Great piece. I had a couple things occur to me reading this.
1. Interesting that Stålenhag's art, which I wasn't familiar with previously, seems to focus on the technology and world just out of frame, just beyond our home lives. Curious that Netflix has made a movie from one of his books that now exists just on the edge of our consciousness as background noise while we do other things. What this says about anything, I don't know. But it struck me as curious.
2. In looking at the initial artworks you put in the piece, I thought of Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood" which, in its best arrangement (the version on the compilation "Shaking the Tree") is a sparse haunting piano ballad which Gabriel himself describes thusly "When I wrote this song, I had an obsession with short-wave radio and I was always amazed at the way in which the radio signals would become stronger as daylight faded. I felt as if psychic energy levels would also increase in the night. I had had an apocalyptic dream in which the psychic barriers which normally prevent us from seeing into each others' thoughts had been completely eroded producing a mental flood. Those that had been used to having their innermost thoughts exposed would handle this torrent and those inclined to concealment would drown in it." Something about the song's lyrics and delivery has always conjured images of strange technology just out of reach - like strange antennas off in the distance. Odd then that Stålenhag has a collection titled "Things from the Flood."
If you're curious, here are the lyrics - I can't help but feel they have a Stålenhag energy:
Very prescient observations. I actually didn't make the connection between "Here Comes the Flood" and "Things From The Flood" but, in a better world, I could very much see a more faithful adaptation of Stålenhag's art with that song featured. Funny enough, "Here Comes the Flood" is a song my friend considers Peter Gabriel's best song and the best thing to ever come out of anyone associated with Genesis, and also, perhaps ironically, I was just writing a piece in which I mentioned that Red Barchetta is my dad's favorite Rush song. Weird coincidence.
I love Genesis (both prog and otherwise) and have to agree with your friend. I can't stress enough how superior the "Shaking the Tree" version of the song is, either.
Interesting too how Red Barchetta is about where our old, freer lives clash against the encroachment of technology and government. I can almost picture that red car racing through a Stålenhag piece - the two lane country road with towering spires of technology peeking out from the fog in the background.
Thank you for sharing Stålenhag's art - I was wondering what the story was behind "The Electric Age" after seeing the trailer on Netflix. The movie looks characteristically 'thin' but I was curious that it was set in what seemed to be such a (comparatively) well-developed world with a very well-defined style. Those elements didn't seem to go together at all.
Hell, they should have gotten you to direct this movie; you've got the soundtrack ready and a vision to match.
As for Stalenhag, I'm happy to spread the word; he's an artist I've followed before he exploded in popularity. I've always thought his pieces were so, so unique and evocative, especially in today's art scene, and I hate to see that this lukewarm, Marvel-ized butchery of his art is how a lot of people are going to be exposed to him. I would love to know his opinions on the matter.
Great essay, thank you. My kids and I watched "Mouse Hunt" by Gore Verbinski again last week. It has a 6.5 on IMDB and when it came out the critics were generally pissy about it, as they always are about comedies.
It's incredible. Pretty much impossible to make today. Beautiful, elaborate sets; good cinematography; great actors. It'd cost 200 million to make today and would be considered one of the best of year. But back in the 90's it was a run-of-the-mill kids movie.
I really think Hollywood peaked in the early 2000's. We had CGI tech, plus all the hard skills still, like costuming, set design, lighting, etc. They produced some real art. Now we have the visual equivalent of elevator muzak.
The multiplicity of screens is disturbing. It's everywhere now, not just during evening veg time. Bars, bowling alleys, pubs, it's all screens screens screens. It feels evil. Like some mastermind somewhere knows that if people stop, look each other in the eyes, and just talk something incredible will happen.
Ah, yes - Mouse Hunt was one of those movies we used to rent from Blockbuster every now and then. As you say, critics are always harsh on comedies, especially physical comedies, but, again, to go back to the masters like Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin, there's a special talent to it that's quite impressive when you look at it deeper that I feel is greatly underappreciated by cinema scholars. I would agree that Hollywood and most other media peaked in the mid-2000's. Video games, for instance, hit their apogee around 2007, and it's been downhill ever since.
