Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #58: 2024 Round-Up Part One
Adam on what has been based and what has been cringe, so far, in 2024?
BASED SAFETY
1. Challengers
I did not expect to be worshipping at the altar of anything Zendaya related this year (how has an acting coach not trained that frumpy face she makes out of her by now?) but Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a masterpiece. Simultaneously a fiercely erotic romance and one of the best sports movies of all time, Guadagnino’s love triangle set against the world of professional tennis subverts expectations as it equally plays to its audience. Transgressive, entertaining and thrilling. Distinctly modern in its framing of contemporary love, femininity, masculinity, and friendships, Challengers also functions as an homage to similar romantic drama masterpieces of the past. Particularly, Challengers echoes Ken Russell’s 1970 masterpiece Women in Love in its deceitful premise: two male best friends vying for the love of a woman/women that comes/come between them. But, as in Women in Love, Challengers is far more about the love between two men, who are not gay by the way, but who share share an extreme, time-tested bond — two male best friends, a dynamic that most women can’t truly understand — than it is about the romances with the women. Given that it’s Guadagnino, the homoeroticism between the male leads is obviously amped up, but never is this a “queer” movie. It’s a body fascist sports film about the complexity of talent, ambition, love and relationships. Zendaya, to her credit, grew a thick, juicy ass for the part. Good on her.
2. Bianca Censori
I’ve already written extensively about Kanye and Ty Dolla $ign’s masterpiece Vultures so I’m not going to say anything more. I do want to commend Ye for his unbelievable rebound skills, however, as I find Bianca to be not just sexy and beautiful, but extremely interesting. An educated architect with an artist’s fascination with the human body, shapes, and her own tits, she has turned the “famous rap artist rebound hoe” into a kind of conceptual art project. Every image she’s been in has a kind of strange, hyperreal intrigue that the hyper-coordinated and PR trained Kim Kardashian never had. Bianca is always silent, standing by her man, but we aren’t looking at him. Our eyes are only on her. She’s become an iconic image without uttering a word. The fact that her scantily clad and skin baring outfits generate so much controversy is proof alone that she's doing something artistically interesting.
3. UFC300
It’s been a rough year for UFC fans and we’ve had a lot to complain about, from Sean Strickland being flagrantly robbed of his championship to the ever uncertain status of Conor McGregor’s career. Luckily for Dana White, however, he achieved his Sistine Chapel with this pinnacle pay-per-view event. Assisted by glorious knock-outs delivered by Max Holloway and Alex Pereira, our blood lust is satiated for the moment.
4. The Beast
Basically every millennial filmmaker that people think is hot shit — Rose Glass, the Mexican lady who took over True Detective for its dreadful fourth season, every midwit launched by A24 since 2014 — pantomimes the aesthetic touchstones of David Lynch. In almost every case, the directors attempting “the Lynchian” fall on their faces because they merely mime the “weirdness” — ie the strange, alluringly goofy and kitsch images easily screen grabbed for social media — of Lynch without the vast ocean of mysteriousness and possibilities that engulf every frame of a Lynch project. These filmmakers, typically women, confuse ambiguity for laziness. Lynch revels in ambiguousness, while they are just too fucking insecure to make a proper movie, with a proper story, and a proper ending.
