American Horror Story Sucks: Horror in American Cinema, Part 1

I have a bit of a habit of getting into big-name TV shows later than everyone else -- I'm recalling a girlfriend who more or less forcibly sat me down in front of Game of Thrones. There are a few reasons for this, the big one being that unlike most of us, I am more or less incapable of binge-watching.

But I eventually come around, and years after I should have, I finally watched season 1 of American Horror Story. And it shouldn't surprise me that I couldn't stand it.

I hated the way that every character was completely unlikable -- not in and of itself, a sin, but an unlikable character has to at least be interesting enough that the viewer cares about their fates, and the Harmon family at the center of the story (the smarmy shrink husband, the self-righteous wife who can't stop calling the cops) was so insufferable that I just wanted the ghosts of the house to off them as soon as possible. I hated the way that high production values were used to gloss over the limp plot and complete lack of emotional involvement. I hated the off-kilter psychological-thriller camera angles that have been tired ever since David Fincher deployed them back in the '90s (and, hot take, Se7en kinda sucked), and which were used to create a false and adolescent sense of the "disturbing" in lieu of actually building an environment of dread.

 

 

But most of all, I hated the writing. Because horror, moreso than any other genre, is dependent on good writing. And this flabby mess of a script completely failed to horrify.

To provide true horror, something has to get under the skin. And when everything seems recycled from other media -- the mysterious and sinister wealthy next-door neighbor, the brooding teen heartthrob with a dark past, the kid-ghosts pretty much copied whole cloth from The Shining -- all you get is pastiche. Sure, there's plenty of gore to go around, but there's nothing visceral about it, and it would be more at home in a second-year theater student's Halloween costume than in the grisly body horror of The Thing or Videodrome.

One could argue that this was not the goal of showrunner Ryan Murphy and his cohorts, and that he self-consciously wanted to allude to the whole history of horror cinema (after all, the show is called American Horror Story). But there are any number of films that both knowingly incorporate these sort of midnight-movie tropes, and, if they don't just turn them into comedy (Cabin in the Woods-style), manage to find ways to celebrate and elevate them. House of the Devil comes to mind as one recent example, which very deliberately apes the style of '80s teen horror, but at the same time manages to be genuinely creepy through slow development of atmospherics. And similarly, in Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro managed to transcend the cliches of Gothic horror and English country-house fiction through his signature visual style and elements of the truly weird.

But when season 1 of American Horror Story just throws these tropes at the audience, subplot upon subplot, ragged end after ragged end, with the hope that a few would stick, with no regard to world-building, none of them made an impact. And because this was television and not independent cinema, the showrunners couldn't just throw world-building out the window and do a full-on freakout, like was masterfully done in Midsommar.

Here's the rub, though. Even if Ryan Murphy and his attendant media machine have completely failed to establish any kind of investment in the characters, the writing, or the imagined world, he has still managed to create a product that received both a large viewership and a relatively positive critical response. How is this?

The answer lies in this very maximalism.

A TV show is not supposed to have a drum-tight and coherent storyline in the same way a classically narrative film should. It is supposed to keep viewers on the hook. Therefore, each episode had to be reduced to a series of easily digestible themes, with enough memorable moments that could generate buzz from episode to episode, that could keep the Netflix viewers in a state of televisual bulimia.

And American Horror Story did just that. It didn't matter that the plot was a mess, that the characters were unlikable. The images were sharp and memorable, the scenery was beautifully composed, pointlessly jarring events occurred to fulfill the requirement of novelty "unpredictability," the actors themselves were photogenic and their emotional touchstones were easily relatable, if skewed enough to be deemed "artistic" (Murphy can't resist dropping in an emotionally volatile twink...). That's enough to both ensure that enough prestige tropes are hit to ensure both critical plaudits and ROI for the show's financiers.

