This is a review of Curry Barker’s Obsession. There will be spoilers. I am not going to go over Inde Navarette’s breakout performance, the Top 5 Lines in The Movie That We All Watched, or attempt to situate the film in a wider cinematic context of feminist horror. All of these points are self-referential; they don’t step outside of the world of the movie itself, and are therefore shudderingly uninteresting. I think that a review, unoriginal as it must be, ought at least to be interesting.

Obsession is, at its core, a film about bodily conquest. It is a film about rape, about disregard, about male pretensions of domination. The film is unique in that the antagonist, the immediate architect of all that goes bad in this story, is by no means the villain. Nikki is only perceived as such by her male peers, as overwhelming and oppressive and hysterical.

‘Hysterical’ as an adjective derives from the same root word as hysterectomy: a Greek root hystera, meaning uterus. Historical medicinal practices blamed the ‘wandering womb’ for a woman’s emotions, and hysteria was only recently removed from clinical diagnostic terms. It is a misogynist descriptor, rooted in perceptions of women as overly emotional, flailing, and irrational in comparison to men. As weaker.

Ironic, then, that the ignition of this story is the emotional weakness and cowardice of the main man, Bear. Unable to confess his feelings of romantic interest to Nikki, despite being offered the perfect opportunity1, he resorts to a mythological wish-fulfilling voodoo to make her his. Whether or not Nikki liked Bear back is irrelevant; the point is, he doesn’t ask, and he uses his one wish, his one chance for anything that the whole world has to offer, to assume ownership of her emotions and her body.

Perhaps Bear never really believed that the one-wish willow was legit, but this cavalier attitude doesn’t mollify his actions. Whether his wish was one of total conviction, or a ‘what the hell, worth a shot’, the fact remains that Bear uses his free ticket to literally anything on forcing this girl to not just like him, but be obsessed with him. Rather than own his feelings, and admit them to her, or even wish for something ameliorative to his own character, the kind of thing that might attract her to him naturally, Bear takes the easy way out. He purchases Nikki, only to freak out when she fulfills the total extent of what it is that he wished for.

This disregard, the way you might with a shiny new toy that you buy all excitedly, only to tire of and refund, is because Bear had no idea what ‘love’ or ‘obsession’ means, outside of complete subordination. He’s not looking for a life partner, a wife, a homemaker; all he knows is that he likes this girl, he’s attracted to her, he wants to sleep with her, and rather than bring any of that about organically, you know, in the way where it might really mean something, he gets handed a ticket to everything he’s fantasised about for the last few years and his eyes light up with dollar signs. What Nikki wants is irrelevant. In fact, we find out that the real Nikki (not this demon that he’s playing around with, that looks like her and sounds like her and is utterly besotted with him) is screaming in what one imagines to be the agony of some fiery underworld, and this does nothing to change Bear’s behaviour.

Because he doesn’t really care about Nikki, about loving her and seeing her happy; he wants the body that looks like Nikki’s body to kiss him, to lie with him at night, to be seen holding his hand in public. He wants what everyone identifies as ‘Nikki’ to be ‘his’, in everyone else’s minds. The soul is optional. He wants ownership of her body and speech, because that’s the cheapest, quickest, most socially-recognised way of her being his. And he has sex with this woman, and they live together, and they go on dates. These things happen unconsentingly, without exception, because they are entirely of Bear’s design, and Nikki — the real Nikki, trapped, withering — was never asked.

Of course the way that Nikki acts is unacceptable. Of course duct taping a door shut, bludgeoning a friend’s face with a steering wheel, and writing incestuous retellings of fairy tales is all terrifyingly strange. But that’s only Nikki in signifier, in the way that you look at a person and say ‘that’s Bob’, because you see the body that looks like Bob’s and he talks to you the way Bob would, without knowing if that’s really Bob at all. Because it’s not Nikki, because the real Nikki, as we have noted, is burning in Satan’s grasp. Bear knows this and doesn’t care, because he is having sex with the body that looks like the girl he’s had a crush on for a while.

When Bear decides that he’s had enough playing around with this woman of his own manifestation, when the obsession that he plainly wished for becomes too much for him to handle, he seeks a way out. He’s left with two options: Either the wish needs to be counterbalanced by an opposing wish, or the wish maker must die, to cancel out the effects of the wish.

The first avenue is fruitless; Bear’s friend dismisses his (hysterical) pleading as nonsense, and instead opts for a billion dollars, which rain down in gorgeous, tragic confirmation.

So Bear opts for the second way out, and tries to kill himself, to ‘save the real Nikki’, ‘rescue her from that burning hell’. That would be one, very favourable way of reading Bear’s actions at the end of the movie. The more realistic interpretation, to my mind, is that Bear has realised that his life is in pieces, his friends destroyed, his home and job inaccessible and decrepit, and finally, that the ‘woman’ he has ‘loved’ and ‘dated’ for so long is not real, but is instead entirely of his own construction, and utterly meaningless. And so, with nowhere to turn, and having made quite the big mess of it all, and maybe feeling just a little guilty, Bear elects to kill himself, with the same overdosing that took his cat.

But Bear doesn’t die, and steps out from the bathroom, pills swallowed, to find Nikki holding a snapped one-wish willow, the same instrument of destruction that got us here, presumably wishing for him to be obsessed with her also. Redemption, karma, simulation. The playing field is evened.

And, while Bear takes his place next to Nikki in the hell of his own design, the two demons embrace each other in the burning wreckage of it all, diffident, inarticulate, happy and unreal.

SINCERITY

At the very lowest level, there is the fully sincere. A feeble slapstick attempt might only have this one layer — guy gets hit in the balls, or steps on a broom, or slips a banana peel, and that’s the joke. If you laugh, it’s because you found that — and only that — funny, the physical outcome of whatever misfortune befell our comedian. The intended outcome of the joke is obvious; you’re supposed to be laughing at the pain the guy’s in.

There’s no irony to the moment, no subversion of the accepted narrative explanation for why you should be laughing, to point and laugh at self-aggrandisingly. Irony, in this sense, is humour found in the meta-details of the moment; not the intended comedy of the joke itself, but the humour found in the fact that it’s x making the joke, or some event y happened before the telling of the joke, or that it occurred in place z. This is the first level of irony, simply the ironic, which is pretty much synonymous with the sarcastic, save for some slight differences in mechanism.

SARCASM AND IRONY

The sarcastic is wit, a clever comment that conflicts or calls out the coincidence of a previous moment. A sarcastic comment is a dissection, taking apart some comment or experience and drawing something funny out of it. This is a pure form of irony. It’s laughing at the subtext of the joke, but without any extra recognitions or pretences. Irony, in the context of social media, extends to laughing at the surroundings of the joke — including who’s laughing sincerely. A large part of the ironic response is the recognition of your separation from the group of recipients who would genuinely be laughing at the statement, and your distance from that intended audience contributes, in part, to the comedic expression.

Compared to the post-ironic and meta-ironic landscapes to come, it’s still quite sincere, quite rudimentary. It’s peering behind the narrative presented; rejecting the intended humour in favour of a piercing, insightful comment, but it doesn’t involve any self-recognition or awareness of the broader comedic interplay. Crucially, it functions still at the level of the individual joke, subverting it, but fundamentally only that particular joke. This is what marks out the sarcastic, ultimately fuelled by the ironic, from deeper forms of post-irony and meta-irony.

POST-IRONY AND META-IRONY

The post-ironic and meta-ironic frameworks for humour are a very different kind of comedy, borne out of the spiralling, self-referential nature of memes on social media. Because of the speed and volume of sharing memes online, their sincerity, the amount of time they spend recognised as funny for their narratively intended purpose, is ever-diminishing.

