frankenstein but Henry Frankenstein, there's no framing device of Victor recounting his misadventure to a ship's captain in the Arctic circle etc. etc.

"The Bride of Frankenstein" resurrects the monster, carelessly, like the somehow by which Palpatine returned, and then unused source material pads out the runtime, most notably the monster coming across a blind man's cabin in the woods and learning to talk. 

In this sense, Henry Frankenstein completing a female monster and bringing it to life is a smaller departure from the source material than Victor being Henry, than him surviving the events of the first film and expecting a child of his own with his wife Elizabeth. In the source material the bride is abandoned because Victor fears the possibility of the monsters reproducing. 

So the eponymous "Bride of Frankenstein" being a means, to the end of illustrating the monster's plight, doesn't give anyone needing to adapt the character a whole lot to work with.

For me though, this very conundrum produces an interesting mirror to hold up to feminism in the 21st century. 

Imagine you were to close your eyes and imagine, which you can't do and keep reading. That I decided to reclaim Frankenstein to my own ends. I open my movie with Mary Shelley talking to us from beyond the grave, embodied but displaced, my Mary Shelley informs you that I never intended for Frankenstein to be any cautionary tale against hubris, that I died before I got a chance to write what the story was really about - the Great Man theory of history, and transhumanism, objectivism!

I think people would writely criticise my hubris of sticking my hand up the arse of Mary Shelley and having her posthumously endorse some Ayn Rand shit as transparently self-serving and disrespectful.

The obvious illegitimacy of this move, is because my claims to know the mind of Mary Shelley go against the solidarities of Identity Politics. From a group identity resolution, Mary Shelley is a woman so somehow therefore, all women are Mary Shelley, Maggie Gyllenhall is a woman, therefore Maggie Gyllenhall is basically Mary Shelley.

I suggest, that the cringe inducing opening of the movie, can be explained because under the auspices of identity politics, the fallacious appropriation of an individual's voice is not obvious. However, for it seems, so many who experience the appropriation of Mary Shelley's voice, it is obviously illegitimate because they experience it as cringe. Mary Shelley has to announce the false bravado of "the motherfucking bride" and it isn't cool, it isn't even ironically uncool, it is simply a misstep.

Bringing us to the second misstep, and where 21st century feminism starts coming into starker resolution, with the introduction of 'Ida'. The bride is given multiple names throughout this movie, but like the monster, really doesn't have one, or shouldn't have one. I have invoked Ida, which is the first chronologically, a much more interesting one is given by the monster later 'Penelope' aka 'Penny' which is the first name the bride accepts, the most famous literary Penelope being the wife of Odysseus and I'd bet some money, that Maggie or someone else in the development of "The Bride!" knows their Natalie Haynes. 

The monster as Odysseus, has been struggling for a long time to reunite with his beloved Penelope, likely the idea from where this name is suggested after "Ginger Rogers" is recognised by the bride as a film reference. Haynes says in her non-fiction art history book 'Pandora's Jar' that I happened to read a few weeks before seeing "The Bride!" that historically Penelope has been held up as the ideal wife, for her quality of loyalty and devotion, awaiting the return of her husband faithfully for 20 years. Hayne's points out that Penelope is not given enough credit for being the ideal partner of Odysseus, in terms of her own cunning, her own sacrifices, the ordeal she endures for 20 years.

I won't be able to do the chapter on Penelope justice in a few sentences and via my lack of expertise. But as the name offered by the monster, this is something a feminist must radically reject, resist, reclaim. Alas, another similarity with the poetry of Homer, is where to lay the blame for the whole debacle.

Who caused the Trojan war? Ostensibly, it is Paris who abducted Helen of Sparta to make her Helen of Troy. But Paris abducts Helen because she was promised to him as the most beautiful of mortals by Aphrodite in order to win the judgement of Paris. But Paris judged Aphrodite the fairest after turning down the bribes offered by Athena (wisdom) and Hera (offered him Eurasia). Having to wikipedia the story because I'd forgotten the third contestant was Hera, I noticed that the event goes down on "Mount Ida" so the Greek myth references in "The Bride!" are looking less coincidental.

Zeus delegated judging to Paris, so maybe the Trojan war is Zeus' fault, but the golden apple inscribed with 'to the fairest' was tossed out by Eris, personification of Strife.

This is the complicated mess of who started the Trojan war, tohm, I hear you say, what the fuck does this have to do with "The Bride!" and 21st century feminism. 

Mary Shelley is Maggie's muse, in the first scene Ida is possessed by Maggie Gyllenhall who brings about Ida's death, that she may become the bride of Frankenstein's monster. The movie is taking place in a reality of Mary Shelley's creation, the events of Frankenstein are canonical, the monster only exists because of Mary Shelley, and Mary Shelley had him demand of Victor a female companion. Maggie steals Mary and makes her kill Ida to provide the necessary materials for the bride.

Again, it would all be much tidier, if you just cut Ida and Mary Shelley out. Then it is just the monster demanding a bride who is a resurrected corpse. That corpse can have a backstory, revealed later when her memories return or she is recognised from her former life. But instead Ida is killed by Maggie reclaiming the plot catalyst from the monster.

If it sounds incoherent, that's because it is. But we aren't past the film's opening yet, Ida's death is precipitated by her causing a scene in the proximity of a mafia boss. I was left guessing as to why the movie was set in the 1930's. I think it was specifically 1936, and I thought it might have something to do with WW2 and the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust or something. That hypothesis went nowhere, I suspect it was in the 1930s because that's when the Boris Karloff movies came out, and that's really where the bride came into existence, not 1818 when Mary Shelley began telling the story.

That leant the Bonnie & Clyde idea of Monster & Bride, but it also provided the mafia as I suspect, a symbolic patriarchy. 

But which "patriarchy" because there are (at least) two, and I am confident I have previously documented in my blog, the incoherency of this Feminism 101 concept. There is intelligent design patriarchy, or the conspiracy patriarchy. This is an active, organised concept that suppresses women. Then there is a descriptive, emergent, status quo patriarchy - this is a passive patriarchy that merely collects observations of all the ways in which women are oppressed in society relative to men.

The mafia is a criminal conspiracy, and it is a conspiracy in the film. The symbolic patriarch of the mafia, who has women's tongues cut out and murders with impunity.

Organised crime is much less scary than disorganised crime. It seems scarier when you live in modest comfort, because you are already spared disorganised crime. It seems scary when you are literally minding your own business and some fat guys in suits come in, don't introduce themselves and suggest you need to pay them a "protection" fee every month because it would be a shame if your business were to burn down.

That seems scary, compared to when unemployment is so high, that pretty much anyone might cut your throat for spare change in your pocket. It's much scarier when you go to the town hall and instead of saying "we are going to address this by building an effective witness protection program where we can guaruntee the safety of those we need to come forth and testify against the Gambino crime family, we are going to get them on taxes, we are going to flip their low level members and get them turning states evidence against the big players..." they say "well we need to stop the civil war between religious sectarian groups in order to secure property rights so people can safely farm again and create the surplus calories needed to keep children in school for longer so we can start building a modern economy that provides good opportunities to our youth so they won't turn to crime and instead pay taxes that we can transparently spend on social programs without foreign interference."

I may not like the term "patriarchy" but I will grant it for argument's sake to move on to the question that interests me - "how efficient is patriarchy?" I think patriarchy is unfortunately, quite efficient, which is to say, its the disorganised kind of crime. Fighting it is not a simple matter of disobedience, standing up and saying "I'm not going to take it anymore" is the starting line, not the finishing line.

This I think, is the unintentionally interesting disconnect between the bride and the monster as a love story. The bride is fighting nebulous patriarchy, a loose end that is handled clumsily in an impatient mid-credits scene. This is, and it is probably a taboo, a Quixotic quest of modern feminism, which is a generalisation on my part, not a stereotype. It is where you fight a coordinated conspiracy to oppress women, but in the movie the monster has literally nothing to do with the mafia.

If you think instead of patriarchy as spontaneous, disorganised, decentralized local cells, where there is no campaign to take the head of the snake, just local battles, then probably the best weapon a 21st century woman has in her possession, is her agency over mate selection, and that is right in front of the bride throughout the film, it is treated as the spine of the film, with the film's ending and final act being that she has come to love the monster who loves her. That's why justice for the mafia don that motivated the circumstances of Ida's death is an afterthought.

I think it is a product of incompetence (and incoherence) because there is a convoluted backstory based on the criminal conspiracy that saw Ida die. She was a spy, basically a prostitute employed by a detective in a case that was killed due to police corruption taking bribes from the Mafia but Ida wanted justice for the silenced and dead women.

With Maggie's visual interpretation of the bride, her production has successfully created an iconic character, it doesn't matter that the movie is bad or bombs, like "The Suicide Squad" and Harley Quinn, the bride's look was destined to become a 2026 Halloween costume staple. Except the next cringe and incompetent thing the film does that an audience needs to move beyond, is that it depicts women everywhere dressing up as the bride, replicating her cheek smear or tattoo birthmark, and fighting their battles of disobedience under patriarchy. 

This is doing Aldous Snow's "I'm like an African white space Jesus. That's not for me to say though." from Get Him To The Greek, but Maggie calls herself African white space Jesus. 

Alas, this is projection, and I think it is projection that sustains appeals to the nebulous "patriarchy" notion, that the battle is about disobedience to a system that oppresses women, by stepping into your power and subjugating your oppressors. That's literally what is happening when a group of women, made up as the bride, pin down the mafia don and tattoo his face in the mid-credits scene. 

