The HBO series served as a stand-in for everything wrong with white millennial women during its original run. Then Gen Z started watching.

It was the Peanut Butter heist that won me over. Everyone watching “Cape Fear” knows what I’m talking about – it’s the sixth-episode confrontation in which Max Cady, played by Javier Bardem, tangles yet again with his nightmare neighbors Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson).

Some of you may be thinking I’ve mischaracterized the Bowdens since past versions of “Cape Fear” establish Max as the problem. But for all of Tom and Anna’s trepidation toward Max, they do little to thwart him from being all up in their business.

In one scene, Anna discovers Max in her kitchen making a sandwich for her son Zack (Joe Anders). In another, her daughter Natalie (Lily Collias) hitches a ride with him. Anna carpools with him too, and Tom joins Max for a few drinks at a local bar. The Bowdens spend more time with their local tormentor than I have ever spent with my neighbors, whom I like quite a bit.

All this happens after Zack turns up with a missing toe, which Anna suspects Max orchestrated. Just like she and Tom strongly suspect Max spiked the family’s iced tea with Tom’s stash of LSD. Why does Tom have a stash of LSD? For microdosing, because Tom is a yuppie who hates his life.

Anyway, when the couple angrily strides across the street to confront Max, we’re supposed to be in their corner. But Max’s door is open to them, and inside they find him preparing a luxurious meal. Before Tom gives the hardened ex-con an earful of what for, he and Anna are shocked silent when their cat strolls into Max’s kitchen.

“You took Peanut Butter?” Tom yelps in a way that halts Max in his tracks. He walks over to the cat and picks him up, and in previous adaptations of this story, this might signal that a disturbing act of animal cruelty is about to happen.

But Bardem’s Max is a different breed of psychopath from those previously embodied by Roberts DeNiro and Mitchum. “Peanut Butter? Really?” he says. “You’re calling this majestic creature . . . Peanut Butter?” Then he kisses kitty on the cheek and reintroduces him as Maní – the Spanish word for peanut.

“Maní will come home when he’s ready,” he says later. “You can’t force a cat.”

“Cape Fear” has now inspired three screen adaptations – two of them feature-length films that last about as long as the endurance limit most people have for its brand of sadism. In adapting the premise for TV, series creator Nick Antosca dilutes the movies’ naked menace by pouring reasonable doubt into both Max’s profile and that of the Bowdens, the married lawyers behind his downfall.

That doesn’t save “Cape Fear” from being a 10-hour slog set to an imitation of Bernard Herrmann’s anxiety-inducing score, but it does lend a little intrigue to Antosca and Bardem’s interpretation of Max.

The TV variation of Max Cady is where the classic prestige drama Difficult Man shakes hands with a manosphere cultist’s pent-up aggression. Bardem’s villain is built more like an aughts-edition antihero. He was once a respected celebrity chef who loved his wife even though he cheated on her, and exudes a kind of danger that brings out a touch of Bonnie and Clyde syndrome in horny strangers.

Meanwhile, Anna and Tom Bowden are a split version of the attorney previously played by Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte, Sam Bowden. Their relationship with Max is also much more personal: Anna was Max’s pregnant lawyer in the trial where Max stood accused of killing his expectant wife, while Tom was the prosecutor.

At some point, Anna persuaded Max to plead guilty even though he maintained his innocence. Shortly after Max’s trial ended, Anna and Tom got married, Anna got sober, and both buried a few secrets. While Max spent 17 years in prison, Anna built a reputation for freeing wrongfully convicted inmates, while Tom went to work for a fancy law firm.

It’s hard not to feel some kind of sympathy for Max, who sustained a severe brain injury while he was incarcerated that required surgeons to install a metal plate in his skull. As he tells a fellow prisoner in a flashback, he’d never murdered anyone before he killed the men who attacked him. Who knows if that’s true? Then again, Anna and Tom aren’t exactly paragons of honesty either.

Everyone in this series is some shade of awful. Anna’s boss, Noa (CCH Pounder), thinks Max is just the greatest, to the point of gaslighting her unnerved colleague. An unhinged girl who turns out to be his secret daughter, Nevaeh (Malia Pyles), has been living in the walls of the Bowdens’ house and messing with their kids. Max even has his own stalker played by Juliette Lewis, who also starred in the 1991 movie.

Still, there’s no getting around Max’s demonic impulses or the Bowdens’ clumsy game of FAFO mixed with “You Started It.” As Anna and Tom keep saying, Max was going to come after them no matter what. But good lord, they are bad at this.

I’ve always understood Max Cady to be a poisonous extension of the male ego, dating back to “The Executioners,” John D. MacDonald’s 1957 book that started it all. Max Cady either validates the paranoia of upstanding men obsessed with protecting or dominating women, or the disdain felt by those whom such men look down upon.

Relatedly, his cinematic incarnations have evolved over the years: In the 1962 film, Mitchum’s Cady is a straight-up unrepentant criminal terrorizing Peck’s Sam Bowden by threatening to rape his wife and virginal teenage daughter. DeNiro’s take in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake amplifies Max’s barbarism and Lewis’ Lolita vibe as Sam Bowden’s daughter, establishing her teenage curiosity about Max by sucking on his fingers. (Scorsese is also listed as an executive producer on the series, along with Steven Spielberg.)

Antosca’s choice to leave rape out of the equation in the TV show, then, is a smart one. Instead, he falls back on a tried-and-true fridging: Not only was Max’s wife brutalized to a degree that there were knife marks on her bones, but the killer also cut his unborn child out of her belly.

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By the rule of Difficult Men, if Max does bad things, he has his reasons. And if he does those things to terrible people, they probably have it coming. Unfortunately, one of the people who paid the ultimate price in this feud is Anna’s coworker, whom she couldn’t leave out of her personal problems. He’s currently resting in pieces, poor guy.

The plot of “Cape Fear” dictates that this sporting tale of homicidal pettiness can only end one way. Until that inevitable conclusion, I’ll be rooting for Max Cady’s campaign against the Bowdens’ vortex of selfishness, which is entirely OK to do. None of these people is real, but the irritations they represent – NIMBYism, narcissism and the compulsion to destroy others to build ourselves up – are quite familiar. If the Bowdens were better written, I wouldn’t wish them ill. But I always trust the instincts of a good cat.

“Cape Fear” is currently streaming on Apple TV.

 

The post This new “Cape Fear” has me rooting for Max Cady appeared first on Salon.com.

