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Careless People: Mark Asch on Gamification, Impunity and 2024 in Film
Nicholas Hoult (second from left), Leslie Bibb, Adrienne C. Moore and J.K. Simmons in Juror #2, courtesy
of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Juror #2, which I saw the night before the presidential election, concerns a man who looks at his phone while driving, hits and kills a fellow citizen, and keeps going. A year later, summoned to serve on a jury at the trial of the man wrongly accused of the crime, the driver scrambles to escape responsibility for his actions while still telling himself that he’s a good person.
Clint Eastwood’s film, a Southern courtroom thriller in the John Grisham mode, has been called a throwback. For one thing, the juror’s car is a midsize SUV from Grisham’s mid-1990s heyday, not a fortress (the 2024 Toyota 4Runner is 25 percent heavier than the 1996 model seen in the film, as well as significantly taller and longer), let alone a wheeled weapon like the Cybertruck. For another, it’s a text from his wife that takes our driver’s eyes off the road, not a notification from Robinhood, FanDuel, Polymarket or Coinbase.
The classical filmmaking of Clint’s ’90s and the genre trappings of the Clinton ’90s feed into a larger sense of nostalgia, which is that Juror #2 feels guilty for what he did and fears the consequences of it. (Shame over one’s actions is proof of one’s underlying virtue, and can therefore be set aside once articulated, as in the “shoot and cry” trope of Israeli military dramas.) In the film, it’s suggested he would face a sentence of 30 years to life for vehicular homicide. In the real world, pedestrian deaths are at or near a 40-year high, which is attributable to bigger cars with bigger blind spots, hostilely designed road infrastructure, a distracted-driving epidemic and, anecdotally, a terrifying decline in road etiquette—best to wait a beat before entering the intersection with the green light, lest you get T-boned by someone beating the red—but custodial sentences for careless drivers are notoriously lenient, verging on nonexistent.
Juror #2’s anguish is a comforting thought, as is his wrestling with the morality of sending another person to jail in his place. He even leaves flowers at his victim’s grave—a quaint shoot-and-cry gesture, in a year in which soldiers in an American proxy war have taken to posting trophy photos of dead or displaced Palestinian women’s lingerie straight to the grid. Juror #2 calls to mind a different era of the American moral consensus, one in which we could expect at least a performance of ambivalence over the violence and inequality manifest even in our exurban built environment (the victim in Juror #2 was walking home on a road with no sidewalk and barely a shoulder). Because even in a position of absolute power—the power to redistribute his culpability and suffering to another—Juror #2 is never thrilled by the temptation to impunity, which is the most aspirational quality of Donald Trump.
The film was barely given a theatrical release by Warner Bros., whose head David Zaslav is said to have scoffed at the studio’s loyalty to longtime partner Eastwood. (“It’s not show friends—it’s show business.”) In his first public comments after Trump’s victory, Zaslav expressed optimism that regulators appointed by the new administration would be friendly to entertainment industry “consolidation”—that is, mergers and acquisitions smoothing the way for his preferred platform-agnostic release strategies and ensuring that “the best content is going to win.” So much winning you’ll get tired of it!
Everything is a game—the devices that mediate our engagement with the world distribute dopamine hits via stock trading, sports betting, prediction markets, crypto exchanges and microtransactions of attention on social media and dating apps—and this mode of living legitimizes selfishness and combativeness, disgust at the referees and identification with bullies. It gives rise to a politics of brute force and magical thinking, of celebrity worship and billionaire plunder, populist in the sense that the fantasy of impunity is equally available to everyone. (The Great Gatsby, the great American novel about the dream of individual transformation through the unlikely acquisition of reality-bending wealth, hinges in large part on the question of who can get away with a hit-and-run.)
Every time a stranger blithely shines a blinding light into my eyes—high beams in the rear-view mirror, phones out at the movies—I try to take a deep breath and remind myself that I’m a historical materialist, and that I must therefore believe that the rules of a gamified society, the ethical tunnel vision and the chips-to-the-center glibness, are a response to precarity, maybe even a logical one. You see this in Lance Oppenheim’s Ren Faire in the way that it applies a reality-competition template (backstabbing and gossip, underdogs and villain arcs) to the question of who will maybe one day inherit a slice of the security and real estate wealth hoarded by an aging, impulsive and unaccountable monarch—a circumstance which, I’m not the first to observe, bears many parallels to the inheritance lottery of the impending Boomer Die-Off.