Bertrand Bonello, the French filmmaker originally associated with le Cinema du Corps in the early 2000s with his 2001 film The Pornographer, has made the first Lynchian masterpiece not actually directed by David Lynch. The Beast is so daring not because it’s particularly ambiguous, but because Bonello opts to go the direction of science fiction and boldly and confidently explain to the viewer exactly what this ponderous, time lapsing, surreal nightmare is actually. He proudly offers a mechanical reason for the film’s bewildering mystery. The main character, played by Lea Seydoux (magnetically, gorgeously, elegantly) lives in a future reality in which society has been taken over by AI and human consciousness, with all its poor impulse control, desires and failures, has become a redundancy. Seudoux is offered by the AI to do a “procedure”, Bonello tells us , to relive all of her past lives and thus neutralize herself of her human desire. This bizarre set-up paves the path for what is really an across the ages love story, as in every past life Seydoux’s character comes across a man, played by the remarkably shredded Brit George Mackey, and in one way or another fails to secure her love for the man. Across four different time periods, the couples comes together and is violently ripped apart. It’s beautiful and tragic, and left me with an ocean of thought for weeks after my initial viewing of the film. In the past life that takes place in the mid-2010s, we are treated to Mackey playing a violent incel posting Eliot Rodgers lines verbatim in his online videos. People were audibly laughing in the theater as they recognized the sly reference. And also Dasha indeed does play a model during the same time sequence.
5. Bjarne Melgaard Barney Does it All at Faurschou
You might call me biased given that Bjarne recently offered me what was likely the most interesting podcast interview I’ll ever host, but the Norwegian legend of contemporary art’s return to the New York gallery scene at Faurschou in Greenpoint is a stark reminder of Bjarne’s ability to consistently do, say, and make whatever the fuck he wants against an industry that runs on castrating its biggest stars. Bjarne is virile as ever with this massive showcasing of work made since he left Bushwick for his homeland some years ago. Heaps of oil paintings, chaotic drawings, vulgar sculptures and the show’s titular video Barney Does it All that, essentially, facilitates Melgaard telling his entire story: drugs, steroids, cock gobbling and all.
Despite the directness of the video, Melgaard said in his panel with the writer Alissa Bennett that he rejects “auto-fiction,” which I appreciate. Auto-fiction invites direct and simple interpretation, Melgaard even at his most auto-biographical, subverts easy interpretation. He’s one of the last truly idiosyncratic visual artists. A perpetual renegade. He will not be castrated, instead, he longs to see the art world itself castrated.
6. Alissa Bennett Taxidermist’s Handbook
I have no clue how people keep up with new books, as there are all ready so many available from the past that are still ripe for exploration (which doesn’t bode well for me, who likes making books, but it’s just the plain truth that no one reads anything, let alone keeps up with new fiction.) Seems sensible then that the best book released in 2024 that I actually read front to back is composed of several texts that I’d already read years ago.
Alissa Bennett lives a kind of double life. In one, she is well known as a director at Gladstone Gallery, in the other she is an obsessive compulsive writer who dedicated the bulk of the 2010s to a series of zines in which she opined on her lurid and tawdry fascinations with celebrity, tragedy, decadence and crime with a literary talent that formally elevates Bennett far beyond the typical books that normally swirl this kind of content. Indeed, the five zines that comprised her Dead is Better series were all bright spots of uniqueness and life in a decade highlighted by its literary conformism and deadness.
Here, all the zines are stacked together and sold as a nice looking book with every topic Bennett has addressed conjoined and turned into something like a novel. GG Allin, Paula Abdul, Selena, Layne Staley, Heidi Fleiss, strange crimes, and other weird obsessions all come together and form an undeniable aesthetic and utterly original “vibe”. That’s what I like about Bennett’s work, it is indeed a vibe. The modern literary world is generally composed of two sides of one coin: the mainstream of MFA holding academics vying for Pulitzer’s (dreadful) and the underground of randos vying for supremacy over schizoid, garbage writing and publishing on companies no one has ever heard of. In neither sides of that coin does anyone actually sell books. I don’t even know how this industry still exists. Bennett’s work is a reprieve because it’s so obvious that she is writing for no one else. It’s a portal to her way of thinking, which is really what art should be: a transportive aesthetic experience that gives you a glimpse of the artist’s worldview.