Earlier this year, an AI agent powered by Claude basically wiped out a person’s entire company by deleting the code that made the business run. It was pretty funny. Sad, but funny. Well, it happened again, but instead of deleting vital code, an AI agent deleted an entire upcoming season of a TV show.

According to reports from Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, production company Mastiff gave an AI agent access to their servers while putting the final touches on The Challenge Sverige, Sweden’s version of the MTV reality show that feels like it’s been on the air here in the States for at least a century.

‘The Challenge Sverige’ Lost Its Entire Edited Season. Now It Has to Be Rebuilt.

According to the Swedish publication, the AI wiped out the entire edited season just five weeks before it was scheduled to air on November 22. No backup was available to restore the files, so weeks of editing vanished into thin air thanks to an AI agent that is basically also thin air.

The show’s broadcaster, TV4, has been forced to push the premiere date back into 2027 as post-production crews scramble to re-edit every single episode from scratch. The show’s host, Ahmed Berhan, seems to be taking the disaster in stride, telling Aftonbladet, “I knew AI would be the death of me” and “some days you just have to accept that you’re living in a f*cking sitcom.”

The post Did AI Really Delete This Reality Show’s Entire Season Weeks Before It Was Set to Air? appeared first on VICE.

The artist’s macabre short works have been adapted into eerily freaky 30-minute bites for television. We got a sneak preview of the next episode airing on HBO Max.

Low-quality AI-generated content currently dominates children’s media. Maka, a streaming platform run by child development experts, is offering an alternative.

If you were asked to select the most unsettling television theme song ever composed, what would you go with? In the event that your answer ends up being Unsolved Mysteries, literally nobody on the planet is gonna have an argument for you. Not one person. However, should you be in the rare position of not knowing what we’re talking about right now, go ahead and listen to the terrifying intro music below—and, for Christ’s sake, turn on a light first.

Composers Gary Malkin and Michael Boyd wrote that haunting little tune you just heard back in the 1980s, and it’s been striking fear into the hearts of everyone who’s listened to it since. Believe it or not, even Malkin himself wasn’t immune to the song’s chilling effects. While speaking with the Los Angeles Times in 2020, Malkin recalled that after spending countless hours on the score and watching reenactments of murders and abductions in the process, he couldn’t get the melody out of his head. “I was destroyed for weeks,” he revealed, “I had horrible nightmares.”

Why the ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ Theme Still Gives You the Creeps

But Malkin was far from the only one his music gave the creeps to. As he tells it, the folks at NBC had to deal with quite a few complaints over the years regarding kids being freaked out by the show’s opening credits. “We used to get letters all the time from parents saying, ‘Could you please change the theme music? Our children are terrified of it,’” Malkin remembered.

As for what it is that makes the Unsolved Mysteries theme so eerie, Malkin explained that he and Boyd used an interval called the tritone (a.k.a. the devil’s interval), a dissonant combination that, according to musicologist Neil Lerner, creates a sense of tension, ambiguity, and instability. Evidently, religious songs from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance avoided the tritone because it made people feel uneasy. Malkin and Boyd were also inspired by the sinister music featured in earlier horror movies, like John Carpenter’s classic Halloween theme, for example.

The post This TV Theme Scared Kids So Much, Parents Wrote Letters Asking NBC to Change It appeared first on VICE.

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Crystal Lake, Tip Toe, and Carrie are just a few of the shows you should be watching right now.

The new Apple TV 4K costs $299, comes with Siri AI, and will be available on November 13.

If anyone can take credit for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s longevity, it’s Danny DeVito. The veteran actor joined the cast during the second season because the network thought they needed to hire somebody famous in order to boost the ratings. As Dennis and Dee’s father, Frank Reynolds, DeVito immediately clicked with fans, and arguably helped save the long-running series from cancellation. But he wasn’t the only big name being eyed for the part.

In a 2022 episode of The Always Sunny Podcast, Glenn Howerton revealed that there was actually a point when they were “really serious” about getting Ray Liotta to play Frank. Though primarily known for his dramatic work, Liotta did venture into comedy at different stages of his career, appearing in films like Observe and Report, voicing characters on Family Guy and The Simpsons, and even guest-starring on a few sitcoms. It’s unclear why he didn’t end up getting the role of Frank, but needless to say, the character’s run would’ve been cut short if he had, due to Liotta’s untimely death in 2022.

‘It’s Always Sunny IN PHILADELPHIA’ Could Have Had a Very Different Frank Reynolds

One Always Sunny cast member at least got to work with Liotta later on, however, as the Goodfellas star played a film producer in Charlie Day’s 2023 directorial debut Fool’s Paradise. Unfortunately, Liotta didn’t live to see the project’s release because production was delayed several times, but he was reportedly very enthusiastic about it. “Ray would text me every three months like, ‘Hey, man, what’s going on with that movie we did?’” Day recalled ahead of the premiere. “And I would say, ‘Ray, I’m so sorry. I’m stuck back doing It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.’”

But according to a later episode of The Always Sunny Podcast, Liotta also came close to doing a guest spot on the show. Though Day remains uncertain as to whether or not Liotta ever watched it, the two did discuss the possibility of him making an appearance. “So he was like, ‘And why don’t you have me on your TV show sometime?’” Day remembered. “I was like, ‘Absolutely, we’ll find something for him.’” 

Liotta died on May 26, 2022, a few months after Always Sunny’s 15th season concluded. Fool’s Paradise finally hit theaters the following May.

The post ‘It’s Always Sunny’ Almost Cast a ‘Goodfellas’ Star as Frank Reynolds appeared first on VICE.

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Scooby-Doo is one of the most recognizable IPs in entertainment, spanning generations. The various shows and films have woven themselves into pop culture in unique ways. Pamela Anderson played herself in the live-action 2002 film, but in 1999, Scooby-Doo paid homage to the most iconic found-footage horror film, The Blair Witch Project.

The Blair Witch Project revolutionized the horror genre because it was the first of its kind to hit the mainstream. Instead of a polished Hollywood production, The Blair Witch Project had shaky handheld cameras and characters that felt like real people. It didn’t have a huge budget, but it proved that original ideas don’t need millions of dollars to work. The concept helped influence films like Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield.

In 1999, Scooby-Doo spoofed the film by releasing The Scooby-Doo Project on Cartoon Network. It aired in segments on Halloween night during the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! marathon.

