full of friction
A couple of weeks ago I went to see Sinners, which I liked and thought was a good movie despite the great amount of gore that left me queasy for at least a few hours after I stepped out of the theater. My partner had seen it a few weeks before me, so we’d already talked about the effect of Michael B. Jordan appearing twice in the film, playing both of the protagonist twins, the titular sinners. He thought there wasn’t enough work done to differentiate Smoke and Stack from each other, particularly aesthetically/physically, so that in effect the two characters were more like one and a half, or a character somehow appearing twice. I went into the movie with that conversation in my head, expecting to have a similar critique or impression, but was instead left with something else: a profound sense of lack.
**
I’ve been thinking a lot about city life, maybe because I’ve been reading Richard Sennett, maybe because I’m moving apartments. In The Uses of Disorder, Sennett argues that the overly ordered nature of life in wealthy suburban areas stifles personal growth, and therefore societal development. We lose something, in other words—now these are just my words, really—when the rough fibers of the unknown and unpredictable are excised from the fabric of our daily lives. When we miss our train, when we give money to someone asking for it on a corner or refuse to do so, when we get caught in the rain—we’re encountering an inevitable piece of urban friction, an obstacle, and we’re also encountering ourselves.
**
There is a certain type of city dweller who believes their urban bonafides rest on the depth of their callousness toward the everyday dejection embodied by other, less fortunate, city dwellers. It’s a woman on BART in San Francisco yelling at a person passed out, maybe from opiate use, but refusing to call 911. It’s a man at the local coffee shop saying “that guy sucks” over and over, as if to prove that he’s lived in the neighborhood long enough to really know, about a man who’s come in one morning to ask for money or food. It’s a neatly dressed woman quipping self-congratulatorily that “it wasn’t even nice enough to have it out” about a man jerking off lying down on the sidewalk where 28th St. meets 6th Ave. These people, I think, are all avoiding encountering themselves, placing a big gray rock of indifference where their compassion should be, and tripping right over it.
**
Still, there is something that happens in that exchange, a certain spark, or lack thereof. It takes two people. Maybe you see where I’m going with this, back to Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan, Smoke and Stack, not two people but one person interacting with the image of himself—or two images interacting with one another, depending on how you look at it. There is no chance of the unknown there, no unexpected friction. So much of Sinners is built, to great effect, around the chemistry between actors and characters; I longed for the same binding agent between the two central figures. I wondered what we missed, what the movie could have been, had it had that.
**
I’m thinking about all this, too, because I’m increasingly hearing about people using ChatGPT for personal advice. It’s difficult to write about ChatGPT (and AI in general) without sounding wistful or sentimental or preemptively nostalgic, perhaps for something that we can’t totally grasp or describe, like fish writing about water. But it strikes me that not only does ChatGPT not know the person typing how do I break up with my girlfriend? into its little prompt box, but also that because the person typing has no personal obligation or emotional connection (benefit of the doubt applies here) to ChatGPT, the receiving of advice from the machine will prompt no further reflection. Again, there is no productive, self-revealing friction there. This format of… is it engagement or entertainment? is increasingly common. We interact not with people but with their image (or the image of something called “intelligence”); we remain unchanged after the encounter.
**
Increasingly I crave the opposite: things that contain humanity in them, something real. I saw Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev recently and despite not particularly liking it I was still happy to have seen it; to have spent a few hours in the presence of someone’s particular vision; to have been made to react to something specific. Andrei Rublev is full of violence; living beings were actually harmed in making the movie. I thought about this after I watched Sinners, to whose CGI violence my body reacted—involuntarily and viscerally—while my mind remained mostly abstracted from the geysers of blood and squishy sounds of flesh and innards. This didn’t make the big final scene—no spoilers!—any less shocking, but I haven’t thought about it much since. That horse in Andrei Rublev, falling off the stairs onto his back, though—I’ve thought about it almost every day for the last two weeks.
**
I can feel myself veering toward aphorisms or irony, thinking about how maybe the importance of artistic production and its commercial viability are inversely related, in which case there might be very few things more important than making art right now. Same with reality, same with humanity.
**
I wrote this newsletter in this format, little discrete paragraphs, because earlier today I read one written in the same manner, and the cadence got stuck in my head.