7. Matthew Barney Secondary
The only rival to Botched Chadification’s throne over the connection between the arts, extreme athleticism, and masculinity is Matthew Barney, who has been doing this kind of shit a lot longer than us. Barney’s Secondary came out in 2023 and abstractly alludes to a devastating sports accident: the horrific paralysis of the Patriots’ Jack Tatum after the Raiders’ safety Darryl Stingily pummeled him to the grass with the force of an SUV during the 1978 Super Bowl. Barney has always sought to make parallels between the way the artist sacrifices his ego with how the athlete sacrifices the body, and the Tatum case makes for a compellingly direct example of how far athletes will go to demonstrate to the world their greatness AND their vulnerability.
Anyways, never one to shy away from ambition or scope, Barney pollutes his broader vision across the globe exhibiting a series of sculptures, drawings, and a painting at Gladstone in New York, Sadie Coles HQ in London, Regen Projects in Los Angeles, and, in Paris, Galerie Max Hetzler and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain all based on the Secondary film. It’s very shocking to see anyone in the art world so obsessed with masculine feats of strength and ambition, but Barney has never dulled his vision. For whatever reason, he remains perpetually above the fray when it comes to the art world’s politics. No one fucks with him, not really anyways. He’s long achieved a level of power that has allowed him to basically make anything he wants.
8. The Lurking Corpses Lurking After Midnight
Writing about new music is fucking tedious. There is simply too much of it — too many records, too many artists, too many labels, too many genres and sub-genres and micro-genres — to adequately assess the importance of. The reality is music is just not that important anymore. It’s more of a personalized hobby than a culturally relevant art form and aside from a few mainstream acts — your Ye’s, Lana’s, etc — is impossible to write about in relation to the world. There are barely even any musical subcultures to lurk and observe, as it all basically exists as one ocean of data on the Internet dropped into your e-mail every week via Bandcamp. I feel like I buy records as decorations. Pretty objects to put on the shelf, otherwise left untouched while I stream from Apple Music on my AirPods.
That said, I still listen to music all day and am always excited when something new or interesting crosses my path. Cue in the Indiana-based “horror punk” group The Lurking Corpses, who actually formed decades ago but have returned after a long absence, a band that is so postmodern and pastiche it’d be nigh impossible for most people to find anything interesting about them. And yet, I detect a substantial artistry in the band’s kitsch, ‘50s B-movie, Grand Guignol theatrics as well as in its distillation of Danzig-esque vocal hooks, grindcore velocity, Christian Death-esque atmospherics, and occasional gestures to first wave black metal (Mercyful Fate, Venom, etc.)
Lurking after Midnight is the band’s new record, and I found it utterly refreshing and palette cleansing. I’m very tired of self-seriousness in basically all art, but very much so in extreme music. As hard as your average black metal musician claims to be, we all know tacitly that if any of these guys ran into any single one of the Bone Thugs N Harmony on the street, well, that black metal musician would have the ever living shit kicked out of him. The Corpses bypass all of that and distill the very essence of all this horror shlock, which is FUN. Yes, they are a fun band. It’s a return to the theatrical rock n’ roll of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Alice Cooper or even the early Roky Erickson solo albums. It’s a self-aware excavation of affect. Look, I admire the extreme sincerity and ideological rigidness and even righteous pretentiousness of the best black metal bands, but for the moment, the absurdity of the Lurking Corpses is hitting.
9. Darja Bajagic represents Montenegro the Venice Biennale
Six years ago, Darja Bajagic was damn near kicked out of the art world after a shadowy group of art world academic mulattos that operated beneath the banner of INVISIBLE DOLE conspired to get her duo show with none other than Boyd Rice at Greenspon Gallery canceled, for the exact reasons you might expect a Boyd show to get canceled. So, it’s rather triumphant to see her having weathered the storm, never apologizing, and moving forward with her distinct aesthetic and content and having wound up here in 2024 with the distinct honor of representing her home country of Montenegro at the Venice Biennale, which was otherwise one of the dreariest and most conceptually outdated editions of the storied exhibition to date.