Now would be a good time to give credit to Ryan Murphy where credit is due -- he also played a major role in the development of the sister series, American Crime Story, where his over-the-top impulses served him well. The two seasons cover sensational tabloid cases -- those of O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan -- where the reality was, if anything, more maximalist and absurd and hyperreal than the shows themselves. If you're writing about O.J. threatening to off himself in Kim Kardashian's bedroom, you really are better served by going big.

But it just doesn't work for horror.

So what is good horror? That, I fear, would merit another essay. And for that, part 2 will be coming soon.

The Klosterman Memos

The books that, without a doubt, make me think the most are not the ones I adore, nor the ones I hate, nor the ones that I have neutral feelings towards (obvs). They are the ones where I understand the perspective, but something is just... off. Like the gloomy, bug-eyed pianist Theodor Adorno said, the splinter in your eye is the sharpest magnifying glass.

So it was when I recently read Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself in Order to Live, his... travelogue, I guess?... about driving around America to places where various rockstars had met their makers, Duane Allman in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Jeff Buckley on an ill-advised swim in Memphis, half of Lynyrd Skynyrd falling to earth in the Mississippi woods, Kurt Cobain by suicide... OR WAS IT?!... on Lake Washington Boulevard in Seattle, and the rest.

The deaths are incidental -- in fact, it's pretty fucking shoddy as a framing narrative for a ramble about his cultural obsessions and his fading youth and a series of very self-consciously ill-advised relationships with women he puts on pedestals.

When I was in college, Chuck Klosterman's star was much higher. Back in the halcyon days of warbly, Bush-era new sincerity, as the slacker generation failed to reckon with the fanged horrors of the dawning 21st Century (see attached documents: the film The Station Agent, the discography of Death Cab for Cutie), his self-described "low-culture manifesto" and landmark essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs was a major cultural set-piece, to the point where if I was a filmmaker setting a movie in 2002, I would use a copy of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs as a linchpin in the male and female leads' meet-cute.

So what is it? Aside from being the most goddamn Gen-X a title as one can imagine (and while we're talking about Gen-X markers, he is of the youngest possible age to still call weed "pot"), it is a series of essays about Star Wars, the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, The Sims, and shit like that. In other words, it's the same cultural perspective as the aimless conversations in Clerks. This style reached its most refined and mind-expanding form in the essays of David Foster Wallace, and its most egregious and twee form in the oeuvre of Dave Eggers. The Cocoa Puffs book is somewhere in between. In fact, I remember being charmed at points as a 20 year old, even if I did kind of envision Klosterman giggling to himself through his oblong black plastic glasses as he typed out his missives in the cold glow of his laptop.

And so it was when I read Killing Yourself in Order to Live, although the moments of charmedness were far sparser. The more I read, the more annoyed I became at someone who was very aware of the fact that he was being called "self-indulgent" or "masturbatory," and who would inevitably address the self-indulgence of his own self-indulgence and metaphorical or literal masturbation in an infinite series of recursive backflips, all ending in some elaborate analogy to the cover art for Appetite for Destruction or the always-a-bridesmaid status of the Jim Kelly-era Buffalo Bills. 

Perhaps this is a difference of age. Perhaps it's the fact that when I first read Klosterman, I was in my early 20s, and far more easily wowed by pyrotechnical meta-melanges than I am now. After all, I was doing a lot of questioning of grand narratives back then, and metashit seemed to be at least an honest answer for how to create art in the era of late-stage capitalism. And while Klosterman seemed to be... well, a dork... he at least had a wit about him and the sort of goofy charm that I always associate with people raised in the painfully earnest Upper Midwest.

Perhaps it's that I am now, at 34, the aimless metropolitan fast approaching middle age that Klosterman embodied. Remember what I said a few paragraphs ago about fading youth and ill-advised relationships? Yep. That was once a lifestyle I looked up to. Now that I seem to be in that whirlwind, I have little use for a guy who seems to be even worse at navigating that than I am. And maybe it's the fact that I didn't grow up an end-of-history Gen-X'er, but retreating into an infinite mirror maze of self-reference, repetition, and simulacrum doesn't seem a valid option anymore (nor does any kind of mealymouthed sincerity, but that's a conversation for a different day).