But what is wrong with patriarchy, such that it is, is that it treats women as a class of inferior people. It manifests in the basic way, that your boyfriend won't go see Pride & Prejudice which you want to see, so you end up watching XXX: The Return of Xander Kaine with him.

Bale's monster is flawed but good guy, he is just desperate. The script shows us this, shows us the bride seeing this in him. Before she is brought to life, (and after Maggie has already possessed her and deprived her of personhood) Bale gets cold feet, rejecting her on account of her being 'too pretty' and the mad scientist pushes it through, she even pulls the lever to bring her to life because the monster has a panic attack, so frightened by the prospect of what the source material got so right in the original bride's lineless cameo - she screams upon seeing the monster. (and also the Helena Bonham Carter incarnation from 1998ish, commits suicide by self immolation upon realizing her own fate.)

Narratively, there is supposedly this issue of consent, but again, consent is a limitation of the modern collectivist form of feminism that allows Maggie to appropriate Mary Shelley to her own ends, it just continues - Ida is dead, Ida is dead because Mary Shelley precipitated the strife that killed her own creation. Maggie, as Mary Shelley hand picks Ida to be the bride of Frankenstein, so already we have Maggie as Mary Shelley consenting to the match. Then there's Annette Benning's character, she is the one who actively argues the case against resurrecting a woman for the monster, just as Shelley's Victor did in the source material. 

Except Benning's objection isn't on the grounds of them reproducing, a la "Seed of Chucky" but on the grounds that she could create a monster. The monster puts forward his counterargument to "what if she's a monster?" as "then I will love her." and to this Benning tacitly consents, like a father blessing a groom.

It's shallow, dare I say, a close reading of the text, to say Ida doesn't consent to being resurrected to serve as a companion for a lonely monster. If you back off a bit, all the characters are Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the marriage has been arranged variously by her, Mary Shelley and Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Benning), the bride is perfectly safe with the monster, he has already been vetted. The bride just has to trust that her fellow women are looking out for her.

The women in this movie, universally approve of the match.

Earlier in publication than Shelley's Frankenstein, but near enough to be contemporary was Pride and Prejudice, which could also be considered a guidebook on fighting Patriarchy through mate selection:

As the story progresses, so does her tumultuous relationship with Mr Darcy. The course of Elizabeth and Darcy's relationship is ultimately decided when Darcy overcomes his pride, and Elizabeth overcomes her prejudice, leading them both to surrender to their love for each other. ~ from the wikipedia article.

As a man, a much more difficult version of feminism to grapple with, is the more literal interpretations of women's liberation. This is the considerably harder battle of not employing mate-selection, something within women's control, to tackle men's violence against women. This takes the form of needing to educate Pete, that the problem has nothing to do with Sarah's insistence on dating Dave (including isolating herself in domestic environments with him) despite his history of jealousy, insecurity, possessiveness, emotional dysregulation and verbal and physical abuse, because Sarah is free to be attracted to whomever she likes, and to date whomever will have her that she chooses. The problem is that Dave refuses to be domesticated by Sarah. 

I understand this, the freedom for Sarah to date Dave and not Pete. It to my understanding, has a lot in common with women's freedom to wear miniskirts and thong underwear to the club and not expect sexual violence. Furthermore, it is relatable. No matter how many studies replicate that arranged marriages provide higher levels of satisfaction, I don't think anyone who has gained the liberty to choose their own partners feels compelled by such data to wish for a return to arranged marriages.

It is the right for women to pursue their own Beauty & The Beast fairy tale. "The Bride!" is an interesting twist on the Beauty & The Beast fairy tale, for the beast in this case is thoroughly domesticated, the bride is not. Benning reveals in the final scene, that somehow the bride was a means and not an end to her. Some long unrealised dream to create a disobedient geometry.

All the evidence suggests, that Maggie is incredibly well read, her movie is a hot intertextual mess. The deep cuts are peppered through the movie itself. That's where the reflection of 21st century feminism comes into sharp relief, and it's unfoundedness and incoherence is the making of this movie, encapsulated in this appeal to disobedience.

"Well behaved women seldom make history." ~ Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

Obviously this mantra hinges on your definition of "well behaved" you can easily "beg the question" by asserting that a well-behaved woman, cannot make history, so if she does, then she can't be well behaved. But I suspect this assertion, could prove, like the rule "i before e except after c" I suspect nobody has ever really examined the claim, I can think of a number of exceptions to Ulrich's statement, but that wouldn't substantiate a frequency claim like 'seldom':

• Queen's Victoria, Elizabeth II, Isabella of Spain, Eleanor of Aquitaine etc.
• Penelope of Ithaca, Iphigenia, Sita etc. from mythology.
• Margaret Thatcher, Teresa May, Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard, Jacinta Ardern etc. in politics.
• Ada Lovelace, Mary Curie, Mary Summerville etc. in the sciences.
• In literature there are almost too many to name but probably should include Murasaki Shikibu, the Bronte sisters, Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie etc. etc. etc.

Again, everything hinges on the definition of "well-behaved" and in large part I have to plead ignorance, for all I know Enid Blyton financed her writing by selling crystal meth to local teenagers, Margerat Thatcher declared war on the falklands, is that well-behaved or badly behaved? She was leader of the Conservative party, but her radical economics ended Britain's post war period of upward social mobility, but it was also pretty much identical policy wise to the Reagan administration across the pond. 

Iconoclasts need to be free to be iconoclastic. I'm not anti-any form of liberalism (with the usual caveat that your rights to swing your fists through the air end at the tip of my nose) 

I think "The Bride!" finds in the mafia, an unintentionally interesting metaphor for how to approach 'the patriarchy' - I'm sure the mafia, and organised crime, kills women. I'm also reasonably confident, that at its deadliest, the mafia has killed far less women than the institutions of marriage and family, nor the alcohol, tobacco, automotive, pharmacuetical or cosmetics industries.

Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised, if organised crime is unpopular with both men and women. There is an overwhelming common ground on which to form an alliance, and that history will show, most people are against organised crime, and its condemnation is codified in laws.

Just so, given what little we know about Ida, it seems that the monster is a better romantic partner for her than any of her known male associates at the time of her death. The major thing making the relationship bad, is that the bride is possessed by Mary Shelley, who created the monster. So this is kind of like a woman being possessed by her own mother-in-law. 

The bride depicts for me, the naive isolationist war against patriarchy that inadvertantly prophesied the US-Isreal attacks on Iran. As at writing today, Trump has criticized/begged for NATO allies to help him out of the mess he made without consulting them.

If "The Bride!" is confusing, then there's hope that women can sit in the audience wondering what the fuck the bride is doing and where the movie is going, and men can sit in the audience and find the monster's situation weird and disconnected. 

Again, that's interesting.

Appropriation of the Commons

So let's address this, for me, worst aspect of the film. Worst creative decision. I have very limited influence, so my neologism of "samening" an offense equal and opposite to "othering" is something I'll have to rearticulate. I think it's bad when people "other" I agree, it is aggressive to be all like "you can't sit with us." but there is also an aggressive form of inclusion, I've seen it. The pressure exerting "hey, come sit with us." not as friendly invitation, but as laying claim to someone's time and attention. 

My sense is, a lot of people naively assume that "inclusion" can only be good thing, not bad thing, forgetting arranged marriages, gangs, teenage betrayals. Forgetting egocentricity, that one can be included as a means, as an object, as an accessory. 

Then there is the question of owning people, to which I feel the answer is an emphatic 'no' but people will take possession of people they identify with. Usually this is banal as people declaring "we won" regarding the victory of a professional sports team that the person objectively contributed nothing to. But sometimes you will get a quite intense sense of proprietary ownership over a person, like people who feel it is their place to defend the honour and reputation of Jesus. Someone to the best of our knowledge, was a person, and I don't think Christians "own" Jesus anymore than anyone can own a person.

I think a problem with identity politics, is when you start thinking in group resolution, you can lose sight of something like Mary Shelly was a person who had her own voice and could very much speak for herself. Some 'forgetting' like this is my most charitable explanation as to why Maggie hubristicly felt that she could write Mary Shelly in the first person as though she knew her mind, the mind of the author of multiple manuscripts of Frankenstein & His Monster: A Modern Promethean Tale, that included her explicitly tackling a request by Frankenstein's creation to Victor, to make him a bride, and Victor (and by proxy, Mary Shelly) doesn't think it a good idea and declines it.

In 2019, Greta Gerwig released her improved ending to Little Women, O magazine quotes her as saying "I wanted to give Louisa May Alcott an ending she might have liked" and in Greta's case it seems there's a paper trail, along with the biography of Louisa May Alcott that suggest that Josephine as a self-insert probably should have wound up a righteous spinster babe.

I recently read Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes, a non-fiction book by the author of "A Thousand Ships" which was a retelling of the Trojan war from the perspective of its women and goddesses. In the conclusion, which I have to paraphrase because I returned the book to the library already, Natalie argues that it is valid to retell stories from other perspectives because they've always been retold from other perspectives. 

This is hard to argue when you have Greek playwrights like Euripides riffing off episodes of the Iliad and Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts. I tentatively accept her conclusion, her arguments compelled me to accept it, including through the preceding book leading to her conclusions.

But only to a degree. One thing that diminishes "A Thousand Ships" as a project (I haven't read it, so it could be great, but I'm just commenting on the project) is that while the Iliad may not pass the Bechtel test, it isn't like it is devoid of great female characters who have great scenes like Helen, Cassandra, Hecuba and Penthasilia who fights Achilles. The question is more of emphasis, I guess, and probably a matter of which roles got relegated to the cutting room floor in the moving picture era.

