Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
In conversation recently, it came up that Digestable used to be a daily mouthful, Monday through Friday, not missing a single day for at least the first hundred issues. Such an investment of time—on my part and yours—seems almost unthinkable now.
We published our first issue in mid-March of 2020. I wrote that column on the first morning I’d ever worked from home, leaning over a kitchen counter improperly sized for the task. Why then? At the time, it’d been my job to read the news and let my colleagues know the highlights, to liaise between the virtual dispatch of a real world and the bubble we all lived inside of.
COVID arrived in the US quickly, as you surely remember. It became, almost overnight, absolutely terrifying to read the news. Friends and coworkers shared this sentiment with me, and I thought, alright—that’s been my job, and it will continue to be.
Scroll through the archive, if you like; this little project has taken many forms, as the shape of the world it attempts to understand has changed. At the beginning, we needed structure, continuity, and virtual community. At the beginning, what felt most important was to focus on everything but COVID. Whenever I mentioned it, I’d apologize.
Hundreds of posts and dozens of weeks later, I got COVID, and wrote about it a bit. In early 2020, the think pieces were all about what COVID revealed: underlying inequality that was more visible than it had ever been to the comfortable; how unprepared our systems are for climate crises and the catastrophes they exacerbate; how precarious and uneven the healthcare system is. These are huge revelations, literally and figuratively.
Two and some years in, I’m thinking about the other stuff, the more secret, invisible stuff that COVID has revealed. Reflecting on this writing project reminded me to look for these more gradual changes, as COVID has become assimilated into our lives. This is the same newsletter, but it has evolved almost fully, per last week’s topic.
Yesterday Democracy Now! aired what Amy Goodman gleefully referred to as a Zinntennial, celebrating 100 years since historian Howard Zinn’s birth. He describes how both revolution and warfare have changed over the course of his life in a way that mirrors the overt and more subtle changes we’ve experienced over the last few tumultuous years. Rather than fighting on the ground, we drop bombs from planes. Rather than opening fire, the state surveils and polices people through data mining.
If you look at the COVID dashboards, numbers are going down. Gone are the headlines marking milestones of dead. Now, you’ll find vague statements like “the scale of post COVID-19 condition and the long-term burden it is likely to have on health systems is only starting to become evident” and shoddy reporting about long COVID, which nobody really understands.
The only community with water in Mad Max: Fury Road is full of people with disabilities. They’re hooked up to oxygen tanks and mobility devices. When I was a kid, bodegas in NYC were plastered with this terrifying ad campaign about how if Hepatitis C affected your face, everyone would know about it. We have a lot of trouble comprehending illness that we can’t see; we had a lot of trouble talking about climate change when it wasn’t happening on our doorsteps.
All kinds of people experience all kinds of disability, much of which isn’t evident by looking. I still look able bodied, but sometimes it feels like there’s an elephant sitting on my chest. You can have a twinkle in your eye and also brain fog. We need a world, now, that is adapted to the rolling, big-news crises of late capitalism and the invisible plight that follows.
And, good things happen out of sight too. Out of public view, people learned what it was like to dress for themselves, to abandon gender and societal expectations. The invisible feeds back into the visible; attacks on trans rights are a response to more and more people abandoning a binary intended to keep us in our place.
Next week, I’ll try my hand again at an OG Digestable column, in which I try to tie together as many news items as possible in a few paragraphs. For now, I’ll leave you with this reflection on slow change.
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
First Contact
I saw Jordan Peele’s latest film NOPE this weekend and absolutely loved it. It’s one of these movies that stuck so deep in my head that I just want to talk about it with everyone and read every review and piece of analysis I can find. Unfortunately, the first thing most people have said to me about NOPE is that they heard it isn’t that good and there isn’t a single review I’ve read that touches on the aspects of the film that excited me the most. So, given that NOPE is a film all about looking, this Second Look is filled with all the things I wish people were saying about the film. Advance warning that what follows is entirely made up of spoilers and this is a film that I think greatly benefits from a dry watch so if you haven’t seen NOPE, go watch it and then read this after!
Second Sight
Let’s start with race because that’s what Jordan Peele is most known for cleverly incorporating into his films. At first glance, the racial themes are not as prominent in NOPE as in Peele’s previous films, but at second glance they are just as present and poignant as ever:
NOPE follows the Haywood family, owners of Haywood Hollywood Horses and the ancestors of the first “actor, stuntman, and animal wrangler,” an unidentified Black jockey depicted in Eadweard Muybridge’s assembly of moving photographs. NOPE is about spectacle, and in particular the relationship of Black people to spectacle, how they observe and are observed and the power gained and lost in each position. Peele makes this very clear from the opening scenes: the Haywood’s claim to fame is that their ancestor was the first Black body depicted in motion. When Otis Haywood is killed by falling debris we are shown an arresting shot of his half-mutilated face, evoking the open-casket funeral of Emmet Till, a choice by his mother Mamie to make “the world… see what they did to my boy.” After Otis’s death, we’re shown the uneasy reaction of the white commercial crew when they’re introduced to Otis Jr. as “OJ,” alluding to the televised trial of OJ Simpson, a nationwide spectacle received very differently by Black and white audiences. In the eyes of the crew, the spectacular associations of OJ’s name gives his reserved nature an unpredictable and violent quality.
OJ and Em cope with their father’s death, it’s clear that they’re coming to terms with the precarity of their family’s position. Otis Haywood was a Black man with significant land and property holdings, as well as close industry connections. With a white patriarch, those things would easily pass on to the younger generation but the Haywood kids are immediately confronted with the difficulty of holding everything together as industry, neighbors, and a territorial alien all try to literally snatch it out from under them. Though OJ and Em react in different ways, the solution they come to together is to document the alien, to choreograph a visual spectacle that may be arresting enough to allow them to survive. When we zoom out from the narrative, we can see that Peele is using NOPE to think through the history murder of Black people by the State and society. When Philando Castile, George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice were being murdered, the only thing people knew to do was what Mamie Till did: document and disseminate, make their deaths into a spectacle, something that cannot be ignored in the hope that it will save the next person.
But there is danger in seeking spectacle. As OJ says of the alien, “it won’t eat you if you don’t look at it.” The quote is just as much about white supremacy as the danger of seeking spectacle and OJ understands the importance of keeping your head down, saying “nope” to staying alive in America, the central conflict with his outgoing sister Em. What the siblings realize is that to do more than survive, to win the day, you have to find a new way of looking, to keep one eye open and one eye closed.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
There’s more that I want to say than I can fit into the column (or have time to write) this week so I’m going to make this a two part review. If you haven’t seen NOPE yet, go do it now and I’ll see you back here next week where I un-Peele the rest of the film. 😉😉😉
I want to know what a world looks like that is adapted to the rolling, big-news crises of late capitalism and the invisible plight that follows.