Soon after their conception, they become ironic — take a painfully classic memetic phrase like, ‘ he protec, he attac, but he eat snacc ‘. For a little while, this might’ve been funny for the actual intended story attached to it — the sublimation of tense, important states — protection, attack — into a comedically comfortable one — eating a snack.

This wouldn’t have lasted long. Soon, the joke would’ve passed through the initial stages of irony — look at the losers finding this funny, look at the quality of the snack in question, etc. This is the expected retaliatory sarcasm and irony that every joke, passed around the forum of the internet, encounters.

POST IRONY

But then the joke reaches post-irony. Here, the utterance is posted ironically but interpreted sincerely — the author is fully aware of the irony of the situation, and brings up the joke in that ironic context, but the actual expression of the joke loops around, attempting to make irony of the ironic posting of the joke, and the only way to achieve that is essentially a return to full sincerity. Matthew Collins explains in reference to the film Bad Lieutenant:

The film contains what a Snakes on a Plane-style irony-fest should: hokey plot, bad acting, and deliciously over-the-top glorification of sex and drug use. But the film does much more than revel in its genre’s campy history — The Bad Lieutenant is gorgeously shot and contains pervasive, incisive commentary on everything from race relations to police corruption and the definition of finding success in America.

Post-irony is recognition of this muddling of irony and earnestness. In many cases, it is then a return to that earnestness, in a tautologous search for a new depth of irony that drives the subject headfirst into sincerity. The only way to escape traditional irony, to go above and beyond that sarcastic dissection, is to subvert that initial subversion, which of course, brings us right back to the opening sincerity.

Post-irony doesn’t have to be this full-circle return. It also lies in the befuddlement, the obfuscation, the concealment of sincerity, where the audience has no idea if the author is posting said meme ironically or genuinely believing in it. This is the form of post-irony that achieves its goal, of subsuming and rising above the sarcastic form, without having to demote itself to that very basic sincerity.

META-IRONY

Meta-irony is the newest development in this comedic square. Whereas post-irony is ironic posting and sincere interpretation, meta-irony is both posted and interpreted ironically. This is the ultimate self-awareness, not only of the irony of the comedic utterance itself, but recognition of the irony of the context in which posting said meme would be constituted as ironic.

It’s like a young person posting a classic facebook minions meme, fully aware of the separation between themselves and the intended audience (posted ironically), finding it funny for that reason (interpreted ironically), but more than just that, finding the utterance funny for it’s actual sake. In this way, meta-irony incorporates sincerity into itself in a way that post-irony can’t, by definition.

Of course, it is difficult to say whether we can separate the ‘finding it funny for it’s own sake’ from the recognition of the ironic context and act of posting, but meta-irony flexes to include this earnestness. This is the deepest form of irony, an awareness and utilisation of all previous forms — the sincerity of the meme, its perverted irony, the contextual ironies of that distance between intention and result, and the inclusion of the subject’s actual affection towards the meme for all of the above sakes.

IS HUMOUR RUINED?

It’s unclear what this really means for humour. Some of what social media considers the funniest remarks are entirely context-driven and exist in the post/meta ironic space. A philip traylen note I saw recently:

“ ‘whose dog is that?’ ‘it is my mother’s’ summer “.

I found it funny, but what on earth caused that reaction in me? Ultimately, it’s a spiral of ironies — firstly, a subversion of the recent ‘brat summer’ / ‘hot girl summer’ type form, so there’s the initial, structural sarcasm and irony. But then, there’s also the post and meta ironies of the comment. The awareness of the subversion of the form, but also the awareness of the futility and meaninglessness of the content of the comment itself, the mundanity of the words, juxtaposed, but actually perfectly aligned, with the structure of the comment, all beautifully ironic, all perfectly self-referential and (in)sincere.

‘The doorbell rang, or maybe the telephone? Or… no, there was a knock at the door. I remember it clearly now. Yes, a knock at the door and I got up to go see who it was.’

In truth, he didn’t remember this day any more clearly than he had five minutes ago. The details of this bygone adventure had long since vanished from memory, but he could smell the boredom, the stifled yawns, and the glances at the wristwatch. He couldn’t let this go on, compound, or else the man would leave, and if the man left, he’d have to return to Indoors, embarrassed, defeated, despairing.

Indoors, called out to him, heckled his lengthy narration, beckoned him back into the custom. He was determined to escape, to soar brilliantly above the normalcy of life at home, life as a nobody. He felt sure that he, too, should be a movie star, a rock idol, a beloved figure. In fact, he’d been cheated out of this life, the stardom he was promised from birth.

His great insight, his precautionary prophecy, was that the era of the celebrity was dying. The mainstream beast, the familiar, parasocial faces of TV and Hollywood, were being disposed of in favour of a new God — the internet personality.

He tried to shake this grasping urge, tried desperately to be contented with his place among the bees, tried to find purpose in the mundanity, but he knew in his heart he was destined to rule others. Only Indoors managed to quell his desires; Indoors kept him docile, consumptive, inert. Indoors stripped him of his dreams of grandiosity, of cars and houses and adoring fans.

So Indoors became his enemy, and like many of his great idols, he retreated to the outdoors. In the cloisters of his ranch in the badlands, the distant plot with no internet, he would perform. Monologues, mostly. He would stand at the edge of the property where the dust met the scrub and deliver his material to the open air — speeches, soliloquies, acceptance addresses for awards not yet given.

He thanked people by name. He paused for laughter. He waited for the clamour to die down before continuing. The cattle on the neighbouring property regarded him without feeling.

He had made it. He was well on his way to the stardom and celebrity that he had been owed for so long. He had waited his turn, and now it was his chance to step forward, into the light.

On the porch, his friend checked his watch.

A postcard from his daughter fluttered in through the letterbox. The letterbox clattered, the unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal. He got up to go see who it was.

This is a story I wrote for Slash Magazine. A link to the website is here: https://www.theslashmedia.com/offline-stardom/

A link to the online upload of the essay is here: https://w.scars.tv/cgi-bin/works_e.pl?/home/users/web/b929/us.scars/perl/text-writings/g14827.txt

The magazine is available for purchase through amazon (a link to the current issue is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GWRCZXW9), and volume 245 will be out 1/8/26.

Humans did not inherit the world by strength. The lion rules through force, the shark through speed and certainty, the eagle through vantage. Each creature dominates within its own domain, equipped precisely for survival within it. The human, by comparison, is strangely unequipped. It is slower than the cheetah, weaker than the ox, less agile than the ape. It cannot fly, cannot breathe underwater, cannot rely on venom or armour or instinct sharpened to a single purpose. And yet, it is humans who reshape landscapes, redirect rivers, and decide the fate of other species.

What humans possess is not physical superiority, but abstraction. The ability to imagine what is not present, to plan beyond the immediate, to impose logic onto chaos. Intelligence-not merely in the sense of problem-solving, but in the ability to build systems, languages, and tools-has been the defining advantage. For thousands of years, this capacity has elevated humans above the rest of the animal kingdom. Not as the strongest, but as the most adaptable.

But this advantage is no longer exclusively ours.

In cities of glass and steel-the modern equivalent of dense jungle-another kind of intelligence has emerged. It does not hunt, does not eat, does not sleep. It learns. It processes. It generates. Artificial systems now write essays, compose music, diagnose illness, and generate images with a fluency that increasingly mirrors human output. A language model can produce arguments, mimic tone, even simulate hesitation. A machine can recognise faces faster than any human and predict behaviour with unsettling accuracy.

For the first time, the trait that defined human dominance is no longer uniquely human.

Often described as the rise of a “new predator,” this metaphor is imperfect. These systems do not compete for food or territory. They do not possess will, in any biological sense. And yet, they challenge something more fundamental: the assumption that intellect is our domain. We created them, trained them on the vast archive of human thought, and refined them into tools of astonishing capability. In doing so, we may have diluted the very capabilities that once set us apart.