But here's the weird thing, and one that remarkably few people seem aware of -- Klosterman is capable of so much more. I would strongly advise picking up his debut novel, Downtown Owl, the story of a few people living in a small North Dakota town in the early '80s, which is nothing like his essays. Sure, there are plenty of pop culture references, and I'm remembering the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup providing a major plot point, but they are by no means front and center. Instead, it's a chilly, sparse novel of human yearning, centered around the intersecting lives of a high school football player, an old curmudgeon at the diner, and a recently transplanted schoolteacher, with more in common with the dead-dream landscapes of The Last Picture Show or the stories of Sherwood Anderson or Raymond Carver than the Tarantinized ennui of the man's nonfiction.

So is there hope for his work?

He's since gone on to publish sets of cards in black Helvetica on a white background, making them look an awful lot like Cards Against Humanity, the funny-the-first-time-you-play game which bills itself as the "card game for awful people" but which is in reality the "card game for giggly pudgy edgelords."

The use of Helvetica is telling -- it would have been a standard choice a decade or so ago, and it made its appearance on every sign on Seattle's Capitol Hill when I traipsed her streets in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but has since ceased to be the typography of choice for the literary caste.

And so I'm convinced that Klosterman's essays slot in along with the first two Shins albums -- a reminder of a time and place, not without its charms, but something I can comfortably move on from.

Ghost Towns

Many years ago, at a time in my life when the future seemed more possible, I sat in a class taught by an old grump who seemed the perfect stereotype of the liberal-arts college professor, tweed and beard and bourbon and all. The class was on Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway, and as one of our texts, we read Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night."

Hardly hip reading, and generally considered a second-fiddle player to Gatsby, complete with a corny-as-fuck title. But it has moments of absolute transcendent beauty, all revolving around the central thesis of the dying world of the French Riviera as the pall of the Great Depression settled over the world, and the protagonists, an alcoholic couple, almost acting as a stand-in for the horror of Fitzgerald's contemporary world, as well as the alcoholic miasma that Fitzgerald was settling into, that would eventually take his own life.

I don't know why these are the lines I remember best:

"The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names--Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo--began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha's eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast--their closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes they favored were put away until their return. 'We'll be back next season,' they said, but this was premature, for they were never coming back any more."

And many years later those were the lines on my mind as I traipsed through the largely boarded-up beach towns of Southern Thailand -- first Chaweng on the island of Koh Samui, followed by Kata, towards the south of Phuket.

I had gone south to use up vacation days I couldn't use in the annus horribilis of 2020, to escape the confusion and drudgery of my urban life. After all, don't the movies so often provide a sense of reconciliation, of future, by having the protagonist run down to the sea? I went to do a quick journalistic assignment, to spend a happy week or so swimming and sunning and drinking elaborate rum cocktails and possibly sharing my (heavily discounted!) resort room with a nice woman. 

It was not to be.

From day one, I was plagued by sickness, technological failures, heavy rains, vicious rip tides, attempted scams, trying to figure out if I was being scammed by listening in on the people around me but being stymied by their incomprehensibility, given their speaking in the harsh seagull squawk that is the Surat Thani accent, a couple screaming at each other and smashing glasses in the next room ("I do fucking everything for you, you fucking bitch!"), services canceled, and above all else, the absolute lassitude of the place.

Everywhere I went were the signs of what once was, 90 percent of shops closed. There were the shut-down hotels, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, souvenir shops, tailors, massage shops, health spas, travel agencies offering cheesy elephant tours and GoPro rentals for your sea kayak, convenience stores (not a single 7-11 or Family Mart left open in Kata). There were the signs -- in Hebrew ktav ashuri, Chinese characters, hangul, katakana, and Cyrillic -- indicating the people who were once here and would likely not be back for a very long time.

