Based Safety Vs. Cringe Propaganda #39

This week in Based and Cringe

THOUGHTS

Talking with someone helped neutralize the power of the imagination. – Ryu Murakami

It’s not totally inaccurate for someone to label this project or me more specifically as “right wing.” This is, indeed, a right wing media space, and those that are drawn to it are also those who share my revulsion to liberal hegemony. That said, I’ve realized more and more that I am not, in most ways, conservative at all. In any other era, my laissez faire attitudes towards sexuality and drugs would make me totally consistent with the urban bohemian liberals of yesteryear. Despite my resentment for leftists and Marxists, I will never be able to accept that liberal capitalism is the end of history. So, it’s hard to deny that as much as I try to suppress them, there are still frameworks wired into my neural pathways that are Marxian. Perhaps this is testament to how truly insane the ideological status quo has become; if you just flatly reject the idea that black people are being slaughtered in mass by the state or are disgusted by the idea that children can or should ever be “trans,” you will end up on the right in 2022. There’s no way around it.

But, as my friends Jack Mason and Filthy Armenian recently opined on this excellent episode of The Perfume Nationalist centered around Ryan Murphy’s fantastic American Crime Story: Impeachment, the contempt for artistry, humor, openness and creative thought that has plagued the left as it was absorbed into the predominant power structure is one that also occupies a notable role on the right. Especially recently, when in the wake of Covid and the obscene failures of the Biden admin a new wave of bottom of the barrel right wing media figures like Pedro Gonzalez or Libs of TikTok has risen to the fore and enacted a wave of moral panics that aren’t totally unlike the ones stoked by #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Why am I supposed to take some avowed “TradCath” Twitter account telling us that sex before marriage is “spiritually bereft” more seriously than some “They/Them” leftist writing a long-winded thread about the racism of Raisin Bran or god knows what? It’s all the same fucking thing. It’s clickbait. It’s stupid. It makes no room for the complexity of human nature. It’s unserious, at a time when American citizens need seriousness. And perhaps even worse, it’s horribly boring and unfunny at a time when American citizens desperately need a bit of levity.

It’s one of the (many) weaknesses of postmodern liberalism that when the power structure adopts a certain cultural affectation (cultural hegemony is what that boring commie dago Gramsci called it) from one side of the liberal spectrum, those who oppose it will all immediately be lumped with the other end of the liberal spectrum. This is why someone like Malcolm McLaren, a slippery genius of a man and a hero of mine, was taken at face value as a leftist for his opposition to the stale, grey, buttoned up conservatism of the 1970s United Kingdom. Orthodoxies will always try to claim the free thinking as their own. This is why I am happy, despite the fact that inclusion would likely be financially beneficial to me, that I have evaded inclusion in all of the many Dimes Square “hipster right wing” think pieces that have emerged as of late. Sure, the narcissistic side of my personality feels jilted for a moment after seeing people that I have (true or not) marked as my imitators getting attention that I am not. But in the long-run, I know this is a strength. My views can’t be pinned down to these mediatized ideological cliques and will likely evolve and shift and be in the conservation longer than any of the orthodoxies that are having their five minutes of fame now. The cultivation of an audience, of YOU, has never felt more important to me than it does now. To earn the interest of people who GET IT, who will bare with me through the shifts in my viewpoints and beliefs, the artistic successes AND the failures, is an incredible asset. I am so grateful to you.

BASED SAFETY

There are two more great TPN episodes to address, given that Jack has swarmed his audience with greatness over the last week: first, Jack hosts Jana from Hate Fiction podcast to discuss the other American Crime Story, the one about Andrew Cunanan and his murder of Versace, and second, I join Jack to discuss the last two films by Gaspar Noé – the experimental 90-minute Yves Saint Laurent produced Lux Aeterna (2019) as well as the brand new Vortex. Vortex is the masterpiece of 2022 and might be signaling the dawn of a brand new era in film art history. To convince people of Gaspar’s unparalleled genius further, I offer up my May column to Compact Mag to emphasize not just the brilliance of Vortex, but also what Vortex forces us to acknowledge about Gaspar’s broader career: this guy has always been as good as it gets.