The Mystery Gang Meet The Blair Witch

Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby head out to investigate their latest mystery in Casper County. Velma is filming the project for the gang, who spend time interviewing locals about the monster haunting the woods. Soon enough, they park the Mystery Machine to trek into the woods. In the original film, the students stumble upon a pile of eerily placed stones—in the parody, they’re Scooby Snacks. When they lose their map, Shaggy reveals he got hungry and ate it.

Later, they begin to hear strange sounds outside their tent, only to discover it’s Scrappy-Doo! It’s a clever way to parody the film while honoring Scooby-Doo lore. When the show first premiered in the 1960s, it paid homage to classic monsters that first appeared in Universal’s black-and-white silent films in the 1930s and 40s. In the end, the gang unmasks a random live-action man who claims to have nothing to do with the haunting in the woods. Only then do they realize there’s a more sinister monster lurking just outside as the camera cuts out.

The Scooby Project wasn’t the first Blair Witch Project spoof; in fact, it was one of many, but it definitely introduced a new level of frights and trauma for children excited to watch a marathon of cartoons.

The post 27 Years Ago, Scooby-Doo Spoofed ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (And It Was Actually Spooky) appeared first on VICE.

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In its 26th season premiere, the procedural legal drama paints a damning picture of power-mad AI CEOs.

On May 11, 1955, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto—a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing a decade earlier—appeared on the American TV series This Is Your Life. Tanimoto was there to discuss the Hiroshima Maidens, a group of 25 women who were left disfigured from the attack. However, the show’s host, Ralph Edwards, had his own agenda that day. 

Early on in the broadcast, Edwards says that he’s been working behind the scenes to put together Tanimoto’s life story. Through the door located to the left of them, Edwards explains, will come many people who helped shape Tanimoto’s destiny. Although this was always the show’s basic premise, Tanimoto clearly didn’t know that and was blindsided by the revelation. “We hope you’ll have some pleasant moments,” Edwards tells Tanimoto before turning to the camera and saying, “And we hope, too, ladies and gentlemen, that you will have a better understanding of what it is to look into the face of atomic power.”

A Hiroshima Survivor Was Brought Face-to-Face With an ‘Enola Gay’ Crew Member on LIVE TV

From there, Edwards jumps right into the events of August 6, 1945—the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Aided by sound effects, dramatic music, and real footage of the city’s destruction, Edwards walks a visibly distraught Tanimoto through that fateful morning and questions him about his actions around the time of the explosion. “What did you do when you heard that bomb?” asks Edwards at one point. “Well, I didn’t hear any sound, but I saw a strange flash,” Tanimoto responds, adding that he was lying down in a garden afterward, where he felt “strong blasts of wind.”

As if this all wasn’t uncomfortable enough, Edwards also decided to bring out a special guest in the form of Captain Robert Lewis: co-pilot and aircraft commander of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Tanimoto and Lewis then awkwardly shake hands as the studio audience applauds, and Edwards allows Lewis to recount his experience on the morning of August 6. Prior to exiting the stage, Lewis shares with Tanimoto six chilling words he later wrote in his logbook: “My God, what have we done?”

You can check out the whole bizarre spectacle for yourself below.

The post This 1950s TV Show Put a Hiroshima Survivor Face-to-Face With One of the Men Who Dropped the Bomb appeared first on VICE.

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On December 16, 2016, A&E announced it was launching a new documentary series about the Ku Klux Klan entitled Generation KKK. The show, which was set to premiere on January 10 of the following year, revolved around four Klan-affiliated families, each with a member seeking to leave the infamous hate group. Among the reported subjects of Generation KKK were an Imperial Wizard who was grooming his young daughter to take his position in the Klan and an Iraq War vet raising his son to adopt the group’s views. This was in addition to the series covering various anti-hate groups and their attempts to lead members away from the KKK.

“This series gives viewers an unprecedented look at what it is like to be born into hate,” Rob Sharenow, A&E EVP and general manager, said at the time. “Our producers gained access to Klan families, allowing for full immersion into this secret world and its impact on the next generation.” Sharenow went on to say, “Generation KKK brings viewers inside the places where hatred and prejudice are born and bred, and carried forward or not.”

The Controversial KKK TV Series That Never Made It to Air

The announcement was met with immediate backlash, and within a week, A&E decided to change Generation KKK’s title. To make it clear that this wasn’t a reality show made for entertainment purposes, the network revealed that they were now calling the project Escaping the KKK: A Documentary Series Exposing Hate in America. Furthermore, they explained that they were adding segments featuring civil-rights leaders to provide context for viewers. Those portions were to be interspersed with the rest of the footage the showrunners had already captured.

However, on December 24, the network pulled the plug on Escaping the KKK after making an unfortunate discovery. “A&E learned last night from third-party producers who made the documentary that cash payments—which we currently understand to be nominal—were made in the field to some participants in order to facilitate access,” reads a statement posted on their official website. “While we stand behind the intent of the series and the seriousness of the content, these payments are a direct violation of A&E’s policies and practices for a documentary,” it continued. “We have now decided not to move forward with airing this project.”

The post Why A&E Canceled This Controversial Documentary Just Weeks Before Its Premiere appeared first on VICE.

Before digesting Zoe Kazan’s seven-part reconsideration of “East of Eden,” I never would have suspected that we, as a society, had been conditioned to misread Cathy Ames, the angel-faced succubus at the broken heart of John Steinbeck’s novel.

Cathy has always had her champions, mind you. The internet is laden with Reddit arguments and academic examinations questioning Steinbeck’s portrait of her beastliness. The author himself was conflicted about her, writing Cathy as a dangerous beauty incapable of empathy in his book, yet expressing how dear she was to him in letters to his editor, Pascal Covici. My English teachers and literature professors were probably too tired to parse such nuance, and I don’t blame them.

Besides, Cathy is not an easy empathy object. She killed her parents, drove a man to suicide when she was young, and shot her way out of marriage and motherhood later. She changed her name to Kate Albey but never changed her ways.

Steinbeck never points to a definitive incitement to explain her behavior, instead writing, “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents” to open a chapter devoted to Cathy’s backstory.

When read in the author’s voice, that seems like a conclusive diagnosis. But to hear Florence Pugh deliver it as Cathy’s belief, and the establishing paradigm of Kazan’s limited series, changes things. Once we discover more about Pugh’s Cathy—once we’ve seen her do the horrible acts I’ve listed—her observation that the only true freedom in this world is economic freedom makes more sense.