To your last point, I'd recommend you listen to Roger Scruton's bit on the "tyranny of pop music"; it's less about pop music itself and more about how ubiquitous it is no matter where you go. I remember sitting in a hospital waiting room and being driven damn near to violence when I heard Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" for the fifteenth time in an hour (yes, I counted), and it's like... why? This is a fucking waiting room, I'm here wondering if my grandmother is going to make it out of her surgery alive and you're subjecting me to this? Scruton suspected that it's a phenomenon that began for the exact same reasons you think they did. And I'm inclined to agree.
So glad to see a bone thrown Tarkovsky's way, especially considering that almost any other essay addressing the culture/media issues of our present so often settles for "i jus wan muh gud storys," that you could hardly break out any name that wasn't a late Hollywood institution like Spielberg. Another banger from the lakeside.
I'm glad someone else is familiar with Tarkovsky. I'm not the most well-versed in his filmography, I've only seen Nostalghia (one of the best ending scenes in cinema history tbh) and Stalker, but the moment I saw Stalenhag's art I knew that Tarkovsky would have been one of the few that could faithfully translate it to the screen. The claims that "The Electric State" as a book could never be adapted to film show how uneducated the people caterwauling about, as you rightly say, "i just wan muh gud storys" are about cinema and how narrow their perception of the medium is. It's pretty much defined by popular blockbusters, which isn't really a problem in and of itself, but given that it's one of two voices positing themselves as would-be abitrators of culture... well, I've always said the claims that "We need to go back to the 90's when movies were good!" is an inherently flawed solution; the 90's cultural climate brought us exactly to where we are today. And, to quote a movie that's been reevaluated (wrongly) as "cringe high brow filmbro cinema": "If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?"
Also as an aside it also reminds me that a lot of people are now saying that "Dune" is "impossible to film" because Denis Villaneuva didn't really do the books all that much justice, and yet have never seen the David Lynch adaptation or heard of Jodorowsky's Dune. Again - limited imagination and scope of what can be done with a camera by creatives thinking outside the blockbuster paradigm.
In all fairness on my end, I'm a certified "CinephileTM" by virtue of my primary trade being filmmaking, so Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, etc. are just part of my balanced breakfast lol. In fact, I share a birthday with Bergman (July 14), and with films like "Persona" and "Cries & Whispers" to his credit, I hope some of that tertiary magic rubs off on me one day. There used to be a time when shows such as SCTV could make Bergman parodies like "Scenes from an Idiot's Marriage" (feat. Martin Short's amazing Jerry Lewis impression), and not only were they funny, but they also got the tone and aesthetic of his films down pat. There used to be a time when arthouse/international directors like Bergman and Akira Kurosawa were on late-night shows hosted by the likes of Dick Cavett. People forget that thinking man's cinema used to be part-and-parcel with mainstream film. It's bewildering how everything segmented off the way it did.
Similarly on DUNE, I will go to bat for Lynch's vision, not only because it got Herbert's blessing, but because it is a tremendous film in its own right, even in its truncated edit. It's a got a certain stately verve, and a great sense of scope. I've been meaning to try the "Spicediver" fan edit that manages to restore the extended scenes without the tedious prologue. Worth a try if you have the time! https://archive.org/details/spicediverk
We? Buddy, there ain't no "we", I'd be out on my own personal Riconante and my own personal Sancho running down windmills like they were going out of style if I could!
I'd run across The Electric State a few years ago, and right off the bat it sent chills down my spine. For one thing, he somehow manages to perfectly capture the feeling of taking a road trip across the Western United States. But then, to combine that with hints of a quiet technological Armageddon currently in process - that's what set my head spinning.
It's entirely fitting and ironic that Netflix turned it into slop-media to stuff into the mouths of the screen-zombies.
I wonder if someone smart at Netflix is thinking about making anti-second screen entertainment as the futility of dumping hundreds of millions into stuff like The Electric State becomes unsustainable. I just finished a kick ass anime partially financed by Netflix, Dorohedoro, that got one season of 12 episodes back in 2020, but now is getting an unexpected second season, five years later, and it is not second screen stuff. If they shifted even a fraction of their resources into funding more Dorohedoro style small projects, that would be better than what live action/CG mashups give us.