Then there's something like 'Julia', which is Orwell's '1984' told from Winston Smith's romantic liason Julia's perspective. The difference being, our ability to preserve the fidelity of the manuscript an author turns in has improved remarkably since Euripides was putting on plays, and that was already a massive improvement over oral traditions of Epic Poems.

Right there's this thing, that Orwell was doing, which was sitting down to a Typewriter and being like "how can I get my thoughts on Communism and Socialism and man's inhumanity to man out to the general public?" and he writes "Animal Farm: A Fairy Tale" and he writes "1984" about a dystopian future and they both hit. 

Somewhere in this very feelie terrain, there's a right of reply. Like anyone can pick up a typewriter and write their own response to Animal Farm, and 1984. Responses include the very famous "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, and while not a direct inspiration, Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" was described upon release as "A Feminist 1984" and I think in modernity and post-modernity, writing a reply that involves creating your own world and characters is the path that leaves one far less exposed to hacks. 

Over on the flipside, there's something like Baz Lurman taking "Romeo & Juliet" and setting it in Las Angeles in the mid-90s. At that time, my feeling is this was a huge swing, where Baz scored a home run on all the doubters. It's success no doubt lead to greenlighting the forgotten "O" and enjoyable beloved fluff featuring a teacher putting Shakespeare to rap in "10 Things I Hate About You" when people realised that teenagers love Shakespeare when you don't make it so fucking boring.

But if some guy was like "I'm going to improve on Shakespeare" by inhabiting the ghost of Shakespeare to endorse my new better version of 1998's Shakespeare in Love, I feel in my waters that it would be far more likely to be caught somewhere in pre-production as "maybe this is a bad idea."

I don't know if it's some embedded sense of Marxist-collectivism, but it does feel to me, that feminism has this distinct hubris wedded to it, that I doubt is essential or necessary, where anything and anyone can be annexed for the cause but is the yin to the cringeness yang woman must feel when watching Vin Diesel remind us that flying a rocket car up to a space station as part of a counter-terrorist heist is "about family" when he and his crew have a cook up to celebrate using a Shelby GT-500 to take out a nuclear submarine in the Arctic Circle.

Of recent I've begun to wonder if anything is actually cool. I don't have an answer, but something that is definitely uncool is trying to be cool. That's the risk though, and again, through that on screen disconnect between Bale's coherent consistent monster and trying to make something of The Bride that isn't relative to the monster, illustrates two viewpoints both trying to be cool in front of each other, that is a unique viewing experience.

Christian Bale > Jacob Elordi

I've now had time to watch some of the reviews I avoided of "The Bride!" Another reason to see this film is because Christian Bale's take on the monster, is probably the best ever. I'd say he's also the best looking monster since Boris Karloff.

I disagree with nothing said in this review that pans the film and this review that praises the film. Don't miss that I think neither of these reviews contradict the other. It is clearly, demonstrably, about what you see and I'm probably closer to being in furious agreement with Mark Kermode, whose review I sought out because of his review of Del Toro's "Frankenstein" from 2025.

Del Toro's movie is commendable because it is closest to the plot beats of the source material. He set out to make a faithful adaptation of Shelley's book, to honour her rather than co-opt her. It was commercially successful, critically acclaimed (it just won 3 Oscars, relating to production design) and was nominated for 9. It was also, surprisingly boring.

Furthermore, Mia Goth as Elizabeth gets these great costumes. Victor as a child has visions of a grotesque angel of death or something, the stuff people go see Del Toro movies for since at least Pan's Labyrinth maybe even Cronos. There's some expectation then, for an interesting visual take on the monster, but the creature is visually boring.

I've seen multiple reviews comment on Del Toro's Frankenstein being boring, even to the point of people putting it on and falling asleep in the middle of it, and I'm inclined to agree. It's a conundrum, because Del Toro has made it to the standard of a proper period drama, he has faithfully adapted the text and yet it is less interesting to watch than Pride & Prejudice, Emma, Vanity Fair period dramas that involve no explosions, no monsters, no reanimated corpses, no rotating barrel blunderbusses nor arctic expeditions. 

The cast too is talented, with the possible exception of Jacob Elordi. I think that's the central problem, the monster isn't interesting, unlike the shark in Jaws, once revealed, I wanted to see less of him.

And yet, the curious thing being that Bale's monster benefits immensely from Elordi's performance. Within Bale's introductory scenes we know his story, his motivations, his character. 

But Maggie has also gone intertextual, giving Bale heaps to work with. She's watched Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder's "Young Frankenstein" and has a scene where the bride questions whether it's "Frankensteen" or "Frankenstyne" in pronounciation, then it references maybe one of the earliest shit-losing comedy scenes in cinematic history, Young Frankenstein's 'Puttin' on the Ritz' from which I'm sure the plot mechanic of having Jake Gyllenhaal playing a Fred Astaire star that the monster literally projects his fantasies onto.

No aspect of hilarity is preserved from the original gag, but its just an example of the freedom Bale had to work with to create a coherent character that also has a century of existence to use to give us insight into the predicament of this experimental byproduct.

Again, I hesitate to give Maggie too much credit, beyond her ambition. What she has is a mess, and I cannot understate how annoying the Mary Shelley personality is and how unwelcome it is whenever it shows up.

In the above linked reviews, there's two different comparisons made - there's an unfavorable one to Poor Things, that I thought of too. That's the movie at its most hackey, and I thought it during the dance scene to putting on the ritz. Especially if you are unfamiliar with Young Frankenstein, you will likely be turned off by that scene, as a try hard attempt to be quirky by out of touch nepo-babies.

With Young Frankenstein it is coherent though, because I guess the joke is, that dignified idiot, Gene Wilder as Dr Frankenstein, feels the best demonstration of his god-like power to create life, is a song and dance number that stars himself. I'm laughing comprehending it, and don't get me wrong, that gag is a greater achievement than "The Bride!" and it's complex, worth getting obsessed over. But Maggie takes that sentiment, and this is the monster's fantasy, to be a tap-dancing hollywood star. 

Things like when Bale's monster reveals he gets his money by fishing it out of public fountains, wishing wells. the film has the scope, and the talent in Bale (who read Maggie's script and took Maggie's direction) to outshine what Elordi did in a faithful adaptation of the enduring source material.

Bale also eclipses, it goes without saying, Robert De Niro as the monster. I remember learning that De Niro was the monster after seeing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and being like 'that was De Niro?'

But then to flip it around, Jessie Buckley is a great actress, and in most of her personalities, she shines. Just not Mary Shelley, the worst and most prominent. I also think, that while she seemingly has a lot to work with, like being part Bonny, maybe part Zelda Fitzgerald, part Mae West. What I would guess happened was to Yin the monster's Yang, where the monster is a composite of body parts with a single original mind, the bride is a single body and somehow all women, so the intertextuality may include Frank Herbert's Dune sequels. 

Jessie Buckley is fundamentally charismatic, but I think its that case of if you are every woman you wind up being no woman. However, I think this comes from there just being nothing to work with, with "The Bride of Frankenstein." beyond the very, very interesting disconnect.

Consider, that in "The Bride of Frankenstein" the primary antagonist, once the Bride is declared alive announces "Behold the bride of Frankenstein!" in a movie where Henry Frankenstein is already married to Elizabeth, who is already pregnant, and they live happily ever after, so she isn't his bride. Is the character making the same mistake as everyone has since forever, in referring to the monster as Frankenstein? Probably. The movie poster plays this trope.

Maggie was fucked like Charlie Kauffman's attempt to adapt 'The Orchid Thief' in Adaptations, where his own hubris from writing 'Being John Malkovich' leads him to want to write a story where nobody grows and nobody learns anything. 

The Bride only exists because the monster does, he is literally her reason for being. 'The Bride' is also Uma Thurman's cognomen in Kill Bill until she is revealed to be called Beatrice, and that was one text this movie missed despite it being right there. 

When you subtract the 'of Frankenstein' to make the bride somehow her own woman, what you are left with is nonsense, like Season 5 of Stranger Things nonsense, and this movie even has an unproposal scene.

Collage

I'm tired, so I think we can say, that there is a lot, probably too much going on in this film. I suspect you cannot work on a Frankenstein screenplay, with so little to work with to begin with, without consciously or unconsciously Frankensteining a bunch of stuff together. This movie has a collage feel.

What it reminds me of, is David W. Mack's collage based art-style, and in that sense the movie has a very 90s feel.

The production design, hair and makeup, costumes, what is the french - mis en scene, shot composition, cinematography is all of artistic merit. 

It's worth seeing as a spectacle, and it's really really busy, like a teenage girl of the mid-90s vision board.

You Could Not Come To My House

This post is not about how my house is too good for you. It is about navigating the space between manners and flattery.

It is about how the home I grew up with could not be visited by guests, which admittedly is exaggerated, you could visit it by 'popping in' unannounced, or I may have been able to smuggle you in if you could pass as a child my own age.

Furthermore, psychologically protective instincts evolved over hundreds of millenia may already be kicking in that I might reveal some dark "people under the stairs" shit involving gimp suits, buckets of fish heads, bars on windows. No I'm talking about clutter.

Because, I feel justified in generalizing, we live in a world where it is no secret what constitutes criminal behaviour, and any person enrolled in a school or subjected to a workplace health and safety training video in an induction program is almost certainly going to connect the dots that if it's not okay to harass a co-worker in the photocopy room, it wasn't okay for your Uncle harass you in your tree house.