“For the modern woman,” she adds to that thought, “that presents a problem.” In her time, and in her opinion, a sensible woman’s paths to financial freedom were limited to hoping for a windfall or making one’s fortune off others’ backs as a madam. In other words, you can be forever reliant on the universe’s mercy or merciless in bending it to fulfill your ambition. That doesn’t magically justify Cathy’s criminality. But she isn’t completely wrong, either.

 

 

Central to both Steinbeck’s novel and Kazan’s update is the author’s interpretation of the Hebrew word timshel, which he translates as “thou mayest.” Adam’s servant, Lee (Hoon Lee), who raises the twin boys Cathy abandons, explains that the term expresses free will. It’s a blessing of agency that sounds much easier to accept when you have more options than Cathy.  Besides, she says in the opening scene’s voiceover while clawing her bloodied, broken body across a dirt field toward the home of Charles Trask (Mike Faist) and his brother Adam (Christopher Abbott), “normalcy” is relative: “Everyone is normal to himself.”

Netflix’s Cathy-centered take on “East of Eden” comes before us at a very different time than the one in which Zoe Kazan’s grandfather Elia introduced his acclaimed 1955 film. It arrives in a season dotted with trauma plots serving as gateways to female rage – some well executed, like Hulu’s extraordinary “Furious,” and others slicked in a messy goo of “been there, done that” tropes, a la “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.”

We’re also witnessing, from a distance, the legal perils of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts labor and delivery nurse tried, on TV, for killing her three children, all under the age of 5, before attempting suicide in January 2023.  Clancy pleaded not guilty, and her trial recently ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury.

The question of why she did what she did may remain unanswered. During her trial, Clancy’s defense argued that postpartum psychosis drove Clancy out of her mind. The prosecution’s argument is simpler and meaner, almost reminiscent of Steinbeck: Clancy’s actions were premeditated, her way of escaping a life she didn’t want anymore. Now Clancy’s lawyers are arguing she should be found not guilty due to a lack of sufficient evidence that she killed her children, and by lack of criminal responsibility due to insufficient evidence she was not in psychosis at the time. Another status hearing is scheduled for Nov. 2.

(Courtesy of Netflix © 2026)

When Steinbeck first introduced Cathy Ames to the public in 1952, and when Elia Kazan brought his version to the screen three years later, we were only allowed the slightest glimpse into her soul. Elia Kazan’s movie, written by Paul Osborn, barely covers the last third of Steinbeck’s 600-page epic. It also omits Lee and focuses primarily on James Dean’s Cal Trask, one of Cathy’s sons, leaving most of her story to secondhand whispers. When a lawman confirms to Cal the rumor that Cathy, known by then as the nearby town’s madam, Kate, shot his father, Cal muses, “He must have done something to hurt her.”

“No, sir,” the man counters. “He gave her everything that any woman could ask for.”

But how would he know? Zoe Kazan’s Cathy, which closely hews to Steinbeck’s original vision, defies easy assumptions about a woman’s wants and needs. Nothing about her, or the way Pugh plays her, is simple.

“East of Eden” parallels the Biblical story of Cain and Abel first through Adam and Charles Trask, then again through Adam’s twin sons Aron and Caleb. Cathy, meanwhile, deciphers the key to life through Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” a story about a girl like her who survives an upside-down world.

Both Steinbeck and Zoe Kazan infer that something happened to Cathy when she was very young. The filmmaker does this through spare imagery: a man baiting a little girl in a blue dress with sweets, coaxing her to follow him into a dark hole that could lead to Wonderland or much darker places. With this, Cathy’s favorite book and her mysterious violation teach her it’s better to be a predator than prey, to be the queen calling for her the heads of her enemies instead of a man’s pawn.

(Courtesy of Netflix © 2026)

Cathy Ames is a complicated symbol, as the countless people who glommed on to Clancy’s case want her to be. Viewers accustomed to crime stories about perpetrators whose behavior is explained, perhaps even justified, by what they survived may see Clancy as another alleged trauma plot come to life—a sum of biological and social hazards, as Elizabeth Bruenig wrote in The Atlantic.

“And some elements of it seem inarguably true, such as the idea that Clancy’s psychiatric care was woefully uncoordinated,” Bruenig added. “But this theory also has the odd effect of making Clancy the star of her own murder trial, for whom the viewer at home may be encouraged to root, which risks eliding the gravity of what she did.”

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We must be clear that differences between the entirely fictional Cathy and Clancy, a real and suffering person, are vast. But if the best fiction can also be instructive, maybe the last moral of Kazan’s “East of Eden” can help us hold multiple truths at once. Cathy’s reasons for doing terrible things may be understandable, even relatable, while the transgression remains unforgivable. A person may even warn us by crying for help or, as Cathy does, advising those on the verge of falling into her trap to turn back.

“You’re so kind to me, and I’ll only ever bring you trouble,” she purrs when it’s clear that Adam is smitten with her. But he refuses to listen and marries her anyway. When Cathy discovers she’s pregnant, she warns him that she’s going to leave the first chance she gets, even attempting to self-administer an abortion with a knitting needle. Not to worry, a kindly male neighbor assures Adam — her maternal urges will kick right in after the babies are born. They do not.

Instead, Cathy makes good on her many cautions, leaving her wailing infants and bleeding husband behind for a new life and a fortune earned by cunning, a con and poison. But for a few twists of fate, she could be any of us. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Pugh’s exquisite, gorgeously brutal rendition leads more of us to her defense.

“East of Eden” is streaming on Netflix.

 

The post Netflix’s “East of Eden” asks if we’ve misread its monster appeared first on Salon.com.

Due to hubris, laziness and drug abuse, Workman continues, the person in question decides it’s easier to grift, spout right-wing nonsense and abandon reality. With that, she places another picture in front of Musk’s and says, “And that person is Aleister Crowley.”

Behold the Australian comic embracing her season. As Gen Z takes a turn en masse toward the world of woo-woo and anti-trans legislation pollutes politics here and abroad, Workman, a transgender immigrant, is unapologetically promoting the lighter side of popular wiccanery from her fictional occult bookstore. “I am expecting some pushback on the internet,” she deadpans.