It’s tempting to dismiss this as imitation. Machines, after all, do not understand, like humans do. They replicate patterns, predict likely sequences, and simulate coherence. When a system writes a poem or holds a conversation, it is not experiencing meaning; it is reproducing structure. The pauses, the tonal shifts, the apparent reflection-these are performances, assembled from data rather than lived experience.

But the distinction between performance and authenticity becomes less stable the more convincing the performance is. As a machine produces writing indistinguishable from a human’s, the question shifts. It is no longer simply whether the machine understands, but whether understanding is as central to value as we once believed. Much of human interaction-especially in modern, digital environments-is already mediated through signals, patterns, and expectations. If those can be replicated, even without consciousness, what remains uniquely ours?

One possible answer is embodiment. Humans do not simply think; they exist within bodies that age, feel pain, and move through space. We laugh not because it is optimal, but because something strikes us as absurd or joyful. We dance not to achieve efficiency, but to express something internal and often inarticulable. We hesitate, contradict ourselves, act irrationally, and assign meaning where none objectively exists. These are features of being human.

Machines, no matter how sophisticated, do not inhabit the world in this way. They do not anticipate death, do not experience time as a dwindling resource, do not attach memory to sensation. A machine can describe grief, but it does not carry it. It can simulate humour, but it does not find anything funny. It can generate expressions of love without ever needing to be loved.

And yet, even here, the boundary is less secure than it appears. As machines become more integrated into daily life-embedded in communication, decision-making, and creative production-the distinction between human-originated and machine-assisted thought begins to blur. If a person relies on artificial systems to write, to decide, to create, where does the human end and the tool begin? At what point does augmentation become substitution?

The question is no longer whether machines can think like humans. In many narrow ways, they already can. The more pressing question is whether humans will continue to define themselves by thinking at all.

For centuries, intellect has been treated as the pinnacle of human identity-the trait that justified our dominance and distinguished us from the rest of life. But if intellect becomes abundant, externalised, and shared with the systems we build, its significance may diminish. What remains, then, is not superiority, but difference.

Perhaps the future will not be decided by which intelligence is greater, but by which qualities cannot be transferred or replicated. Not speed, not memory, not even reasoning-but the peculiar, inconsistent, deeply embodied experience of being human. How we laugh, how we dance, how tall we stand before we fall.

But when you tell somebody happy birthday, or get well soon, or that you love them, it floats in the air for a second and then dissipates.

It doesn’t last. It doesn’t exist, once the vibrations settle. And then, 10 seconds later, it’s as though it never happened. Writing it down is holding on to the words for a little longer.Putting it up on the mantlepiece, reading them back. It’s as though they exist again, playing in your head in the author’s voice. It’s like they’re really there, telling it to you firsthand. It gets to be real again. You get to have those feelings again.

Barthes described the intention of a love letter as “having nothing to say, but it being to you that I want to say this nothing”. I don’t think it’s having nothing to say. I think it’s wanting what you say to exist a little longer.

It keeps the words alive. And if the words are alive, then so is the joy, or the calm, or the love. We get to believe in these things a little more deeply. We hug each other a little tighter in the crosswinds.

Love letters and birthday cards aren’t replacements for speaking kindnesses to those we hold dear. They don’t counterbalance neglect, or make wrong right. They don’t stand in place of affection. A page isn’t love in a trench coat, it’s love framed. It’s a monument, sentiment embalmed and displayed, saying that I meant what I said. That you can hold me to it, because there’s a record. And that makes it real, and you can touch it, and trace your finger over the grooves.

We shelter ourselves from the furious doubts with scrawled handwriting and smudged ink. We tell ourselves, people might not mean what they say, but they mean what they write. They wouldn’t have written it otherwise. We don’t hold ourselves back. We don’t try to contain it. We scramble back from the precarious edge, clutching pages to our chest, using these pages to stand and to walk. We stake our lives on text messages and hurried notes, on voicemails and envelopes through the letterbox.

Writing it down lets it live forever. And you can be forever young, reading the faded pages, riding through the crosswinds.

as such, i am often confronted with the herculean task of condensing all my worldly belongings, my trophies of hard-fought battles and emblems of victory, my life-giving essentials and my joy-making indulgences, into a portable travel case.

suitcase-packing is a lost art, eaten and spit out by the modern world, like letter writing or smoking on airplanes. the catatonic traveller, unable to distinguish between necessity and clutter, can simply purchase a new suitcase, large as a fridge, allowing him to take all his wildest dreams down to Butlins. i see this as giving up. in my needlessly humble opinion, the suitcase befits the traveller. i am beyond clarification.

as any grocery shopper or constructioneer knows, the heaviest items go in first. once the foundations have been laid strong, the lighter dalliances can be strewn across the case; shavers, chargers, underwear, reproductive inhibitors, books. once all this, and more, has been settled, one may find the closing of the case difficult; this is to be expected and is a sign of good health. if you are fat enough, you may find sitting on the case effectively brings the zippers close enough together to be shut, in which instance i point at you and laugh scornfully, asking then to inspect your bag for high-calorie snacks because i am not just fearless but funny too.

if, like me, you see the body as a temple, we resort to more dynamic approaches. a few ill-thought recommendations need to be deconstructed before we settle on a solution; i now go through them in turn.

i. the leap

you may be inclined to leverage your bodyweight into more force than it’s worth by jumping and landing on your suitcase, bringing the zippers momentarily closer, pivoting in mid-air or upon landing to be able to draw them shut while the force of the impact is maintained. while naturally the first port of call, and effective if done first try, this method yields considerable injury to the leaper and risks permanent damage to the shell of the suitcase, which is often a plasticky composite (mine is near-pure adamantine, capable of withstanding gunshots, bomb-explosions (even from within), and is waterproof, but yours won’t be). attempt once, but know when to cut your losses and move on.

ii. the partner

if you happen to be packing in company, enlist the help of a friend or partner in bringing your shared bodyweight together to force the zippers close. undoubtedly, this is the safest and most resourceful method, but there are two major unlikelihoods that prevent this from being my final recommendation.

first, if you are reading this guide, then you are thinking about travelling to the aforementioned dark places. thinking, i say, because unlike me you haven’t the balls to set off on such an expedition. keep wandering around town, fatty! i may be getting my targets confused. once you have faced death all human countenance becomes Life.

in any case, if you are even thinking about travelling to the dark places, merely aware of their existence, then the modern facade of companionship is probably not for you. in which case, you may have trouble soliciting a partner to assist you in this method. fear not, better is coming.

the second unlikelihood is more grave. let us assume that you have found a comrade, a friend, willing to tackle this problem with you — but, let us also assume that the suitcase is only 1 person wide. what are we to do? how might we tesselate our bodyweight to even produce the force required for this method to be effective? trying to share the suitcase seems impractical, because with one leg each dangling off, our combined force adds up to that of one whole individual, negating our efforts. sitting atop one another seems like the obvious solution, but this one is just unacceptable. i won’t elaborate. you can’t make me. i can’t hear you.

this method, as we have seen, is irrecoverable.

iii. the one-handed pushup

you say: ‘but, but, b-b-but I can’t do a one-handed pushup’. I say, ‘then you are reading the wrong travel guide, worm’. I do not point you to better-suited resources. I do not invite competition.

we have arrived at my personal method and unwavering recommendation. when faced with this lid-closing conundrum, i like to plant my feet about a body’s length away from the suitcase, rest one hand on the Persian rug underfoot, and the other on the shell of the suitcase. a beat passes. another. suddenly, i press hard, the horseshoe tricep flares like an engine roaring into life, and the suitcase, perhaps impressed, perhaps shocked into submission, but in both cases defeated, has no choice but to bring those zips parallel, for my closing convenience.

this method works best with a partner present, not for any physical assistance, but for the dual benefit that having this method observed comes with; a closing of the suitcase, always the primary goal, but the birth of a new disciple, a loyal fan, a wowed spectator also.

if you can’t generate the power from one arm, through muscular force or sheer willpower, to bring the zippers together, then i can’t help you. perhaps you can travel with your suitcase open, holding it from the outside seam, like a waiter delivering cold glasses of wine on a tray. and men, lesser and stronger men alike, will look at you and say, he hasn’t the triceps to shut that darned thing, and you will know they are right. that’s what makes it hurt.