The few shops open in Chaweng seemed mostly Indian-run -- the upcountry Thais seem to have had the good sense to pack up and go home, but given the current desperation of India and their possibly questionable legal status in Thailand, they found it best to stay on and weather the storm. They smiled at me, offered Hawaiian shirts and garlic naan. 

Perhaps saddest of all, there were the remnant sex workers, "masseuses" in black cocktail dresses and blush awkwardly smeared on over their pancaked foundation, doing their best attempts at a sexy dance to pounding mor lam music in front of massage parlors where fluorescent light illuminated the peeling floral wallpaper in the reception area, pouting their best at me and tutting "pai nai?!" as I refused their come-ons.

I did my best to enjoy myself, truly. I swam many long, happy hours in the South China and then the Andaman Sea. I drank strong mojitos at one of the few "beach club"-type bars still open where they were for some damn delightful reason playing the club bangers that my 20 year old self obsessed over, Glass Candy and Kavinsky and LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends," I ate (with sheer joy at the weirdness of it) a violently spicy (true South Thailand spice, for those in the know, with an obscene amount of still-green black pepper ground up into it, the copious coconut cream doing nothing to blunt the spice levels) sea-anemone curry. I read the gloomy anarchist philosophy of Max Stirner and the optimistic Marxist science fiction of China Mieville. I gathered branches of many species of coral that had washed up on the beach on my long walks.

And yet inevitably, I ended every evening with a sighing solo beer, staring out at the crashing waves, the eerie green lights of the squid boats flickering along the water.

The last night in Kata before I was due to fly back to Bangkok, I decided to stop in one of the Russian restaurants that were still open (it's called Veranda, by the way, shout out if you're on Karon or Kata Beach, dope-as-hell food), and the only one that seemed to have a fair number of Russian customers, seemingly the last on the island -- young men who looked like MMA champions and their girlfriends with pulled-back blonde ponytails, roots exposed, in awkward ballerina dresses, and their elders, men looking like Ohio highway patrolmen with short-cropped blonde hair effortlessly fading into their sunburned neck fat.

The meal itself was excellent, a nice chilled bowl of okroshka made with proper kvass and bittersweet radishes for the hot weather, followed by chicken-mushroom croquettes, all washed down with plenty of vodka. But as I sat back at the end of the meal, saw the signs of neighboring restaurants fading across the road, the chalk menus offering an "ekzotika" menu of weird local meats and fishes that were probably no longer even kept in the walk-in, the white lattice and fake flowers evidencing a still-Brezhnevian aesthetic sensibility, that I thought again about Fitzgerald's lines again.

And then I realized the inevitable sadness of tourist towns, even in peak season -- that they are inevitably defined by people who are generally not there.

And I was one of those people who was generally not there. And 12 hours later, I was there no longer.

Amanda Gorman's Shitty Poetry: An Intervention

Generally speaking, I despise culture-war issues, and consider them to be a needless distraction. If you actually care about a potato-headed toy losing its gendering, you are quite likely an idiot.

But sometimes when something hits near and dear to my heart -- in this case questions of poetry, translation, and meaning -- I feel the need to intervene.

It was reported in the Guardian, among other sources, that the Catalan translator of Amanda Gorman's debut book of poetry "The Hill We Climb" was being removed from his assignment on the grounds that he was not a young, black woman -- remarkably, the second such row over the translation of this one book in Europe. Oh dear.

Even if you accept the shaky-at-best premises of standpoint epistemology, what connection is there between the experience of a black Catalan, likely a first- or second-generation Subsaharan African, and a black American, beyond being subject to systemic racism, when even the systemic racisms they experience are pretty fucking different? Does this very presupposition -- that the translator of a work needs to share a similar set of demographic characteristics as the author -- negate the very idea that a work is translatable, understandable, or communicable across societies, and if you carry the idea to its logical extreme, even between individuals? Doesn't this reduce the nature of an artistic work to the author, in complete ignorance of every lesson and every intellectual debate of literary theory in the 20th Century, from the New Criticism movement and the Frankfurt School on through thinkers as diverse as Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, and Harold Bloom?