No, this post is about some Seinfeld/Curb level shit. When I was 17 I went on a summer exchange to Japan, a culture known for it's neatness and manners. My fellow travellers and I were billeted out to host families to stay with over our 3 months. I clicked with my first host family, a couple of teachers that lived in a house with their two sons.

I have kept in touch and been back to Japan maybe half a dozen times. Always staying, likely overstaying, with my first host family. I remember fondly, but with some melancholy when my Japanese mother introduced me to another way of being, when she invited me to come look at her eldest son's bedroom, a spectacular mess, impressively so and he was by no means a Hikikimori. He was in fact much like me, a teenage boy. Now Japan is an oppressive patriarchal society, so I am not asserting any black-and-white here, simply that I benefited greatly from feeling my Japanese mother's affection for her messy son radiating off of her in a profound way. To me, this was another way of being I was not aware existed, a form of radical acceptance that I was not a recipient of.

Manners it is my impression, are poorly understood. Their crucial function in society regard how we treat strangers, because of stranger danger. I saw somewhere that in Germany good manners involve having your hands on, not below, a table, a tradition that allegedly goes back to people using the cover of a table to pull out a dagger and kill someone to get out of a long, boring meeting. Road rules can also be considered a form of manners that has in many cases been codified in law - like 'right of way' but there's law, and then there's law enforcement. Furthermore, not being a traffic law expert, I can't recall anything in my licensing exam that addressed who had the rights to a car park space - the car reversing in or the car going in frontways. Generally though, I'm going to assert that manners say poaching a parking space by going in forwards on the pretext that the reverser is 'taking too long' is wrong. 

It's wrong because it's a dick move. Dick moves are bad because they can escalate into violence. Someone bad mannered in respect to road manners can cause a fatal incident. We don't realise that in a society where citizens of the wealthy nations can go pretty much anywhere and be greeted by a "Good morning, how can I help you?" that we came from societies where a stranger was routinely greeted with "Who are you? I don't fucking know you. What are you doing in our village? Did you put the evil eye on Bessy and cause her womb to fall out? I'm going to fucking kill you!"

Flattery is also intuitively, but often intellectually not understood. Flattery is manipulation, Socrates debates whether what he calls "rhetoric" is an art or a 'knack' in the Gorgias dialogue and then gives us a pretty good description of what I feel the lay process of a flatterer these days: "guesses at what's pleasant with no consideration for what's best." and the post that follows is going to be difficult because of this guessing game. Specifically, there's a piece of my brain missing I am acutely going to struggle with that doesn't understand what and who is being flattered when a distant cousin comes to visit a house and a child is commanded to clean up their room to look like an Ikea display suite in case a guest gets lost looking for a bathroom and stumbles into it.

'Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies. Even on the highest throne in the world, we are seated still upon our arses.' ~ Michel de Montaigne 

When I visit friends of my own age in the places they live, and friends I have made myself as an adult in the places they live, the experience can be like visiting a foreign country for me. Not universally but frequent enough to be normal; I encounter clutter, mess, dishes piled in a sink, I'll be given house tours past unmade beds, and permitted in bathrooms with cluttered countertops, mirrors spattered in toothpaste, hair clogged drains and verdant toilets.

Now I may be an oddball, but generally I approve of this social norm. I must admit, I am not behind the environmental consideration of "if it's yellow let it mellow" and as a bad guest, I will flush both before and after I use such toilets, even if I am just doing no.1 from a standing position. There is no myth-busters episode where Adam eats nothing but a whole can of beets a day for a week before pissing into a toilet that Jamie has pissed into in white overalls so they can see weather the splashback is rebounding Adam piss or displaced Jamie piss, but if it is wrong for another person to piss on me, and wrong for a person to leave a bucket of piss propped above an ajar doorway so when I go through it I get their piss on me then it is wrong to leave diluted piss in a toilet so it can splash up and/or out and get on me. So I plead ignorance, and flush that stagnant piss away.

Furthermore, there is an element of informed solidarity I feel with the greater socio-economic context. The post-war period of actual social mobility is well and truly over. The numbers all say social mobility goes downward now, as a natural consequence of growing inequality. When I grew up, most adults I knew lived in a more comfortable, more spacious and more beautiful property than their parents (i.e. grandparents) I hardly know anyone of my generation in that situation, admittedly though, I am a deadbeat artist. 

When I am permitted to move through my friends spaces, the message I am receiving is not "I don't respect you" but is in fact "yeah, so this is how we live in our home and I respect you enough to be honest about it."

And it isn't just the houses, as scarcity usually intensifies value, it is the time-poverty, the cost of living, the remoteness from grandparents who for previous generations provided less financial support and more services like babysitting. Grandparents were also generally younger, as were parents. Furthermore a significant number of school leavers were leaving education around 16 and more curricula were dedicated to vocational skills that can be used to maintain a property, and spendthrifts used to repair their own whitegoods rather than take them to the viable businesses that used to repair whitegoods, whereas now cheapskates simply don't leave their refrigerators out for hard rubbish when interior design influencers declare "matte gunmetal finish fridges so 2000s." 

So yeah, whether conscious or unconscious, the ability to tidy a home and scrub the toilet before (or during) a visit by a guest is a necessary sacrifice of expectations for our modern times. We have a loneliness epidemic which isn't helped if people feel obliged to handmake a gluten-free vegan croquembouche with enough time left over to clean and renovate their kitchen before they will have me over to discuss how stupid everyone is.

But also, and crucially for me, I'm with Montaigne. Who are we kidding, people shit. People live. People have better things to do than constantly maintain the place where they live, (where they have agency, where they relax and self-medicate) up to open-house standards.

This is not to say I have no standards, but a line must be drawn, and that shall be the meat of this post. I have been to some friends places that crossed my disgust threshold. Where at times I felt like gagging and needed to tamp it down and gut it out, because when things get bad enough for me to be sensitive, I'm not going to say anything because I'm not qualified nor equipped to deal with mental health issues. 

Where they've handed me a cup to drink from and my impulse has been to refuse it, I don't, I just purse my lips real tight.

And I am one of the dirtiest hobos I know. 

What I am going to argue, is that there is a fuzzy edged goldilocks zone that constitutes good manners. The lower limit sits above safety including hygiene, and also matters of guest consent and agency. The upper limit sits beneath actively engaging in deception, fraud, grift.

And sorry, due to the misstep of letting me be in a highschool debate team, I have a lifelong habit of anticipating and heading off objections. I am very familiar with the "preference" defence, the "I like living in a home that looks like an Ikea Catalogue" people also prefer to fly business class, I dare say, more people have this preference than hold the financial means to realize this preference, and it is wrong for someone to demand someone else, like their partners or children make financial sacrifices to fulfil a preference. 

Two people with a shared mental health issue that anything that can't be photographed for a coffee table book is "messy" and "doesn't feel good" to live in, can partner up and mutually consent to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to avoid tackling their deeper anxieties until they have children. But maybe not, because this isn't one of those big klaxon sounding ways in which parents fuck up their children. It is a very ordinary way in which parents fuck up their children.

In what the US is known as "The South" child beauty pageants are "a thing" often defended as a practice as "a southern thang" a mere impeachable preference. The entirety of not just the US but the Anglosphere gets the heebie-jeebies over this preference, and confidently voices their opinion that it is "fucked up" as in "this is obviously going to fuck kids up" but in the same way, you might co-opt your kids into a cleaning spree on a Saturday morning that takes 6 hours when the Prime Minister has launched a social media ban by telling the kids to get outside and enjoy their summer, and your friend will flatter you by remarking on what a "beautiful house you have."

Child beauty pageants are condemned from the outside because there's an intuition that makeup and false eyelashes are not age-appropriate pursuits or diversions for a pre-pubescent human child. But what of the pursuit of home beautiful? Are throw pillows and polishing display-only trashcans and degreasing overhead fan filters the age appropriate pursuits of a child?

By fuzzy edges, take for example being naked. I feel there's a lot to be said for Scandinavian cultures where nudism is far more normal creates healthier attitudes to the human body, and not narrowing an association with nudity to sex. But I'm pretty sure in nudist scenes, you generally carry a towel to sit on, and people retire to a restroom to piss and shit, and while obviously you can have your cock out, you aren't supposed to get erect.

And in a share house situation, or even where there's a guest over. It's okay if you are having noisy sex, but generally so long as there is at least one wall between you and your guest, and also at some point it may become rude if you keep your guest up beyond a reasonable hour, at which point they may bash on the wall and yell "enough already" and that's not rude of the guest. But having sex in front of your guest is not cool, unless all parties have consented to it.

When it comes to how clean your house should be, I mean humans shit. We're also omnivores so our shit is not consistent. If you are expecting a guest, I feel its reasonable for a guest to expect you to have cleaned your toilet recently, but between that recent and the guests arrival, if people need to shit, I don't expect them to clean the toilet every time they shit. Specks of shit are fine, streaks of shit, or spray coverage like 30% need the toilet brush, because its implausible you didn't notice that so its a reasonable inference that you saw what you did and thought "that's fine" which it isn't and not particularly for a guest, but for anyone but you, it's not fine for the same reason it has never been a human custom to great others by bending open and gaping our arsehole with out fingers so others can inspect the inside of our rectum. 

Curiously this means that leaving a loaded toilet, does not incur as much judgement as a flushed toilet with big nasty streaks left behind, because I'm going to assume you got distracted by your phone and forgot to flush, possibly to wipe. I will likely flush, and not mention it to anyone. These lapses happen, plus we've all, but those with specific mental health issues, used a public toilet or needed to use a public toilet, we'll certainly be able to handle a private one. 