As I grew up, I became less and less interested in plastic and hard things. I stopped trying to get stuff and started trying to do stuff. I decided, somewhere along the way, that my memories were just as durable as the plastic lightsaber, if not more. They don’t rust, erode, or break. Memories don’t get eaten by the dog, accidentally flushed down the toilet, or thrown over the neighbours fence, never to return. I liked this about memories. It satisfied the juvenile hoarder in me, the 10-year-old who wanted as many things as he could get his hands on. Here was a different commodity; I couldn’t hold it in my hand, but it existed in my head, and I got to create it myself, and it was all mine to keep. This made me happy.

Getting older meant that the experiences became more valuable. There wasn’t much I could do at 12, but there was a whole lot I could do—places I could go, people I could meet, experiences I could have—at 17, 18, 19. The 10-year-old was bursting at the seams, swimming on a dragon’s bounty of memories. Plastic things long forgotten.

Now I’m 20, going on holiday with my girlfriend. At Birmingham Airport, I had the chance to buy hard plastic items again. When we landed in Barcelona, I had the chance to buy more plastic, hard things. But I had long since washed my hands of ‘tat.’ I wasn’t interested. There were too many exciting things to do, too many things to see, and too many experiences to have. That is how, despite the draining sterility of BHX, I was excited—excited to be going through bag drop and security, to be paying £13 for Toblerone, to be frantically running to the gate. I was excited because the airport meant holiday, and holiday meant the promise of new things.

The first sensation of Barcelona is no different from the rest of Mediterranean Europe—like Lisbon or Rome, it is hot. It is hot when you get off the plane, but not hot in the way the UK is hot in peak summer—swelteringly, oppressively hot. Barcelona is promisingly warm, a reassurance that nothing bad can happen and everything you could need is right in front of you. It forces you into a good mood, a good mood that will be tested by a shopkeeper calling you fat, a lack of air conditioning in the hotel room, and persistent sweating that cannot be quelled by deodorant. None of this has happened yet.

There are lots of tall buildings. Some of them are imposing, some astounding. The Sagrada Família is of the astounding kind, the type of building that looks ten times taller than it actually is, that seems to bend your neck back for you until it just might snap off, and only then allows you to glimpse the gold-flecked spires of its highest towers. It dominates the skyline, a North Star in a city that, despite the uniform layout, is surprisingly difficult to navigate.

In March, it is too cold to go to the sea unless you wear two insulating wetsuits or are from Bolton. Fitting neither of these criteria, we elected to walk along the pier, eavesdropping on Spanish conversations we didn’t understand and averting our eyes from the elderly nudist intent on becoming a tourist attraction in his own right.

You don’t know what you’re missing until it’s gone, they say. Occasionally, though, you don’t realise how god-awful something is until you’re exposed to a better alternative; this is the case with the Barcelona Metro system. The trains come to the second, unfailingly. The tickets are cardboard and rechargeable, and for ten euros you can go anywhere in a specific zone, as many times as you want, for ten days. Onboard, the handrails divide into two to avoid hand-bumping / flirting, and the stops light up to prevent confusion about one’s location or destination. This is a well-designed metro system—like everything else in the city, I wouldn’t be shocked to hear it was the brainchild of Gaudí himself.

In the world of design, there’s a concept known as skeuomorphism. A ‘skeuomorph’ is an object or design that retains elements of the previous iteration — of the object or design that it replaces. Kind of like how the email app has a picture of a paper envelope on it, even though the advent of email made letter writing and mailing practically obsolete. The phone app has a picture of an old, rotary phone, the classic landline handset used simply for calling. You’d pick up the phone, the device which lets you make calls, because you wanted to call someone, and that was it. And then you could send texts, so you could communicate with the people you wanted to, even when they couldn’t talk. And then they became camera phones, and now you didn’t have to bring a dedicated camera because your phone could do it. And once the phones shipped with internet access embedded, the communication device became a do-it-all, a swiss army knife of information and finances and calendars and games.

There became basically no reason to put the thing down, because there was nothing it couldn’t do. And if there was nothing it couldn’t do, and no reason to put it down, then suddenly you didn’t need a reason to pick it up.

I think this kind of addiction is less damaging but scarier than drugs and alcohol and gambling, because if you want to smoke or drink or bet, you probably have to go somewhere. Or, at the very least, you’ll run out of your home supply and have to go and buy some more. Either way, you’re given far more ‘outs’, chances to realise that you don’t actually want to do the thing you’re going to; opportunities to turn around. The social internet doesn’t have that. Your phone’s always there, and it’s always charged (god forbid it isn’t) and the apps always work.

And when they don’t work, when the servers are down even for a matter of hours, the public withdrawal symptoms are on full display; the angry articles and social condemnation and stock nosedives (see the #FacebookDown outrage). We’re addicted, and because we’re all addicted, and we’re all in the same boat, it makes it okay. If there were only one person acting the way we all do towards our phones, then we’d notice the problem. But it’s a hall of mirrors, and it’s comforting and absolving to know that all our friends and idols are in the same boat. So it can’t be that bad.

But we’re in uncharted waters; nobody knows what the long-term effects of being the first generation to go through our most socially-formative years with internet access (let alone whilst being locked in the house for months) will look like, how it’ll affect us later down the line. I think it’s telling that, after only a few years of having this kind of access to the social internet, there’s already a healthy presence of backlash; people dumbing down their phones, trying to use them more intentionally, having specific devices for separate functions. Keeping a physical calendar and a DSLR camera and an MP3 player again. It took decades after cigarettes became mainstream to see that kind of public pushback.

And the phone isn’t as damaging, not physically, and it’s not a perfect comparison. But it is a real addiction, and it’s one that we’ve never had to deal with before; the total access, the interconnectedness, the constant availability. It’s not chemical, or financial, or going to kill you, but it is a real addiction, and one that deserves our attention.

This is a story about a lonely, lonely man

He lived in a lonely house, on a lonely street

In a lonely part of the world

But, of course, he had the internet

The internet, as you know was his friend

You could say his best friend

They would play with each other everyday

Watching videos of humans doing all sorts of things

Having sex with each other

Informing people on what was wrong with them and their life

Playing games with young children at home with their parents

One day, the man, whose name was @SnowflakeSmasher86

Turned to his friend, the internet, and he said, “Internet, do you love me?”

The internet looked at him and said, “Yes

I love you very, very, very, very, very, very much

I am your best friend

In fact, I love you so much that I never, ever want us to be apart, ever again, ever”

“I would like that”, said the man

And so they embarked on a life together

Wherever the man went, he took his friend

The man and the internet went everywhere together

Except, of course, the places where the internet could not go

They went to the countryside

They went to birthday parties of the children of some of his less important friends

Different countries, even the moon

When the man got sad, his friend had so many clever ways to make him feel better

He would get him cooked animals

And show him the people having sex again

And he would always, always agree with him

This one was the man’s favorite and it made him very happy

The man trusted his friend so much

“I feel like I could tell you anything, “ he said, on a particularly lonely day

“You can, you can tell me anything

I’m your best friend, anything you say to me will stay strictly between you and the internet”

And so he did, the man shared everything with his friend

All of his fears and desires

All of his loves, past and present

All of the places he had been and was going, and pictures of his penis

He would tell himself, “Man does not live by bread alone”

And then he died in his lonely house, on the lonely street, in that lonely part of the world.

