Category Archives: Transhuman News

Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump's son-in-law, said during a livestream this week that he was keeping trim in the event that medical science allows him to "live forever."

During the stream, Kushner said that he had made it a "priority" to exercise more after leaving the White House, where he served as a senior adviser to Trump.

"I think that there's a good probability that my generation is, hopefully with the advances in science, is either the first generation to live forever or the last generation that's going to die," Kushner said. "So we need to keep ourselves in pretty good shape."

Speaking to The Daily Beast's Zachary Petrizzo and Matt Wilstein, an unnamed source close to Kushner said the comments were in jest.

"It's like a tongue-in-cheek joke to make the larger point that he wants to work out and be in good shape because people are living longer lives," the source told The Daily Beast.

Kushner has been promoting his new book, "Breaking History," a memoir of his time in the White House.

During a series of media appearances this week, he defended his father-in-law over the FBI's raid of Mar-a-Lago. He told Fox News that while Trump had a "peculiar" way of governing, the former president probably did what he thought was "appropriate" with the sensitive government documents found at his Florida residence.

Representatives for Kushner did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.

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Jared Kushner is keeping fit because he thinks he might live forever - Business Insider

Posted onAugust 26, 2022Posted byJohn Scalzi

Life is short but TV is forever. Author Randee Dawn plays with a fantastical variant of this sentiment with her new novel Tune In Tomorrow.

RANDEE DAWN:

Who wants to live forever?

One great thrill we get from writing and reading fantasy, science fiction or even horror is about imagining creating and watching creatures who toy with mortality. Ancient demons, immortal gods, fae with unknown lifespans, potions that turn back the clock. Were fascinated with tweaking time and simultaneously terrified by it.

Time weighs on me now more than it did in my 20s or 30s; there are more never gonna do that listings in my bucket list column than there used to be. Mostly because theres no time. My body tells me that. My patience is shorter, my attention span shifted. I get cranky at things that waste my time, because they feel like theft.

When I first started writing Tune in Tomorrow, a book that muses on what a reality TV show/soap opera created by mythical creatures, for mythical creatures but starring humans would look like, I confess that I didnt give the nature of time much thought. After all, Tunes a funny book (if Ive done it right) full of slapstick, puns and backstage shenanigans. Im an entertainment journalist and trust me, Ive seen some stuff.

But time was always part of the story. The title even harks back to classic cliffhangers soaps relied on, suggesting the answers you crave will all be there if you tune in tomorrow. Many soap actors devote their careers to one character, one show. So what would it be like to work among creatures who live for hundreds, if not thousands, of years whod want you, a puny human actor, to stick around longer than their molting cycle? What would it like for them to confer a prize (an Endless Award, in the book) for your talent that gave you immortality so long as you were employed on the show?

Weirdness would ensue, to say the least.

In one way, its an ideal solution to the conundrum of never being able to die: immortality, but conditional. Exit when youre ready (in my world, you dont turn into a heap of dust with all your years accruing at once) and live as long as you want. After all, immortality ranks up there with almost everybodys top three super wishes (right after flying and invisibility).You could do All! The! Things! You could invest your money wisely and spend hundreds of years tending your portfolio. Youd be wealthy and forever young. Or young-ish.

But I wanted to explore what this would feel like beyond a thought experiment. Long life is a double-edged sword, something people my age are only starting to comprehend. Weve already read the moaning and groaning of creatures like vampires, whore purely exhausted with all the chasing down of victims, the sameness of meals every day. Anne Rices Interview with the Vampire got it right it takes stamina to be a bloodsucker decade after unending decade, until Buffy catches up with you.

For humans, this is exponentially more horrifying. Mortality introduces stakes to a life (not wooden stakes, weve moved on from vampires now), while immortality removes them. Like a river youve stepped out of, the world moves on without you. Loved ones and friends die. Politics, entertainment, culture, medicine everything goes on, while you stay fixed in place. Actors in the book stop going back to the real world on the other side of the Veil, living full time on sets and in dressing rooms, with the occasional jaunt to protected areas of the fae world. Meanwhile, the real world becomes its own alien landscape, made all the more so because they no longer participate in it. Theyre like Severances innies cut off from anything but their jobs.

