January 2021: We Did The Blackpill

Losing my goddamn shit over here.

Wednesdays are officially the new hot weekday for sizzling news items. Let's see, we got the insurrection, the new impeachment, the inauguration party, stonks day, Bezos steps down. All happened on Wednesdays. Who knew hump days were all about the wild child?

Throughout it all, January 2021 was probably our official month of Blackpill Ingestion. In celebration of this momentous occasion, we might as well round up all the garbage.

The three largest puzzle pieces that unlocked our epiphany arrived in the reactions to the Bernard meme, the controlled chaos involving meme stonks, and Promising Young Woman.

Bernard Memed Because He Is Cool
Jan 20: We watched the inauguration and the embarrassing DNC celebration party because we correctly figured it would be fascinating. "Return to Obama-land" means a return to celebrity lawmakers, and so the events' TV production team and organizers consider everyone involved a celebrity, including anyone who primaried. Accordingly, they eventually aired the now world-famous 10-second wide shot of Bernard Sanders unintentionally expressing all of the frustration that his past and present supporters felt in that moment, as we anticipate the certain path of upsetting inevitabilities carved and cleared for a flood of status quo irrigation, not unlike the ongoing flow of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Despite catty comments from the fashion police and the classist Karens, Bernard looked stunningly fabulous. We don't throw around the word "King" ever. But for what it's worth, "King" was the first word that came to mind. Stans typically overuse "king" and "queen," so this moment helped us realize that we are "Stans of Bernard." With respect to Jon Moxley and Jeff Tweedy, Bernard is our lone stan figure.

And yes, we get it: We understand why some socialists and progressives felt disappointed by Bernard's decision to support Unky Joe, unjustly labelling him a sellout and a traitor. But we will never understand how easily these same people forgot how the DNC blatantly and publicly stole his (our) delegate lead.

And here's where we get to make Hot Take #1: Fuck Pelosi and The DNC for condemning "people who want to take away our democracy" when they're not only guilty of pulling the exact same shit but - quite predictably - they fucking got away with it. Realizing how close we came, the DNC absolutely wants his past supporters to say "I fell for it" and give up hope.

Like it or not, it's Bernard's job to work with these losers everyday, and he would have made an unwise decision spending the road to election day condemning moderates and risking a vote split just to make his whiniest supporters happy. P.S. These delusional people assumed that a hypothetical Bernard presidency would involve some sort of magic wand that instantly converted the entire country to full socialism. They would have been unhappy no matter what he did or said. He's worked in congress for decades and has somehow avoided the pod people. He also understands long game strategy, and perhaps we should have some faith that the country's only trustworthy politician does in fact know what he's doing.

As the Bernard meme grew exhaustingly overused throughout the following weekend, a handful of remarks - mostly from bot accounts - unsuccessfully attempted to shift the dialogue in the direction of white misogynist cancellation. Others wondered why we weren't using this historic inauguration as an opportunity to meme Kamala The Cop. A week or so later, her Karen-in-training clown of a step-niece not only became a meme but signed a modelling contract, so they got their wish.

Aside from anything Bernard-related, it's definitely worth noting the musical-theater-heavy "Kids Bop" sponsored DNC celebration perfectly capturing their immense condescension and contempt for anyone but themselves and the powerfully rich.

Meme Stonks Are Okay
Smooth segue into the stonks thing: The underlying conflict regards The Powerful VS The Voiceless -- consistent with congress' reaction to the insurrection. They could have impeached Dr. Professor for a hundred other offenses, but none of them really mattered until powerful people felt threatened. The powerful also get to strategically choose which voiceless-adjacent people to provide a temporary platform. But only when they have to. (Like the poet at the inauguration. Or Ken Bone. Two great examples.)

Stonk trading is not supposed to be ethical. But despite its blatant inherent evil, Robinhood users who took the app's branding too literally became surprised when the free user-friendly stonk app cracked down on organized targeting. What did they honestly think would happen? Playing with stonks involves an understanding that powerful people will always win.

That's actually all we really have to say about the stonks thing.

Movie Review: Promising Young Woman
We haven't had this much time to catch up on movies in well over a decade, and the hits just keep on comin'. Accordingly, we've grown obsessed with Letterboxd and the good people at Red Letter Media. But we've also been enjoying episodes of our favorite dirtbag podcasts that occasionally focus on movie critique, perhaps partially as a nod to Zizek's film criticism.

Skipping over some explanation here ... something about how we somewhat expected a years-long movie marathon to expand our worldview, but perhaps not to this extent. In every movie we've seen in the past six weeks, we had no trouble finding at least some hinted theme about power struggle or class struggle.

Promising Young Woman is an interesting case -- an exercise in modern capitalist liberal idpol pro-cop propaganda. Earlier today, it was nominated for four Golden Globes. We would recommend it to anyone for the same reason we would recommend occasionally watching 30-60 minutes of cable news 2 or 3 times a month: it's important to know your enemy; it's good to know the extent of the bullshit.

We appreciate it because it's not an echo chamber of our own belief system and its grossly flawed messaging actually helped us gain clarity about a few aspects of liberalism that we most strongly disagree. So it's an important movie, but not at all in the way its filmmaker intended.

As a movie, it's pretty sloppy; its narrative's got some clunks, a few unchecked plotholes, a few too many "how convenient" moments, and virtually no likeable characters. Viewers are expected to root for the main protagonist lady, although she's never really given a moment or two of endearment. Her motivation for revenge only about 50% makes sense. However, the filmmaker (nom'd for Best Screenplay and Best Director) can use the film's messaging as a crutch to fight back against any anticipated critique. Yes it's flawed with many exposed loose ends, but that should only matter if you're part of the problem.

Here's the spoiler paragraph: So it's structured with a standard three act template. The first and third acts could have both been pretty great -- and in the case of the final act, very moving -- if they had been presented as shorts or as episodic segments. Acts one and three actually feel tonally incongruent. These are separated by an objectively bad second act (spoilers) that ends with a badly executed, awkward, corny, uncomfortable "dating" montage that's (probably) intended to trick people into thinking that the movie is wrapping up. But since happy endings don't exist in real life, the movie continues. Also by the middle of the second act (spoilers), we learn that the protagonist's one-dimensional revenge-motive doesn't involve any actions that actually teach the film's would-be-predators any long-lasting lessons, which renders her efforts entirely meaningless. At the end of the movie, the big finale (spoilers) concludes with the cops taking care of literally everything. A great message indeed.

We're almost positive that PYW was one of the 8 or 9 trailers screened prior to Cats, our most recent movie theater experience (one entire year ago this week), which also included a trailer for Trolls World Tour (a $110 million movie) among others. When it eventually hit streaming services, PYW's $19.99 rental price seemed suspiciously large compared to most of the other mid-to-low budget 2020 Sundance premieres. We suspect it had some big investors. And after today's multiple nomination announcement, we can see why.

If you're interested in seeing a film that handles #metoo responsibly and effectively, PYW is not that movie; instead, go see The Assistant, which also premiered at Sundance 2020 and was probably our favorite film of the year.

The Assistant is now streaming on Hulu.