All of that being said, I'm not surprised. Ever since I saw the clip of her reading her poem at the Biden inauguration, her work was, fully and completely, reduced to her personhood. The quality of the poem didn't matter -- it was the media image of a young black woman with a Harvard education reading a poem, something that, in the American liberal imagination, functioned as a negation of the state-sponsored racism and crass vulgarity of Trump and Co.

I had vaguely remembered the video, and that I'd watched it and not been impressed. But I figured, what the hell, let me look at it as I would any other poem.

It fucking sucked.

To be fair, so does inauguration poetry in general, all the way back to John F. Kennedy having middlebrow fave Robert Frost give a reading. I get it, it was shared widely on social media, and largely by people who would consider themselves educated. If you look at the text, its substance is no more sophisticated than a motivational poster ("We've braved the belly of the beast / We've learned that quiet isn't always peace" -- pretty sure I heard a pimply white kid read that at a slam poetry night freshman year). But here's the thing -- it sounds poetic, in that it sounds like the idea of poetry in a world in which poetry has been all but expunged from the public sphere.

It's a point I belabor a lot. A lot of the "intellectual discourse" in the contemporary English-speaking world is really an illusion of discourse. People are drawn to Ben Shapiro because he sounds like he's debating, when he's really just yelling and invoking the concept of logic rather than actually deploying it. People are drawn to Jordan Peterson because he invokes a near-astrological conception of personality and uses it to provide fatherly advice, and this seems like psychology. People are drawn to Robin D'Angelo because white liberals prefer to engage in performative, self-flagellating mea culpas rather than admitting the ways in which capitalism props up the white supremacist order.

All of that being said, I can't blame individuals -- I really, really try not to -- because people really are deprived of a humanities education, given the way that testable metrics have become the focus of the American educational system and the system itself is largely taken over by disaster capitalists (see the near-complete dismantling of the public school system in New Orleans), leaving little room for the subtleties of perception and interpretation.

In an era in which information is so omnipresent in our lives, to the point where it's overwhelming, it would seem obvious to me that it's these perception and interpretation skills that are necessary for sorting it out -- failing that, you are likely to get a bad case of Joe Rogan brain.

For those of us who put great stock in the humanities, it's a massive fucking bummer.

But when you find contemporary cultural products that still resonate -- recent works by Jarett Kobek, Ben Lerner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Celeste Ng coming to mind, as do the media-studies texts of Evgeny Morozov, as did David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" -- it's a revelation. Those are the moments when, staring at the page, there is a hand on your shoulder. You are not crazy. You are not alone.

On Music and Writing

In December, I began a standard ritual. It's a ritual I've been doing for over a decade – going through Pitchfork's year-end top 100 songs and listening to them, in order, from number 100 to number 1.

I'm not going to comment on the music itself. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. Much of it is in-between. Some of it might be good, but it is not for me, or for people of my general inclination, but there are still reasons to qualify it as by and large good. These are not the issues I care to write about. After all, is there anything more tedious than an aging hipster bitching about contemporary music? (Answer: yes, there is, and it's an aging hipster glomming onto contemporary music in a pathetic attempt at youthful enthusiasm).

What I wish to write about, rather, is the writing about the music.

Consider their commentary on their number 1 for 2020, Cardi B's “WAP” (and Ben Shapiro's song-that-must-not-be-named, a fact which will forever be hilarious):

“...a Cardi verse somehow tributes the unsung uvula amid an imposing tour de force of lecherous metaphors.”

Really?

To a certain degree, I have a sympathy for the writers. If they want to say that a song is a banger, there are only so many ways they can. There are only so many descriptors, so many adjectives, especially when it comes to pop music that has its appeal in groove and hook more than anything else (credit where credit's due, Cardi has had some very clever lyrics in her day, albeit in other songs). When a music critic tries to review a DaBaby song, say, there's only so much you can milk out of the repeated phrase “I'm a young CEO, suge” before getting to the point where there's more analysis in your review than in the song itself. There's a reason that the absolute most common album review I hear referenced in conversation is a Pitchfork review of a Jet album that was just a link to a monkey peeing in its own mouth.