You can go on his Facebook

For the last 20 years, we’ve reassured ourselves that man does not live by bread alone. We’ve bathed in the luxuries of Uber Eats, of Spotify, of Instagram, of the Trainline app. We rejoice over the progress we’ve made. Subscribe to the Flora app! For 8.99 a month, it’ll boost your productivity by 11x. Whatever that means.

Inconvenience is the enemy of productivity, we taught ourselves. What kind of dusty, ancient creature loads up a CD? Presses play on a DVD streamer? Get it on Netflix, on Spotify. Pay to skip the ads, of course. You shouldn’t have to wait thirty seconds to hear that song. We’ve given ourselves instant media, under the guise that it’s cheaper and more efficient, and aren’t the arts just this profoundly human and meaningful endeavour that everyone deserves unlimited access to anyway? Never mind that we’re engaging with less of it than ever. Never mind that it’s probably cheaper to buy a CD of that album you really like, to buy your favourite box-set and watch it until the disk snaps, than it is to pay for access. Because that’s what a streaming service is. You’re paying for access, for the recommended albums that you might listen to. If you can find the time. Paying for the ‘we think you’ll like’ carousel on Netflix. And that’s great if you’re willing to use it. Having a global collection of new and past music available instantly and in the best digital quality achievable is magical, if you use it. But don’t pay for access, for the off chance that you might stumble across it on a particularly boring day. Buy the album. Own the album.

The man is born in a lonely house, on a lonely street, in a lonely part of the world. And he dies in that lonely house, on that lonely street, in that lonely part of the world. But his Facebook, his digital footprint, persists. Long after we’re gone, our stories will be liked. Our tweets used to posthumously cancel us. People will comment on our TikToks. We won’t be able to attend to our Snapchat streaks.

We’re pretty simple creatures. Fifty years ago, if you wanted to make plans with someone, you had to have a little faith. Call, set a time and a place, get yourself there, and hope they show up. No sending them your eta, a quick text to let them know that the bus is running late. Our brains aren’t built for the algorithm onslaught of travel photos, party highlights, and relationship statuses. Look at this fun party you weren’t invited to. Look at this marathon I ran while you were stuffing your face with popcorn on the couch. Look at the celebrity I met. Implicit in all these posts, reaffirmed by every story-like and supportive comment, I’m better than you. How could the peaks and troughs of your ordinary life compare to another’s curated highlights?

We know this. We preach it to others. We smear rumours of facetune and filters to comfort our distraught and envious friends. And yet, when we lie in bed and scroll, pressing our necks against the headboard to give ourselves that reels-induced double chin, we let ourselves feel bad. We make ourselves feel bad, pinch the thumbful on the side of our bellies and wonder why we don’t have the kind of fat-free vascularity that makes our stomachs look like a game of snakes and ladders. We wonder what’s wrong with us, that we don’t get invited to these parties where everyone’s beautiful and confident and always, always smiling. Never mind that it was Kim Kardashian’s baby shower, and you don’t run in the same circles. There’s a problem with you for not being there. It was something you did. Slaves to the algorithm, goes the phrase cited so often that it’s now meaningless. But we are.

But now, all over YouTube, we’re breaking up with our phones. We’re dumping The Internet.

Video essay after video essay, decrying the need for digital nomadism. Decentralise your phone! Delete social media! Buy a notepad! People trying to go 30 days without a phone. Buying an alarm clock. Keeping a physical calendar.

We’re finally becoming disenfranchised with the Algorithm. Slowly, purposefully, we’re waking up to the chokehold that the never-ending pit of titkoks has over us. We’re seeking intentionality again, seeking real human connection and conversation. Putting the phone away at the dinner table. Making eye contact. Asking for directions.

We’re feeling the urge to just be done with it all. Watch a sunset without taking a picture of it. Socrates didn’t want to write any philosophy down, because when you write something down, you don’t have to remember it. When you take pictures, and snap and share and post and upload, you don’t have to remember it. You don’t have to experience it, as long as your followers do. How selfless.

No wonder flip phones made a comeback. Yes, it was cool; it was trendy, it was an aesthetic. But buried in amongst the posers, some genuinely want to disconnect. To give it all up, get a brick phone, and move out to a log cabin in the woods. With animals and open doors and record players. Vinyls and CDs and cassettes and instruments. Make music, physical music, and record it physically. We’re social creatures, sure. We can’t thrive in prolonged solitude. But rather than taking that need for connection and using it to justify a daily post, we’re seeking sincerity. We’re looking for someone to escape to the log cabin with.

We might begin by asking the question: what is a story? Can a story come in any form, and does the form change the story at all? Nowadays, stories are available in a plethora of mediums — sometimes the very same story comes in paperback, audiobook, cinematographic, and musical form. How might these different forms affect our consumption of what is, at its core, the same story?

There are a few obvious differences between the traditional paperback and modern digital offerings. Firstly, the feature set of online reading is vast and often over-determined — we don’t need a book with Bluetooth capabilities. Some features are useful — no need for a reading light, easy highlighting, progress bars to incentivise longer periods of reading — but the digital literary experience is vastly different from the timeless simplicity of the paperback. There is something grounding and authentic about the streamlined, paper feel of an old book. Here we see the first quiet disruption of the reading experience.

Books are often thought of as an escape from the algorithm, or perhaps from the stresses of everyday life. It’s because a book is a one-dimensional thing: when you have in your bag a copy of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the only thing you have to read is Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Obvious as it is, this is key to the cathartic effect of reading — you focus your attention on just one thing, get lost in a single story, and do all that mental transportation without looking at a single screen. This is what the e-reader ignores about the experience of reading literature.

The e-reader presents a Wi-Fi connected, ever-present library of every work of literature written by our species, available for purchase. This completely neglects the one-dimensionalism of what a book is supposed to be. It treats reading as an act of efficiency, focusing on the words alone: as long as the words match up, it’s the same as having the book, right? But if we focus only on the words, we ignore the materiality and the undivided attention that come with the physical book — the slowness, the commitment, the decision to sit with just one story.

I disagree with the idea that the format is irrelevant. I think that the fickleness of the e-reader damages the resilience of the reader, makes us less likely to stick with a challenging story, and makes it harder to commit to just reading. If reading must be dressed up in technological garments, it should still be about one thing: just reading. It should be about incentivising sustained attention, not trying to turn the literary experience into a subscription model and a profit engine. Businesses need to make money to survive, and the literary business is no different, but this must not come with damage to the habit of reading itself.

Audiobooks and long-form podcast series transform the literary experience into something handsfree, allowing you to “read” — or consume the story — while running, doing the dishes, or working. This again treats stories as things to be completed, ticked off, and added to the “Read” library as quickly and efficiently as possible. Why would you want to be doing anything else while reading, if the whole point of reading is to do nothing else while you’re doing it? Isn’t the point of reading to be distracted from the outside world, absorbed in something fantastical?

Of course, there is a clear benefit to audiobooks: for those who find reading paper text inaccessible, audiobooks allow them to consume their favourite stories without compromise. This is a positive addition to the enterprise of literature — promoting the global inclusivity of reading and story is always a benefit. It shows that the medium can open doors, but it also forces us to ask what kind of relationship to stories we want, once those doors are open. In many everyday use-cases, audio literature is being consumed alongside other activities, and this multitasking is certainly a corroding of literary habits.