Sure, it’s true that the exhibition required a little ideological laundering by curator Ana Simona Zelenović to get the work to adhere to the theme, but I’m proud of Darja nonetheless. Not everyone has to be me, saying what is exactly on their mind at all times and facing perpetual consequences because of. Some just stay silent and let their work do the talking. Dominick does this, and so does Darja. She’s at the peak of her career now, and I hope she does something interesting with the large platform she’s created.
10. The Perfume Nationalist Brokeback Mountain episode
Hadn’t watched this film in a very long time, and the last time I did I remember still being a bit too insecure to admit how much I loved it. Indeed, Ang Lee’s 2006 romantic drama depicting the lifelong love between two cowboys is a contender for the best film of the 2000s, and rewatching it after this tPN episode only reinforced its brilliance for me. Every frame in the film looks like an oil painting, shot on film against bewilderingly beautiful Montana landscapes. The story is tragic, of course, and beautiful. Those who don’t cry at its end might want to get their heads checked for soul sickness. Heath Ledger gave what is arguably one of the greatest lead performances in the history of cinema. What else can you say? Great episode and an incredible film.
CRINGE PROPAGANDA
1. Trump indictment
May 30, 2024: an absolutely humiliating day to be an American, when Trump was charged with some ridiculous and absurd amount of felonies for a matter as trivial as paying a whore to keep her fucking mouth shut. You shouldn’t even have to be a Trump supporter to recognize the hack job that the DNC and the Manhattan justice system just perpetrated against a former President or the fact that law fare can be directed at your doorstep at a moment’s notice. Trump’s election is now an emergency vote, if he doesn’t win there’s no end to what they can make illegal. This is a cultural fault line, if you are anywhere in the middle of this issue then you’re on the wrong end of it. Wafflers will not be tolerated.
2. The Sympathizer
The Sympathizer never had much of a chance. The series was developed from a novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2016’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, which itself reeked of MFA bait. If you, like me, recognize that the mainstream “literary” hierarchy has plummeted into meaninglessness for decades now, then you’ll have little difficulty understanding what I mean when I say that novels like this are jailbait for contemporary critics feeling the sting of their grad school debt fees and housebroken by the ideology of their industry. The novel is about a minority (a half white half Vietnamese unnamed spy), an event that we already know to both have been “bad” and, even better, an event that makes America look bad (Vietnam war), and palpable anti-colonial themes all make this kind of thing a shoe-in for today’s prestigious literary prizes.
I tuned in all the same to the HBO adaptation of the novel, out of loyalty to Park Chan-Wook. But holy shit, did this show suck or what? So many terrible decisions made. Among them, having Downey play all five white men that appear in the show — I suppose some joke about how the Vietnamese all see white dudes as indistinguishable — so we have to deal with Downey and his bullshit five times over. Horrible lead actor, wooden as a board and annoying to look at, makes you want to backhand the smugness right off of him. Very libtarded. Finally, the show was wildly boring in its first six hours, then decided to make its finale its own individual surrealist art-house film alluding to 1984 style reeducation torture that stretched for two hours. It was almost very impressive, but then went on for 20 minutes more beyond its ending and started to pile on the sentimental third worldist ideological pandering and fell apart again. So, it still sucked very badly.
3. Hit Man
You should know you’re about to watch an absolute mediocrity when RT presents you with a score above 95%. All this means is that midwit critics took no issue with the movie, which means there is nothing contained within the movie to take issue with, which means it’s a failed artwork. Hit Man is a big fat nothing. A star making performance for Glen Powell, they said, despite the fact that he’s completely forgettable and utterly flat in delivery. Clever script, they said. Boring script, nothing happens. It’s a Netflix movie through and through. Coasting on clicks. Linklater is, like the rest of his generation, completely lost and out of ideas with no ability to respond to the world and say something real about it. Netflix puts out a lot of trash, but this one really stings. This is, after all, the new film by the director of Dazed and Confused, a masterpiece of vibes, and Boyhood, a masterpiece of ambition and scope with a real sweeping beauty to it, and a film with A LOT of hype attached to it. I can’t even wrap my head around what a NOTHING this film is. Formally, aesthetically and politically hollow. The only real messaging it makes is that it’s morally neutral to KILL A COP for being somewhat “racist and misogynist,” so yeah, it’s a fucking miss, this one is. Linklater, please retire.
