The grandchildren told stories of kitchen mishaps and wholesome car rides during the tribute readings. Fond recollections of experiences now committed entirely to memory, recited over and over to each other with bittersweet tuts and careful, measured-out smiles. I find it difficult to face the reality that this will happen to me, too.

That one day the people I leave behind will sit around, dabbing at their eyes, telling stories that slowly morph into something totally distinct from the original, a patina developed by exaggerating only those best qualities in the deceased, as I saw happen today. To think that’s what becomes of us all, a series of amiable tales passed from nephew to grandchild to wife.

This is an unavoidable fate, and our sole imperative is to leave behind a character deserving of those hyperbolic stories. To “wring out every last bit of living”, as Libba Bray said.

The priest read from Ecclesiastes 3:1–8.

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

There comes a time for everything, but all of those times are succeeded by a being out of time altogether, a final deadline of experience, events, emotions - of everything. A last toll, a finish line. And then experience, whatever it is that ties together all the events “you” have lived through, just stops. Death is an obliteration of experience, a total, calamitous erasure of living.

It is dark, and violent, and terrifying, and to pretend it is anything but is a self-soothing ignorance. It is the ultimate monster in the woods, the unavoidable line in the sand that you’re being carried towards, screaming, kicking. It is terrifying to die.

Epicurus tries to tell you not to fear death, because “When I am, death is not, and when death is, I am not”. The two can never coincide - you’ll never actually experience your own death, so there’s nothing to be scared of, right?

What Epicurus failed to grasp, evidently, is that the notion of “I am not” is completely horrifying. The notion of not existing, of never existing, of never seeing, or hearing, or feeling anything again - of not being.

The fact that, as Epicurus suggests, I personally won’t “experience” the after-effects of that (because I won’t be experiencing anything) is far from consolation, it’s the exact thing that’s so awful about death, about being a totalising, infinite consciousness in a fragile shell.

The human body is a fragile casing - it cuts, breaks, and denatures. It protects us only from the most insignificant threats. It is a miracle, from a physical standpoint, that you’re alive at any moment, when you think about the sheer number of threats to your body, and its inability to defend against many of them. To live is, largely, miraculous.

Standing in front of the coffin, the understanding of those two inverted axes, the fragility of the body and the finality of death, are fully realised. They are real, and brutal. They can no longer be only concepts in the mind, when you’re staring - you’re weeping - at evidence of their applicability.

In light of it all it seems, then, that the best one can do, the most noble and profound goal, is to leave gracefully, with the knowledge that the family you left behind - three children, numerous cousins, nieces, and nephews, and eight adoring grandchildren - saw you out with love, with happy remembrances, and with the desire to live as you lived.

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Ann Quin’s Berg understands and reproduces this problem. Alistair Berg arrives in Brighton with the express intention of killing his estranged father. But Quin refuses to resolve this murder plot — it instead dissolves into obsessional neuroses and an impotent repetition. Berg is a fragmented self, unable to trust his own perception, his communication with others stunted and often failing. His crisis is not merely psychological but linguistic; he cannot find himself a stable position from which to communicate with others, to articulate his desires, because the same structures that produce his identity are keeping him from controlling it. His repeated attempts to redefine himself — to rename himself, to annihilate his father, to occupy a different position in the world — are curtailed by the very language through which this redefinition has to occur.

This essay argues that Berg presents speech as a site of symbolic instability with dire consequences, rather than a self-possessed mode of social integration. Through Berg’s fluid naming, Oedipal fixation, failed acts of communication and outreach, and fractured narrative consciousness, Quin fictionalises a fundamentally psychoanalytic account of subjectivity in which language divides, rather than helps to express. Using Freud’s account of the talking cure and its limits, alongside the Uncanny, this essay will illuminate how Berg’sspeech circles the desire it stops itself from directly expressing, and how this semiotic impotence prevents Berg from self-restoration. Lacan’s notions of symbolic order and the divided subject clarify why it is that Berg’s identity remains dependent on the same paternal authority that he seeks to negate, and the novel uses its own experimental prose to enact what it narrativizes; not just representing the psychic fragmentation that Berg undergoes, but producing the conditions for that symbolic breakdown in the language of the text itself. Berg’s inability to speak clearly and act decisively reveals that his Oedipal crisis is not simply a personal conflict with the father, but a crisis of redefinition and symbolic identity.