Furthermore, lyrical complexity doesn't really make the critic's task any easier, because the lyrics are inextricably embedded within the music. It's hard to think of a dumber Nobel literature prize than that given to Bob Dylan, because no matter how much 16 year old boys in Middle America (spotlight casually falling at my feet) would like to claim that Dylan's lyrics are poetry, they would be absolutely godawful if they were actually written down as poems. Consider Desolation Row:

“Ophelia she's 'neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She is already an old maid

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession's her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness.”

See? Just awful, high-school creative writing class shit. But in Dylan's voice with his spare guitar, it's heaven.

And when you think about those songs that form the soundtrack to your life, it's rarely the song in and of itself that you think of – it's the context. It's where you were, both geographically and in your life, it's the nostalgia of old friendships, first loves, long drives.

Yet in another era – not too long ago – poetry was itself a form of music. It was meant to be remembered and recited, with a rhythm akin to that of what we have formalized as music, and in oral cultures, there is very little distinction between poetry and music. A time before those of us in the industrialized world didn't have to deal with the shattered remnants of a dead God. When the stained-glass windows of Chartres were the most radiant thing one would see, when the emperors were still descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu.

And while such things are but distant memories, their residue is all around us.

We still seek the transcendent, and it is so often that that transcendence cannot be reduced to words.

It hits you as see the afternoon light moving across the corners of your room.

Survivor's Guilt

I try not to watch the news from America anymore. The abject horror simply becomes too much, and I've come to realize that basically, the country that I still, at least in a formal sense, call home, has completely given up. I saw, like a lot of people, the chart where four of the deadliest days in American history were in the previous week – exceeded only by 9/11, the 1903 San Francisco Earthquake, the Battle of Antietam, and the (weirdly forgotten) 1900 Galveston Hurricane. Which apparently excluded Gettysburg and the Spanish Flu, but point taken all the same. Meanwhile, my Iowa hometown has frequented among the most pandemic-ridden places in America, and thereby on Earth.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting poolside with a cucumber Italian soda, reading A Dance to the Music of Time, wondering whether to go to the little French bistro with the white tablecloths, now that it's the season for game and white truffles, or whether to keep it simple and just go to the sushi place down the street. And darling, do we have enough Campari for a round of Negronis?

It might (will) sound melodramatic, but I imagine that this is not too different a feeling from that experienced by the great wave of European intellectuals who wound up in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, ready to be recruited by Hollywood and by the newly wealthy universities of the West Coast. Their home countries were ripped to shreds and turned to headlines, even as they had martini-lunch meetings with MGM.

I'm in this weird blank spot on the planet that's been relatively unaffected, despite a recent outbreak in a distant industrial suburb. My job continues unabated. I actually lost weight during the lockdown. Sure, I can't travel, and that's something of a raison d'etre for me, but really, how much of a complaint is that? Does it have any validity? “What a DRAG, I can't go to Sri Lanka this year...” This is where I'd tell myself to fuck right off.

So I tell myself to feel gratitude. But the flipside of that is that with everything I'm grateful, for there is an inevitable sense of survivor's guilt.

I've often been accused of fatalism, owing to the fact that I generally believe that we as individual, atomized humans are tossed about by grand physical, biological, historical, and economic forces that we have more or less no control over, and that the true horror and despair occurs when we are forced to confront our own essential powerlessness.

Meaning that even though I myself have escaped unscathed, what does that mean, when I look around and see nothing but prospects getting progressively dimmer and dimmer? If I were to return to America anytime soon – as I'd been seriously considering before – what would there be to return to? A diseased, economically depressed landscape, riven with political strife, operating solely for the enrichment of a callous ruling class. And then, this is compounded with the horror and the sneaking suspicion that most places aren't that much better off right now.