So, the films that scream (wail, gnash) 2024 to me are those that reflect or distort or confront an audience in a race to accumulate, a population gathering up the commons like they’re moving candies around in Candy Crush, driven by a paranoid terror of scarcity applied equally to every commodity, from the economic, to the interpersonal, to even the metaphysical—from a constricted housing market, to space on the road, to even, as in The Substance, the same spinal fluid. In Coralie Fargeat’s film, two women compete for the finite social capital that comes with youth and beauty; though told “you are one,” they see only the image of their rival on a painting or billboard, each as real to the other as someone else’s avatar.
The title character of Anora lives a precarious existence as a sex worker until she hits the jackpot in the American casino and gets married in Vegas. She burns her bridges at work and heads off to live her new careless life with her new nepo husband, cuddling on a white sectional as he plays video games—it’s all a game to him, he who bought a girlfriend experience the way that new government efficiency czar (at time of writing) Elon Musk, also a born-rich foreign oligarch, wants all the employees he’s impregnated to live together in his Texas breeding compound. (On Reddit, they’re saying that Musk probably pays people to play video games for him, too, to pad his stats on the global Diablo leaderboard.) Anora, who wants to honeymoon at Disneyland, can play make-believe as a Disney princess—or at least as Anastasia Romanov—with her castle a McMansion in Mill Basin, a part of Brooklyn that the subway doesn’t reach. When her in-laws’ hired goons come in through the gate, she yells herself hoarse at the help until she is at last persuaded that she and they are on the same team. Much of the comedy of the film’s farcical second act arises from everyone’s uncertainty over how much of their boss’s impunity trickles down to them—when they go out in public, for instance, do they get to park their SUV wherever they feel like, or are there consequences for driving like an asshole?
Rap World takes us back to an earlier grasp at similar coattails—to the white working class of sprawling suburban Pennsylvania circa 2009, in a recessional dead end of menial jobs, depressing house parties and digitally mediated dreams of escape. The amateur rappers played by Conner O’Malley and his co-conspirators dress up their inadequacies and insecurities in clownish swagger appropriated, presumably, from the low-bandwidth early YouTube clips evoked by the film’s vintage DV camera cinematography. Building gags around Facebook status updates, the film evokes an earlier, less polished era of FOMO and online self-presentation—it seems almost sweet that images this unpolished could distort anyone’s sense of reality. But the rappers are awakened from their dreams as rudely as Anora is. At the end of the film, a music-video prop gun goes off for real.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud has as its center another character rudely yanked back into the real world by the sound of gunfire. Its protagonist is an internet reseller totally void of personality, a human pricing algorithm whose adherence to free market principles approaches pure sociopathy, eventually effacing even his job, which he quits, and his home, which he turns into a warehouse. But despite removing himself from society, he is eventually subject to a digital mobbing made flesh—violently confronted by unsatisfied customers with bullets instead of vindictive one-star reviews. The depersonalized logic of ecommerce feeds back into the real world with no norms, no guardrails, in the Call of Duty–style warehouse shoot-em-up that takes up the entire back half of the film. In its near-total disinvestment in character development and narrative momentum, the sequence is as jarringly untethered as hearing somebody refer to another person as an “NPC.”
Digital solipsism and social disinhibition, respectively, were subjects for two old masters. In The Shrouds, David Cronenberg imagined a near future in which the raw introspection and necessary compartmentalization of the mourning process is literalized as an in-coffin livestream app, another box on the home screen to distract you at dinner if you let it. In Hard Truths, Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste make the latter’s character into the concentrated essence of austerity Britain’s broken social contract. She blows everyday transactions into open confrontation: in the checkout line at the supermarket, in interactions with service workers, over a parking space (cars again…).
It’s a parking lot that most obviously marks Carson Lund’s Eephus as a period piece—it’s full of trucks and muscle cars of similar model years to Juror #2’s Toyota. (If the cars were much newer, the high beams they use to illuminate the baseball diamond after dark would have been too blindingly bright to play by.) The ballplayers of Eephus don’t really talk politics, but what else will they have to talk about, and who with, after they drive away? The film is set around the same time, the mid-to-late 1990s, that Robert D. Putnam was writing Bowling Alone, about the decline of community organizations, collective civic participation and social cohesion. After the game ends, the ballfield is to be bulldozed; after the loss of such third spaces comes the male loneliness epidemic, the specter of online radicalization and susceptibility to disinformation. It’s easy enough to picture any number of the players using parlay bets to fill the space left in their lives that used to be occupied by their baseball team, and to imagine what other digital wormholes they might fall through. I wonder where these guys are now, and how many of them still talk to their kids.