Dennis Cooper highlights the formally mind-blowing work of Kiwi-based kinetic sculptor and experimental filmmaker Len Lye. In a podcast episode guaranteed to make sexually neurotic right wingers freak out, Zac hosts Mommy Milkers herself on I’m so Popular to discuss the beauty of Marlon Brando, amongst other desires. Bret Easton Ellis, never a man to disappoint his legions of fans, opens up the sixth season of his podcast interviewing William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist and my personal pick for the ultimate movie of the New Hollywood Sorcerer, and it doesn’t disappoint. Geoff Shullenberger discusses school shootings, Bataille, and the use of “child sacrifice” rhetoric as a political bludgeon. And though this text isn’t new (it’s from January), I only recently read writer David Samuels’ (who, coincidentally, was a teacher of mine at NYU in the early 2010s and one of the greatest professors I ever had) interview with the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy: “I esteemed Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault much more. For me, Derrida was a level below. He was a great Talmudic commentator, but still a commentator…”

In one last final self-promotional whore plug, please check out our podcast System of Systems by Safety Propaganda’s latest episode with writer and philosopher Daniel Miller, his second time on the show, who has the specific intention of relaying his recent experiences in Mexico where he engaged in peyote rituals.

CRINGE

So, Netflix finally realizes that its business model of green-lighting everything in hopes of gaining prestige amongst the cinematic elite is unrealistic. They are bleeding green. The most interesting thing about this news for me is that for all Netflix's attempts at cinematic legitimacy (The Irishman, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, and even the wildly over praised Roma), not one of these films stuck with me. They all disappointed and bored. McLuhan, who was right about almost everything, infamously said "the medium is the message," and it seems that even if the artist is an icon, the medium that is Netflix will still reduce their visions to cold, clinical, near unwatchably boring drivel. Netflix was at its best when it was a vehicle for finding already released obscure films. I remember being able to see Antichrist on it down in my parents basement, high as a kite on opiates, and was shocked by the rabbit hole of weird films that I haven't seen before. I don't need or want Netflix to produce films. I just need them to have cool ones that I can watch whenever I want.

It’s not that anything that the aforementioned Pedro says about Zelensky in this article is wrong — it isn’t — it’s that its timing seems consistent with which I’m detecting to be a consistent trait on the “dirtbag right” that is functionally indistinguishable from the tendencies once displayed by the “dirtbag left”: he’s reiterating claims that have already been made for months by people who suffered consequences for taking those stances at a time when making these claims is already safe. I mean, shit: none other than massive platform having leftist Jimmy Dore has already been making these points for months. It’s media behavior.

What else? I don’t know. I’m too happy this week to access my spiritual piss and vinegar. What I can tell you is I hate this art a fucking lot! Jacobin is still publishing “material analyses” at the exact moment it’s culturally safe to do so and that are years too late to change anything. And, sorry I don’t want to freak out about this, but Meagan Day trying to claim Fassbinder — who explicitly hated leftists and said as much on the record after dealing with them earlier in his career collapsed whatever proletarian idealism he once held — for her useless little rich kid political faction evokes in me apocalyptic fury.

Finally, Joe Biden (or, whatever blue haired tranny military goblin they have writing his thoughts) states that he has no desire to prolong the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia. Well, then why the fuck are we giving them $40 billion in weapons and aid?

AMENDMENT: It has come to my attention that the Quietus is still publishing the vulgar displays of pearl clutching we’ve come to know them for – most recently, this writer Layla Legard, who appears to be at least five years behind in political discourse — refuses to enjoy The Northman for its alleged functioning as far right propaganda (god forbid a contemporary culture product act as propaganda hmmm yeah we’ve never seen this before how fascinating): “In this respect, it feels like 2022 is exactly the wrong time to produce a Viking epic. Unless you are going to be highly informed and challenge contemporary assumptions about Nordic culture there exists the danger of unwittingly producing a film that the far-right will idolise – essentially doing their propaganda work for them.” Guys, this is an absurd thing to publish — essentially a college essay made by a naive and politically dim 18-year-old — even for you.

ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Malcolm McLaren
2. Still from Len Lye
3. Fassbinder’s Mother Kunsters Goes to Heaven