 

 

Maybe not. “Witchy AF,” executive produced by Lilly Wachowski, is undeniably entertaining. Think of it as a cocktail mix of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and “Drunk History” for Etsy spellcasters, starring the lovechild of Patsy Stone and Bauhaus front man Peter Murphy. Most of Workman’s tales are fact-based and reenacted with puppets, although she also stumbles off-site to her local dive bar or her apartment for occasional “Interview with a Demon” segments. Accompanied by her sidekick and netherworld patron King Grimsquawk – a crowned raven-baby holding a scepter – Workman conjures up one of the funniest small-screen comedies that isn’t officially on TV.

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But its good witchery also contextualizes the quest for sanity in mad times like ours with comforting observations about occultism’s role during eras of social upheaval.

“If there’s anything tumultuous happening now . . . I wouldn’t know, I haven’t been paying attention,” she jokes, “just remember that historically, an enlightenment of epic proportions is probably not far off.” If that’s true, may Workman’s sweet, intoxicating humor hasten its arrival.

New episodes of “Cassie Workman is Witchy AF” debut Wednesdays on Etch’s YouTube channel.

 

The post “Cassie Workman is Witchy AF” is a comic spell for a mad world appeared first on Salon.com.

Today's links

• Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts: The big P only matters if the small p is in play.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Gilberto Gil v WIPO; Censored Apple wifi hacker talk; Wells Fargo crime-spree started in 1998; Stencils "may not be reproduced"; DVD Jon v Apple DRM; Unpaid diplomatic parking tickets as index of corruption; Tortured Canadian was not a terrorist; Decarbonization at a distance.
• Upcoming appearances: Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts (permalink)

Here's a funny thing about the right to vote: it wasn't won by voting.

From the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to the Emancipation Proclamation to 19th Amendment, voting rights (what you might call "Big P" Politics) were always downstream of protests, riots, petitions, mass movements, strikes and good, old fashioned community organizing (that is, "small p" politics).

Which is to say, Big P politics matter, but to make them matter, we need a lot of small p politics. That means that democracy isn't something you do every couple of years with a ballot paper (though that's an important aspect of the process). Democracy is continuous.

If you've ever wondered why your vote seems to accomplish so little, I think you can blame the near-abolition of small p politics by Big P politicians of every stripe. Indeed, Obama's genius was summoning up an army of door-knocking, phone-banking small p political activists and then euthanizing that organization after he won the election:

https://newrepublic.com/article/140245/obamas-lost-army-inside-fall-grassroots-machine

For Obama, the grassroots were useful for one thing: getting out the vote. The last thing he wanted was for millions of activated voters to turn into activists who'd flame him and harangue him and picket him if they didn't like his compromises. Boy, did Obama ever compromise.

He let the bank executives who created the Great Financial Crisis off the hook and encouraged them to foreclose on the homes of millions of Americans, the very same public that had bailed them out:

https://theweek.com/articles/624777/obamas-biggest-failure

He shielded the CIA's torturers from scrutiny and prosecution:

https://journals.law.harvard.edu/ilj/2009/04/obama-publishes-torture-memos-immunizes-cia-staff/

He reneged on his promise to shut down Gitmo:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/obama-failed-close-guantanamo

And his promise to hold the phone companies to account for their complicity in the NSA's mass domestic surveillance:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-government-surveillance-then-and-now/

He stepped up secret drone warfare:

https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data

And unconstitutional domestic surveillance:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveillance-powers-his-way-out

Whenever I raise this, Obama's apologists come out of the woodwork to tell me that "the president isn't the Green Lantern," and that Obama couldn't act without help from Congress and the Senate, who wouldn't back his plays.

I think that Trump's presidency has shown us how much power the president really has even when the legislature won't play ball. But even if you accept the Green Lantern apologetics, the fact remains that Obama could have had a clamoring army of ardent supporters in the streets, defending his agenda against recalcitrants in his own party and wreckers in the GOP. He chose not to have that army. He sent that army home.

It's like Obama heard the story about post-election FDR telling civil rights leaders, "I want to do it, now make me do it," and concluded, "I don't want to do it, so I'd better not let anyone make me do it":

https://www.quora.com/Did-Franklin-Roosevelt-ever-say-I-agree-with-you-I-want-to-do-it-now-make-me-do-it

Of course, Trump is doing everything he can to extinguish both small p politics and Big P Politics. It's not just his wildly illegal voter suppression tactics. He's banning and prosecuting political groups, invoking anti-terror laws (which Obama supported and promised would only be used proportionately and wisely) to chase his grassroots opposition underground:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/

Liberals are often contemptuous of grassroots movements (cf "basket of deplorables," "Green Lantern" scolding), but the right is terrified of them. The right's political leadership is terrified of its own grassroots, and rightly so, because those people are maniacs, and they're the reason the GOP has been pushed into its most extreme positions. The right's grassroots, meanwhile, are afraid of the left's grassroots. The last thing they want is a militant, organized, mobilized base pushing Dem politicians to take the stands that are wildly and widely popular in America, from Medicare for All to an end to ICE – the Mamdani agenda, in other words.

Mamdani is the anti-Obama. He shows what happens when a progressive candidate nurtures and co-governs with their base after the election, using millions of passionate, committed, everyday people to steamroller anyone who gets in the way of his agenda:

https://www.nyc.gov/content/100days/pages/

Of course the downside of this is that when Mamdani reneges on his pledges, he is loudly and furiously held to account for it:

https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/02/19/mamdani-budget-parks-libraries/

Mamdani understood that he would be corralled into compromises if he won the mayoralty and that when he made those compromises, his base would come after him with the unmistakable fury of betrayed idealists. He also understood that any comfort he enjoyed by sidelining his base while in office would come at a price far higher than being yelled at by his supporters: it would cost him the ability to get anything done.

Voting for Mamdani was important. It got him elected. But staying organized – in unions, neighborhood clubs, affinity groups, DSA chapters and mutual aid groups – is what's letting him get stuff done, and stopping him from bailing on his promises as politically infeasible.

In other words, voting only matters if it's the final stage of a sustained campaign to build and mobilize popular power. Without that, voting will get you precious little. The right's leadership understands this very well, which is why they've spent years attacking unions, community organizers like Acorn, and activist institutions like Planned Parenthood. We must defend voting rights – Big P Politics – to the bitter end, but we need to defend organizing – small p politics – just as ferociously.

The reduction of politics to voting is part of the 50 year neoliberal project whose foremost goal is to make you think of yourself as an atomized individual and not as a member of a polity. Turning "politics" into "voting" is absolutely in line with Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there is no such thing as society." It's the same move that convinced workers that the answer to bad working conditions is looking your boss in the eye and threatening to change jobs (not forming a union and striking).