I feel this pain, now that the car Im driving has crested the hill of middle age and is heading faster and faster toward well, you know. Theres a line from The Breakfast Club that used to make me well up like a baby when I watched it as a teenager: When you grow up, your heart dies. Tragic! Unfeeling adults, lazy and comfortable! Yet thats not it as I understand now, its not that your heart dies, but you become less relevant to the world even as you live in it. Everyone on TV feels like they could be your kids or your grandkids age. The soundtrack of the zeitgeist Muzak, music in movies, lyrics is not your music. Technology advances come and go so fast theyre like quicksilver in your fingers. And then you learn that three of the four Golden Girls were in their late 40s or early 50s on the show. Youre behind the times, not ahead or even in the middle of them.

The world moves on.

It takes more effort to remain in touch these days. Its tempting to stay in my own version of a dressing room, to withdraw and engage. To understand only the things I already know and say enough. To stop listening to new songs or watch new movies. So I actively push back. I listen to Billie Eilish (whos already mainstream). I think about what its like to grow up as this generation, in this version of the world. I try to taste the world as it is, not as I want it to be, so I wont get stuck. So my heart wont die.

One character in Tune in Tomorrow is terrified of losing their position on the show, and that fear makes them do terrible things. To be thrown out into the cold, into the real world, is a horror that justifies them doing anything to protect their station. But its not sustainable. Something has to change. It may take a newcomer, a rising star to upend the way forever has always worked.

Because the way forever has always been, doesnt have to be forever.

Tune in Tomorrow: The Curious, Calamitous, Cockamamie Story Of Starr Weatherby And The Greatest Mythic Reality Show Ever:Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powells

Visit the authors website. Follow her on Twitter.

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The Big Idea: Randee Dawn - John Scalzi's Whatever

2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the debut of The Wire, the five-season HBO masterpiece that is now considered one of televisions great achievements. In its time, however, the show faced yearly cancellation threats and low viewership, and was virtually ignored during awards season.

In the years since, David Simons magnum opus has gained generations of fans who debate, to this day, favorite characters, episodes, and seasons in what is described as a Russian novel applied to the Baltimore streets, police, politicians and drug dealers.

The anniversary has spawned a new round of critical appreciations, an eight-part podcast from HBO, and this project.

Over the years, many of the people who worked on the program have recounted their experiences during WAMC interviews. What follows is an oral history of the program as heard on WAMC.

Jonathan Abrams, author of All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

I think that was a big part in why The Wire initially struggled when it was on. Chris Bauer, who played Frank Sobotka, has a quote in the book that You can't watch The Wire and make a casserole at the same time The Wire requires that you paid attention to it and didn't get up out your seat. And I can only imagine being one of the first to actually watch that show when it aired on HBO. And in the pilot, you're introduced to so many characters, you can't really figure out what's going on. The dialect is like nothing you've ever heard on television before. And then it's off for a week, it's not like you can just stream it and go to the next episode, you don't see it for a whole nother week. And then you have to it's on your own to pick up where you left off. So that' as a lot. So that's why it didn't really gain popularity until you were able to stream it all at once.

Show creator David Simon

I'm not sure that anybody can make a credible argument to a 14-year-old kid coming up in places in South Chicago or North Philadelphia or West Baltimore that it's an irrational decision to go down on the corner and raise up as a lookout or run a ground stash for some older drug dealer, when that's the only industry you've ever known in your neighborhood who's ever been hiring. The factories are all closed, the jobs that used to be an evident transport to American society. You know, for people who had a high school degree, or maybe not even that, they don't exist anymore. Now the job is at a computer screen somewhere far away from you. And it requires a level of training that wasn't ever credible as an outcome within the public education system that you knew. And there's this one factory still hiring, and it's up on the corner, and it hired your older brother and hired your cousin and hired your father.

The level of hopelessness is such that I'm not sure you can argue with that kid. The kids that we saw in West Baltimore when we did The Corner and we followed them for a year, they were being rigorously trained for the one factory that was still open. Never mind mental health, poverty, the fact that there were these two Americas and in one of them there are viable alternatives to find your way through and become connected economically, socio-economically to the society, and then the other one there isn't. And I live in a city that is rigorously divided between those two Americas. Ao the people in the one America, you try to police into the face of that you might as well be policing Soweto or Gaza I mean you're up against the entire neighborhood because everybody looks uponit's like trying to police Birmingham in 1960 and saying, Guys you can't work in the steel mills. Steel mills are illegal, don't make steel. You know, it sounds insane. But to tell a kid in Baltimore in 2005 or 2015 don't go down to the corner, don't make that money. We have some other place, some other plan for you. Yeah. What other place? What other the plan? Really? We can't even figure out a summer jobs program. So, on some level, the drug trade as an industry proved itself to be rational even as it destroyed human beings, even as it destroyed neighborhoods. It proved to be rational on a day-to-day basis and on an economic basis. And we have to upend that. And that's kind of epic. That would be epic.

