To Security and Beyond!
There’s not a spooky theme here aside from all the pieces of media being horror. However, I hope you have a great Halloween with cool costumes and all the spooky stuff your heart desires. Also, I guess the encroaching spectre of securitisation is spooky enough right?
Media Round-Up
The Lost Boys [1987]: As much as I am deeply unwilling to give in to our general culture of constant pro-80s propaganda, I will say that this vision of a dipshit vampire polycule in extremely cool outfits was very fun to me.
Dr Caligari [1989]: Utterly UNHINGED cinema, does what the other filmmakers couldn’t even DREAM of. Leans deep into obnoxious Berkoff-esque bullshit. The only downside is when the fun/fascinating gender-fucking gets turned to INTENSE transmisogyny in the last five minutes.
Fatal Frame [2011]: Very pretty, drags and convolutes a little too much. I still enjoyed it though!
To Security and Beyond!
Disney recently released a trailer for their prequel called Lightyear, which focuses on the story of the in-universe person who Buzz in the Toy Story films is based on. It's a bizarre way to expand the Toy Story world that I am morbidly curious about. In any case, that's not what prompted this newsletter. What truly opened my third eye was the proclamations of his hotness.
Countless jokes can, have and will be made about thirsting after a Toy Story character with a nondescript face now that he has vaguely defined features. But let me refocus. I would respect this more if it was just honest perversion but it embodies a specific pattern of post-ironic horny which has overtaken the Internet in the past decade. This has become so ever-present that brands will make tweets about being horny on main and liking their ex’s posts.
All of this forms a loud performance of horniness which has a Schrodinger's Cum (I'm sorry) existence in which we construct a space that is hypersexual in tone without any of the sex in substance.
This can be seen in what can only be a CIA psy-op to sink its grips into the Black community - the widespread notion that Chris Evans in his MCU era is/was one of the hottest men on the planet. There is not a Marvel movie or MCU-related interview where that man gives off substantive sexual energy yet he has my people in a chokehold. He's a man who is perhaps pretty to look at and seems nice on an interpersonal basis, but muscles and niceness do not a sex god make. It is notable how the imagined sexual energy attached to Chris Evans is inextricably linked to his glaring whiteness and distance from fatness. If/when people who are not of the hegemonic desirable groups display real sexual energy (unlike the phantom energy Evans has), it is decried as deviant and/or fetishised (see: Dev Patel, Idris Elba etc). This model of hypersexual and yet sexless desirability politics even further prioritises an aestheticism where a clear hierarchy of traits forms - which are informed by dominant social hierarchies (race, fatness, disability) etc.
More substantively it should also be noted how this swing to a performance of horniness comes as sex workers get kicked off of most major platforms, and are vulnerable to spurious suspensions/bans when they do remain. Black/fat people are also punished by Instagram for showing some skin, while skinny white women can be functionally naked. And last but not least we have a media hegemony that is averse to sex and sexuality (especially if queer) while cosigning largely uncritical portrayals of substantial physical violence. All these platforms and companies want to sell you sex without any of the materialities that make it so complex and sticky.
This need to detach from tangibility is not limited to films or sex. It is representative of a broader movement where (in part) through the internet and culture, companies are trying to sand off the edges and release themselves from the need to engage with the tangible world. You see this with NFTs, Facebook's launch of Meta and more. As Eating For Free covers in their episodes on CGI influencers, it is cheaper to offload labour to technology that can't ask for a raise or strike or unionise (which is only slightly less agency than the severely exploited labourers in the imperial periphery who are being used to make this tech function have). They also point out that these influencers are not only cheaper but safer, a CGI influencer can't complain when you make her a size 0 to be the most 'desirable' possible. A CGI influencer also can't get cancelled, because the exploitative working conditions behind the technology doesn't exactly make for a catchy headline in our present culture.
When we look at this obsession with safety we can see how neatly it fits in with the broader project of securitisation in present-day capitalism. Over 20 years after History ended then started again we are in a constant state of insecurity caused by the damage that capitalism has done to our planet, the externalities of capitalism and the damage neoliberalism has done and continues to do to the institutions on which we rely. This has been the lived reality for those in the imperial periphery for many years before, but now those of us who have been comfortable (to a greater or lesser extent) in the cradle of empire is starting to feel the shaking as the legs begin to crumble. The response to this has been to fixate on finding ways to be secure on an individual level in the midst of the disruption. Corporations like Amazon work with police departments to spread Ring security cameras which both they and the state can access. Capitalist institutions like the EU which like to portray themselves as laissez-faire invest massive amounts of money into sharpening already-violent border regimes. Technologies that have often been tested against SWANA people (especially in Palestine) are now moved back into the imperial core, then used to survey and manage dissent. Why would our public understanding of sex and sexuality be immune from those impulses?
And who is better suited to be the face of security-obsessed sexuality than a white dude with generic features who is vaguely military but abstracted enough through animation and the intergalactic that you don't have to think about the associated violence. He won't brutalise and murder piles of people in foreign lands under a false premise. Then as an added layer that is coming through the voice of a man who has played the embodiment of a `fantasy version of 'American Values' in s multi-billion-dollar DOJ approved franchise. After all that is the job of our mass media in the present day, to maintain the childish dream of fetishised security ignoring that (much like the movies that Disney pumps out) it is based on the continued exploitation of the marginalised - especially on the imperial periphery.
To borrow a little from Baldwin, the blanket of ‘security’ allows us to keep consuming media and sexuality that we barely enjoy all so that we can keep playing in the ‘sunlit playpen’ as the world burns around us.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.