Reader's Digest: March 3, 2023
Leaving London for LA: two fascinating essays that are not—despite the venue—about books.
In one, Jorge Cotte dissects the second series of Mike White’s acerbic tragicomedy, The White Lotus:
Like other satires of wealth and luxury, The White Lotus articulates the very promises it seeks to undermine, and it is hard to dissipate those kisses after they cloud the air.
A running theme in this and other reviews: the audience’s complicity with the show’s pampered protagonists, “fatty with ignorance and marinated in acid.”
In perhaps the series’ best comic moment, the wealthy-but-woke nouveau riches, Harper and Ethan, share their doubts about having kids, with everything that’s going on—a euphemism that prompts baffled curiosity from the couple they are with: “Really? What’s happening?”
Like Harper and Ethan, we pat ourselves on the back for paying attention—Harper is so anxious that she cannot sleep—but we may be no better than they are at expressing what we fear, or doing anything about it:
Harper has trouble articulating what keeps her up: “I don’t know. Just everything that’s going on … in the world,” she says. And when asked to elaborate: “Oh, I don’t know. Just the end of the world.”
Cotte leaves implicit the parallel between Harper’s relation to environmental and political doom—a smug and helpless voyeur—and our relation to the show’s driving narrative: a corpse washed up on a white-sand beach.
It’s what we know will happen without knowing who or why or how. Dread travels in words and waves…
We know we are better than the oblivious couple, better than Ethan, better than Harper, yet here we are, smug and helpless voyeurs of a doom we cannot prevent.
Our complicity has layers: we gorge on the scenery and congratulate ourselves for knowing we’re complicit—for writing reviews like Cotte’s, and reviews of those reviews like mine. At bottom, the awkward fact that “anti-capitalist” art will sell.
I don’t play video games these days, so I am at some distance from the sense of wonder anatomized by Nathan Wainstein in an essay on interactive architecture:
Game wonder … depends in every case on an awareness of technical constraint. In this respect, it resembles the formalist awe of the specialist even when it’s experienced by an amateur.
To appreciate the wonder of video games like Bloodborne, one must know, at least implicitly, what is easy and what is hard to simulate: one appreciates the landscape as a simulation. For instance, there is (allegedly) a special thrill in being able to interact with distant objects one initially read as part of the inert graphic backdrop of a game.
Wainstein compares this experience, perceptively, with that of the protagonist, Robert Blake, in H. P. Lovecraft’s last short story, “The Haunter of the Dark”:
Like the player of Bloodborne wielding their monocular from the heights of the Cathedral Ward, Blake stares in fascination at the “shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distance whose unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy,” training his field glasses “on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house.”
The distant spires of the church on Federal Hill, the hill itself, feel like an unreal canvas: a graphic backdrop, not something Blake can interact with. It takes months for him to seek them out in person—as if they belong to a higher level of the game, as yet unlocked—and when he does, the cityscape “is mediated simultaneously through the received tropes of fiction and the spectacle of modern industry”: Federal Hill seems to him “linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of [his] own tales and pictures.”
What Wainstein doesn’t say is that “The Haunter of the Dark” is an affectionate riposte to Robert Bloch—the later author of Psycho—whose story, “The Shambler from the Stars,” inflicts cosmic horrors on a thinly-disguised facsimile of HPL. In return, Lovecraft casts his friend Bloch/Blake in an HPL story—as someone might immerse themselves in a Lovecraftian video game. The sense that he is looking at a fictive cityscape is, for Blake, quasi-veridical: the joke is that he almost knows he’s in a story, as we know we’re playing a game when we suspend belief and revel in the wonder of a virtual world.
BONUS CONTENT: Gwenda-lin Grewal on philosophy and fashion.
Why wear your gym clothes 24-7? Because you are not defined by the lie that there is anything other than flux. Here, in Heraclitean athleisure, a moment turns static and time falls away. … Do we meet in fashion the fantastical arbitrariness of our own existence?