Also apparently someone decided Chris Pratt needed to look like Duane Allman circa 1970.
You're disturbingly on the money about Pratt looking like Allman. If they ever do a biopic on the Allman Brothers, he's a shoe in for the role.
I would like to think that someone at Netflix can read the tea leaves, but at the same time their unique method of distribution means that movies like "The Electric State" exactly need to make money like typical studio films. Tavlin speaks to this in his essay. I think it's more sustainable than Disney pumping out another few "Snow White"-tier duds, but there will come a time where they'll need to pivot again.
The thing about Netflix "original" anime is that Netflix has very little influence over the production; they basically bankroll Japanese studios to do the dirty work and outside of licensing the end product to slap their name on it, they don't have much to do with the development. Technically, even newer seasons of the Pokemon anime are Netflix Original Anime.
This is a good thing since they've produced some good stuff - Devilman Crybaby was good, and Cyberpunk Edgerunners was so surprisingly high quality it single-handedly rehabilitated the game it was based on after its botched release. I've heard good things about Knights of Sidonia (which if you like Dorohedoro I'd suggest you give a watch), Beastars, and I haven't watched Dorohedoro, but I love the manga so if they did a good job with it, that's a net positive.
Yeah, Edgerunners was legitimately good. Way better than I expected. Even got me nostalgic for the game, which I had abandoned due to bugs and general meh.
Knights of Sidonia anime was also pretty good. Didn't make a huge impression on me but at least remember general positive vibes.
Dorohedoro is one of the better pieces of later 2010's manga (never seen the anime), and Q Hayashida is one of the best mangaka working in the industry. I love her grimy and grungy style; it's probably only matched by Tsutomu Nihei, who's Knights of Sidonia was also adapted to an anime by Netflix (again, can't speak to the quality of it but the manga was solid). Hayashida's current manga, Dai Dark, is well worth a read if you liked Dorohedoro; it's more of the same, but in space. She does what she does well.
I think they're just financing a bit of it, and do not have creative control. I think all the Japanese know that giving the woke gaijin control of their IP in any way is a disaster (see Cowboy Bebop's live action bomb like Hiroshima for example) and they also know that manga and anime are killing Western capeshit in sales, and thus have the power to demand they retain creative control over a profitable industry instead of a bloated rotting corpse like Disney or Marvel.
It's exactly this. MAPPA and Trigger studios are bankrolled by them but left to their own devices, so long as Netflix can distribute the end product. On that note, the Cowboy Bebop adaptation should be considered not just a crime against art but the nation of Japan and Shinichiro Watanabe in particular. I was pleasantly surprised by the One Piece adaptation, though. It showed me that A) at the heart of One Piece, if you cut away the literal weeks worth of filler, there's a good story and B) when put in the right hands, anime-to-live action adaptations are not impossible. Then again, it's easy to elevate a source material when it starts off at the bottom of a barrel (I do not think highly of One Piece).
I'm afraid to watch the live action of my absolute favorite, Golden Kamuy, precisely because the manga and anime are so fuckin' good. I don't think a cheap live action can give it what it needs.
Thanks for writing this. I wasn't familiar with Stalenhag's art or with "Stalker" (though I'd heard of Tarkovsky before), but I'm fascinated with liminal spaces and these are exactly the sort of works that appeal to me on a deep, unexplainable level.