Psychoanalysis has long been concerned with the problem of speech — Freud held that speech was never innocent, the primary vehicle for expressing our repressed thoughts and desires. Psycho-physical symptoms, slips of the tongue, jokes that express with insincerity what we truly want to say — all show, for Freud, that language is shaped by unconscious forces (Freud, 1895). Freud uses this knowledge to inform his ‘talking cure’, dependent on the possibility of putting psychic material into words, making hidden conflicts visible, and therefore available for interpretation. However, speech is not simply honest testimony or confession, but indirect, displaced, resistant in nature. Informed by the unconscious drives and desires of the subject, our speech often conceals what it is we wish to convey. This suggests that the talking cure is less of a straight path to truth and more concerned with navigating a verbal labyrinth; the patient speaks in order to work through the blockages, the gaps and silences that define their neurosis. Consequently, ‘meaning’ to Freud is always over-determined — layered with conflicting impulses and desires, ensuring that the subject is always, in part, a stranger to their own vocabulary.

Lacan radicalises Freud’s suspicion of speech by shifting the focus; instead of fixating on what speech hides, Lacan wrote on the linguistic constructions that constitute the subject in the first place. Lacan saw the unconscious as ‘structured like a language’ (Lacan, 2006), page numbers please! decentering the self from its own utterances. Where Freud sees a slip of the tongue as unconscious desire pushing itself into the foreground, Lacan thinks that we are the slip-up — a ‘divided subject’, held since birth to the standard of the ‘symbolic order’. This order, the pre-existing, complex network of social laws and linguistic rules, demands that we give up our reckless, wordless freedoms in place of rigid, structured grammatical and lexical laws. Lacan’s tragedy, mirrored in Berg, is that by entering this unavoidable system we are alienated from ourselves, forever unable to bridge the gap between the inner self and our linguistically-acceptable presentations (Lacan, 1978). We become dependent, Lacan argues, on the ‘sliding signifier’ — the burgeoning slideshow of one word leading only to the next, but never to the actual ‘thing’ in question — and our identity becomes a perpetual catch-up as a result.

Quin’s Berg narrativizes this psychoanalytic function — the novel’s prose works as a literalisation of the Lacanian divided subject, where the boundaries between inner monologue, external narration, and authorial observation are bleeding into one another. Berg’s speech and patterns of thought do not provide a window in a coherent consciousness; instead, they are evidence of a psychical impasse, a blockade between repressed desires and the external self. His repetitive, often circular syntax mirror Freud’s ‘compulsion to repeat’ (Freud, 1920) page number?, showing us a mind unable to move past primary trauma.

In this sense, the experimental form of the novel is itself a ‘symptom’, a hallmark of the psychological instability characterised by this relationship with speech. Rather than serving as a tool for Berg to master his reality, language becomes the prime mover of his undoing. Berg finds himself ensnared in a semiotic loop; his desires, his true wishes, are repressed by the very words with which he seeks liberation. Ultimately, Berg demonstrates what Lacan finds so tragic — that when symbolic order fails to provide a stable identity, the subject is jettisoned, drifting among sliding signifiers, unable to distinguish between — in this case — the desire to annihilate his father, who had ‘died in thought alone’ (Quin, 2019) and the realisation that his own self is merely a linguistic shadow of the paternal figure he seeks to kill.

Berg’s exploration of naming and its effects provides another lens through which we can observe the psychoanalytic effects of language and speech. Berg’s first act of rebellion is not the attempted murder of the father, but an act of linguistic defiance — the adoption of a pseudonym. By arriving in Brighton not as ‘Alistair Berg’, but as ‘Greb’, he attempts a radical redefinition of the self. The name is considered the primary anchor that hooks the subject to the ‘symbolic order’, a gift from the Other that precedes our birth and succeeds us in death, dictating our position in the structures of law, family, and social recognition (Lacan, 2006)page number. Berg’s attempt to regain control of the self through a name-change is, therefore, a doomed project, and ‘Greb’ provides no more stability than the inverse identity that he was compelled to flee.