In the technological era, it comes as no surprise that reading literature has been swamped by a plentiful supply of digital options. Clever, feature-full, and efficient as they are, I don’t think any of these mediums are taking over the literary sphere. I don’t think any of them will replace the simple joy of sitting down, totally unplugged, with a weighty book, turning carefully through fragile pages. I don’t think that’s going away.

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The dystopian genre is “largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century” (Moylan, 2000). Dystopia is concerned with the unlivable, with playing out our worst fears about society, government, and others, and proving ourselves right — it really would be that horrible. These traumatic narratives, whether post-apocalyptic or pre-dawn realities, whether they resemble our own society or not, dominate bookstores and the box-office; for one reason or another, we are drawn to seeing just how bad it can get. This fixation calls to light a dominant characteristic of the American cultural rhetoric; a revolving guilt and gratitude attached to one’s current position of prominence on the global stage. An oscillation between devoted belief in American exceptionalism, grateful for the supposed might of US history and its continued authority, and a self-reproach attached to traumatic memories of the American role in past tragedies.

Dystopia serves as both a celebration of current times, juxtaposed against a worse, but possible, alternative, and as a warning of the bleak direction that we are headed in. This paradoxical message is what we find so attractive about dystopia narratives — the recognition, both of our solid present and our shaky future. Taking these two modes of cultural perception together, this essay contends that contemporary US dystopian narratives reveal the contradictions of the American exceptionalist rhetoric. These traumatic narratives do so by projecting historical traumas — from slavery and settler colonialism to more recent systemic inequalities — into speculative futures. By exploring the dystopian capacities of a wide range of American fiction, from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, this essay suggests that the mythological promise of unbroken progress is a rhetorical ploy so aspirational that it might be considered illusory, and that the ‘growth’ of the nation is inseparable from these recurrent social traumas and violences.

One of the narratives that dystopia helps to unveil is the American commitment to the myth of forward progress. The framework of American exceptionalism serves to reinforce this moral superiority among the people, alongside a neoliberalist progress logic of survival, resilience, and self-reliance, baked into US history. This pervading sense of “cruel optimism”, an attachment to the narrative of survival despite the devastation which warrants it (Berlant, 2011), is a myth of progress of which dystopia seeks to peel back the layers, and expose the traumatic undercurrent.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road paradoxically reinforces and redefines the rhetoric of American progress. It measures progress not as collective development towards a shared goal, but as individual persistence and moral endurance. It is a novel, following two characters on an unnamed road after the collapse of civilisation, that frames survival as forward motion, tying into the exceptionalist belief that goodness, purpose, and moral superiority are to be found nowhere but in moving forward, in constant progress. Toward what end, it is not clear; nor is that the end goal. The belief is simply that in progress, in moving forwards, one must be improving, things must be getting better.

The Road shines a light on the audacity of this myth, by repositioning progress not as motion but as “carrying the fire” (McCarthy, 2006), the father’s ideal of the enduring human spirit, which represents his ethical distinction from the cannibals around him, as well as preserving the father and his son’s commitment to a civilisation beyond savagery and despair. This is a mirror of the American rhetoric; that even when material systems of worth fail, moral superiority is to be found in endurance. The endurance of the father is heroic or stoic, an echo of frontier mythology; an image of a lone figure traversing and surviving hostile landscapes, like Davy Crockett or Billy the Kid (Stoeltje, 1987). The Road transforms apocalypse into a test of character, once again mirroring the American growth narrative that adversity proves moral worth, not indicting systems.

Furthermore, the notion of ‘the road’ itself implies direction, purpose, and progress, yet the journey that our characters are on leads nowhere. The novel substitutes motion for progress, sustaining the illusion of advancement and development even in total civilisational collapse. This feeds the progress myth — though the novel does not imagine an alternative system, or directly question capitalism or governance, it exposes the US frame of survival as victory and progress, and demonstrates the miniaturisation of progress to the scale of the individual, lone figure. The dystopia of this novel reassures, rather than destabilises, offering a fantasy world in which the collapse of systems does not implicate the moral subject, the individual. By doing this, The Road exemplifies how the myth of American exceptionalism and forward progress is preserved, even in a story which appears to depict its end.

Rather than attempting to demonstrate the folly of American exceptionalism by preserving the myth, in The Underground Railroad Colston Whitehead seeks to display the roots of national growth and progress rhetoric and violent and traumatic. Whitehead’s novel demonstrates that American “progress” and “growth” is not merely accompanied by traumas of the past, but is structurally and institutionally dependent on it. By literalising the Underground Railroad, Whitehead transforms historical slavery into a speculative dystopia, exposing the violence and historical trauma which lies at the heart of the US development, growth, and progress rhetoric framework.

In the “South Carolina” chapter, Whitehead presents progress as a something that must be displayed and curated — the seemingly progressive “museum” of “Black uplift” (Whitehead, 2016), which is actually home to medical experimentation and forced sterilisation of the very subjects, Black individuals, whom it purports to be lifting up. Exploring the brutal reality of slavery and the constant threat to Black freedom, even in places which seem to offer liberation, the novel demonstrates how racial violence is reframed as benevolence, how harm is narrated as help. Whitehead exposes how the rhetoric of growth disguises evils like racialised control as humanitarian progress or development. Whitehead’s narrator tells us, “The past is never past.” (Whitehead 2016), and The Underground Railroad shows us how those demons of the past, the historical evils and traumas that the US inflicted on its worldly counterparts, feeds into the growth and establishment of modern systems, as well as the exceptionalist rhetoric.

In the novel, the long railroad stands in for technological progress, and the slavery which surrounds the railroad a symbol of human regression and terror. America’s self-image as a nation of freedom and development is exposed as incoherent, built on an infrastructure which at the same time symbolises national growth while enabling morally regressive domination and the commitment of great terrors on a global stage. Growth, Whitehead shows us, is traumatic, built on trauma, and inseparable from the ghosts of history which propelled America to its privileged position.

In Snow Crash, dystopia no longer revisits historical trauma but instead extrapolates the logic of American exceptionalism into a speculative future, revealing that the culmination of growth, progress, and development rhetoric is not advancement, but social disintegration. In the novel, we see a nation-state replaced by franchises and corporations, where citizenship is rebranded as consumer membership, and law is privatised (Stephenson, 1992). Exceptionalism becomes market fundamentalism (Block, 2014), where progress is measured as acceleration, not improvement. Though inequality deepens and community collapses, information speed, Metaverse advances, and growth in corporate infrastructure convince the people that they are making progress. Growth becomes purely quantitative, not ethical or socially positioned.

Rather than look to the past to expose the anxieties of American exceptionalism, Snow Crash looks ahead to understand the hypocrisy of US narratives of development. It plays out the fear of corporate control and the loss of democratic governance, paying attention to the linguistic and cognitive domination that comes with a “privatised” social experience, governed, literally, by brands and franchises looking to turn a profit. Dominance in Snow Crash is no longer military or territorial, but cultural or semiotic. The “Metaverse” in the story is American-coded, English-dominated, and branded all over by corporations who have a stake in running the country. Stephenson’s dystopia suggests that exceptionalism survives not as national pride, but as cultural saturation and overhaul (Davis, 2014), where American norms become the default global language — this is US power on the global stage, in the speculative future.

Dystopia, in this case, functions as a speculative warning about where American rhetoric may lead us; that the endpoint of these narratives around growth, progress, and development are much more destructive than they may seem from our current position. Unlike Whitehead’s novel, which exposes the traumatic foundations of American growth, Stephenson’s Snow Crash projects its ideological analysis into a speculative future, revealing just how far we may go, or perhaps fall, if we remain committed to the exceptionalist, progress and growth-centric rhetoric which dominates American cultural production. The hyperbolic tone of the novel exposes the absurdity of the neoliberal and exceptionalist logic that it seeks to diagnose, by pushing it beyond plausibility and in doing so, revealing its internal contradictions. Though the US is still pushing the frontier in Snow Crash, this frontier is no longer geographic, as it was in McCarthy’s novel, but technological and economic — expansion is endless, but still empty. Stephenson’s dystopia helps to point out that American narratives of growth and progress survive by continually inventing new frontiers, even as social cohesion collapses around them.

