Every Day We Inch Closer to Dystopian Parody

Plus: A pair of indie-minded interviews.

Southland Tales. (Courtesy Samuel Goldwyn Films / Destination Films)

AS A JOURNALIST, I get a lot of weird pitches for coverage, random emails on random topics that have little to do with my beat or anything anyone could reasonably care about. But earlier this week I saw something that … well, it caught my eye:

“Sophie Rain Claps Back At UFC Star Justin Gaethje Earning Comparisons.”

If you are blissfully unaware, Sophie Rain is a big deal in the world of boutique pornography, having amassed an enormous following on OnlyFans. Which means that what I was being pitched here is a story about a porn star explaining to a guy who gets choked out for a living—choked out in an MMA octagon, I mean, not on OnlyFans—that she has more than earned her 2025 payout of, and I had to look at this number twice, $103 million. The numbers here are unfathomable, almost as unfathomable as the idea that anyone should or would care about it.

And it was at this point that I realized I felt like nothing so much as an extra in the film Southland Tales, Richard Kelly’s cult classic 2006 war on terror opus that features, among other characters, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Krysta Now, a pornstar-turned-talkshow-host who is having an affair with the son-in-law of the GOP candidate for vice president (played by Dwayne Johnson, himself often floated as a potential politician by members of both parties). That we happened to be kicking off a war with Iran as I opened the email was icing on the cake.

The stark unreality of our reality is growing more disconcerting by the day. How am I supposed to respond to the news that Glenn Beck is asking an AI George Washington for its thoughts about the Iran War?

Glenn Beck’s fake George Washington. (Via Instagram)

I don’t even know what kind of madness this is. Like a more demented version of Her, one in which boomers pine for the wisdom of the founders rather than female companionship. I guess it’s preferable to creating AI companions who tell vulnerable users to kill themselves and others.

I’m sorry: Every single AI story is crazier than the last. This whole Anthropic fight is giving me the willies. It’s not often you see a private company ask for their product to be used more carefully and ethically, but Pete Hegseth wants AI to be able to autonomously select human targets? Hasn’t he heard of Skynet?

For a few minutes, I wondered if I could make a few bucks off of all this nonsense, as the hopeless addicts prediction market experts on Polymarket offered an option on whether or not there would be a nuclear strike in Iran. Polymarket has since pulled this contract, but the fact that it was even an option is yet more proof that we’re veering ever closer to Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, what with its murderous game shows and nuclear war board games. Some might suggest that gambling on whether or not America will rain death from the sky on random Middle Eastern countries is gauche, but those losers don’t understand how to rise and grind, now do they?

Robocop. (Courtesy Orion Pictures / Amazon MGM)

Look, Idiocracy is a common cultural touchstone and for good reason, what with the WWE-trained Donald Trump running the show while the Fox News-trained Hegseth peacocks about American military prowess. It’s enough to make even the biggest peacenik long for the staid days of Donald Rumsfeld and his unknown unknowns. But I can’t help thinking of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil—a movie that begins with a bureaucratic snafu confusing Tuttle and Buttle that culminates in a labyrinthine, Kafkaesque nightmare—every time I read a story about ICE shanghaiing kids and sending them across the country without their families.

Terry Crews in Idiocracy. (Courtesy 20th Century Fox)

Luckily, when the news gets to be too much—and, honestly, that’s happening more and more—I can just slip away into my stream of videos. The endless scroll, the constantly flickering short films providing endorphin bursts and allowing me a chance to either slap a like on something or tell the author to kill themselves. Gore Verbinski and Matthew Robinson hit on this in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which is still in theaters now: there’s a fantastic sequence where kids scroll through a series of videos that call to mind an AI slop version of the nightmare imagery from the cursed videotape in The Ring. But this is fertile soil to till, and David Foster Wallace got there first: Infinite Jest is a guide to so much of modern life that it’s kind of scary. Set aside the germophobic entertainer-as-president promising to clean up America and consider instead the great threat at the heart of the book, “The Entertainment,” a vision of the endless scroll that is so compelling, so captivating, that people cannot look away, cannot do or want anything else, eventually wasting away into nothing.

Wallace envisioned “The Entertainment” as a terrorist weapon of sorts, one accidentally created by a visionary genius before being unleashed on North America by Quebecois separatists. But let’s be honest: In our heart of hearts, we know it’s what society craves, just as the plants crave Brawndo. The social media gurus haven’t quite mastered it yet; we’re still, unfortunately, able to look away and return to the real world. For now. God willing, our techno billionaires can figure out the precise AI algorithm that will get us to that state of blissful emptiness soon enough.

Which makes me wonder: Is there a Kalshi contract for a timeline on the complete nullification of human will? I’d buy that for a dollar.

Two New Interviews for You

We dropped two new episodes of The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood this week. There was just too much good stuff to hold any till next week. Importantly, both of the movies under discussion are in theaters now and need support to stay here.

First up on Wednesday was my chat with Óliver Laxe, the director of Sirāt. The film has been nominated for two Oscars and Laxe is touring with it this week around the United States. It’s the sort of movie that should be seen in a theater with an audience, as one of the film’s key ideas is finding community in an age of seeming apocalypse.

‘Sirāt’ and Finding Community in the End of the World

And from this morning, here’s my interview with Rod Blackhurst and Ethan Suplee, director and star of the new horror film Dolly. The film is not likely to be nominated for any Oscars, but it is, like most horror movies, best enjoyed with an audience: Just as there’s something to be said for watching a comedy with a crowd and laughing in unison, there’s something to be said for watching a horror film with an audience and cringing in unison. That instant community, that idea of coming together alone in the dark to experience something: It’s real, and it’s powerful.

Ethan Suplee and the Challenge of Getting Nasty

Par for the Corpse

Jessie Buckley in The Bride! (Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)

Up on the homepage, I’ve got a review out this morning of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new riff on the Frankenstein story, The Bride! It was interesting! It just wasn’t... good.

Spectacularly ill-conceived from start to finish and stuffed to the gills with lots of Big Choices from stars Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale while having only the loosest grasp of the ideas it is playing with—a sort of cataclysmic mishmash of post-MeToo, post-ACAB mutterings—The Bride! does manage to be interesting. It’s never boring! You’re never tempted to look away from the screen, even when writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s script goes into spastic repetition or Buckley jerks her head like she’s coping with Tourette’s.

Read the whole thing.

Assigned Viewing: Robocop 2 (Prime Video)

This sequel is not directed by Paul Verhoeven, but it is very good in no small part because of the menace radiated by the villain, Cain, played by Tom Noonan. Noonan died a couple of weeks back (my friend Bill Ryan wrote a nice obituary for him at his site), and while this is by no means his best or his biggest role, it is, in many ways, my favorite of his performances. Cain radiates a sort of cool menace that almost doesn’t fit with a movie that leans so hard into the dystopic parody of the Robocop universe.