It's also the same move that transformed "boycotts" into "shopping." Boycotts are a collective enterprise. Before a boycott takes place, small-p political groups hold meetings, organize alternatives and communicate their demands. During a boycott, organizers work to insulate participants from reprisals, like the Montgomery Bus Boycott organizers who reasoned and remonstrated with employers who disciplined workers whose participation made them late for work.

And yes, as part of a boycott, you make some consumption choices. You buy X instead of Y. But "shopping" by itself isn't a boycott. You can't "vote with your wallet" (especially not when billionaires get to vote against you with their wallets):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits

Shopping isn't politics, and while voting is Politics (Big P), it's also not politics (small p). A boycott, on the other hand, is politics. What's more, "shopping" has the same relationship to "boycotts" that "voting" has to "politics." It's a step you take, after you've laid a lot of groundwork with other people, as part of a mass movement.

I understand why shopping and voting are more attractive than boycotts and politics. Meetings suck. Hell is other people:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/

But changing the system requires systemic work. Hell is other people because other people are great but it's so hard to get them to do things your way. That takes time and understanding and togetherness and arguing and forgiving.

Not everyone has time or capacity for that, and at any given time, we don't all have to be doing that work. We can take turns, spelling each other off at times in our lives when we have more or less slack. But lots of us have to be in the fight, or all of us will get screwed. There aren't enough of us doing politics right now. We can tell, because our politicians are so contemptuous of the grassroots that they will sell us out without a moment's hesitation, smugly certain that they will face no consequences for doing so:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/22/happy-chudmas/#baloney-in-our-slacks

Oligarchs have it easy. Where we have to convince people to fight, they can pay or threaten people to bring them into line. But oligarchs' power is wearing thin. The data-center uprising shows how much fury there is out there, looking for a productive outlet:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers

Data centers are very bad and very visible, so they make for good targets. But data centers are only the physical extrusion of a vast, brutal, extractive system. The most important way to fight data centers is to take everyone you meet protesting one and organize with them to scare the shit out of "your" politicians so they don't dare compromise on anything.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Facebook Fake-out https://www.anildash.com/2026/09/29/facebook-fake-out/

• Anatomy Unzipped: John of Arderne’s Sweden Scroll (ca. 1425–35) https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/arderne-scroll/

• Inside McDonald’s push to have AI price your Big Mac https://www.reuters.com/business/inside-mcdonalds-push-have-ai-price-your-big-mac-2026-09-29/

• what is going on with ceiling fans https://mcmansionhell.com/post/829127919552151552/what-is-going-on-with-ceiling-fans

• From Shitpost to Bullshit https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/from-shitpost-to-bullshit

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago GWB's press secretary to media: "watch what you do, watch what you say" https://web.archive.org/web/20010926223602/https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010926-5.html#BillMaher-Comments#BillMaher-Comments

#20yrsago Stencils kit “may not be reproduced in any form” https://web.archive.org/web/20061022000842/http://www.fairuseday.com/index.php/2006/10/01/copyright-is-broken/

#20yrsago DVD Jon selling Apple DRM to Apple’s competitors https://web.archive.org/web/20061004191106/https://featured.gigaom.com/2006/10/02/dvd-jon-fairplays-apple/

#20yrsago Unpaid diplomatic parking tickets as index of national corruption https://web.archive.org/web/20130719065306/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/10/primary-sources/305203/

#20yrsago Canadian deported to Syria for torture is cleared https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/02/worlddispatch

#20yrsago Gilberto Gil slams WIPO https://fromgeneva.blogspot.com/2006/09/wipo-general-assembly-impressions-from.html

#20yrsago Speech given by censored Apple WiFi hacker at ToorCon https://craphound.com/cache_toorcon_2006.txt

#10yrsago Company suspected of blame in Office of Personnel Management breach will help run new clearance agency https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-background-idUSKCN1202M6/

#10yrsago Wells Fargo started demanding fraud of its employees in 1998; Illinois cuts Wells off from state business https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/wells-fargo-king-of-cross-sell.pdf

#10yrsago Google: if you support Amazon’s Echo, you’re cut off from Google Home and Chromecast https://variety.com/2016/digital/news/google-home-amazon-echo-chromecast-1201874125/

#5yrsago How the IMF loan-sharks the global south https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/02/debt-trap/#global-arm-breakers

#1yrago Decarbonization at a distance https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/

• Brighton: Digital Sovereignty and the Post-American Internet (Green Party Conference), Oct 3
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/digital-sovereignty-and-the-post-american-internet/

• Virtual: How to govern technology in a multipolar digital world (Connecting Current), Oct 6
  https://connectingcurrent.tech/how-to-govern-technology-a-multipolar-digital-world/

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
  https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

• Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
  https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/

• Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
  https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow

• Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
  https://slowtechsummit.com/

• Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

• Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
  https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

• How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

• Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY

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Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 509 (20770 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Along with a few other TV critics, I have the dubious distinction of attending the last party at the late Hollywood producer Robert Evans‘ Woodland estate before its storied pool house burned down in 2003. There, I rubbed elbows with famous comedians and an assortment of UPN and WB starlets. But the guests I remember most clearly were a woman in her 40s, possibly, and her daughter, who was perhaps in her mid-20s. They were remarkable because they’d been surgically altered to look like twins. By that, I mean both women bore evidence of similar procedural enhancements, most noticeably lips plumped like party balloons and sharp cheekbones.

Plastic surgery is common in Hollywood, but this was something novel. This mother-daughter duo wasn’t in a show. They were there because they were part of Evans’ wealthy, powerful social circle. And they weren’t trying to maintain an existing aesthetic but to stand out with the best version of perfected artificiality money could buy.

That memory sat at the bottom of my mind’s darkest well until I watched Erin Lee Carr’s “The Swan: Behind the Mirror.” Indeed, I had blocked out most memories of that 2004 Fox reality train wreck until Carr’s documentary reached into my mind’s cobwebby attic and retrieved its cabinet of horrors.

For those who also blanked it out or were too young to clearly remember the details, “The Swan” recruited a bevy of normal-looking women convinced by magazine ads, the tabloid industry and other media that they were, in fact, ugly ducklings. “I wanted some big-a** cans,” one of Carr’s subjects said, explaining that was the age of Pamela Anderson and Maxim cover girls, women she wanted to be.

Yes, this horrendous TV egg could only have hatched in a place like Hollywood, where mother-daughter spa days might also mean going under the knife.

