Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
For the first time in awhile, I was up to see the sunrise. I’m a morning person, but the sun’s been up way earlier than me these last few months. Today, our timing converged.
This summer, the US experienced an ‘unusually calm’ Atlantic hurricane season. Summer is (one of many) climate disaster seasons these days. We’re in a crucial moment for climate action, and certainly deadly heatwaves, flooding, and drought have reminded people here, and even more acutely around the world, that the emergency has arrived.
But still, when showy storms, with dramatic wings whirling around a somber eye, stay out of the news cycle, it is apparently easy to put them out of mind. The invisibility of this peril is present in highly contested Pennsylvania elections, a keystone place for American worship of fossil fuel extraction.
Once upon a time, it looked like peak oil was over in the US, and we’d have to meet our energy needs another way, or continue importing fuel. Enter fracking: advances in technology paired with the fact that landowners own the stuff underneath their soil led to a huge boom. People were happy to accept money from the well-heeled fossil fuel industry in exchange for the wells and pipelines that make this industry lucrative.
Pennsylvania is home to a massive shale formation that lends itself well to fracking. Given the oddity of US land use law—that you own what is above and below—some Pennsylvanians have experienced positive economic impacts through cooperation with the oil and gas industry.
Just four years ago, a Pulitzer-winning book about how fracking poisons air and water came out. Remember those videos of people setting their drinking water on fire? That was fracking. Localized epidemics of cancers? Also fracking.
But it’s not on the Pennsylvanian mind, it seems, as the midterms approach. It’s pouring rain now, but I know the sun rose this morning; it’s shining behind the clouds. Water and air can look clear, but still be full of poison.
The GOP, with hefty help from corporations, has successfully made fracking synonymous with American values. Dr. Oz, the crudité eating, multiple-house owning Republican candidate for one of PA’s senate seats, recently said “Back off Biden, and give us freedom to frack.”
And thusly the American mind turns off, transformed into the freedom-seeking zombie we know well: freedom to extract our way to a dead planet, freedom to assault weapon our way to slain friends and family, freedom to make up election rules our way to fascism.
This isn’t personal; wanting freedom is only natural. But this particular flavor of freedom has been carefully defined by American corporations to align people’s understanding of themselves with activities that drive corporate profits. These profits fund the American Chamber of Commerce which, you guessed it, just threw a ton of money at Dr. Oz.
Meanwhile, the judicial branch, which is supposed to be ~unbiased~ is no match for a new billionaire bully. Sarah Palin, the sloppy grandma of Trumpism, is still at it, but her power is waning. Nearly one in five congresspeople have made problematic stock trades while in office. Johnson and Johnson is using its credit score to stall court cases against its deadly products. There was never much of an ethics anchor in this country—arguably, this nation’s history has been a montage of theft, abuse, and murder—but even the guise of care for people and the place we live in has fallen away.
It may be very, very dark out there. But the sun, friends. It’s still shining behind the clouds.
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
Last week when I ran out of space to talk about all the parts of Jordan Peele’s NOPE that I loved, I ended with the different ways of seeing the film’s characters adopt, either out of choice or necessity. Before I dive back in to wrap up my thoughts on this cinematic monster, a similar warning that this column is assembled entirely out of spoilers, so if you have yet to NOPE please do so before continuing.
The film, everyone says, is about spectacle, about seeing and being seen, watching, being looked at, and everything between. Two characters from the film, the young Jupe on the set of Gordy’s Home, and his co-star Mary Jo at the premiere of Star Lasso, have their vision slightly obstructed by sheer veils. Jupe hides under a sheer tablecloth during Gordy’s rampage and Mary Jo, who survived Gordy’s attack, wears a veiled hat to hide her disfigured face. The obvious symbolism here is that the characters’ perspectives are partially obscured or colored by their experience on the set of Gordy’s Home, and that certainly rings true with both characters confident in their safety in the presence of Jean Jacket. But veils also are a way of seeing without being seen: Jupe hides under the tablecloth because, until Gordy gets close, he can’t see behind the fabric, and Mary Jo is able to see from beneath her hat without revealing her face until Jean Jacket’s winds whip the veil away.