I wholly agree with you on second screen movies. I've run episodes of The Office on my desktop computer while answering emails or filling out paperwork, but I refuse to "second screen" series or movies I haven't seen before, and I find it quite depressing that this might be seen as a form of discipline. Like following an hour-long episode of Wolf Hall is somehow a feat of concentration and focus, when really it's just good TV you enjoy after a day's work. Anyway, this made me think of the topics of books vs audiobooks because for me it's similar. I have argued before that reading a book and listening to an audiobook aren't the same thing (and I enjoy audiobooks myself), especially if you're doing something else while you listen, in which case it's no different than listening to a podcast (which I also do). Every single time someone argued that I was being bigoted and unfair because some people don't have time to read books and some people are blind and some people have ADHD and so the only way they can enjoy books is by listening to them at twice the regular speed while they scroll on TikTok etc etc etc. "Why can't you just let people enjoy things" indeed. The same arguments could be given for the compulsion to second screen, where any criticism would be brushed off as elite ableist gatekeeping. So too actually writing books and not using ChatGPT to do it.
This is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of slop. It upholds uber-palatable mediocrity as the great equalizer. If everyone's intellectual capacities are dumbed down to the lowest possible level, then at least we'll all be equal.
It's always good to know that, for as much as I introduce readers to The Horrors (TM), I occasionally lead someone to The Pleasures (TM) as well.
On Audiobooks; I've had the same discussion, albeit with less animosity than it sounds like you do. A lot of my friends will listen to audiobooks in the car, while they work, or while working on hobbies like models, and most of them just say, "Yeah, it's not the same but otherwise I wouldn't have time to 'read'." And I get that. I don't fault them. I have seen the argument online that it's ableist or some such nonsense to say that maybe reading audiobooks while scrolling social media or TikTok before, and it's just like... how did blind people get into this conversation? I never said anything about blind people?
Also, for what it's worth, the two aren't equivalent. I always come back to the argument that 97-98% of what we say is communicated not by what we say, but how we say it - body language, tone, microexpressions, etc. Even when you add adjectives to describe a line of dialogue's tone, you'll never truly be able to communicate the sentiment as you would in person. The strength of the written word (as well as a weakness, at times), comes in that ambiguity. The same simple sentence can be read a myriad of different ways by a myriad of different people and they'll all take away something different from it, which is something that cannot happen when they hear the dialogue spoken and interpreted by an actor. Again - neither is good nor bad, it's just simply a difference in the mediums that some people like, some people don't. But anyone who says they're the same is deluding themselves.
As to your last point, it does seem as if that's the end-goal of the Grand Deluge of Slop, isn't it? ChatGPT "equalizes" the field so that people who've never written a word in their life can "Write" the next great American novel. Remember when National Novel Writing Month said it would be "unfair" to "discriminate" against those who used LLMs to write their novels because "not everyone has access to the same writing skills"? Well, fuck 'em - why don't they learn like the rest of us? It is pernicious. The idea inherent is that you may not be the next Dostoevsky, or Joyce, or Steinbeck... but if you toss a little cheddar to OpenAI, you could be. And you wouldn't have to lift a finger.
Tales from the Loop (Amazon show) was pretty good. Given what you like about the art, you might dig it. Some friends described it as "painfully boring." But I thought they did a pretty good job of capturing the mood and atmosphere of the source material.
There's not much to it - sort of a "weird machine of the week" episodic structure tied up with a straightforward <spoiler: redacted genre> mystery. But it feels like the people who made it "got it" in a way that the people who made Electric State did not.
Everything I saw of it seemed much more reflective of the actual source material, so I believe you. Good to know that there's at least one good adaptation of Stalenhag's work. Unfortunately it'll probably always be overshadowed by this.
Great piece. I had a couple things occur to me reading this.
1. Interesting that Stålenhag's art, which I wasn't familiar with previously, seems to focus on the technology and world just out of frame, just beyond our home lives. Curious that Netflix has made a movie from one of his books that now exists just on the edge of our consciousness as background noise while we do other things. What this says about anything, I don't know. But it struck me as curious.
2. In looking at the initial artworks you put in the piece, I thought of Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood" which, in its best arrangement (the version on the compilation "Shaking the Tree") is a sparse haunting piano ballad which Gabriel himself describes thusly "When I wrote this song, I had an obsession with short-wave radio and I was always amazed at the way in which the radio signals would become stronger as daylight faded. I felt as if psychic energy levels would also increase in the night. I had had an apocalyptic dream in which the psychic barriers which normally prevent us from seeing into each others' thoughts had been completely eroded producing a mental flood. Those that had been used to having their innermost thoughts exposed would handle this torrent and those inclined to concealment would drown in it." Something about the song's lyrics and delivery has always conjured images of strange technology just out of reach - like strange antennas off in the distance. Odd then that Stålenhag has a collection titled "Things from the Flood."