4. Whitney Biennial/Venice Biennale/Art World
What a bunch of fucking bums these people are. Perpetually stuck within the overwrought and pretentious self-hating white brain of Hal Foster, the art world is absolutely unmovable in its failed position. The world designed to be the most open to extreme creativity and provocative new ideas stopped creating around 2014 and stopped producing new ideas in 2016. It’s a fucking dead end and I’m glad to of washed my hands of that nonsense.
5. Chris Cuomo Apology Tour
Saw Chris Cuomo on the Adam Friendland show. Thought he was funny, smart: “maybe he deserves a second chance I thought.” My temporary lack of judgement was swiftly ended by everything Cuomo has done in the interim, like failing to take any accountability for his flagrant disregard for ethics during his time as a primetime CNN anchor during the lockdown, for instance. I don’t know what the fuck this guy is trying to do. It’s like he’s trying to edge into dissident media, his only means of making a wage after being destroyed by CNN for advising his scandal ridden brother, while still defending everything he did as an establishment backed hackjob. Fuck him. Whoever his TRT doctor is though, send me the details on that. Guy is dense as a brick for his age.
6. Mike Tyson/Jake Paul fight
Influencer culture is a fucking disease. I don’t care how much people with a passing interest in boxing cope about it. Yes, Mike Tyson was as good as it gets. Does that give his body a pass from the ravages of the aging process? Of course not. Whoever sanctioned the boxing match between Mike and the Youtube star turned “boxer” Jake Paul should be sent to the gulag. No, Jake is nowhere near at the elite level that Mike once was, BUT he is good enough to basically be a mid-level pro boxer. And he’s 27, in his physical prime. The fight has as of now been delayed to November and I for one hope that Mike cancels it entirely. Sure, there’s always a possibility that Mike pops the kid’s head off in the early round. But power is the last thing to leave the body. Timing and speed are the first, and he’s lost those decades ago. Would you expect that Michael Jordan, the best of all time, would be able to beat a college prospect in a game of one on one just because he used to be Michael Jordan? Get the fuck out of here. This is a horrible thing to do to a legend and a potential calamity of morbid proportions.
7. Love Lies Bleeding
I don’t know how you take such a fresh concept — bodybuilding, juice head dyke lovers committing crimes and scissoring until the end of Earth — and turn it into such a dreadful, dull, empty and lifeless movie? Oh yeah, you hire a woman that Indiewire regards as a genius to direct it, and watch it fall apart from there.
8. The Kendrick Lamar/Drake rap beef
If you are older than 15 and cared about the outcome of two overpaid, over-the-hill mainstream rap hacks doxxing each other you are probably retarded. These guys aren’t hard. At least in the ‘90s we could count on these guys to shoot each other over this shit. Now, this shit is marketing. Very low rent marketing for stupid and bored young men with bad taste.
9. Hunter Biden
I can’t stand this motherfucker. I despise irresponsibility. I loathe the inability to be discreet. And here he is, being kept whole by his brainwashed best friend and South Park lawyer Kevin Morris to weather the storm of a litany of felony charges ranging from illegal gun purchases to foreign money laundering. This man destroyed everyone he ever cared about. His wives, his kids, hell, even his girlfriends. The lovely artist Zoe Keston, who I know personally, has had her life upended by the brief mistake she made in letting him into her life, being forced to testify in the case of his drug addled gun purchase last week and still facing another witness stand in the fall. All this trauma perpetrated on everyone around him, and his shitbag of a father will continue to enable him. And will most certainly pardon him, whether he wins or loses these cases. If you’re a Democratic Party operative, you can be a criminal and live easy. If you’re a Republican voter, you are a criminal whether you commit crime or not. There’s a profound truth buried in there.