Jean Jacket is similarly veiled, for most of the movie it wraps its fabric-like body around itself into a saucer shape and even in its fully revealed form, its endlessly undulating body promises that there must be something more behind its gauzy green opening. Discussions of Jean Jacket’s body also invite comparison to cameras: in the opening credits of the film we are shown what looks like the interior of a camera with the film of the black jockey superimposed at the center. Later this is revealed to be an organ within Jean Jacket’s body and the square rhythmically flashing opening that Jean Jacket displays when unfurled is similarly camera-like, neither an eye or a mouth but seemingly both, an aperture.
And this is the beauty of an alien that is more metaphorically than biologically constructed: Jean Jacket is spectacle embodied, it wants to be observed and challenges viewers to really look at it, to understand it by way of looking. But in looking, the viewers are themselves captured, captivated, absorbed, and consumed by the spectacle. Jupe is taken by Jean Jacket because he is a man already consumed by spectacle, having built his entire life and family around it. Filmmaker Antlers is similarly taken, but not in a way that feels horrifying or non-consensual, but ecstatic. Antlers believes we are not worthy of the perfect shot and in swooping into Jean Jacket’s aperture with camera rolling gives himself over entirely into the spectacle he’s spent his life pursuing.
There is a lot in NOPE about seeing through cameras, symbolized primarily by one-eyed characters: The TMZ reporter wears a mirrored helmet with a single opening and the giant balloon that finally does Jean Jacket in shows Jupe winking, with one eye open and one eye closed. You could maybe read something moralistic into this, that Jupe and the TMZ reporter along with the Star Lasso audience are too busy looking through cameras to “really” see. But I like to think of this one-eyed sight as just another different way of seeing, one that can be good and bad.
The ultimate instance of this one-eyed camera imagery is in the Winkin’ Well, an attraction at Jupiter’s Claim where you can take a giant polaroid looking down a well. Emerald eventually uses the Winkin’ Well to capture the Oprah shot of Jean Jacket, cranking the well several times before finally succeeding. The one-eyed Winkin’ Well is essentially a gigantic film camera, with an aperture and flash at the end of a long lens-like well. Emerald must crank the wheel for each successive shot, like a manual film camera, and ends up with a sequence of images that advance through time, just like the images of her horse-riding ancestor. You even have the jockey of the cowboy Jupe balloon “riding” Jean Jacket, who is of course named after a horse. The final pop of the balloon, reflecting the flash of a camera and the Gordy’s Home balloons that set the entire plot moving, is the perfect pay-off to the film. Emerald’s effort to operate this huge and slow camera so romantically encapsulates the herculean effort of filmmaking. It’s the perfect shot.
There's so many more thoughts I have about this film, like how characters are purposefully named so the humans can't be distinguished from non-human and how the perspective of the camera is an eye itself and makes the audience it's own character, even when taking the veiled perspective of Jupe or the bird's-eye perspective of Jean Jacket. And even though NOPE stands for Not Of Planet Earth I'm convinced that Jean Jacket isn't an alien at all but a sky-dwelling species that explains images of angels and ascension to heaven.
Jordan Peele is kind of an impressionist filmmaker in the way he takes different ideas and images and weaves them together into a work. Themes of animal agency, cinematography and Blackness all run throughout NOPE and commingle in surprising and thought provoking parallels. Oprah chimp-mauling victims rub elbows with the Flying Purple People Eater, the wacky waving inflatable tube man, and Corey Hart in ways that don't directly make sense but make for a provocative watch. I think people may not like NOPE because they expect it to be one thing, an alien invasion flick or a monster movie or a meditation on the Black experience but it's not just one thing. There aren't easy moral themes that can be pulled out, or easy connections between everything because the audience has to work to build those connections themselves. It may not be everyone's cup of tea but its certainly the kind of spectacle I can get behind!