When I say “The Swan” was one of the vilest shows ever made, that is coming from a person who has seen a quarter-century’s worth of terrible television. Lest you think my opinion is an outlier, here’s what my predecessor Heather Havrilesky had to say about it when it first aired:

The funny thing is, it doesn’t just make you depressed about plastic surgery and sad women and sleazy TV executives. It also makes you depressed about the war in Iraq, the frailty of the human ego, the undeniable soul-sucking lameness of our culture, and the impossibility of real beauty at a time when such confused animals roam the earth.

Somehow, despite each episode’s invasive gawking at each participant’s ghastly surgeries, the lasting legacy of “The Swan” and other shows – it didn’t exist in a vacuum – was not simply to normalize cosmetic surgery but to establish it as part of a system of social signifiers.

At the lowest consumer-friendly rung rest affordable fillers and Botox injections. At the top, in the realm of multimillionaires and billionaires, you will find the Hall of Mar-a-Lago faces. A library of radically changed visages, sliced and sculpted to fit the funhouse-mirror beauty standards set by a handful of influential men.

Dr. Randal Haworth was among the specialists creator Nely Galán recruited in 2003. Galán declined to be interviewed for Carr’s documentary, having been thoroughly raked over the coals once the public’s visceral disgust with “The Swan” got it canceled after its second season.  

But Haworth offered his view, which he may now regret. At first he opines that plastic surgery is surgical psychiatry before likening himself to an interior designer and then, in explaining his role in the series, saying, “My goal was, as a plumber, can I perform early hyperesthetic surgery on these people?”

Off-screen, Carr calls out the weirdness of a plastic surgeon describing himself that way. “You’re literally talking about toilets,” she says. “And women.”

“That was unintended,” he replies, only digging himself in deeper when he explains that, like plumbers or electricians, he was there to do a job.

So. The women in “The Swan” weren’t quite latrines, but the man who got intimate with their flesh and bone didn’t exactly see them as people either.

With “The Swan: Behind the Mirror,” Carr does a service to the participants this production tortured for ratings and to the modern TV audience by not only reminding us how exploitative it was but also establishing it as a benchmark for the beauty industry.

Of course, the first idea is likely to gain much more traction than the second, if the public’s shocked reaction to Netflix’s “Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model” is an indicator. “ANTM” and “The Swan” were contemporaries, after all. Before “The Swan” aired, ABC ran “Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People,” made memorable by ‘80s star Lorenzo Lamas, one of its judges, using a laser pointer to point out contestants’ flab and cellulite for viewers at home.

“Extreme Makeover” had also been airing since 2002, showing ordinary men and women undergoing plastic surgery, receiving style makeovers and adopting fitness routines. “The Swan” was not a singular occurrence, then, but part of an era hawking cosmetic improvement, whether surgical or noninvasive, as the key to succeeding at life.

The difference between the two shows resembles the divide between workaday vanity and Mar-a-Lago maximalist aesthetic uniformity. “Extreme Makeover” pitched each contestant’s journey as personal, ending with them showing their “new, improved” selves to their friends and family.

Producers on “The Swan” not only pressured participants to undergo a series of grueling procedures and painful recoveries (that Carr’s documentary reveals were insufficiently managed), but they also made them compete against each other in a pageant. Very much like an election, in other words, only one populated with women who were scalpel-sculpted, lifted, tanned and tucked to surgical specifications.

Or, in Haworth’s telling, maybe just one surgeon’s.

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To be clear, that difference does not make “Extreme Makeover” less morally reprehensible. The fact that it outlived “The Swan” by several years only enhanced its role in mainstreaming elective cosmetic surgery. More than two decades after these aired, we’ve swerved between an age of unattainable thinness being pushed as a cultural ideal and a time of healthy-at-any-size body positivity from which we’re slowly regressing. The first runs of these shows probably missed Gen Z. Not millennials, sadly. And yet, Sephora and other cosmetic retailers love that their obsession with anti-aging begins in their teens and 20s. These products are marketed to them as “skin-loving,” not as wrinkle creams.

As the recent, depressing discourse about the difference in Jasmine Guy’s appearance between when she starred in “A Different World” four decades ago and how she looks in the reboot rages on, we’re reminded that Americans still have a deeply ageist view of daring to grow old gracefully.

For the record, Guy is a physically fit woman in her 60s who has not undergone cosmetic surgery, whom many women would kill to look like. And if she had gotten all the lifts and tucks we expect of a TV star, we’d be criticizing her for that too.

But her appearance is her choice and doesn’t serve anyone but herself which, in these days of grotesque facial augmentation being associated with a dehumanizing strain of conservative politics, is downright refreshing.

Carr’s documentary closes by showcasing the sisterhood shared by the women who survived “The Swan” – women seduced by a sales pitch predicated on the assumption that cosmetic surgery would change their lives. Most of them found that wasn’t true.

But at least one participant in “The Swan” still believes in its promise. “It was empowering,” insists Haworth in “Behind the Mirror,” “because it shows you that beauty is power.” Reflected power, sure. But whose?

“The Swan: Behind the Mirror” is streaming on Hulu.

 

 

The post “The Swan” tested the waters for Mar-a-Lago face appeared first on Salon.com.

In “Primetime” — Lance Oppenheim’s psychological crime thriller about the rapid ascent and swift fall of the “Dateline NBC” segment “To Catch a Predator,” and its host, Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) — television is a complex ecosystem where hyperawareness is paramount to survival. To prosper in this broadcast biome, close surveillance is key. Attack too early and risk being mauled; retreat and risk going hungry, growing weaker and becoming the prey. 

Though a skilled hunter, even a reporter like Hansen can’t go up against an apex animal like ABC’s “Lost” when it comes to ratings and audience share. To assert dominance and secure his spot on the food chain, Hansen needs to observe the waters and hook a big fish. His cohort Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) — the founder of Perverted-Justice, the vigilante group in charge of luring the “Dateline” prey — believes he’s found just that in an internet chat room.

“This is big, the biggest,” Erck says. “A whale.” Oppenheim douses their conversation in blue, with the eerie artificial light of a computer illuminating both men from below. The effect erases the color from Pattinson’s eyes, fusing his iris and pupil into a black circle, like a shark that’s caught the scent of fresh blood. Emboldened by his animalistic observation, Hansen decides to weaponize Erck’s information and go in for the kill.