Musician Steven Earle played recovering drug addict Walon

Really a lot of it has to do with how much the show means to people. I mean, David Simon is a really good friend of mine, I'm really proud of him and really, you know, happy for him that because he's a guy making art for the right reasons in a medium where you don't have to to be successful. In fact, he would probably be more successful if he would bring my character on Treme back as a vampire, he would probably have better ratings, but he has more integrity than that. So, I'm dead on that show and I'm dead. I'm gonna stay dead. So, it's an amazinga lot of people think it's just the best show that's ever been on television. You'd be amazed how many people believe that how many people say it and it's all over the world. So, I learned a lot from doing it. And you know what, it's brought a few people that my music that never listened to before. So, it's hard to complain about it.

David wrote the part for me and it required zero acting, which is the reason I had, you know, only a small amount of trepidation about doing it. And it didn't require any acting at all. Harley, the character on Treme, was similar but actually required more acting even though Harley was a musician, I got to sing. I got to sing my own songs. But I was really playing the person that was sort of fundamentally different than I am. Walon's a redneck recovering addict; that requires no acting.

He's a huge music fan. And he used a song of mine in a miniseries called The Corner that he did for HBO. And then when he was writing the first episodes of The Wire, he called my manager and said, I'm writing this character that I think might be good for Steve. And he tracked me down and I read for it in a recording studio in Nashville. And they filmed it and I read it. And I got the part. And I mean, it was written for me, he was just hopingI had to really suck probably not to get it. Next thing I knew I was on a plane to Baltimore. And I was in the show off and on for the five years and a lot in the fifth year. And I was makingit was weird, I had just moved to New York when we started filming the fifth season, I was making Washington Square Serenade so I'd make that record; I'd like work a day on the record and then I'd have a day where they have to shoot. So, Id just take the train from New York down to Baltimore the night before. As soon as like I would work in the studio till the last train, 7 or 8 or something, take the train to Baltimore get up and do the early shoot, and I'd be back in the studio, they'd work on something else while I was gone. And I'd be back in the studio usually by dinnertime.

David Simon

We've been witness to a lot of police violence that is absolutely without question an affront to Black lives. I don't think there was anything in my head that suggested it wasn't happening. Even when I was a police reporter. The difference between now and then, is simply this and you know, I realize we're doing radio, I'm holding up my smartphone with the camera in it. As a police reporter, I probably covered 100 police shootings. I haven't taken a careful count, but I would guess that probably 70-75 of them, 70 of them, at least, I had no question about they werewe live in a heavily armed society. There's a lot of guns on the street, there's a lot of violence. It's kind of hard to ask anybody to police anywhere in an American city, you know, with this level of gun saturation, and do so unarmed or do so in a circumstance where you're never going to use your weapon, although many police go their whole careers without using their weapon. You know, there are certain posts where it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen to somebody at some moment. So, I guess I'm saying I covered a lot of honorable police shootings. They were not any less tragic than many dishonorable ones. People died; people were wounded. But I covered a lot of police shootings that were legitimate. And then I covered, I would say, maybe 25% of them. I have no, I had no idea. I don't know what happened becauseit was what a police could write in his report, and what a guy might claim, but it was basically one guy's word against another and there was no other evidentiary logic with which you could judge it. And one of those guys knows how to write a police report. He knows how to testify in front of a grand jury and one of them doesn't and one of them might have no criminal history and one of them might have an extensive criminal history. So even if there were a couple of witnesses, if they were from the milieu of the drug corner or wherever the shooting happened, and they had criminal histories, the credibility was such that a prosecutor could knock it down. So, there were a lot of shootings, where as a reporter I have no consistency between the narrative that the police are telling me and the guy shot, or the witnesses. So often the guy shot is dead, he can't tell me anything. And that case would fly. And you would always be left with, you know, wondering, what was legit. And then there were 5% of the cases where there were a lot of witnesses, and the police really did something wrong. And in those cases, there were controversies and I covered some of those. But what's happened with the cell phone is that a lot of the cases that were in that 25% bracket, of we don't know, now, suddenly there's first generation evidence from just regular folk pointing their cameras and for police, that's a whole new world. And they're having a hard time adapting to the fact that sometimes the lies and the disconnects and the falsity that that used to protect them in the case of a bad shooting is no longer there or is now confronted by an alternative reality.

