What happens when Alien (1979) and The Abyss (1989) have a child? They call it Underwater. The daughter of two legends manages to twist and turn her parents upside down and inside out, taking the time to make a few family jokes. Our household was split over her ability to really scare. The claustrophobic me found the whole thing very unsettling. The other half was a little bored by her, but all things considered Underwater (2020) gets on well with her older brother Life (2017). They’re your typical brother and sister, sat beside each other, squabbling over who gets more of the sofa.
A post from Mona Chalabi popped up on my social this morning.
As you can see it’s a beautifully cutting analysis of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent $25 million donation to help in the fight against coronavirus. She manages to show in the simplest way possible just how much Zuckerberg has sacrificed to the greater good. Twenty-five million dollars is few millilitres, a squirt from the vast glass of his $81 billion fortune.
In the old days, in the UK, a billion meant an million million, but since 1974 the UK Government has used the American definition of a billion when announcing figures. An American billion is just a thousand million, or a one followed by nine noughts; 1,000,000,000. Even using this lower scale, Zuckerberg’s $25 million donation accounts for only 0.03% of his current $81 billion fortune.
To give this some perspective. $81 billion is the equivalent to the gross domestic product to Cameroon. A country ranked 90th by the CIA in their World Factbook, that includes a listing of countries by GDP.
Basically Zuckerberg has more money at his disposal than bottom 53 countries of the World Factbook list combined. His personal fortune is the equivalent to the combined gross domestic product of Guam, Liberia, U.S. Virgin Islands, Cape Verde, Djibouti, The Gambia, Guernsey, Central African Republic, Andorra, Belize, Curaçao, Guinea-Bissau, Seychelles, Aruba, Cayman Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, Greenland, San Marino, Gibraltar, Faroe Islands, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, ComorosSolomon Islands, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Western Sahara, Dominica, Vanuatu, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Sao Tome and Principe, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tonga, Saint Martin, British Virgin Islands, Sint Maarten, Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Falkland Islands, Cook Islands, Kiribati, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Marshall Islands, Anguilla, Nauru, Wallis and Futuna, Montserrat, Tuvalu, Saint Helena, Niue, and Tokelau.
Why’s that a problem? Twenty-five million dollars is a large sum of money. It’s a problem because the billions Zuckerberg has taken from the economy, and is now sitting on, might be the difference between people living or dying, not just from COVID-19 but generally.
I’ve been sorting through some files on my computer and I came across something I wrote as part of a job application. One of those quirky questions they toss in at the end to “challenge you”. They asked “if you were superhuman, what would your superpower be?”
Here’s my reply.
When asked the same question one of my friends answered flippantly, invisibility. They wanted to be invisible so they could spy on people. Because the superhero is the territory of the adolescent, it’s hard not to be flippant, there’s something very childish in all of our answers.
When you really think about the same question as an adult, the answer is very different. For adults superpowers are less super, more human. As an adult I think my superpower would be strength.
Strength of character.
Strength of will.
Strength of intellect.
We all make up stories to help us understand the world. I constructed one about a super-villain called Mr. Panopticon.
The Panopticon was a circular prison designed by 18th Century social theorist Jeremy Bentham. In his design the cell walls are made of glass, transparent, allowing prisoners to be watched at any time from a central tower. The structure teases compliance from its tenants because they never know when they’re being watched. Michel Foucault used Bentham’s prison design as a metaphor, to highlight the way power, since the destruction of absolute monarchies, has sought to hide itself from view. If there’s no focus for our anger, it’s impossible for us to remove the cause of our pain.
My Mr. Panopticon has a lick of the Mr. World’s about him. For those who don’t know Mr. World is character from the book and television series American Gods. He’s mysterious, charming, and dangerous.
More recently my view of Mr. Panopticon has changed. I used to think of him as a machine, a huge torus wrapped around us, surrounding us, watching us from central point, controlling our behaviour with his constant gaze, but then Extinction Rebellion entered the public space with a series of demonstrations. Their efforts to highlight the impending doom of Global Warming have made me adjust my vision of Mr. Panopticon. Their efforts made me realised, he’s not a torus as Bentham designed him, but instead a sphere, a visceral ball rolling over the planet consuming everything in his path.