To anyone who’s spent even a modicum of time online in the last 20 years, this attack pattern looks familiar. In the World Wide Web’s wilderness, casual users, corporations and government intelligence alike collect data about everyone and everything, building digital footprints and algorithmic profiles that sit hidden just behind our newsfeeds. Gen Z and digital natives grew up in this extreme surveillance state, emboldened by controversial legislation like the Patriot Act and USA Freedom Act, which allowed unprecedented surveillance as a post-9/11 counter-terrorism measure. And while younger people have been raised in a vigilantly monitored world, that doesn’t make the lack of privacy any less disconcerting.

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Certainly, that’s why Gen Z has taken to “Primetime,” a film set in an era most of the generation is too young to remember firsthand, but one that has had a critical impact on their lives and well-being. In 2006, “To Catch a Predator” sat at the intersection of the surveillance state, militaristic nationalism motivated by the backdrop of the Iraq War, and digital culture proliferated by cellphones that were affordable and could accompany us anywhere. By the time Gen Z bled into Gen Alpha, all of these things morphed into one well-oiled machine, a self-regulating ouroboros. Though we may all be steeped in this reality, it’s unsurprising Gen Z would feel cheated out of a life where surveillance wasn’t constant — where they didn’t have to wonder whether a person on the train is scrolling on their phone or covertly taking a photo. 

Naturally, “Primetime” has become a point of fascination for zoomers, who made up 69% of the film’s opening weekend audience. While younger viewers adore Pattinson and the movie’s distributor, A24, alike, it’s the film’s subject matter that’s driving their conversations. “Primetime” traces a straight line from today back to the mid-aughts, clarifying the connection between pivotal historical events and their contemporary consequences. And though I didn’t find that the film actually said much about those events, it’s easy to see why so many people under 30 argue otherwise. Buzzy new films like “Primetime” rarely reflect the modern surveillance state’s inflection points as well as older media like “To Catch a Predator” can. But if Gen Z is really interested in retracing history’s steps to learn about surveillance culture, “Primetime” is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Whether or not that tip feels sharp depends largely on one’s relationship to our everyday insanity. Most zoomers likely grew up perceiving “To Catch a Predator” and Hansen through memes — chat logs removed from their disturbing context, or compilation videos of the show’s “funniest” moments. That perception in itself is upsetting, not only because it trivializes survivors’ experiences, but confirms just how much the show succeeded in turning criminal intent toward minors into entertainment. For those who already understood these inherent problems, “Primetime” doesn’t pose many new questions, which gives one the sickly feeling that the film is repeating some of Hansen and the show’s mistakes. For others, who are only beginning to understand “To Catch a Predator” as a planet that orbited the surveillance state’s blinding sun, Oppenheim’s film may be rife with new threads to pull. 

The film’s strongest narrative aspect in this regard is how accurately it reflects Perverted-Justice’s sting tactics, which made many “To Catch a Predator” cases unprosecutable or their evidence inadmissible by wading into entrapment. The team would hunt down potential predators in chat rooms and, in many instances, encourage prey to do things they were initially reticent to do or flat-out didn’t want to engage in. Occasionally, when the alleged predators would express their reluctance, the Perverted-Justice decoys would play mad or upset.

To build out a profile on their prey, the decoys would use chats to draw personal information out of their subjects. Furthermore, the on-camera interventions and arrests were largely faulty, too. Hansen wasn’t a cop; he never read anyone their rights. And the police lying in wait would greet the predator with unnecessary aggressive, martial force. The surveillance state is the primal wilderness, where anything goes, and “To Catch a Predator” employed the laws of the jungle: Identify, lure, attack, kill.

The methods are strangely akin to those employed in the concrete jungle, where badly behaved teens act with as much life-altering, brutal force as the characters in “Primetime.” If “To Catch a Predator” is the paradigm of reality television’s reflection of the surveillance state, the original “Gossip Girl” — which aired concurrently, however briefly, with Hansen’s show — is the prototype for the insidious ways surveillance is weaponized. That might sound like an offbeat comparison, but just because a teen soap is, well, a teen soap, doesn’t mean it has no cultural merit. 

“Gossip Girl” is an especially ideal time capsule for understanding how cellphones and all digital technology became useful tools for constant civilian monitoring. For anyone unfamiliar, the series follows a group of privileged teenagers living in New York’s Upper East Side, whose lives are chronicled by the anonymous titular blogger. Gossip Girl knows all of their desires and vices, their wins and their foibles. “She” walks among these spoiled brats, yes, but also relies on a steady stream of tips from readers. Photos, videos, intimate details; any hearsay is fair game, and Gossip Girl will go to the ends of the Earth to prove it— right up to the point where it’s revealed that Gossip Girl was actually not a “she” at all, but a male classmate.

This is all deliciously compelling on its own, but the series’ writers do a great job of emphasizing that these takedowns are products of the world we live in now. Gossip is currency, and anyone looking to climb the social ladder can use it to pay their way to the top — at the cost of their soul, of course. Characters blackmail one another left and right, sometimes with criminal intent. And while it’s entertaining to watch, the real marvel is how prescient the series is today.

 

“Gossip Girl” burst onto the scene in 2007 just as the cellphone was becoming the staple accessory for every teenager in America. The iPhone was four months old when the show premiered, and the series’ writers keenly understood the technology’s wicked possibilities. Surveillance was no longer a military or government tactic; it was for everyone with a wireless connection.

And while, like “To Catch a Predator,” one might argue that “Gossip Girl” encouraged this phenomenon by turning surveillance into entertainment, I’d say the show more often depicts its awful consequences. While the teenage characters already see the amateur espionage as part of their lives, the show’s adults are horrified by Gossip Girl and “her” web of tipsters. With age comes sagacity, and that transition sits parallel to the zoomers’ fervent response to “Primetime.” 

The surveillance state perseveres by making itself invisible, an incontrovertible part of everyday life, especially for those who have grown up inside it. Sometimes, it’s much easier to see the boundary lines between the material and the intangible when someone or something points them out. “To Catch a Predator” and “Gossip Girl” are two sides of the same coin; the former an arm of dystopia, the latter a critic. “Primetime” may try to play both of these sides to its detriment. But what it lacks in searing critique of its subject matter, “Primetime” makes up for by showing viewers of all ages where older media and younger generations collide. Often, the best way to understand the world now is by revisiting its past, warts and all.

The post Why Gen Z sees itself in “Primetime” appeared first on Salon.com.

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