If you're curious, here are the lyrics - I can't help but feel they have a Stålenhag energy:
'When the night shows
the signals grow on radios
All the strange things
they come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
still waiting for the swollen Easter tide
There's no point in direction we cannot
even choose a side.
I took the old track
the hollow shoulder, across the waters
On the tall cliffs
they were getting older, sons and daughters
The jaded underworld was riding high
Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky
and as the nail sunk in the cloud, the rain
was warm and soaked the crowd.
Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.
When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You're a thousand minds, within a flash
Don't be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there's only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they'll
use up what we used to be.
Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.'
Very prescient observations. I actually didn't make the connection between "Here Comes the Flood" and "Things From The Flood" but, in a better world, I could very much see a more faithful adaptation of Stålenhag's art with that song featured. Funny enough, "Here Comes the Flood" is a song my friend considers Peter Gabriel's best song and the best thing to ever come out of anyone associated with Genesis, and also, perhaps ironically, I was just writing a piece in which I mentioned that Red Barchetta is my dad's favorite Rush song. Weird coincidence.
I love Genesis (both prog and otherwise) and have to agree with your friend. I can't stress enough how superior the "Shaking the Tree" version of the song is, either.
Interesting too how Red Barchetta is about where our old, freer lives clash against the encroachment of technology and government. I can almost picture that red car racing through a Stålenhag piece - the two lane country road with towering spires of technology peeking out from the fog in the background.
Thank you for sharing Stålenhag's art - I was wondering what the story was behind "The Electric Age" after seeing the trailer on Netflix. The movie looks characteristically 'thin' but I was curious that it was set in what seemed to be such a (comparatively) well-developed world with a very well-defined style. Those elements didn't seem to go together at all.
Hell, they should have gotten you to direct this movie; you've got the soundtrack ready and a vision to match.
As for Stalenhag, I'm happy to spread the word; he's an artist I've followed before he exploded in popularity. I've always thought his pieces were so, so unique and evocative, especially in today's art scene, and I hate to see that this lukewarm, Marvel-ized butchery of his art is how a lot of people are going to be exposed to him. I would love to know his opinions on the matter.
For those with taste, "Liquid Crystal Disease" by Vektor is very pertinent to this subject. The lyrics are so good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEAsNxcIGKM
Great essay, thank you. My kids and I watched "Mouse Hunt" by Gore Verbinski again last week. It has a 6.5 on IMDB and when it came out the critics were generally pissy about it, as they always are about comedies.
It's incredible. Pretty much impossible to make today. Beautiful, elaborate sets; good cinematography; great actors. It'd cost 200 million to make today and would be considered one of the best of year. But back in the 90's it was a run-of-the-mill kids movie.
I really think Hollywood peaked in the early 2000's. We had CGI tech, plus all the hard skills still, like costuming, set design, lighting, etc. They produced some real art. Now we have the visual equivalent of elevator muzak.
The multiplicity of screens is disturbing. It's everywhere now, not just during evening veg time. Bars, bowling alleys, pubs, it's all screens screens screens. It feels evil. Like some mastermind somewhere knows that if people stop, look each other in the eyes, and just talk something incredible will happen.
Ah, yes - Mouse Hunt was one of those movies we used to rent from Blockbuster every now and then. As you say, critics are always harsh on comedies, especially physical comedies, but, again, to go back to the masters like Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin, there's a special talent to it that's quite impressive when you look at it deeper that I feel is greatly underappreciated by cinema scholars. I would agree that Hollywood and most other media peaked in the mid-2000's. Video games, for instance, hit their apogee around 2007, and it's been downhill ever since.