Lacan saw names as manifestations of the Name-of-The-Father (Lacan, 2006), the fundamental signifier that regulates desire. By attempting to move from his ‘real’ name, Berg seeks to undermine the paternal law itself. However, instead of granting him autonomy, Berg’s redefinition exposes a void in place of a structured self — for Berg, even the name has become a ‘sliding signifier’, a dynamic construction he now must cling on to, in place of the rigid designator created to anchor his self to the symbolic order. His entire identity becomes an inversion of the father — his mother mentions that ‘There’s definitely something about you, Aly… your father was the same’ (Quin, 2019). Consequently, he seeks to destroy the father, rendering his self-definition paradoxically dependent on the paternal figure.

Berg discovers that language does not express his true self — it alienates him from it. Every introduction of himself as ‘Greb’ reminds him of the gap between his lived experience and the symbolic label he is attempting to masquerade as. He wishes language to be a tool for liberation, but frustratingly, all it does is condemn him for his displacement, provide proof of his crisis of redefinition. He tries, in vain, to use the tools of the symbolic order, names and labels and stories, to escape the primary rule of these constructions — that the self is authored and defined by the Other (Lacan, 1978).

The instability of Berg’s name serves as a microcosm for his larger psychical collapse. Quin uses the failure of the pseudonym to show that identity is never self-contained, or self-authored. Berg’s subjectivity is a product of the very language he desperately attempts to manipulate, and that language cannot be freed from the imposition of the father. As the novel progresses it becomes clear that ‘Greb’ is less of a person and more of a site of conflict, a collection of fragments failing to coalesce into a coherent self. Quin demonstrates the psychoanalytic truth offered by Lacan — that language allows us to speak ourselves into existence, but in doing so ensures that the ‘self’ we speak of is a fragmentary, divided, untethered and alienated construction, haunted by the paternal structures it tries failingly to outrun.

Freudian theory provides the initial map for Berg’s desire — a rivalry with Nathaniel, and gravitation towards mother-substitutes (Freud, 1905), but Quin resists a mechanical, thoughtless application. Instead, she renders the Oedipal structure of the novel as something linguistically fluid, with the father not simply a biological obstacle, but a lexical and psychical double. The narration frequently blurs the boundaries between the two men, with unclear pronouns and untethered utterances suggesting that Berg’s aggression is inextricably — and perhaps foundationally — linked to an identification with the father so deep that it becomes near-mimetic. Berg does not simply want to kill the father, but ‘power unequivocal’ (Quin, 2019) — to become the father, a linguistic compulsion that renders his aims inherently contradictory.

Lacan’s transition from the literal father to the ‘symbolic father’ clarifies why Berg’s rebellion is doomed to fail — the father representing the primary signifier ensures that even if Berg were to kill Nathaniel, this physical annihilation does nothing to destroy the symbolic function that the father serves. The father structures the very language and symbolic order through which Berg communicates, participates in society, and understands himself, showing that any move Berg makes towards autonomy is structured by paternal guidelines (Lacan, 2006).

This mediation is most evident in Berg’s desire for Judith. She becomes a point on the oedipal triangle — Berg desires her because she belongs to the world of the father. Judith, in this sense, functions as a signifier of the father’s power, rather than a person in her own right. By pursuing her, Berg participates, or gets to participate, in the father’s economy of desire. However, Berg’s outreach to her is inevitably a failed act of communication, because it is spoken in a ‘borrowed’ language, his desire being mimetic rather than genuine.

Ultimately, Quin shows us that Berg’s Oedipal crisis is a linguistic one. He is trapped in a symbolic loop, where every act of defiance — renaming himself, seducing Judith, plotting a murder — unwillingly confirms the centrality of the father. He cannot find a position of speech from which he can operate outside of the paternal structure. Quin uses this impasse to show that the subject is never truly free from the structures that birthed them; Berg remains a prisoner of the father’s shadow, because he is in every sense a prisoner of the father’s language.

The structural failure of Berg’s mission is rooted in the failure of his speech. Psychoanalysis itself is coined under the ‘talking cure’, a method of self-discovery and unburdening the mind through vocalisation. This inauguration grounds the methods of psychoanalysis in speech and language. Freud’s foundational premise was that repressed material, once translated from the primary storage of the unconscious into more digestible syntax, could be mastered and analysed, and then integrated into the subject’s consciousness. However, for the neurotic subject, speech is rarely a transparent vehicle for truth, but is instead shaped by condensation, displacement, and a compulsive circling around the very trauma rendering the subject unable to talk coherently and honestly in the first place.

