Propoganda, Hollywood & Ideology | The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The greatest art makes you question. Question who you are, what you believe. Question the assumptions you make about the world around you. Question the fabric of reality, the nature of being. Question free will or fate. Question systemic influences of behavior, or intrinsic human desires. It does not answer, because in answers we find a more shallow understanding of ourselves and of the world’s complexity.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of these great pieces of art. Its questions are not concerned with your preexisting notions of the Vietnam War, nor will it dichotomize the opposing sides into good and bad, right and wrong. The complexities of the War are not simplified, and our American-centric perspective is challenged at every turn. If you read closely and mindfully, you may finish the book having examined the very nature of your way of thinking, our collective desire to neatly place thought into ideological boxes that give us an easy position on any issue.
The Iron Giant: You Are Who You Choose To Be
What if a gun had a soul? What if a gun didn’t want to kill? What if a weapon of mass destruction resisted the one thing it was designed to do? These are the questions Brad Bird posed in The Iron Giant (1999), and 25 years later after its release, the animated classic is more relevant than ever. It’s an intense movie with serious themes for a child, and yet it delivers its message with such poignant candor that kids can understand it and adults can resonate with it. The Iron Giant is about identity at its core, about choosing who you want to be, but it’s also about violence, mortality, xenophobia, and friendship.
‘Frankenstein’: The Futility of Thoughtless Ambition
Vanity masquerades as individuality. Selfishness masquerades as acheivement. Pointless pursuits masquerade as progress.
Victor Frankenstein embodied these ideas when he devoted years of his life to merciless toil in the name of science. He was vain, selfish, and pursued great accomplishments, not for the sake of improving the world or helping people, but for his own ego and legacy. The cruel twist of irony in Frankenstein is that exactly this arrogance that doomed him to a life of vicious misery.
Mary Shelley’s wrote Frankenstein, the 1818 classic of gothic horror and science fiction, in the age of—and largely in response to—the Industrial Revolution, a time of great human “progress” and “achievement”. It is a harrowing tale of a scientist that goes too far and creates a monster in his desire to learn “the secrets of heaven and earth”. And although he occasionally frames this thirst for knowledge as a driver, the much greater desires, by his own admition, are glory and power. Frankenstein says, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”
The Transcendent Power of Art in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’
Celine Sciamma’s 2019 masterpiece of desire, forbidden love, and tragedy
Director Céline Sciamma decided upon two key omissions early in production of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). First, that there would be few smiles from the all-female cast in what became the first 70 minutes of runtime. Second, that there would be no music, save two scenes where it crystallizes with the power and emotion of a thunderstorm. “…you will have to find the musicality of the film elsewhere,” Sciamma said in an interview with IndieWire. “In the rhythm of the scenes, in the bodies of the actors.”
Portrait of a Lady on Fire masterfully captures a desire that swells like the tumultuous ocean that Marianne and Héloïse gaze upon while stealing longing glances at each other, until the swells coalesce and produce a grand wave of passionate hunger, a necessity for each other’s touch. Portrait portrays the yearning and desperate lust of an early relationship better than any film I’ve seen, all upon the tragic backdrop of the lovers’ knowledge that what they’ve captured cannot last.
A Remarkable New Identity
The Next Chapter of Blog, Podcast & More.
I’ve been complacent for most of my life. I’ve taken the path of least resistance at every turn, like a nomadic human choosing to forage berries and nuts rather than go through the tiresome and sometimes unfruitful process of hunting gazelles. But the nomad who subsists on only foraged foods and disregards the need for protein will grow stunted in body, mind, and spirit. I did not realize the critical error in my apathy until it seemed too late.
This is a severely limiting belief—that it’s too late—and one I refuse to accept. Such is a central theme of this next Remarkable™ chapter, which we’ll get to shortly. Discovering one’s true calling (I don’t think I even like “calling” it this), beneath all the bullshit distractions of modern society, is no easy task. Maybe for some it is—and for those people I offer a hearty congratulations and a whisper of “fuck you” under my breath—but not for me.
The Word for Human is Violence
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972) examines whether violence is human nature or not.
Humans and killing go together like Subarus and Colorado. We kill one another with such frequency that we’ve developed cute little names for all the different kinds—genocide, xenocide, fratricide, regicide, etc. And of course there’s war—for resources, conquest, religion, independence, glory—which is so synonymous with human history that it seems no fantasy or sci-fi story can exist without it.
We all know a No-Face
Spirited Away and the importance of identity in a rapidly-changing world
We all know a No-Face. Someone who has no true identity, who mirrors their environment in order to fit in, who doesn’t possess the ability to think for themself. Someone who parrots whatever opinion or hot-take is popular on Twitter that week. Someone who is addicted to external validation and consumption. Lonely and insecure, these No-Faces crave connection or purpose, and think the best way to achieve their goal is to loudly conform to societal expectations.
I know this because I was No-Face for a time in my early 20s
Every Book I Read in 2023, Ranked
2023 was the year of reading, and—to a lesser extent—writing. I am on pace for 41 books read this year, after 22 in 2022, and 10 in 2021. I’ve also more than doubled my page count from last year. So, what was the key to unlocking my reading potential? Well, it boils down to two main factors: habits, motivation, and knowing what I like. I have a lot of free time in my new-ish WFH life, yes, but I was unemployed in 2022 and read almost 20 books less, so it can’t only be time.
The key, for me, was building strong habits around reading. I read nearly every night before I go to bed, usually 30-90 minutes. I used to listen to podcasts, but reading calms me and helps me sleep better. That probably made up the bulk of my reading, but I also would make a habit of taking a book outside during a nice day and reading in nature.