I mean, I think if you if you look at The Wire, the impulse towards brutality and towards non-accountability on the part of police department is embedded in the piece. I mean, I don't think you have to go two and a half episodes before one of the police officers resorts to an unnecessary brutality and blinds a kid, blinds a kid in one eye in the projects, and his lieutenant explains to him how to lie about it to the internal investigators so that it won't go further than the grand jury. That happened, I think, in episode three of a 60-episode show, and we revisited the idea of brutality. You know, when one police beat up a schoolteacher in a car, one other guy broke the fingers of a of a 12-year-old after he stole a car, we routinely returned to the idea of the drug war being this moral disconnect for some officers. But what we didn't have was the idea of being confronted by the fact that your lies might now bethat the things that you do to protect officers who've overreached or who've made mistakes, or who have been willfully abusive, your ability to damage control that stuff is now much more vulnerable because of this technology. We would certainly show that because the smartphone with its camera has been a revolution.

Wendell Pierce played homicide detective Bunk Moreland

Bunk, first of all, was based on a real man. So, I have a relationship with the real Bunk. Oscar Requer, retired police detective in Baltimore. I consider him family. I think of Darryl Massey and other sergeants in the homicide who I studied with in preparation for the role and thought of them in the recent, you know, uprising that was happening in Baltimore especially. The first thing people had to think of was all those issues that we brought up in The Wire over those seven years that we worked on, in the five seasons that we produced, were the same issues that were coming to a head this summer. And I thought of those specifically Black protectors on the police force, who became policemen because the crime and the violence in that neighborhood reduced by only 1% was not reflective of the good people in the neighborhood. And that's why they became police officers.That was developed in the script when Bunk Moreland had a relationship with Omar. You know, this homicidal burglar of the drug dens and he said listen, no more bodies. I don't want any more bodies. The community also puts that challenge to the police officers if you became a policeman because you feel as though this neighborhood is of great value, don't allow the few to ruin the relationship because of their behavior within your ranks as police officers. And that's what the community was saying back to the police officers this summer in real life. So that form of art reflecting on all of those things, shows you how powerful and influential and profound culture is. And it's not just a piece of entertainment, it's something of great substance, and importance. And that dialogue, once you create a character, is something that you always go back to because it's the humanity that we all share, that we reflect on, when we consider all the issues that we bring up in a piece of art that we created. And so, the character of Bunk that I created, I constantly reflect on because I think of the men that helped me create it, like Sergeant Darryl Massey, and the original Bunk, Oscar Requer, because they root me in the reality of those issues that are so profoundly important to act on today, especially in Baltimore.

Jim True-Frost played police officer-turned-math teacher Roland Pryzbylewski, Prez

It was very dramatic. And it was a great couple of scenes there where me and a couple of the other cops go to a housing project and raise hell trying to say that we're in charge, and we're going to take things in hand. And things go terribly, terribly wrong. And my gun goes off and my gunI'm trying to put everything in the passive voiceand my gun makes contact with somebody else's face. My character, you know, appeared right then to be a real piece of work, I pistol whip a young kid in the face, and I take some shots up in the air randomly and recklessly. So, it was really interesting. Yeah, it was, as you said, it was it was very confidence instilling, you know, just to know that, wow, it's a cool, complicated, messy part. And could be really interesting. But it was also a total mystery. I mean, we didn't get the scripts until we were about ready to shoot each episode. So, I had no idea what the arc of the character was going to be. And, you know, from the looks of those first couple episodes, for all I knew, my character's problem was he was a total loose cannon and he had a drinking problem and who knows what, but those turned out to be not such a big part of the whole picture. It was more than the character was kind of frustrated and lost in the system, which was a big theme of the show. Sort of the individual who may have good intentions, but gets sort of mired in institutional apathy and unchanging ways of doing things even when things are going terribly wrong. So, in a way, that's what came to ring true much later in the series too when my character became a school teacher. Those themes were very much there again for Prez where he's the little guy who, at that point, is a little bit more on the ball and is a little bit more in control, but is still nonetheless a guy who's completely at a loss for what to do in the face of this monstrous bureaucracy of the school district and city politics that just aren't getting the job done and he's up close witnessing these kids in the schools who are just being left behind.