There is also the fuzziness of things everyone knows and everyone knows not to speak about - like every hand you have ever shaken has had a dick in it. The complicated aspects of manners where knowledge is shared under conditions of plausible deniability. But not mentioning the floater is not an argument for the non-existence of the upper fuzzy edge, where everyone knows that people don't live in an interior staged for a photo shoot, because staging your interiors for a photo shoot is an act of commission not omission. It's a lie, you are lying to people's fucking faces, and plausible deniability doubles the offense not diminishes it. This is the difference between "well maybe all she was offering was a coffee" and "maybe he thought I was offering him a coffee at 1am" and "maybe that is reflective of their home life" and "maybe they thought we can afford a maid."

"In fact, he no longer respects the other as a human person. From that moment on, to be precise, all conversation ceases; all dialogue and all communication come to an end. But what, then, is taking place? This very question is answered by Socrates with an old-fashioned term: flattery" ~ Josef Pieper

Pieper resonates with me because 'flattery' seems so trivial that it can fly under the radar. I am acutely aware of how banal it is, how mundane, how everyday it is for parents to ask children to perform for strange adults. How vulnerable I am right now to someone simply asking "what's wrong with making your bed?"

There's that, I don't know like US Naval College commencement speech where the guy who does have a proper title and an accomplished career said something like "if you wanna change the world, start by making your bed" and I think Jordan Peterson picked this up and ran with it somewhere in his 12 rules. But do you think any robust research has ever been done into whether it matters one fuck if beds are made? I ask this genuinely as someone who lived through the revolution in rolling vs stuffing sleeping bags into their case, and it turned out there was no fucking point to the tedium of rolling up a sleeping bag into a swiss roll, however, this may have been a result of the advent of synthetics and it used to matter when sleeping bags were stuffed with pigeon feathers and rat fur.

Anyway, parenting is controversial, I do not believe children are short adults and generally I think it is bad that so many children are growing up not with the historical standard experience of having unqualified parents (a quirk of our biology predating bureaucracy) but with unqualified parents who have no fucking handle on their own anxiety, and worse: dogs, our domesticated pack-animal best buddies being held hostage by people with no fucking handle on their anxiety. Yes, there are households out there where the dog is in charge and they can't operate the door handles.

I need to get this back to flattery, so here's the road I am taking - I think it is progress that parents now don't force their children to "Go give great aunt moustache a kiss. Go on. Go on! Kiss Aunt Moustache or I'll fucking beat you to death tonight! That's blood family is everything. Everything you hear me child! If we didn't have family, I would have to be accountable in some way for my cluster B personality disorders. There is no fucking escape, pucker up and kiss this distant stranger because she needs to feel looooooooooved, and if we don't uphold this convention maybe one day I will be accountable for my personality!" 

...and it may have taken lesbian feminist marxist scholars to finally say what we all feel - which is that when we were children we hated being forced to kiss some musty old hag who made us sad to see, hear, smell, touch and kiss. It is surprising that intellectual heavy lifting had to be done to reform the institution of extended family, by pointing out that it is a violation of human rights to force a child to 'love' someone without their consent.

For some people, even though I really got into that example, (I'm picturing Greeks and Italians), it may be hard to see what is wrong with the institutionalised lie of unconditional love for distant relations. (and even immediate relations) What is wrong is that it is a lie, what Pieper said, even worse, because nobody is respected as a human person in this scenario. The worse thing than lying to someone, is coercing someone to lie for you.

Still from stop motion Christmas feature "The Little Drummer Boy" where his refusal to smile is solved by painting one on.

One day my residential college's catering company invited some prospective clients to our dining hall to demonstrate what they were capable of. There was no briefing of the student residents that this was going on, we just came in one lunchtime and noticed that the food we were being served looked like actual food, with recognizable ingredients, like one might expect at a restaurant, with things like garnish.

My speculation, was that the catering company were pitching their services to clients represented by men in business suits sitting at a table. That it was likely a contract worth much more than the student residency contract. That they weren't invited to experience how they normally fed us, but how they potentially could feed them.

A friend of mine, an Arts-Science double major, speculated that the catering company were in fact trying to win a contract by overpromising, and felt himself to have an ethical obligation to approach the table of suits and say "just so you know, today's food is not representative of what we normally get." and he reported back to our table that a few of the suits had said smiling "oh is that so?"

Josef Pieper is a guy that wrote a little text you can find for free on the Internet Archive in pdf format called "Abuse of Language Abuse of Power" and I find it interesting that he touches upon flattery in particular. 

Though in my pull quote he references Socrates, from memory his argument against flattery is more grounded in the Kantian moral imperative to always treat people as an end not a means. Pieper argues, and I am inclined to agree, that flattery is by its very nature inescapably manipulative. We flatter because we want to use someone in some way.

Which brings me to the upper ceiling of the goldilocks zone of manners. There's a heuristic regarding manners, that goes "it is the duty of the host to make the guest feel at home, it is the duty of the guest to assure the host they are not." I really like this, because of its two way nature - the host extends hospitality and the guest declines to take advantage.

I grew up in a household where the rule was more like "it is the duty of the host to assure the guest we are not at home, it is the duty of the guest to assure the host they feel at home." Now the tricky thing is, most of this story is not my story, I can't tell it, I was just a witness dragged in a couple of times a year to a pantomime where our family presented to guests as though we were a hotel, not a home where a family lived.

Furthermore, my parents who held this view, and still do to a greater extent, I'm not confident were aware there was any other way to be and are not conscious of why when we had friends from out of town dropping in for some coffee and cake, it was necessary to mobilize the family to clean the house all Saturday.

My intuitions told me it was an undertaking worthy of ridicule, and on one distinct visit I joked before the guests arrival that I would take them on a tour and explain everything we had cleaned and tidied just for them, and then repeated this joke to the guests when I arrived. 

Decades later, comedian and eating disorder survivor Nikki Glasser appeared on Conan O'Brian's podcast and shared an anecdote of being complemented by a coworker's daughters for being so beautiful, and she preceded to "break down" the illusion of her beauty by going through everything from her fake eyelashes to her spray on tan and maybe washed ass, to impress upon these girls that it wasn't how she really looked, and her co-worker thanked her. 

The evidence that these standards remain ridiculous to me, takes the form of (for me) bizarre conversations with my parents where they have come to me seeking validation that they've done some good intervention by forcing their grandchildren to brush their hair.

As near as I can guess, my parents think that the modal member of society sees a kid with unkempt hair and thinks "that kid's parents must be crack addicts." that the children's grooming is a reflection on the parents. They simply haven't had time to catch up on the fact, that society no longer tends to view crack addicts with antipathy, but sees them as victims of complex bio-psycho-social factors. 

Now, I am not disputing the laws that require parents to take care of children's basic needs, like nourishment and hygiene. But brushed hair so the members of the parish don't start their tongues a wagging as to who is a good and proper Christian is not a child's basic need, and my parents and I are at a communication impasse.

It's an impasse where, like most impasses, I don't get what they don't get about the 21st century. I would guess that of all the things parents force their children to do, they are generally undertaken with a rationale of "they'll thank us for this one day" like getting vaccinated and educated, having limits imposed on their screen time. But then there's the all the things parents force their kids to do, that they re-evaluate as adults and don't thank their parents for, like elocution lessons, kissing decomposing relatives, concertina camp etc. and it scares me because I too will be displaced by time at some point, with kids telling me "tohm brah don't be such a woozle wozzle ya gravy nerfer, you sound a million years old when you worry about thermonuclear missile exchanges, nobody needs to live to reproductive age, get on the astral plane Xenial." or some shit. 

But my parents (and this is not a photograph of me) used to pay people money to give white boys like me this haircut:

This is a haircut you give a child, when you do not give a fuck what people think of your kid, when you want him to get the shit beat out of him and he only survives because so many parents also harbour resentments of their children that he disappears in a sea of mushroom cuts. The haircut you give your kid when you are oblivious to what people of culture and taste think of you, or your ability to parent. The haircut you give your kid, when you slept through the classes about Hitler's visions of a perfect Aryan race and what was bad about them. 

This haircut was incredibly in the literal sense of what 'incredibly' means, popular with parents of my parents generation. Like we'd been bad or something, or they hated us. That hair is clean, that hair is brushed and it looks terrible (sorry kid, but you know it's true, I can see that that smile is 'brave' and that you are in fact, about to cry and I still can't tamp down my bullying instincts to put my fist through your face because by rendering you unrecognisable it would improve your quality of life under that fringe) fucking cave children roll off elk hides with natty, parasite infested hair and look better than 80s white children with their low infant-mortality and long life-expectancy rates. Except as it transpires, that when the leading cause of death in males under 50 is no longer parasites, diarrhea, syphilis, rabies, appendicitis et al. men choose to kill themselves as their leading cause of premature death. Coincidence? It's Movember that fights for mens' mental health, not Bowlvember.

My parents in turn would have been of the Levi-501 generation, having had their own battles with their horn-rimmed spectacle parents to "chill out" about the fact that kids these days don't wear trousers, don't go to Church, drive without a hat on, don't wear gloves, and don't know who "that bitch on all the money" is. 

On one of my first dates with Claire, she pointed out how it was our grandparent's generation that lived through the depression, but an abhorrence of food waste had been transmitted through three generations, from their children to their children's children ie. us. I can only imagine that there is a similar sensibility regarding children's hair that goes back to the bubonic plague. But Milhouse was the voice of our generation when he declared "it's not cooties it's lice and my mom says it's nothing to be ashamed of."