The generation gap between digital natives and their elders is implicitly a subject of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, which, like Eephus, sees a filmmaker mounting a stylized recreation of their Clinton-era childhood and its analog modes of socialization. For two young fans, The Pink Opaque, a show halfway between Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, presents, like the pop culture enjoyed in Rap World, a window into an alternate reality and a reflection of the people they might be there. The characters explore this through the means available to suburban adolescents in the ’90s, catching glimpses of the other side at sleepovers, in the VHS tapes they swap, in the episode guides they read—they’re born too early to post to Web 1.0 message boards, let alone subreddits or Discords—searching within a fan community for traces of possibility that were less visible in Schoenbrun’s own childhood than they are today. The film is an allegory for transgender identity that’s also about identity in general. The braver character leaves the stultifying suburbs, squeezes through the keyhole and comes out on the other side as someone new and truer; the other doesn’t.
The song Schoenbrun opens the film with, “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” was originally recorded by Broken Social Scene, a Toronto collective of indie-club lifers, and eventually reached a wider audience when the album it was from was written up in Pitchfork in 2003; the version in the film is by yeule, the cyber-pop alter ego of a nonbinary Singaporean twentysomething who named themselves after a Final Fantasy character. In its most optimistic reading, the film is a millennial director’s reflection on the oppressive geography and basic-cable media diet that delineated their youth, made with the knowledge of how these restrictions would eventually loosen in time for the zoomers. They would be more at home in the global digital stan armies within which young people share fan art or fanfic for a favorite show, game or foreign pop group, discovering that they’re more themselves talking to people who only know them as the avatar they chose, finding their people and eventually themselves. Given how much of this process now happens on apps, chats and streams, it feels increasingly reductive to call the place where digital life takes place “the internet,” but still, just on the other side of I Saw the TV Glow is the promise, rare in the films of 2024, of a web that connects.
The other film this year that offered any realistic reason to be hopeful about the future, Union, shows a fragmented society relearning how to cohere as Amazon Labor Union activists camp out in a third space just outside the factory gates, grilling hot dogs and striking up conversations underneath tents that sometimes blow away in the wind. The organizers get cold when the weather is cold and wet when the weather is wet; unlike Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who named his movie after the no-place where our data lives and tapped into his alienated laborers’ essential nihilism, Brett Story and Stephen Maing depict the global digital economy as embodied and are commensurately more optimistic. Their documentary climaxes with the ALU’s victory in a union election—though the other side, the “no” voters, are Amazon workers, too, meaning its victory is a victory over the self-interest and fear within its own members, encouraged by a tech company’s disinformation campaign that the organizers must counter by building out their own communication network in the physical world. In an analogous turn of events, Story and Maing self-released their film theatrically. Despite uniformly strong reviews out of Sundance and NYFF, distributors dependent upon Amazon’s platform were reluctant to antagonize Jeff Bezos. For his part, Bezos is reluctant to antagonize Trump—he killed his newspaper, the Washington Post’s, endorsement of Kamala Harris because he, too, wanted to be careful.
Who can afford to be truly careless? (Tom and Daisy Buchanan, but not Gatsby.) In The Brutalist, a master builder discovers the limitations of even the most expansive license: uncomprehending paymasters, a hostile zeitgeist, his own flaws. These are the same limitations that Francis Ford Coppola discovered in self-funding Megalopolis—though the 85-year-old Coppola had more license than the millennial Corbet because he could sell some of his vineyards. (The lesson here is the same lesson as in Ren Faire: You should have invested in real estate 50 years ago.) His lavish and indulgent auteur vision, with echoes of the high-tech backlots of New Hollywood’s decadent phase, is even more of a throwback than Juror #2. Reflecting on the contemporary analogues to his own master builder Cesar Catilina, and to his relevance to a progressivism that now sees its salvation in mutual aid, shared burdens and collective care, Coppola told Sight & Sound that he considered Elon Musk “a genius,” but that he is “very confused by what he’s doing now.” His cinematic edifice likewise sways between the competing gravitational fields of the great man and the greater good—and on a humbler scale, this is same dilemma faced by Juror #2, whose own imperatives as a husband and father run up against the wider imperative to live in a just society.
The final scene of Juror #2 is reassuring in that context because it reminds us that there is, after all, such a thing as society, not just individuals and their families; equally reassuring, for similar reasons, is the most magical moment in Megalopolis: the live-participation sequence in which the action jumps off the screen and into the real world. In form, this is a nostalgic hit of culture experienced collectively and in the flesh, even if in content it is tinged with uncertainty over what comes next. At select screenings, a live performer—an actor, a publicist, a journalist—stood in front of the screen in the role of a reporter with an imploring question for Cesar Catilina, and as we jump into 2025 I am moved by the thought of all of us average people looking up to a movie screen for reassurance, too:
Mr. Catalina, you said that as we jump into the future, we should do so unafraid. But what if when we do jump into the future there is something to be afraid of?
Nevertheless, happy new year.