To your last point, I'd recommend you listen to Roger Scruton's bit on the "tyranny of pop music"; it's less about pop music itself and more about how ubiquitous it is no matter where you go. I remember sitting in a hospital waiting room and being driven damn near to violence when I heard Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" for the fifteenth time in an hour (yes, I counted), and it's like... why? This is a fucking waiting room, I'm here wondering if my grandmother is going to make it out of her surgery alive and you're subjecting me to this? Scruton suspected that it's a phenomenon that began for the exact same reasons you think they did. And I'm inclined to agree.
I'll check it out, thanks!
So glad to see a bone thrown Tarkovsky's way, especially considering that almost any other essay addressing the culture/media issues of our present so often settles for "i jus wan muh gud storys," that you could hardly break out any name that wasn't a late Hollywood institution like Spielberg. Another banger from the lakeside.
I'm glad someone else is familiar with Tarkovsky. I'm not the most well-versed in his filmography, I've only seen Nostalghia (one of the best ending scenes in cinema history tbh) and Stalker, but the moment I saw Stalenhag's art I knew that Tarkovsky would have been one of the few that could faithfully translate it to the screen. The claims that "The Electric State" as a book could never be adapted to film show how uneducated the people caterwauling about, as you rightly say, "i just wan muh gud storys" are about cinema and how narrow their perception of the medium is. It's pretty much defined by popular blockbusters, which isn't really a problem in and of itself, but given that it's one of two voices positing themselves as would-be abitrators of culture... well, I've always said the claims that "We need to go back to the 90's when movies were good!" is an inherently flawed solution; the 90's cultural climate brought us exactly to where we are today. And, to quote a movie that's been reevaluated (wrongly) as "cringe high brow filmbro cinema": "If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?"
Also as an aside it also reminds me that a lot of people are now saying that "Dune" is "impossible to film" because Denis Villaneuva didn't really do the books all that much justice, and yet have never seen the David Lynch adaptation or heard of Jodorowsky's Dune. Again - limited imagination and scope of what can be done with a camera by creatives thinking outside the blockbuster paradigm.
In all fairness on my end, I'm a certified "CinephileTM" by virtue of my primary trade being filmmaking, so Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, etc. are just part of my balanced breakfast lol. In fact, I share a birthday with Bergman (July 14), and with films like "Persona" and "Cries & Whispers" to his credit, I hope some of that tertiary magic rubs off on me one day. There used to be a time when shows such as SCTV could make Bergman parodies like "Scenes from an Idiot's Marriage" (feat. Martin Short's amazing Jerry Lewis impression), and not only were they funny, but they also got the tone and aesthetic of his films down pat. There used to be a time when arthouse/international directors like Bergman and Akira Kurosawa were on late-night shows hosted by the likes of Dick Cavett. People forget that thinking man's cinema used to be part-and-parcel with mainstream film. It's bewildering how everything segmented off the way it did.
Similarly on DUNE, I will go to bat for Lynch's vision, not only because it got Herbert's blessing, but because it is a tremendous film in its own right, even in its truncated edit. It's a got a certain stately verve, and a great sense of scope. I've been meaning to try the "Spicediver" fan edit that manages to restore the extended scenes without the tedious prologue. Worth a try if you have the time! https://archive.org/details/spicediverk
In a way, since we don't take up lance against windmill giants, we deserve the nightmare.
We? Buddy, there ain't no "we", I'd be out on my own personal Riconante and my own personal Sancho running down windmills like they were going out of style if I could!
It's a funny kind of horse a lake, and a strange manservant a hydra...
I'd run across The Electric State a few years ago, and right off the bat it sent chills down my spine. For one thing, he somehow manages to perfectly capture the feeling of taking a road trip across the Western United States. But then, to combine that with hints of a quiet technological Armageddon currently in process - that's what set my head spinning.
It's entirely fitting and ironic that Netflix turned it into slop-media to stuff into the mouths of the screen-zombies.
I kept thinking that if Stalenhag was dead he'd be spinning fast enough to power Stockholm seeing what they did.
That's exactly it. His stuff reminds me of the Cabazon dinosaurs, but abandoned and metal.