Brian Anthony Wilson played homicide detective Vernon Holley

I was just a local hire guy. Came in, I read for like three roles at first and then I was lucky to get Holley and I thought it was just a one and done. And I ended up being in five seasons of it, all five seasons, by the grace of God. I mean, the weird thing is I probably would have been in probablyI was in 19 episodesI probably would've been in about 30 or more, but because of the way TV series shoot, they only give you a couple of weeks notice. And a lot of times I was committed to theater projects, and they would just write me off, they would call me and say hey, are you available? If not, they write you out. And then they give your lines to somebody else and figure out something else. But yeah, because of my theater schedule, I was knocked out of over half of the episodes, I would think. But yeah, I've been very lucky to work as much as I do. And very fortunate, I'm usually working on two or three projects at once. Because I mean, I seek those out. And a lot of times work begets work, but it is tough. You know, for Black actors, firstly, especially of a certain age, you know, past middle age, and certainly not a leading man type, like I say, I'm the big linebacker kind of build type, but I've you know, luckily knock on wood have been working, professionallyI mean for as a livingsince 96 when I did my first film, The Postman with Kevin Costner. So, I've been lucky, but it is temp work. You know, you're always looking for that next gig and always looking for that next job, which is a little scary.

Benjamin Busch played Police Officer Anthony Colicchio

I think some of my best acting actually was in Iraq, simply because of the fact that I was very frustrated. I mean, it was an incredibly difficult situation every day. And I did have a position that came with certain expectations. You know, my Marines expected me to be invulnerable. And so, I had to believe that I was, and the Iraqis themselves, were also looking for vulnerability, they were looking for, at the same time, for strength, for confidence. And in the face of these things, I created an invulnerable persona. You kind of cloak yourself in a certain belief in your own immortality, you create your own myth. And that's what an actor does. An actor has to move into a character and inhabit them all the way in enough that their emotions are reflected in their eyes. You play someone that you half are and half can't be. And I think I did that a lot in Iraq, because I was a public performer to an extent. And I think you carry your experiences back and forth. I think that when I came back from my first tour in Iraq, the first audition I had was for Officer Anthony Colicchio on The Wire on HBO. And he was a very frustrated police officer but at the same time he was someone who had an uncompromising sense of justice. That's why he was frustrated. He was seeing things black and white in Baltimore, which is a city of gray, the police are cheating, the criminals are cheating, and he couldn't stand any of it. It was coming from a war which had been entirely gray, which as a Marine, you hope is a noble mission. And that was compromised very early. So, I think all these experiences feed into your performances and your performances feed back into your life. You begin to gather all this, like I talked about emotional resonance and also memory and begin to build who you really are. And I feed off of all of that, I think. I think there's some truth in in Tony Colicchio for me.

Clarke Peters played homicide detective Lester Freamon

When I left America, we were in the throeswe were coming to the end of the Civil Rights Movement. And we were going into the Vietnam War debacle on whether it was good or bad. You know? I think that I was on the right side of both of those arguments, and I see that history has shown me that I was. Now, you know, 50 years later, I see that some of those issues are still being debated and argued and questioned, and there not just being questioned by Americans and myself, but it's also the way that the rest of the world is viewing America, its involvement in Afghanistan, its possible involvement in going into Eastern Europe. It's the same arena as, politically, as I saw myself view Vietnam. I'm looking at now the civil rights movement that we were working on in the late 60s, in the mid-60s, is now still a point of contention for some parties. And the outside world, Europe, looks at that as well and says, What's happening over there? Who are you? I have to say that living outside of America, America has the best idea. We have the best idea of how a society should be. And if only we would live up to it, it would be great. Believe me, the rest of the world loves the idea of America, they really do. And if we can get there, we will have a beautiful, utopian existence, I'm sure.