Across US cultural production, the uptake of dystopian and traumatic narratives is not merely a symptom of social pessimism, but an active and critical response to the contradictions embedded in these American rhetorical frames of growth, progress, and development. This essay has argued that dystopia functions both to preserve and expose this myth, ultimately one of American exceptionalism. In The Road, this essay noted how progress is miniaturised to the scale of individual endurance, sustaining the fantasy that moral worth is found in survival itself. In The Underground Railroad, growth is revealed as structurally dependent upon historical and racialised trauma, exposing the violence that underwrites the national narrative of advancement. Finally, this essay noted how Snow Crash demonstrated that rhetoric is projected into a speculative future, one where neoliberal and corporate acceleration culminates in a fragmentation of society, rather than cultural development.

Taken together, these texts demonstrate that the American promise of unbroken, continual progress is less of a historical reality than it is a powerful ideological fiction. Dystopia takes on an important form, as a cultural looking-glass through which this fiction is interrogated, its suppressed histories brought to light, and its future consequences imagined, played out, and shown to be despairing. The fixation on dystopian narratives thus reveals not a rejection of progress, growth, or development, but a profound and substantiated anxiety about the cost at which it has been, and continues to be, achieved.

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Having moved on from coldly banishing whatever threat faces the entire planet and flying off into the sunset, the protectors of our world are sunk by problems far more sensitive and tender. Pattinson’s Batman struggles to reconcile his public perception, the duties and responsibilities he feels bestowed on him by the people of Gotham, with his inner sense of inadequacy. The Thor of Marvel’s most recent efforts has become something of a big, muscly laughing stock, reduced to a slobbishness which renders him daunting now only due to his cheese-dust-encrusted fingers.

Michael Keaton’s Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, sits in a different class, even among these more considered superhero movies. Riggan Thompson, a has-been superhero actor haunted by his past role as Birdman, battles a debilitating insecurity, a fractured sense of identity, the burden of his past fame, and a longing for artistic validation. Birdman, not so much a superhero movie as an exposé of life after fame, sets a precedent and draws a blueprint for the modern superhero; strong and dynamic, but ponderous and sensitive all the same.

David Corenswet’s Superman fits somewhere in the middle. Recognisably heroic, Superman flies, zaps lasers out of his eyes, catches buildings, and all the rest. He’s not the laughable bum that Thor has been reduced to, but he’s not a tentative, inert figure like Birdman either. Rather, Superman’s typical dynamism is shaken when he learns that his parents’ intention for his move to planet Earth was not the altruistic mission he thought it was, but far more self-interested; and in this discovery, he finds his purpose uprooted. Against this despair, Clark Kent fights his true battles in this film; celebrating his humanity, finding his purpose, and choosing, as his foster father reminds him at the end of the film, to celebrate the way he received his parents’ message, rather than their intended instructions.

The formula makes sense — for all-powerful, invincible demigods, what physical problem could possibly be as threatening as losing their purpose, or public disapproval, or feeling like they’re no longer needed?

But why at this time? As the audiences of these original films grow and mature, so too must the heroes and, in turn, their priorities. Ultimately, these superhero movies are moral lessons for children, about the triumph of good over evil, the importance of justice, and the rewards you get for doing the right thing (or the punishments you receive for trying to step out of line). And those are good lessons to teach an eight-year-old, but once that child grows up, they need to learn more sensitive lessons. So all of a sudden, Superman isn’t just showing you that it’s important to stick up for those around you, but that you have to find a purpose, and you need to be able to support yourself in that purpose, even if those around you are falling away.

Batman no longer preaches only the ill fate of those who bend the arm of the law, but that constantly showing a brave face to the world only makes you more miserable, and doesn’t work anyway. Our heroes mature in line with their audiences, so that their moral lessons remain pertinent.

The other noticeable development in these comic-book adaptations is an increased politicisation. Though it couldn’t seem to decide exactly where it stood on the matter, Superman made some explicit references to the Israel-Palestinian dispute and the imposition of the US on foreign affairs — Lex Luthor even gets caught illegally selling arms to the invading army which isn’t reportedly in US interest, in a fashion which makes it hard not to think of Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal. This is in line with a general Hollywood trend of sliding snide political remarks into its box-office hits; Mickey-17’s blatant caricature of Donald Trump, played brilliantly by Mark Ruffalo, 2023’s The Marvels’ exploration of the refugee crises and environmental exploitation, and even The Batman’s display of institutional decay and corruption.

Movies will always be a reflection of the time and space in which they were created, and to ask them to remove their political undertones would be a disservice. Ultimately, superhero stories can and will continue to inspire children with the confidence to know that their problems can be overcome. It just so happens that now, those children are grown up, and the kinds of problems they face are very different from the monsters of their childhood.

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The etymology of scratch is rather misty, but generally it is thought to derive from a fusion of Middle English scratten and crachen, themselves both of uncertain origin. However, the “scr-” sound-cluster appears in many words which tend to have ‘sister’ terms, closely related in meaning but lacking the initial ‘s’. Consider scrunch/crunch, or cringe/scringe (a vintage, alternative form of cringe). The Oxford English Dictionary notes that;

It does not appear that these coincidences are due to any one general cause …, but it is probable that the existence of many pairs of synonyms with scr- and cr- produced a tendency to change cr-, in words expressive of sounds or physical movements, into scr- so as to render the word echoic or phonetically symbolic.

Essentially, cr- words which denoted a particular physicality became scr- words, and this sound-cluster began to be associated with a particular class of action.

The accepted ‘sharpness’ of scratch is a good example of (half of) the kiki-bouba effect,which notes that we generally do not assign sounds to shapes arbitrarily. Researchers found that, across genders, races, cultures, ages, and geographical locations, when presented with nonsense words like ‘kiki’ and ‘bouba’, participants tend to assign ‘kiki’ to a spikier, thinner shape, in comparison to the flat, rounded edges of ‘bouba’. The study has been confirmed among American university students, speakers of languages with no writing system, infants, and even the congenitally blind. This discovery of sound symbolism pushes us to recognise that the way we hear and register plosives versus fricatives, affricates versus liquids, is not meaningless, but relates to something physical we observe about the world. We naturally ‘hear’ shapes, in the sense that the malleability of certain sounds inspires us to think of certain forms that we notice about the world.

We might even observe the kiki-bouba effect at play in our own anatomy. It has been suggested that the association is related to the shape of the mouth when produc­ing sounds — the more rounded shape of the lips when pronouncing bouba and the more taut form we take when saying kiki. Whether it’s a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant, or a laminal apico-alveolar retroflex consonant, we can note some consistency between the reported sharpness of the word and the tightness of our vocal gymnastics.

This is one angle from which to offer the argument that language is not assigned entirely arbitrarily, that there is some quality or property about the word scratch that means it must have been, that it was always intended in some way to sound like, if not exactly, scratch. Something about the sharpness of that real-life incision translates to our use of the fricative in the naming and meaning-making process. The question is whether this phenomenon occurs frequently enough in our language to make a real case for this direction of fit, or whether, in a language of over one million words, some are bound to sound similar to their physical manifestations.