I wonder if someone smart at Netflix is thinking about making anti-second screen entertainment as the futility of dumping hundreds of millions into stuff like The Electric State becomes unsustainable. I just finished a kick ass anime partially financed by Netflix, Dorohedoro, that got one season of 12 episodes back in 2020, but now is getting an unexpected second season, five years later, and it is not second screen stuff. If they shifted even a fraction of their resources into funding more Dorohedoro style small projects, that would be better than what live action/CG mashups give us.
Also apparently someone decided Chris Pratt needed to look like Duane Allman circa 1970.
You're disturbingly on the money about Pratt looking like Allman. If they ever do a biopic on the Allman Brothers, he's a shoe in for the role.
I would like to think that someone at Netflix can read the tea leaves, but at the same time their unique method of distribution means that movies like "The Electric State" exactly need to make money like typical studio films. Tavlin speaks to this in his essay. I think it's more sustainable than Disney pumping out another few "Snow White"-tier duds, but there will come a time where they'll need to pivot again.
The thing about Netflix "original" anime is that Netflix has very little influence over the production; they basically bankroll Japanese studios to do the dirty work and outside of licensing the end product to slap their name on it, they don't have much to do with the development. Technically, even newer seasons of the Pokemon anime are Netflix Original Anime.
This is a good thing since they've produced some good stuff - Devilman Crybaby was good, and Cyberpunk Edgerunners was so surprisingly high quality it single-handedly rehabilitated the game it was based on after its botched release. I've heard good things about Knights of Sidonia (which if you like Dorohedoro I'd suggest you give a watch), Beastars, and I haven't watched Dorohedoro, but I love the manga so if they did a good job with it, that's a net positive.
Yeah, Edgerunners was legitimately good. Way better than I expected. Even got me nostalgic for the game, which I had abandoned due to bugs and general meh.
Knights of Sidonia anime was also pretty good. Didn't make a huge impression on me but at least remember general positive vibes.
Dorohedoro was great. Everything modern fantasy in general is lacking: interesting characters, conflict, mystery, a unique setting.
Sadly it was made by 2018 Netflix, and I'm not sure I trust 2025 Netflix to do the second season justice.
There is, however, manga.
Dorohedoro is one of the better pieces of later 2010's manga (never seen the anime), and Q Hayashida is one of the best mangaka working in the industry. I love her grimy and grungy style; it's probably only matched by Tsutomu Nihei, who's Knights of Sidonia was also adapted to an anime by Netflix (again, can't speak to the quality of it but the manga was solid). Hayashida's current manga, Dai Dark, is well worth a read if you liked Dorohedoro; it's more of the same, but in space. She does what she does well.
I think they're just financing a bit of it, and do not have creative control. I think all the Japanese know that giving the woke gaijin control of their IP in any way is a disaster (see Cowboy Bebop's live action bomb like Hiroshima for example) and they also know that manga and anime are killing Western capeshit in sales, and thus have the power to demand they retain creative control over a profitable industry instead of a bloated rotting corpse like Disney or Marvel.
It's exactly this. MAPPA and Trigger studios are bankrolled by them but left to their own devices, so long as Netflix can distribute the end product. On that note, the Cowboy Bebop adaptation should be considered not just a crime against art but the nation of Japan and Shinichiro Watanabe in particular. I was pleasantly surprised by the One Piece adaptation, though. It showed me that A) at the heart of One Piece, if you cut away the literal weeks worth of filler, there's a good story and B) when put in the right hands, anime-to-live action adaptations are not impossible. Then again, it's easy to elevate a source material when it starts off at the bottom of a barrel (I do not think highly of One Piece).
I'm afraid to watch the live action of my absolute favorite, Golden Kamuy, precisely because the manga and anime are so fuckin' good. I don't think a cheap live action can give it what it needs.
Great essay. But you’re too generous to the Electric State’s adaptation:
https://undergrounddesigns.substack.com/p/electric-funeral
Thanks for writing this. I wasn't familiar with Stalenhag's art or with "Stalker" (though I'd heard of Tarkovsky before), but I'm fascinated with liminal spaces and these are exactly the sort of works that appeal to me on a deep, unexplainable level.