Jonathan Abrams

Early on, Uta Briesewitz, the cinematographer, came to Bob Colesberry, who was kind of the eyes of the show and said that the show shouldn't lose any visual elegance when it goes from, say, inside the police station to the streets. So, they kind of kept that same template. I think, probably in the pilot, it was a little bit different. But as it carried on, it kind of kept the sophistication between the two. And what they were trying to show was that the methods that the drug sellers were using was often just as sophisticated as the methods the police were using in trying to capture them. Literary titans like George Pelecanos and Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, that was a real joy, because these guys are some of the best crime novelists around. And, honestly, it's so surprising to me that they were able to get any type of work done, because you just have all these guys who, when you write a book, it's really isolating, and you're by yourself, you're just you and your editor. But you bring all these guys together. And you all think that you're the best novelist. Meanwhile, David Simon and Ed Burns are kind of overseeing the whole ship, and they really put their egos aside to be able to make great television. And for me, Season Four is just so instrumental, I just consider it the best season of television in history, just as far as it shows such a huge problem and really humanizes it. At the beginning of the season, we see these four boys who are bright eyed and seemingly have a lot of potential and through their character arcs, we see just almost the lights turn out and the forces that are against them and how they really don't even have a chance to get going in life.

Jim True-Frost

I wouldn't say it surprised me because, I mean, it surprised me somewhat during the life of the show, while we're still in production, it just seemed to get more and more of a fire behind it and a real acclaim for the great writing. And the pertinence of the social issues and the quality of the show, which was just very episodic, or very serialized, just a long form, kind of a long novel on TV, which wasn't the first show like that, but it may have sort of really cracked the form or set the bar for that kind of television. So yeah, we saw then that it was really catching fire and people were really responding to it and it was so exciting to be a part of it. And yeah, I mean, I do I continue to hear from people all the time either renting the show or watching it online or whatever. And I bump into people on the street and say, "Hey, I just started the show" or, "I'm just through the first season" and things like that. So, it obviously it's got legs. We shot our five seasons, but the audience is still growing.

Jonathan Abrams

I think those feelings still remain. I think that's a blessing and a curse with the show in that The Wire accomplished what few television shows can it educated and entertained. So, you're gonna have a good segment of people who just watched The Wire as pure entertainment and maybe the larger messages of the show flew over them. I remember when I watched it in real time, I was saying that, hey, I've never seen a character like Stringer or Omar. And I think that's what first led me into the show. But if you watch it deeper, and if you watch it multiple times, you enjoy the aspects of the message that it's trying to get across, and that these institutions often fail to reform themselves and the individuals are the ones who often get caught up in it.

David Simon

I mean, the one thing that is probably been my predominant theme for about a decade, certainly in The Wire, is to try to assert against the drug war, drug prohibition, as being an incredible disaster for the country and for American cities in particular. So, I tend to try to get near young impressionable minds and urge them to have nothing to do with the drug war. I think if I get that one done, I've done a little something. The drug war has always been, I think, a means of social control. And it's always been targeted against fear of the other. If you go back to its origins, I mean, if you go back all the way to the turn of the century, and into the late 19th century, the first moments of drug fear of what became the basis of policing of dangerous drugs, has to do with the fear of the yellow horde on the West Coast, the opium dens of the dreaded Chinese, it's always been linked to some fear of the immigrant other or the racial other. And if you look at the history of drug prohibition, it's never come from an organic logic that says, by treating this as a criminal dynamic rather than a health problem, we can achieve anything. They've never sold that with any credible empiricism because it never does. It never fixes anything. It just makes for a lot of people in a lot of prisons. And at this point we never lost our mind quite as we did in the 1990s, but we did lose our minds and we filled prison after prison after prison with nonviolent offenders.