I try to donate to decent causes, to perform random acts of kindness. All of which ultimately feels less like I'm expressing any kind of agency and more like I'm paying indulgences.

And then I go back and repeat the cycle. I fetch my towel and my sunglasses, and my copy of A Dance to the Music of Time. Iced Americano, this time, though.

I close my eyes, the patterns of the tropical sun dance around beneath my eyelids. The sun's fangs drip with blood.

Ozymandias at Arecibo

It's remarkable how much of my education I can attribute to my childhood/teen habit of watching late-night television. Before the Internet, this was where the mystery lay.

I was seven or eight years old, watching the X-Files – a habit that helped instill in me a lifelong love of the weirdness and darkness lurking around the American fringe. There was a lot of snide talk about “little green men,” a lot of cagey dialogue, gray sky.

Agent Mulder ran along the edge of what was identified as the Arecibo Radio Observatory – white guy-wires criss-crossing the elegant curve of a massive, concave satellite dish, precise lines contrasted against the verdant Puerto Rican jungle.

 

Nothing seemed more indicative of the modernist idea of the future. It was the same impulse I'd registered in old atlases from the 1950s and 1960s, with their breathless prologues proclaiming exploration as the... dramatic pause... destiny of man, at a time when such grand notions could be contemplated. I'd registered this impulse in diagrams of orbital paths, the ocean depths, cloud patterns. Nothing seemed to be a purer representation of the human will to enter communion with the stars.

On December 2^nd, as I scrolled through the headlines of the day – continued political fracas and pandemic spread across America (expected, miserable), the transitioning of a pint-sized Canadian actor (and pausing to wonder, over my coffee, if any nerdy dudes were no longer able to masturbate to Kitty Pryde) – there it was.

My childhood image of scientific progress lay there shattered,the jungle lurking beneath the cracked concrete.

 

In 1960, construction began on the Arecibo Radio Telescope, designed to study the ionosphere as part of a DARPA project to allow for more effective scanning of ballistic missiles. As with so much American science of the mid-20^th Century, the spirit of discovery was facilitated by Cold War interests. And yet it became known not for any defense against the ICBMs that never came, but for its pivotal role in astronomical observation. This was where solid evidence of the neutron star was found, where the binary pulsar was first observed, and where, in 1974, Carl Sagan and others transmitted a radio frequency towards the Hercules Global Cluster in the impossible hope that some alien species would find it, decode it, and nod towards us as an intelligent species.

That kind of optimism seems, in 2020, to be so damn naive. And it's not just the fact that it's been a shit year (not helped by Facebook Boomer “2020 duhr huhr huhr” memes). It's the fact that this was a once-mighty site of scientific endeavor, slowly defunded as the American public sector was strangled to death by increasingly fiscally hawkish governments over the '90s and '00s, until it was a mere shell of its former self. In 2016, Arecibo lost its position as the world's largest single-aperture telescope to the new Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou Province, China, and in 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, leaving millions of Puerto Ricans without power and water for months, even years, fully revealing the colonial nature of the island's relationship to the mainland. Cracks had begun to appear, and by the time Arecibo collapsed, plans were already underway for decommissioning.

It would be a hack metaphor if it was in a movie, wouldn't it be? The proud American institution crippled by the neoliberalizing state, before final humiliation by Chinese competition, a hurricane in all likelihood exacerbated by climate change, before finally giving up the ghost. Insert undertones of militarism and colonialism that existed since the beginning.

But if there's one thing I've learned over the last year, it's that things that would be hack metaphors in sci-fi movies are depressingly close to the reality we have, the reality of deepfake videos, Silicon Valley choked in orange haze, major news leaks coming through Tiktok, the Internet being dominated by clips of braying idiots demanding their right to not exercise pandemic protections at Yankee Candle, and Belle fucking Delphine.

Perhaps that's why I mourned Arecibo more than expected.

And perhaps that's why Sagan's hopeful message of 1974 seems more like a retelling of a certain Shelley poem:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."