But what about having to get a special duster on a pole to remove cobwebs in a high-ceilinged house on a Saturday, because the nobodies from nowhere were dropping in? 

I know to this day, I am sensitive to what I experience as the erasure of my being. Often the hardest part of a break up for me is the effect my former partner has in packing away anything and everything that reminds them of me, even though I understand this often indicates how much, rather than how little they care about me. 

There is just some deep intuition in me, that saw it as reasonable in a home to see invisible lines where it's like "here is tohmicito's room, he is a child and he manages this space like a child" or a few years later "this is the door to tohm's room, he is an adolescent, he shuts himself in his room and listens to angry music because he is going through a prolonged period of disillusionment and is seeking out voices that do not lie to him, if I stop talking you will hear the muffled bass lines of Mike Bordin or Justin Chancellor bass players of Faith No More and Tool respectively which are on high rotation. We don't know if he is masturbating in there and it would be wrong for us to investigate" whereas kitchens, communal living areas, bathrooms are spaces adults are responsible for. 

The alternative message which makes no sense when you say the quiet part out loud, is "these are our children they have no agency and are mistaken about who and what they are."

I am sure there is something about this performative cleaning that functions as flattery. There is plainly a deception, because of how uncooth my joke-cum-threat to point out to our guests that a coffee table was normally cluttered with books and VHS cases and CDs that we read, watched and listened to rather than dust, and so normally there was also a patina of dust on that coffee table too, but they were all stashed away to pay you the respect that we in fact sit in a sterile environment staring at the wall, or worse, watched Channel 9 on free to air TV.

I don't know, I don't understand it, I don't know what it was all in the service of, but it was fundamentally performative, deceptive. The best and most benign I can guess, is that it was a form of costly signalling, that lets the guests know we expended all this effort to erect a facade that nobody could possibly believe was reflective of our day to day reality. 

But I'm sad that you could not come to my house. See how messy my room actually was, the cds all over the floor, those CDs were important to me. The millimeters thick layer of dust on my desk I pretty much never used, that desk was unimportant to me, hence neglected, even reviled. How I piled my casual clothes in a heap and dressed mostly from the floor. And the doghair, on my clothes, on the rug, and the cardboard boxes our dogs had to sit and sleep in because their was a Quixotic quest being undertaken to keep the house tidy.

I'm sure there is a lot going on, and opinions will differ. I suspect a Robert Sapolsky style analysis would fully explain performative house cleaning as needing to understand 5 minutes ago, 5 days ago, 30 years ago...150,000 years ago as to whether your ancestors lived in a fishing archipelago or whether they were nomadic pastoralists on the steppe.

I would drive at this fundamental thing which is painting a smile on your face and come back to that quote from Pieper that "[they] no longer respects the other as a human person" as a fundamental truth. 

I will freely acknowledge, that there is much wrong with me, as a person. Even as a child, for which I likely was not equipped to take responsibility for, but this was not handled by painting a smile on my face, nor on our house.

And then there is the degree to which things were fine, but presented as perfect. Like cobwebs are fine. Dust on bookshelves are fine. Dog's being inside is fine. Lawns not being edged is fine. 

It was getting into these diminishing returns that I would guess the old culprit shame needs to be suspected, and I hope I do not take too much license from Pieper, to say it is an abuse, a lack of respect for our fellow human beings, to hide our shame.

"Who needs the approval of one family member when you can have it from millions of acquaintances?" ~ Mayor Shelbourne, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 

The reason you could not come to my house is that you weren't allowed to. I would eventually learn, that this was not a universal practice. As a kid and teenager, even as an adult, I have tended toward having a best friend whose house I spent a lot of time at, where I was made to feel at home, and aside from a willingness to help out with chores I probably failed to "assure the host I was not" at home. What I didn't do was go to a bunch of friend*s* houses, and likely for bio-psycho-social reasons, I didn't tend to befriend kids who lived in houses that felt like hotels rather than homes with shit lying around and mess and clutter and all the tangible evidence that people live in a home.

But because flattery is a deception, all I can testify to, as an insider, is that the house you visited was not the home I lived in. Either we were lying to you, or we needed you to lie to us. Or possibly both, like when Dave Chappell did that bit on fake people who make you fake, I believe anthropologists call them Californians.

Maybe though, other people live in neat and tidy homes. I mean absolutely some people do. Let me hit up pinterest real quick.

Neat with a dog.

Messy w/o a dog

An influencer's bread and butter is literally the pursuit of the adoration of millions of strangers. But in the first image, because of those very pressures, I just can't have confidence I know what I am seeing. It seems likely though that the image is heavily curated. Not just the fit, but perhaps the placement of the dog. My attempts to read the mind of the dog and compare it to my experience suggest that the dog was recently told to "up, up" on that cushion and "stay" or "sit" or possibly "down" which the dog will understand as "lay down" not "get down" and it appears to be interested in when master is going to okay it to come and loiter around her and be like "what are we doing where are we going?" 

It is plausible though, that this influencer is rich, they have a cleaning service, possibly an interior designer, they may also, as seems very likely, have been born rich. Rare is the Lillie Allen who while  having a famous parent, pulls themselves up by their bootstraps. I'm sure influencers have a huge advantage if they have the starting capital of a dentist's offspring, vs a teenager that caught a bus up to Oaxaca from Chiapas and works a 10 hour day to earn $4USD to save up for her first smartphone.

The second image though, contains text that suggests a different kind of curation. The thing is, I believe this photo, I feel confident in what I'm looking at, though it may be to some extent performative, this is much closer I feel, to the median experience of an adolescent to undergrad woman. She owns a bunch of shit and storage solutions don't work. She doesn't have to essentially complete an obstacle course to get into her bed each night, but I believe she has a wardrobe that has overflowed onto a cheap roller rack, and flat surfaces are immediately co-opted to house her abundance of shoes and cases for jewellery and makeup and electronics and she is time poor, cash poor and space poor.

The same confidence-disparities apply when it comes to visiting people's houses. Alas, just as I don't understand the full story of my own experience, like I've been in some spick-and-span houses in my life, but I have no fucking idea how curated my impression was. I simply lack the experience of someone going all out when I visited to make their place feel like a hotel suite, and then watched them break after three days and confess that "I can't keep this up. I need to use the stove top and fats gonna fly. I can't keep running down the street to the public park toilet block to shit. I live in this house, and my existence leaves a trace."

Perniciously leaving me with a lack of understanding if I have been in households that were what my household occasionally pretended to be, or whether I have been in households that were also pretending to be what we pretended to be.

I feel it is more likely to be the latter, under Occam's razor rules. The best evidence I have is that common experience people in Australia who live in apartments with balconies have, where they are technically not allowed to put a clothes horse on their balcony because in a paradox of modernity - apartments are less valuable to potential investors if they give the impression that they are used as housing by tenants.

And just as apartment dwellers struggle to air their clothes in deference to hypothetical buyers passing by, enter the Schrodinger person whom may or may not exist that was alleged by my school administrators to call up the school to report uniform policy violations they had seen by students off campus, down the street. I have friends that say "of course these people really exist" I'm more inclined to think these were just "good guesses" by administrators playing the odds that almost certainly, students left campus and untucked their shirts, rolled up their sleeves, took their blazers off, and defecated in gutters because school uniforms are anachronisms from another fucking country.

The kind of person, I assert, that has the motivation, should they exist, to call up a school and say "I saw three ungentlemanly students of your supposed house of learning entering a KFC at 2pm with their blazers tucked under their arms!" is by definition someone whose esteem is worth fucking nothing. As Bart said to Mr. Stanky "let's just say I'm a concerned prude with a lot of time on his hands."

I'm not saying I've never been to Epstein Island, I'm not saying I'm not in the Epstein files, redacted or unredacted. But the curation of private school students, really the upper class, the attempts to mould young boys and girls into the kind of person who wouldn't be seen dead in a KFC without a formal jacket, is likely foundational to the kinds of abuses perpetrated by and for the Epstein class.

What matters is not the etiquette, but the manners. Objectively the kid whose school does not require him to wear a necktie that holds the KFC door open for a tradie coming in to grab lunch and use the bathroom is a better person than the private school boy in blazer and tie that leaves their trays on the table for staff to clean up and date rapes your daughter.

Now, I'm not stereotyping all private school boys as monsters and all public school boys as angels. I am a private school boy. I am saying "manners maketh the man" and the point of blazers with embroided crests, leather hard soled shoes, neckties, boater hats is and always has been pageantry to confuse exclusionary etiquette with inclusive manners.

You don't hold a door open for another person so they can esteem you, you do it because you esteem them.

It was my second year in a residential college that was likely my first real experience of dysmorphia. At my college, back then, people applied on printed applications, you attached a passportish size photo of yourself, an image that would be reproduced in the student extension directory in black and white photocopy and the tradition was that the photos from the application would be stuck to these big boards for all the "freshers" and displayed on the junior common room window with names to help facilitate orientation week, where the intake students got to know each other.

I was an "o-weeker" a returning resident that would facilitate o-week, an elected official so I was present that year when two young women cut their photos out of the display board. In contrast to making kids kiss distant decomposing relatives without their consent, yes there are in hindsight likely a bunch of consent issues to be explored with this tradition and the use of residents application photos.

At the time though, I found it odd behaviour. Irrational. I expect it to be a basic incompetence in perceiving how we look. A lot of people think ascertaining how we look is a matter of perceiving oneself in the mirror, and may be thrown when seeing in a photo of themselves, that their hair is parted the other way, that other people don't see their reflection, they see them. But actually, how we look is best ascertained by how other people treat us. This is the reconciliation we need to do with a photo we find unflattering, and there is that flattery again.