See the rest here:
The Oral History of "The Wire" on WAMC - WAMC

Its important to remember that George Miller is and has always been more than Mad Max, but that Mad Max is all George Miller. See, Miller, like the bespectacled and bookish protagonist of his latest film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, is a storyteller, and my favorite interpretation (call it a fan theory or whatever you want, its still compelling) of the Mad Max films is that theyre ultimately depicting the creation of a folk legend. In the first, the modern world exists in living memory and is contextualized as such, but as the films progress, they get more and more fabulous until you wind up with a cult-leading warlord hoarding water and enslaving women, the thread linking reality and pure myth severed so long ago that its riding with the War Boys in Vahalla, shiny and chrome. Miller specializes in that kind of adult fairy tale even outside the Wasteland, most obviously in The Witches of Eastwick and more subtly in Lorenzos Oil, but even his childrens films tenors are perfectly pitched to shatter the hearts of even the coldest adult without overwhelming them with treacle. The Babe movies rightfully hold a special place in the hearts of parents everywhere as much as they do within the children they delight(this is also where I beg you to reconsider Happy Feet, which is as gorgeously imagined and rich as any of his other works as hard as it may be to swallow the idea of a jukebox musical about dancing penguins). So, to the folks hopped up on Fury Road who may leave Longing wondering exactly where the hell that filmmaker is and how a studio could finance a condensed adaptation of D.W. Griffiths Intolerance, clothed, this time, in the rich fabrics that adorned The Thief of Baghdad which also somehow manages to be a painfully gorgeous and earnest two-person love story, well, this is who hes always been.

Clocking in just under 110 minutes, Longing covers a span of human history that could be, in the hands of another filmmaker, perilous and paralyzing in its ambition. But Millers ferocious skill and ability as a storyteller ensure that it never strays too far from its emotional core, even as it documents the happenings within the court of Queen Sheba while shes being romanced by King Solomon or the longings of a young woman, trapped in a loveless marriage to an older man and in an era in which her natural talents for science make her into a sort of Da Vincis Sister (with the inventor and artist substituting for Shakespeare in my adaptation of Woolfs idiom). Such are all the things that a Djinn (Idris Elba) can witness throughout his odd immortality, linked to the mercurial wants and needs of the humans hes bound to serve. Unlike the rest of his kind, this Djinn isnt a trickster: hes a hopeless romantic, doing his best to try and bring gratification and satisfaction to those around him and, occasionally, trying to forestall the worst possible outcomes for all, say, in a medieval Byzantine power struggle. But Altheia (Tilda Swinton), the storytelling scholar I mentioned earlier, has her doubts: she knows, from years and years of research, not to trust them.

But, then again, shes found herself in an impossible circumstance: while in Istanbul for a conference, she stumbles upon a Nightingales Eye in a junk shop buried amongst a thousand other trinkets. Its a gorgeous blue-and-white shaped bottle, covered in some amount of detritus, and when she returns to her hotel room and absent-mindedly starts to clean it with her electric toothbrush, she pops the top off and is overwhelmed by a swarm of electromagnetic vapor, which congeals into a giant. The Djinn introduces himself and, after a short interlude where he converses with her in Ancient Greek, sucks knowledge out of a computer and television to quickly learn English, clothes himself in a comfortable bathrobe just like hers, and presents her with a tray of delightful delicacies for her to nibble on, presents her with the eternal problem for both Djinn and master. She has three wishes. There are rules: she cant wish to become a Djinn, nor can she wish for unlimited wishes, she cant change the past or, say, eliminate suffering wholesale from the human condition, and her wishes, importantly, have to be her hearts true desire. But, much like Christian Slater with Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire, why rush headlong into anything when you have the chance to pick the brain of a creature whose life contains stories beyond your imagination? And, much like anyone who ever imagined themselves in Slaters role in that film, how could you not fall hopelessly and madly in love with a person trapped in such a desperate and romantic situation who also happens to look like that? So, over the course of his stories (three historical tales, with a modern-day fourth, much like Griffiths bladder-busting apologia for The Birth of a Nation), we witness Altheia turn the central question over and over in her head and find ourselves, along with her, stunned as to where it ends up.

One can practically feel Miller taking each and every one of the Oscars that Fury Road surprisingly won back in 2016 and putting them in the smelter to fashion this particular brick of solid gold, and Id argue that it was well worth it. Longing is what folks would call a loss-leader, and its financial prospects are suitably dismal given how hard it goes against the grain. As usual, Miller disregards many of the central tenets of the modern cinematic landscape and, instead, tells the story that he wishes to tell in the fashion that he wishes to tell it, without an ounce of irony or audience flattery included in the mix. Hes always proudly worn his silent-film influences on his sleeve, to the point that Fury Road got a black-and-white cut whose Blu-Ray one could always mute if they wanted to experience it without all that lovely sound design or, you know, intertitles. Yet the long stretches within the three tales without any diegetic dialogue with Elbas narration, the score, and the sounds within the scene comprising the audio track make it clear that Millers placing the same kind of care and emphasis on visual storytelling as he did his last film. Its a fantastically colorful and gorgeous bizarre bazaar of uncommon imagery, rendered fantastically with the same and oft-subtle usage of CGI that shocked so many after they discovered how much of Fury Roads central images were created in post-production, but applied to different ends. The pace remains frenetic throughout the historical tales, the images coming at such a fast clip that one may feel the need not to blink lest they miss something, but the film does slow down for its fourth story, a modern-day tale whose movement can feel ponderous and without an obvious direction. It bears few of the hallmarks of what Miller is properly known for, and perhaps best can be compared to the black-and-white sequence in the zoo at the climax of Happy Feet in its ability to depress, with all of the joy and vivid emotion of the first hour-and-fifteen minutes made all the more meaningful by its lack.

