been rotating this quote from Diaspora by Greg Egan around in my mind
"Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice."
It so neatly encapsulates my disgust with the idea of space colonization. Why do you presume that unchecked exponential growth is the only fate we can choose?
I’ll stop goncharov posting soon but can I just say how fascinating it is to me that the genre we picked was cold war mafia movie? because if you had asked the internet a month ago what kind of film tumblr would invent, if tumblr were to invent a film, the answers would have been way more woke. a queer coming of age romance or a sexy heist with a super diverse cast or live action infinity train or whatever.
instead, the hive mind, the collective, latched on to something with much narrower boundaries, with stricter rules. no cold war mafia movie would have “good gay rep” or “a happy ending”, like you might expect tumblr to want. we want, we made, something rife with hidden truths, deception and manipulation, suppressed and sublimated emotions. it’s a movie rife with symbolism and suggestion, a text that needs to be unpicked and puzzled over, not one that spoonfeeds us a morally pure protagonist.
the website famous for our shithouse reading comprehension made this complex metatext about methods of interpreting an ambiguous artwork and that’s given me more hope for humanity than I’ve gotten from the internet in a long goddamn time
NYT article abt goncharov has comments like 'what is the purpose of this film's existence these kids are just lying' motherfucker how do you think our ancestors survived. how do you think folklore formed. culture. music. art. PURPOSE????? do you think everything must be commodified? sold? weighed to be valued? has the rot in your soul spread so far you cannot find value in anything not spoken in numbers??? it's FUN. THAT'S WHY. THE PURPOSE IS THE ACT, THE MESSAGE IS THE MEDIUM, THE SYMBOL IS THE STORY. it brings people joy for its mere existence and that IS the point. existence is its purpose alone
also i'm such a gemma girlie. i don't mean in relation to mark or vs helly i don't care about any of that i'm a gemma girl forever. it's me and her. what if you thought you were eurydice until the last second until you turned around just in time to realize you were orpheus