If that’s the case, where does Mr. Panopticon watch us from? Is he at the centre of this massive ball like structure? More importantly, where do we fit, where do we live?
After thinking about that for a while I can only surmise the cells we inhabit line the inside of Mr. Panopticon, coating the inside of his outer membrane like the proteins lining the wall of a virus. This realisation changes the orientation of the cells we live in, tipping them over, packing them together side by side, and that shift changes the way we’re watched. He no longer looks out along a horizontal axis, instead monitoring us from above.
If we inhabit six-sided boxes, a hermetically sealed cells, what do we see when we look out? Looking left or right, front or back, we should see the other tenants of Mr. Panopticon. They should be there, staring in on us, as we stare in on them? But we don’t! Why is that? Are we all so similar we mistake them for a reflection? Does he mediate everything, filtering it though some platform or other, making us forever reach but never make contact with our neighbours? It could be that he has transfixed us, made us all Narcissus, so enamoured by our own reflection everything else is just a haze.
If when we look around, and only see reflections, what do we see when we look up? Do we see Mr. Panopticon looking down on us? No. He’s a trickster. His entire existence is based on not being seen. Can we even see the spherical version of the tower? All watching? All knowing? Omnipotent? Do we see the virus gnome, hovering above us like water sliding over oil? Do we see God? Is that why Mr. Panopticon hasn’t destroyed our notions of God? He needs us to believe in the almighty, so we keep looking up. If we’re always looking up, we’re not looking down. If we don’t look down, we don’t see the viscera, the clots of blood, the chimeric limbs of the virus. We don’t see the true horror of Mr. Panopticon swirling beneath our feet. We’re taught the fiery chambers of hell are waiting for us should we transgress. They’re not. All that is beneath us is the bloody intestine of the beast that has swallowed us.
Give me strength.
The strength of character to call him out.
The strength of will not to succumb to his manipulations.
The strength of intellect to dissect the intricacies of his plan.
One final thing. Do I think I live in a glass box? No. Am I alone in the world? No. I can reach out, pull my partner close, and feel their warmth against me. Mr. Panopticon is a story. He is Joker to my Batman. Agent Smith to my Neo. He’s a villain that I need superpowers to resist, and reason for my superpower to be strength.
I really can’t believe that this is the end of the Skywalker saga but it is. It’s big on spectacle, even grander on heroics. Flipping and flopping reversals of fortune in search of a triumph over evil. This felt, more than the previous two in this trilogy, pitched at the young boy who has always been the focus of Star Wars. That said I still enjoyed it, and feel a certain sadness, and a twinge of nostalgia, for what’s come to an end. No doubt Disney will reinvent Skywalker and Star Wars in some way. Give it a couple of years and they may even reimagine the saga for a new audience. In the end it’s a fitting end to a stonking adventure.
A “zombie” film with a religious twists. It stretches the first person point of view to the point of be annoying. Using what are Google Glasses, in all but name, lead us on a journey through an end of days Jerusalem. The zombies here are demons rising from the underworld. But that’s pretty much all we know about them. It owes its existence as a film to The Blair Witch Project (1999), Cloverfield (2008), and the much much better Rec (2007).
There are so many startling things about this movie, not least that it was all shot on tape, with a domestic video camera. The only thing that bothers me is the final act. The whole army salvation thing feels like a poor choice. While I understand the basic idea of men with no hope descending into batshit crazy. I’ve never been convinced by the idea that trained soldiers would become that ill-disciplined. Trained soldiers respect the chain of command, and follow orders. It feels wrong. Following the orders of a crazy captain, that might’ve worked, but not the ill-discipline.
The best way to describe this is as a great example of a popcorn film. A bucket of popcorn, a few beers, and your set for a fun two hours. It delivers a cacophony of fast talking madness, hitched to a rollercoaster of ultra-violence, that revels in all kinds of neon coloured visual mayhem. All of the main characters are women, and all of the talent behind the scenes is too. If you wanted to be a tight arse you could say that all of these characters are portrayed as psychologically damaged in some way, but no more than any other comic book antihero. It does celebrate a kind of escape from the oppression of men that some men might be uncomfortable with, and logically try to dismiss, but it’s not a film that’s going to take up less space for anyone.
Darrin // Nightingale 