In Berg, this therapeutic process is reversed — instead, Berg’s talking functions only as an enclosure. His internal monologues and fractured interactions reveal a profound semiotic impotence, a language characterised by excess but lacking meaning. He speaks and thinks incessantly, but his words constantly hit a wall — ‘there can never be any kind of communication between us’ (Quin, 2019). Berg is a subject who is talking away his desire, rather than working towards it. His speech is pockmarked with displacement, where the primary Oedipal rage is transported onto more available objects — the sounds of the floorboards, the textures of the room.

Berg’s speech is not cathartic, but compulsive, doomed to repeat his obsessive intentions, while at the same time stalling his active plot. He repeats these intentions to himself — the Hamletian need to act, to kill, to become ‘Greb’, but the more he speaks, the more the possibility of his springing to action dissolves. Language becomes a substitute for action, a way of acting out his neuroses without ever resolving the underlying conflict.

This linguistic failure, and impotence, extends to his dialogues with Nathaniel and Judith. These exchanges are rarely communicative, but are instead scenes of misunderstanding and psychical projection. The characters talk at or through one another, never truly communicating or understanding their interlocutor. This suggests that for Berg, language has lost its ability to control or negotiate desire. He is a fragmented, divided self, because his symbolic tools — his words — no longer correlate to his real drives.

Ultimately, Berg’s failure to speak mirrors his failure to act coherently. His Oedipal mission remains unresolved because he does not have the linguistic position from which he can supersede the father, and authorise this mortal act. Quin uses this impotence to show that language itself is part of the conflict, and that Berg’s talking forms part of his paralysis; he is trapped in a linguistic labyrinth where every sentence is a detour from his ultimate goal. He is a divided subject, with his own speech leading him not towards freedom, but mapping out the boundaries of his restriction.

The structural instability in the text highlights how Quin utilises Lacan’s ‘sliding signifier’. In Lacanian theory, meaning is never fixed, but signifiers — the words and symbols we use to communicate — move constantly, deferring meaning to the next signifier in the chain (Lacan, 1993). There is no anchoring point, and Berg’s narrative behaves with this exact fluidity. There is rarely a moment of secure footing for the reader — events drift between the protagonist’s memory, his immediate perceptions, and his psychical projections of himself as ‘a man of action conquering all’ (Quin, 2019). Each moment is in flux, unable to be placed in neat sequence, unmoored from a stable reality.

Quin’s prose style is the primary engine of this instability. Her use of fragmented sentences and clipped, verbless syntax performs this psychical breakdown. This narrative slippage prevents the reader from ever establishing a coherent ‘I’ to ground the story in, forcing the reader to confront, and become, the same kind of divided subject that Lacan explicates as the function of participating in language.

This instability is most potently performed in the blurring of fantasy and reality regarding the central act of the novel, the patricidal murder. In Berg, the murder is perpetually deferred or reimagined, sliding away from the reader just as the moment of action seems ripe to occur. Often it is unclear whether an event belongs to the external world of Brighton, or the internal chaos of Berg’s obsessional neuroses, reflecting the psychoanalytic truth that for the subject, the real is often less impactful than the psychic reality of fantasy.

Berg is not simply about a man undergoing a psychical and semiotic breakdown; it is the very playground for this breakdown to occur in the reader. It produces the perfect storm, the ideal conditions for the semiotic impotence and uncertainty that afflicts Berg’s subjectivity to be transferred onto the reader. Just as Berg cannot find a stable position from which to articulate his fantasy and his desires, so too does the reader struggle to find a position suitable for mastering, comprehending, the novel. Quin demonstrates that the reader cannot resolve the narrative for the same reason that Berg cannot resolve his Oedipal trauma — the language we use to understand it is the very same thing that keeps us alienated from the truth.

Freud’s understanding of the Uncanny is of something once familiar but now repressed, returning in unsettlingly imitative form (Freud, 1919). The disturbing aspect to the Uncanny is that it draws out hidden psychical material in a new, unsettling form — exposing us to these deeply-rooted traumas, fears, and desires, but with a digestible buffer. Language and speech cannot contain these forbidden objects, and the subject is required to reformulate these mysterious but impactful parts of the self in uncanny ways, resulting in thoughts or perceptions that feel familiar yet impersonal, distant from the self and the subject but still causally tethered. In Berg, the overarching narrative progression of Alistair Berg is fundamentally an uncanny relation — a return to homely origins, his biological father, that had been for his whole adult life unfamiliar, repressed, disavowed.