When I see a photo of myself looking particularly weary, haggard or burnt out, when strong downlighting turns my hair translucent and reveals my scalp or experience dysphoria in myself usually because I'm doughier than my self conception of who people are interacting with, I feel something, maybe bad, but take a conscious moment to think "well that's how I looked and people treated me fine." 

Now I don't disagree if you are already thinking "that's because you're a man, that's because you are white" certainly it is easier for me, but the tricky thing for me regards flattery. People tend to treat me as though I am intelligent and authoritative and worthy of respect no matter how I appear outwardly, I can count on one hand the number of times I have been disrespected to any extent that obstructed me from getting what I want. You in an Armani woollen suit and glasses by Oliver's peoples and Gucci loafers is not your ticket to being treated like I have been treated almost my entire life.

Maybe I'm being flattered. Almost certainly I have been a victim of flattery, having interactions where people assure me I'm fine through word or deed and then never hear from them again because they were lying to me. The contents of other people's minds and hearts is also not entirely a mystery to me, though mind-reading is, I acknowledge, a cognitive distortion. 

But there's also times when I'm overconfident, I'm being mean, I can tell people don't like it but won't do anything and I avoid my shame by feeling contempt for them, and their inability to stand up for themselves and this is like when I say to someone "nice hair" and they are like "ha ha." When I write out the social exchange it sounds more sinister than it is.

And by that I mean:

From "The Far Side" by Gary Larson.

I'm sure it doesn't help that I make fun of your hair, but this is because I am a lay pleb. and not a dentist merely touching your gums gently with a probe and using your sensitivity to diagnose a larger problem in your emotional health.

One of the things certainly wrong with me, is that I don't esteem most people enough to esteem me in return. I've told the story a number of times from my early flirtatious exchanges with Yoli, and it resonated with one friend enough that they've shared it back with me as an example of me-ness. I walked into the break room one time and she was there so it was just the two of us. We made small talk, and she asked me what I'd been up to and it happened to be after the weekend I ran a marathon which I mentioned and she said "what? I don't believe you." and I replied "I don't need you to believe me."

I possess in other words the obverse attitude to "photos or it didn't happen" which isn't in an internet context, insensible as a policy. (There's a lot of people claiming drinking milk from a cow's anus cured their cancer and such.) Crucially, the marathon isn't something I have run in the past to seek esteem from my peers. It is for me, an autotelic exercise that I generally employ to get away from people and feel emotions like isolation and despair. And Yoli is someone I liked and wanted to like me.

Based on my observations, other people seem to really care about the impressions they make on people they in turn, don't particularly care about.

Back when commercials weren't 100% gambling and scams, Harpic ran a campaign with the slogan "What does your loo say about you?" for which, I cannot find the ad that ran on Australian televisual milk crates, but I found a British one that is no doubt, the original:

I wish I could find the ad campaign I remember, because for my cultural context the casting sensitivities were perfect. The host was clearly a perfectly nice woman just trying her best, the kind Mitchell and Webb portrayed in the "women sort yourselves out" sketch, and the guest was some horrible snob, a real Karen, someone with both resting bitch-face and animated bitch-face, the kind of woman the Australian patriarchy can't successfully keep out of offices where they can make an impression on foreign visitors so they can't appreciate how chill we can be at our best.

My RMIT Marketing lecturer Con Stavros, now a faculty dean, made no bones to my class that he found such campaigns unethical, not specifically this one, but any that operated by trying to sell you some personal deficit in order to sell you a product to bring you back up to the blissful ignorance you experienced before they told you.

This is particularly different from say, making someone aware they have cilantro stuck in their teeth, causing them momentary embarassment before they remedy the situation with a fingernail, and know going forward everything is going to be alright.

I can't read British archetypes, in the Australian ad though, you need to be able to parse that the problem isn't that your toilet doesn't have the right plastic attachment that releases chemical streaks with every flush, gets covered in shit itself, colours the water some colour that people associate with strong chemical agents, think of a port-a-potty and also infer that your shit must be especially potent because most toilets don't have visible urinal cakes in them, except for the grossest toilets used by the grossest people; but the problem is that you have a snob in your house, and the ad actually tries to sell you an anti-solution to the problem - a product that will encourage a snob to stay in your house.

I have said before, and I'll say again, I know there is something wrong with me. I too heavily discount millions of acquaintances. There is something unhealthy in the romantacism of ATCQ's "Against the World" I am the grasshopper that needs that speech about "if the ants rise up" from Pixar's A Bug's Life although granted the grasshoppers lose despite the speech and in my case there is no "us" of grasshoppers, and grasshoppers have a more successful historical record of killing hundreds of thousands of humans that underestimate them than possibly any other animal on earth except the mosquito. But I digress.

I'm going to "yes, and" my own defects as a human being. Psychologist Esther Perell, it's been years but I listened to the first maybe two seasons of her podcast where she shared de-identified recordings of couples therapy sessions. I recall one where a couple were struggling with impotency issues. The husband couldn't get it up, Esther dug into his background and inquired as to whether anyone had ever asked him "what would you like" on the hunch that he was from a cultural background where families valued 'face' or something.

I'm not some orientalist that delineates a hard and fast line between the Orient and the Occident and that they are necessarily opposite. In this case The Onion article "Teen Unaware He Locked in Heated Ongoing Competition With Parents' Friends' Son" is good investigative journalism into the human condition. 

White people also get overly concerned with face without Maoism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism or living through the Qin, Ming, Tang and Han dynasties, The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution.

People everywhere fall for comparison traps, let the imagined attitudes of millions of acquaintances get into their own heads, and wind up resentful of their own children, something they imagine would also be judged unfavourably by millions of acquaintances and so need to add to the list of things they need to "fake until they make"

There's a calibration issue, and like I probably am not calibrated into the Goldilocks zone, I wear clothes until they fall apart, this has been a life long habit, and the recent change I made to my lifestyle was to learn to sew so I can better repair my clothes and get even a few more weeks out of my rags. 

Alas, it's a calibration issue, not a "just don't do that" but you have to make careful adjustments to stay in the zone. 

The triggering incident for this post was being in my parents house and needing to throw something out. I walked up to the bin and had to ask "where is the bin?" in a world weary voice, for me the equivalent of "Dad have you stopped taking your meds?". The bin had been removed, hidden, in anticipation of a guest. Making me instantly recall the scene from Curb where Larry's cousin Andy and wife tell Larry off for using their kitchen trash can, and Andy's wife explains the purpose of the bin is that "it indicates that we know how to throw things out" to guests.

I am certain that this was based on actual events.

Fortunately, that was not the house I grew up in either, the house I grew up in had a bin. Our first dog Lil when she was dying but before we knew it, would knock the bin over to eat the contents because she couldn't swallow food because she had developed megaesophagus and so was starving constantly. Lil was a big and best part of the house I grew up. Sadly, you couldn't come.

A Naive Series 1.5: Moralism

 At the moment I am trying to avoid short form content, largely because Youtube is pushing it, and I associate it with TikTok and Twitter all bad things.

But I like Subway Takes, conceptually and in execution. And I saw the thumbnail of his take with Zohran Mamdani, and the subtitles said something like "...no matter what literature you've read, I'm not defunding the police."

The Problem of Evil

"The Problem of Evil" is an argument against the existence of the classical god, which generally has the property of being "all loving" or "benevolent."

The trouble with this argument, is that in an atheistic or agnostic worldview, evil isn't really an intelligible concept. Christopher Hitchens believed in evil and defined it as "the surplus value of totalitarianism" and you may or may not be impressed and/or satisfied by such a definition.

Look at this - classical god, properties, benevolent, atheistic, agnostic, intelligible, surplus, totalitarianism. None of these are intuitive concepts nor words the modal person uses in daily life.

We are kind of stuck with the name of this argument, but really it is "the problem of unnecessary suffering" it is pointing to the contrary evidence for a benevolent god in the form of a dear carcass found after a wild fire where a park ranger can determine that it suffered painful burns to a large percentage of its body before taking shelter where it proceeded to die over hours in agonizing pain.

And you go "where's the design of a benevolent god in this circumstance?" and the supernatural to be clear is outside the purview of science as a falsifiable claim, so most theists will respond "god works in mysterious ways" aka "don't ask me, ask our all-loving god."

Again, all of this is very complicated to a majority of people who feel no need to think so deeply about this. They can have an idol of the Virgin Mary on their dashboard and never see a deer in their whole lives.

But culturally, what is commonplace are concepts like "evil" and "sin" that are supernatural, so we don't actually generally know them to exist, but a lot of people act like they do.

Evil also crops up in the real unifying features of storytelling - or the monomyth, where "the heroes journey" is demonstrably not a monomyth.

To recap my understanding, almost all stories are about trouble of some kind, and typically there is something causing that trouble. Like an agent. So the three billy goats gruff face trouble in the form of food security, and that trouble is caused by the troll under the bridge.

Flood myths for example, inject into our understanding of reality, an angry god, they are not just an indifferent weather event. The Mexica told stories (and believed) that the moon was the decapitated head of a woman who attacked their culture hero. Trouble and agency.

We naively believe, that things don't just happen. Evil, is a property of our stories, and when we start to think about Disney animated fairytales, it becomes much easier to define "evil" because we have these very unrealistic malevolent actors who want to make bad decisions. Wicked stepmothers who want to take over the kingdom in order to induce drought and mass starvation.