Alas, Hunter was declared guilty on all the gun charges this morning, so that’s somewhat a relief.
10. Mass Illegal Migration
It’s very rare that political and social trends have such direct, visible, and totally impossible to ignore day-to-day ramifications. But living in New York especially, you know you’re living in a pressure cooker that is mere moments away from exploding . The heat is turned all the way up, people are mad, resources are being drained, safety feels like an absurd proposition, and we just have no fucking clue what to do with all these people.
There are many daily reminders of the hell wrought by allegedly good intentions, but none so potent as that of illegal immigration. My wife has been attacked on the train twice, both by people who barely spoke English. My walk home from the train is like traversing through a hellscape where South Americans are often in fisticuffs and screaming at one another over who will pick up the Uber eats order that just came through. “Shelter city” is a concept developed by misguided, arrogant retards. 175,000 migrants entered the city limits by February alone, homeless shelters have doubled in population, and those numbers don’t even reflect the number of migrants too dangerous to house in those shelters. This is a fucking nightmare, and one that could have been so easily avoided. While so many citizens struggle just to make end’s meet, $2 billion have been spent trying to deal with the housing situations of people who don’t belong here. The crime, from bootlegging to theft to violent felonies, is only insult to injury. Yeah, obviously migrants commit less crime than citizens, there are less of them. But there is something extra offensive about people who snuck into our country abusing the privilege in such insidious ways. This has to have been the point of wokeness all along right? This is the single defining political issue of our time, and needs to be addressed immediately.
WILDCARD: Baby Reindeer
Never have I been so jarred and confused by my response to a streaming series as I was watching Richard Gadd’s autobiographical tale of his experience with a dangerous stalker, Baby Reindeer. There is a propulsive feeling to this show that gets you hooked early; it’s addictive, well written, and undeniably well-acted. Jessica Gunning as maniacal stalker Martha is particularly gripping; sweet, alluring and terrifying all at once. The show goes to places so dark that you end up totally shocked. I mean, I did not know that this would be a story about a failed comedian so desperate for fame that he all but allows for his own rape by a powerful behind the scenes power broker, and at the same time it was all so believable. It felt true and real. “I know people like this,” I thought. People so desperate to be told that their voice is valid and that their perspective is fresh that they will do ANYTHING for that validation.
But the show quickly backslides after that early brilliance, and then devolves into a fairly one-note, manipulatively woke, #metoo redemption story where the lead character, who insisted prior that he was not a victim because he was fully complicit in his victimization, plays up his own victimization. It was dreadfully disappointing, because I am damn near positive that Gadd has a real talent. A raw talent for storytelling, and to see him play to the Netflix authoritarian discipline machine totally stalled the story.
And then, the finale complicates my reading of the show again. There is no redemption. Gadd slowly reveals the fact that not only was he complicit in his own rape, but that he also encouraged and even somewhat enjoyed being stalked. It made him feel important, it made him feel seen. The series ends with him demonstrating some of the same dangerous online behavior that just led to his stalker Martha being locked up and once again Gadd fully implicates himself in his own tragedy. The ending felt true, you see, it felt correct. I’m sure this was an extremely difficult story to tell, and Gadd waffles at times trying to get through it, but ultimately ends it in an incredibly authentic and honest place.
I haven’t made a final verdict yet, but I do believe that a Gadd unchained to the Netflix ideological production machine might be an artist to watch, and I hope he can look back on both the failures and successes of his series and understand what it was in his own story that was compelling. I think this guy is simply too good to be playing to the #metoo easy way out tear jerking. I think he can write something truly special.
This is a fantastic write-up. Haven't seen Baby Reindeer, but pretty much view the Netflix logo as a harbinger of shit these days lol.
Totally agree on Brokeback! I, too, was a little insecure when it came out, but it's absolutely one of the best films of the decade. And Ledger's performance is an all-timer.