Quin uses Freud’s Uncanny primarily through the double, and the confusion of the animate and inanimate. Berg’s relationship with his father is one of uncanny symmetry; the boundaries between the self and the other dissolve, creating a doubling effect symptomatic of Freud’s notion. This doubling provides a kind of psychic substitute for the speech that Berg cannot master. When language fails to establish a clear distinction between the I and the father, the uncanny emerges to fill in this gap.

In the narrative, the recurring presence of dead or mummified animals — the ‘taxidermal creatures’ that ‘stared from their glass houses’ (Quin, 2019) serve to highlight this uncanny replacement, the grotesque imagery providing a substitute language, a material kind of speech that gives a tangible form to the repressed anger and aggression that Berg cannot articulate with words. The dead cat, for instance, becomes a focal point for his obsessive fury and his fascination with mortality, acting as a physical signifier for the death of his own symbolic identity.

The reliance on uncanny imagery reveals the limits of talking, speech, and language in the world of Berg. When the symbolic order, the world of lexical laws and rules, breaks down, the subject is forced to confront the real in gruesome, material ways — a dead animal, a rotting corpse. The uncanny objects of the novel are evidence of Berg’s linguistic crisis; they express what he cannot, what he is too inarticulate to say but is at the same time most foundationally true about his actions, his desires, and his self. The uncanny is the final failure of redefinition, the point at which his subject comes to understand that the new identity it sought is nothing more than a repurposing, a hasty portmanteau of old, repressed trauma.

Ultimately, Berg’s inability to murder his father is not a failure of will, but a failure of speech. Quin demonstrates that the Oedipal crisis is just as much a semantic struggle as it is a psychological hurdle. Through Berg’s failed attempts to redefine himself as ‘Greb’, the novel dramatizes the futility of trying to self-author identity outside of the paternal symbolic structure. Berg’s stunted communication and obsessive, whirling monologues demonstrate a compulsion to repeat that highlights the failure of the talking cure — his words do not clarify his intent, but map out the boundaries of his own neuroses. Quin uses the novel’s experimental prose to goad the reader into experiencing the same linguistic alienation that Berg embodies. Berg therefore proves that the subject does not simply speak language; rather, language controls the subject, bringing to light the foundational unconscious conflicts, desires, and beliefs that make identity, and the language we reach for to sustain it, inherently unstable.

Psychoanalysis, then, offers a radical redefinition of speech, transforming it from a vehicle of self-expression into a psychical battleground. It insists on a self fundamentally caught within language, a divided subject with utterances pockmarked by repression, displacement, and semantic dynamism. By guiding us away from the illusion of a coherent, autonomous voice, psychoanalysis allows us to pay attention to our slips, repetitions, and silences as authentic markers of human desire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Breuer, J. and Freud, S. (1895) Studies on Hysteria. Translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1905) ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901–1905). Translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1919) ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. London: Vintage, pp. 217–256.

Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

Lacan, J. (1978) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Lacan, J. (1993) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956. Translated by R. Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Quin, A. (2019) Berg. Sheffield: And Other Stories.

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 campyhistory — 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.

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 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.

On the 1975’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, there’s an interlude called ‘the man who married a robot’. It tells the story of a man, snowflakesmasher86, who enters into a relationship with The Internet.

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.

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.

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, on the plots of the films and their dystopian elements:

The Long Walk, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novel, follows 50 boys competing on a televised contest of wills, where they must walk without stopping or falling below a certain speed, 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 in the classic dystopian motifs of surveillance and poverty, but nods also to these ideas of corruption (especially in media), powerful conglomerates, AI — modern manifestations of Orwellian fears.

Finally, Bugonia. Though I have written already 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 and 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, 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, ousted in our dystopia 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 over-interested 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 and internal focus; One Battle After Another and Bugoniatreat 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 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 the places we are. Not as a warning to heed of what we could do to ourselves, but 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, the manifestations of those dystopias, the literal practicalities, always felt like the works of science fiction. Never have the pictures felt so possible, seemed so unavoidable.