In reality, our bad actors are often people who want to win political office in order to enrich themselves and so do so on the backs of migrants. But these people are more incompetent than evil, as their regimes often derail when the economy collapses because they didn't understand the net benefits of migration and the complexity of a modern economy. The Trusses and Trumps and Mileis.

Then we get the force in reality that is "trying" to destroy the world and everything else - entropy. But those who understand it at all, understand it as very much a thing like gravity, that has no desires or motivations or interests. The universe expanded, cooled gave rise to life, but will keep expanding until it falls apart. 

The naive default is to set up a moral code simply by sorting "things" into "good" and "bad" buckets. Hence "evil" makes an intuitive sense in a way that entropy doesn't. 

Racism is bad vs Why Racism is bad

To demonstrate this naive morality, most people that I know learned that racism was bad in school. The cliche "I'm not a racist but..." suggests that the speaker understands that racism is bad but also that they have no understanding of why racism is bad.

The reason racism is bad, is because we treat individuals as members of a homogenous group. Something obvious in a thing like racial profiling. this reason is upstream of common effects of racism like when a group in power deprives a marginalised group of opportunity based on notions of race, that we can also cite as reasons racism is bad.

This is also why racism pairs so naturally with facism, which is, even among scholars, hard to define but has a common thruline of asserting that a nation state exists within the blood of its people. 

But you'll notice that the argument I've provided for why racism is bad, remains valid for describing why fascism is bad - Just as it is bad to have a young black man who is the best candidate for a scholarship or job denied by a stereotype applied to them based on a Rudyard Kipling poem or some shit, it is bad to put forward as a candidate a white man based on ten minute youtube clip where Jordan Peterson rambles about Judeo-Christian values.

Though "race" has no meaning when it comes to genes, it has traditionally been based on phenotypes (appearances) and accompanying psuedosciences like phrenology and what not.

This meant, and this is my speculation, that for much of the 20th century, the practical difference between knowing racism is bad, and knowing why racism is bad had little consequence. Probably right up to the instigating incident of the War on Terror.

There was a hint in the name, that we were faced with a far more conceptual war, yet many reduced it to an analogy for "racism is bad" the received wisdom of a late 20th century education that had almost entirely abandoned the effort of asking students why racism is bad as they taught us the horror of the holocaust and the plight of Vietnamese refugees resettling in Australia, and the shame of establishing a Commonwealth nation in the absence of a treaty with the human occupants of the land.

It is hard to describe, but the resultant phenomena I walk amongst too this day, is a population of people who understand that racism is bad, and do not understand racism. I am not referring to the well known "I'm not a racist but..." trope, but a population of people who say myriad variations of "Islam is basically Christianity" the errancy of which literally would take too long to write out a single example.

Because I don't want to single out Islam from the incurious secular mind. The point is, it is possible to be bigoted not on the basis of phenotype (appearances) but ideas, giving us phenomena like "call out culture" and "cancel culture."

It gave us extremely weird moments of the last decade, that in the parlance of right-wing commentators scared of reds under the bed, they call "woke" but specifically and technically I would just describe as the "illiberal left" that began to label MLK Jr. as a white supremacist, and free-speech as a racist dog whistle. 

And if you didn't come across someone between 2015-2024 that didn't say something overtly and obliviously racist with all sincerity like "we need to stop hiring white men to management" then you're either a) 15 years old in 2026 or b) were that racist person.

But I explained such encounters to myself with the simplest reconciliation - people only understand that racism is bad, they do not understand why racism is bad.

Eating Red Berries

Naive moralism I'm asserting is just that our default approach to life is to do as our parents instruct. And I mean, while I use the evolutionary story of waiting to see our parents eat the red berries before we eat the red berries, I bet monkeys have been observed to eat all kinds of lethal shit out of natural curiosity.

Conversely, I bet that there's a number of kids that have had the shit beaten out of them hypocritically for imitating their parents - like smoking mum's cigarettes or beating off to dad's lingerie brochure he keeps hidden in his sock drawer.

However the determination, it is not so much a system as a database of accumulated knowledge of "good" and "bad" and all that matters is that it works.

Alas, we have institutions that have enabled greater forms of civilization that are not naive and not intuitive. Like the judiciary branch of government that functions as an institution to make us more civilized. 

The world in which we live, where if you a woman were to divorce me a man and take up with a friend of mine as an intimate partner, and I were to kill that friend for "stealing my woman" we come from a naive past where you the woman would have raped me the man because you are my property and I had benevolantly settled the matter by killing another man and reclaiming you as my property, and you just had the hard work ahead of you of repenting before god to save your soul.

Now we live in a civilized time where a slow, deliberate and cerebral process has determined that actually no. Women aren't the property of men, that irreconcilable differences is a legitimate basis for seperation and divorce and that I have no right to take the life of another person to appease my own unstable emotions.

I feel modern phenomena like "revenge porn" bolster my case that the moralism I describe is naive and that the justice insofar as our civilization achieves is an educated position that requires constant transmission. 

Just on the front of men and boys not possessing woman and girls, some will be educated into this position by stories their parents read them, others by completion of primary school, more by completion of secondary school (with the learning experience of the onset of puberty and the awakening of sexuality) but beyond these formative years, there will still be men who require a psychologist to explain to them in their 30s and 40s that they do not own their (former) partner, and some will require the intervention of a court to essentially mandate they undertake some form of remedial education.

And the rubble that will need to be cleared in all cases, will be a naive intuition as to their own victimhood of a wrong doing. They may, as Jonah Hill famously did, appropriate psychology speak to brandish their own jealousies as "boundaries" they maintain.

Divine Command Theory

Something that should be better known is Socrates dialogue "Euthyphro" but with a name like that, we are basically fucked. In it Socrates asks Euthyphro, presumably able to pronounce his name, but maybe Socrates just called everybody "Gus" (he seemed the type):

 "Is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

Socrates to modern Christian nationalists was an abhorrent pagan, but monotheism makes this dilemma even more delicious.

Say Jesus descends from the heavens tomorrow, robes flapping in the breeze, a crown of light resting on his brow and a sword suspended in mid air from his tongue, and he holds up his stigmatized hands and declares "Yo, the legal age of consent is 12 or first menses for women, whichever comes first. Statutory rape is bullshit, a woman's honour can be repaired through marriage to her rapist."

Here is the dilemma (if you are Christian, or otherwise recognise Jesus as some kind of authority) is something good just because god commands it so? 

Because of particular interest in this philosophical dilemma, is the way most with an emotional stake in the character of god might choose to weasel out of it - "god would never say that" - because this assertion demands an argument so as not to be dismissed.

At this point, I'm regretting my example, because in all likelihood for all but recent Catholics (and I don't actually know if the Pope has ruled on age of consent etc.) it's likely that a lucid exegesis of scripture would lean towards "this is precisely the kind of thing the Christ of scripture would say" hence why this was practiced in Christendom up until shockingly recently.

But if he said "kill all puppies and kittens" you really have to argue why, your god would never say such a thing. This dilemma destroys the basis of what some apologists call "divine command theory" that is used to pooh-pooh secular morality as baseless. They are arguing that morality comes from burning bush voices distributing tablets to bearded men on mountaintops. Literally what the scene from the Simpsons where Homer the thief greets Simon the adulterer with "my wife sends her regards" before Moses hands down the new morality.

The beauty of Socrates youth corrupting dilemma is that if god would never command us to kill all puppies and kittens, then god is deferring not just to his own reasons, but reasons he is constrained, there is a greater principle than god says so. 

In "Le Petit Prince" the titular character on his journey to earth, comes across a planet inhabited by a king who commands the stars to twinkle. (Questions of atmosphere are not addressed) The Little Prince asks how he can know that the king doesn't just order the stars to do what they were doing anyway, for which the king has no good answer.

Just so, if god(s) can change what is good and bad, then what is good and bad is arbitrary. If he can't then we are a long way towards what atheists routinely do in excising the divine command as unnecessary and just using reason.

Lifelong Scandelization

The bigots often make the mistake of fixating on religious fundamentalists, and we should be sympathetic to this bigotry, because we as a society are pretty pour at acknowledging that we don't really believe in freedom of religion.

We have a tacit understanding that the world we live in largely works, because while people like religiosity in theory their own religiosity usually survives on a kind of wilful ignorance of the contents of their religion. 

Christianity being the one I am most familiar with, this means I come across really wishy-washy ways in which the contents of scripture are dismissed, like for example, a lay insistence that the only real commandment of Jesus that supercedes the heavily livestock obsessed commandments of Moses is to "love thy neighbour" and this basically means the same as "buy the world a coke."

I'm a fan of Jonathan Rauch who can speak soberly about the reality that most US Christians are "secular Christians" a rough analogue to secular Jews. 

But in this post, I am asserting something far more universal - that almost everyone defaults to a naive moralism, they accept uncritically notions of good and bad as presented to them. 

Yet even half an average human lifespan is plenty of time to observe social mores shifting, and witness the friction caused by naive moralism. For example, two generations removed from me I heard the opinion that gay marriage would destroy society. One generation removed from me, I saw someone struggle with two dads spending the afternoon at a park with young kids, with no visible "mother" present, and I am of a generation that assumes either the two dads are a couple, or a couple of divorcees with their kids.

The remedy to such scandalization however, is brightly an achievable one - argument. The prejudices of other generations and our own can be relieved through argument. The trouble we face is the regression we have experienced in our abilities to even furnish arguments. Indeed, we have members of younger generations currently alive that find arguments, and being expected to furnish an argument, itself scandalous.