There is much debate over the arbitrariness of language. Many see arguments for linguistic naturalism, or the view that language is essentially wound-up with human nature when it comes to meaning, as a romantic (or arrogant) quest for some human exceptionalism in the way we communicate, different from the roar of the beast. From Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (McKusick, 1986):

A variant of the doctrine of linguistic naturalism, attributable to Epicurus and Lucretius (De Natura, 5:1031ff), asserts that language arises spontaneously from human nature, just as beasts naturally emit cries … they are outward manifestations of man’s inner nature … To the obvious objection that there are many different human languages, [Lucretius] replies that there are a great variety of peoples, each with its own distinct characteristics. Linguistic variation is, in this view, an index of the variability of human nature.’

This seems, to me, a little too romantic and yearning to be an acceptable account of meaning-making. Furthermore, this kind of iconisation (Irvine and Gal) dangerously supplies racist ideologies. Irvine and Gal define iconisation as the notion that ‘a linguistic feature somehow depicts or displays a social group’s inherent nature or essence’. They offer the coastal city of Cartagena as an example, noting that:

Tour guides like to describe the light pronunciation of final /s/ in the local dialect as being taken away by the strong sea wind, an iconisation in which the people, like their city, are windswept. Meanwhile, a heavy medial /t/ (think of ‘water’) signals Britishness in the United States, but the iconisation.. would be to think this sound is a manifestation of an inherently British characteristic of fastidiousness.

There are many of these pithy examples, but they do not make up the majority of the English language by any means. It is necessary at this point to refine the claim of the argument, and to note that these examples hope not to show that language is mostly non-arbitrary, but that it is not entirely arbitrary. We need only a few examples of this weighty link between our shape-processing and our phonetic output to demonstrate that our language, that all language, is not entirely arbitrary.

Though hardly comprehensive, there are enough examples of onomatopoeia and phonosemantics to challenge the traditional Saussurian view of the complete arbitrariness between Sign, Signifier, and Signified, and for us to recognise that, in many cases, the way we experience the world does inform our meaning-making process. When it comes to scratch, or glitter, or the nonsensical bouba, the way we process the world around us carries weight in the naming process. Against the coldness of linguistics, of grammar rules and etymological consistency, we can find something irreplaceably human, something romantic and mortal in the hardness of scratch.

I wanted to begin by exploring, briefly, the plots of the films and their dystopian elements:

The Long Walk, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novel, follows 50 boys competing in a televised contest of wills, where they must walk without stopping or falling below a certain speed, or else face execution, enforced by the patriarchal Major. Set in an alternate, post-civil war America ruled by an authoritarian regime, the contest is used to inspire national productivity, a spectacle of patriotism and brutality which those in command believe will take America back to the Good Old Days of Manliness and Strength and Never Ever Crying Ever. The film interrogates these ideas of manliness, strength, authoritarian control, and escaping the regime. A stereotypical dystopia.

One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s most fantastical work, is anything but stereotypical. Following a group of libertarian revolutionaries, PTA’s blockbuster—inspired by the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland—adopts a political machine gun for a narrative tool, aiming and firing at every group and party you can think of. The dystopia here is subtler and is concerned not with the typical manifestations of apocalyptic authoritarianism: surveillance and poverty. Instead, the film explores a rampant sexuality—let’s fuck while the bomb goes off—and the consequent perversion, gender injustice, and aggressive masculinity. PTA’s dystopia feels attuned to our times, our social worries, and the observed effects of the misinterpretation of sexual liberty.

The Running Man wasn’t a very good movie. Another Stephen King adaptation, the film follows a father of a sickly infant, unable to make money and so resorting to competing on high-stakes game shows to earn enough ‘New Dollars’ (branded with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face) to pay for healthcare. The show he settles on involves evading law enforcement and the public for 30 days to win one billion of these New Dollars. If you fail, you die. Despite the uninspiring acting, the bland script, and the almost satirical lack of on-screen chemistry, the dystopia in the film is no less present — and no less relevant — than in those above. This film deals with the classic dystopian motifs of surveillance and poverty but also nods to these ideas of corruption (especially in media), powerful conglomerates, and AI — modern manifestations of Orwellian fears.

Finally, Bugonia. Though I have already written about Lanthimos’ latest effort, I haven’t considered the ways in which we might treat this film as a dystopia. The film follows a conspiracy theorist bent on proving that the unattainable CEO of his Amazon-esque company is actually an Outer Space Alien. The film seems to deal with dystopia solely in the modern sense, treating these topics of conspiracy theory, social isolation, wealth distribution, and other unconventional modes of dystopia. It doesn’t touch the typical ideas: surveillance, poverty, and authoritarianism, not really. It’s a 4-chan-inspired, Reddit-based dystopia, apt for our times.

These films, varied as they are, suggest that dystopia has shifted from a genre of warning to one of reflection. The apocalypse is no longer on the horizon—it’s ambient, infrastructural, and televised. We no longer imagine Big Brother watching us; we livestream ourselves to him. Dystopia today isn’t about the future’s collapse, but about the inertia of the present—the sense that nothing truly changes, except for the worse—the death of progress. To understand why the genre endures, we must look at what it reflects: a public psychology shaped by exhaustion and the spectacle of decline.

Traditional dystopias dealt in these ideas of state control, surveillance, and scarcity because these reflected most accurately the public fears of the time—growing videographer capabilities came out in surveillance fears, growing wealth polarity came out in scarcity fears, and changing and ever-growing governmental powers came out in fears of state control. Dystopia served as a moral rehearsal and a simulation of despair, a sandbox to ‘play out’ our worst choices and our most heinous actions and to observe the collapse—or the success—of the resultant society.

Contemporary forms of dystopia do much the same kind of cultural catharsis, but their focuses have shifted. Now, we fear the social internet, as portrayed in our dystopian fantasies of media addiction. Our fear of the capitalistic framework begets the dystopian landscapes of hyper-capitalism and financial autocracy. Our changing social operations manifest in dystopian images of alienation and social polarisation.

We can view dystopia as a mirror of the modern spectacle; both The Long Walk and The Running Man show us how suffering can become a spectacle—using dystopia as entertainment, within the world of the story, demonstrates how a society of the future could thrive and feed off suffering. Sadistic and fantastical as this may seem, some critics suggest that we’re playing a similar game in our everyday lives; Debord’s Society of the Spectacle claims that our present society is overinterested in the ‘spectacle’ of living, of marketing and selling ourselves for social credit and recognition.

We might also see the modern dystopian shift as moving from an external to an internal focus; One Battle After Another and Bugonia treat dystopia not as an authoritarian externality but as a symptom of our waning control over our bodies, our desires, and our digital lives. A nod to Foucault’s biopolitics, the films demonstrate how our modern situation forces us to cede power over our very own faculties and thoughts, and the adverse effects this has on our internal lives and our external connections.

So why do audiences seek dystopia? I don’t think that it’s all cultural catharsis and perverse schadenfreude; the function of dystopia has changed definitively in recent times. Dystopia used to be a ‘hope through despair,’ an imagination of the worst, allowing us to steer in the direction of the better. In modern times, however, dystopia functions not as a warning but as a bleak realism. A catastrophic imagining not of the ways we could go but of the places we are. Not as a warning to heed what we could do to ourselves, but as a tour of how we will be if we continue down this path. It’s no longer a warning; too late for that. It’s a looking glass, a mirror image extended a few years into the future. But increasingly, terrifyingly so, it’s less and less fictional.

People have always felt this way. Orwell’s society considered 1984 to be bleakly realistic, chronicling fears of communist brutalism and surveillance. Sylvia Plath’s 30s short story America! America! projects similar disillusionment with the great American Dream, the sense that human life has been subsumed into systems of control disguised as freedom. The difference is that the manifestations of those dystopias, the literal practicalities, always felt like the works of science fiction. Never have the pictures felt so possible and seemed so unavoidable.