I wholly agree with you on second screen movies. I've run episodes of The Office on my desktop computer while answering emails or filling out paperwork, but I refuse to "second screen" series or movies I haven't seen before, and I find it quite depressing that this might be seen as a form of discipline. Like following an hour-long episode of Wolf Hall is somehow a feat of concentration and focus, when really it's just good TV you enjoy after a day's work. Anyway, this made me think of the topics of books vs audiobooks because for me it's similar. I have argued before that reading a book and listening to an audiobook aren't the same thing (and I enjoy audiobooks myself), especially if you're doing something else while you listen, in which case it's no different than listening to a podcast (which I also do). Every single time someone argued that I was being bigoted and unfair because some people don't have time to read books and some people are blind and some people have ADHD and so the only way they can enjoy books is by listening to them at twice the regular speed while they scroll on TikTok etc etc etc. "Why can't you just let people enjoy things" indeed. The same arguments could be given for the compulsion to second screen, where any criticism would be brushed off as elite ableist gatekeeping. So too actually writing books and not using ChatGPT to do it.
This is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of slop. It upholds uber-palatable mediocrity as the great equalizer. If everyone's intellectual capacities are dumbed down to the lowest possible level, then at least we'll all be equal.
It's always good to know that, for as much as I introduce readers to The Horrors (TM), I occasionally lead someone to The Pleasures (TM) as well.
On Audiobooks; I've had the same discussion, albeit with less animosity than it sounds like you do. A lot of my friends will listen to audiobooks in the car, while they work, or while working on hobbies like models, and most of them just say, "Yeah, it's not the same but otherwise I wouldn't have time to 'read'." And I get that. I don't fault them. I have seen the argument online that it's ableist or some such nonsense to say that maybe reading audiobooks while scrolling social media or TikTok before, and it's just like... how did blind people get into this conversation? I never said anything about blind people?
Also, for what it's worth, the two aren't equivalent. I always come back to the argument that 97-98% of what we say is communicated not by what we say, but how we say it - body language, tone, microexpressions, etc. Even when you add adjectives to describe a line of dialogue's tone, you'll never truly be able to communicate the sentiment as you would in person. The strength of the written word (as well as a weakness, at times), comes in that ambiguity. The same simple sentence can be read a myriad of different ways by a myriad of different people and they'll all take away something different from it, which is something that cannot happen when they hear the dialogue spoken and interpreted by an actor. Again - neither is good nor bad, it's just simply a difference in the mediums that some people like, some people don't. But anyone who says they're the same is deluding themselves.
As to your last point, it does seem as if that's the end-goal of the Grand Deluge of Slop, isn't it? ChatGPT "equalizes" the field so that people who've never written a word in their life can "Write" the next great American novel. Remember when National Novel Writing Month said it would be "unfair" to "discriminate" against those who used LLMs to write their novels because "not everyone has access to the same writing skills"? Well, fuck 'em - why don't they learn like the rest of us? It is pernicious. The idea inherent is that you may not be the next Dostoevsky, or Joyce, or Steinbeck... but if you toss a little cheddar to OpenAI, you could be. And you wouldn't have to lift a finger.
Bleak stuff. Glad you liked the article, though.
Tales from the Loop (Amazon show) was pretty good. Given what you like about the art, you might dig it. Some friends described it as "painfully boring." But I thought they did a pretty good job of capturing the mood and atmosphere of the source material.
There's not much to it - sort of a "weird machine of the week" episodic structure tied up with a straightforward <spoiler: redacted genre> mystery. But it feels like the people who made it "got it" in a way that the people who made Electric State did not.
Everything I saw of it seemed much more reflective of the actual source material, so I believe you. Good to know that there's at least one good adaptation of Stalenhag's work. Unfortunately it'll probably always be overshadowed by this.
M B-B looks like Stifler's mum.
I can see it. I imagine by the time she's thirty she'll be Jennifer Coolidge's personal Mini-Me.
Could be, though if this accelerated pace of ageing keeps up Bobby-Brown may have entered the toothless crone stage by then.