But thats where Millers other talents come in. Elba and Swinton are a perfect pairing, and their energies are delightfully complementary in a way that elevates Millers already hyper-competent screenplay, which he co-wrote with Augusta Gore (its also lovely to see Swinton in a straight-man role, confronted by the oddities of the universe, much like she was in Memoria). Theres such a deep wellspring of emotion that the pairs the cast and the writers are able to tap into, and were all lucky enough to be able to drink from it, being the kind of rich refreshment that seems to elude so many similar works. Why they fail and why Miller succeeds seems to boil down to a single reason: they dont mean what they say, and he always does. His tempered earnestness be it focused on love, the power of storytelling, or in the propulsive and pounding nature of cinema itself, wielded as a blunt instrument to remind viewers that they have working and functional hearts that can still set off Apple Watch heart-rate alerts in the middle of movies is in desperately short supply, and even if it were abundant, youd find few other filmmakers able to execute it with the same level of joyous precision and wonder present in a film like Three Thousand Years of Longing. If Miller should choose (and if its not a sacrifice on his part or a concession) to make a dozen more Mad Max movies in his short time left on this planet so that he may find funding for ecstatically dreamy projects like this and its an underrated power move to go ahead and sign on to a film like Furiosa knowing that youve got this chambered, waiting to splatter audiences expectations all across the walls and then all moviegoers should thank their lucky fucking stars. We genuinely do not deserve his talents, and its amazing that we ever got the chance to witness them. After all, he could have just remained in medicine.

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'Three Thousand Years of Longing' Review: George Miller, the G.O.A.T. - Vanyaland

Its always been easier for him on the field. Give up a touchdown and you move on to the next possession. Allow a long catch and you get yourself ready for the next play. Between the lines, Baltimore Ravens cornerback Kevon Seymour has learned how to quickly forget. His position demands it. Of the qualities that make up a good NFL corner, short-term memory is as vital as size and speed.

But it becomes infinitely harder for him off the field, when real life continually intervenes and lands blows far more damaging than a 340-pound pulling guard can deliver. The truth is that the things that Seymour has endured, from not having a father in his life to running from gunshots to losing family members and friends, are impossible to forget. He wouldnt want to anyway. Its all shaped who he is.

Theres been so many times when you feel like, Man, Ive been through it all and theres nothing else that I can go through thats harder than that, Seymour said. And then something else happens.

Seymour was home in Arizona in May preparing to travel to Baltimore for the start of organized team activities when he learned that his older sister, Ebonee Tinnin, who helped raise him, died suddenly at the age of 35. Seymours twin brother, Keon, found her collapsed in their mothers Pasadena, Calif., apartment. Seymour said Tinnin had a heart attack.

Not long after getting the crushing news, Seymour phoned Ravens coach John Harbaugh to update him and ask when he needed to report for workouts. Harbaugh urged Seymour to go to California and be with his family.

I said, Ive got to come. My sister wouldnt have wanted it any other way, Seymour said. But man, it was tough. Still is. Its another battle Im dealing with now. I dedicate every day to her.

As a teenager growing up in Pasadena, Seymour was told that football could be his way out, a path to a better life for himself and his family. It sounded far-fetched. So few people from his neighborhood were making it out. It was hard to dream that big amid such humble surroundings.

Yet, he clung to the idea and his football skills helped him get a college scholarship at the University of Southern California. He still believed, even after a final college season spent partly on the bench. When a litany of injuries led to him being out of the NFL for two years and prompted him to get a job at a car and tire shop to support his family and settle his mind, Seymour never once conceded that his playing days might be over.

Three years later, hes still on an NFL roster. His life really has been kind of a movie-type scenario, said Seymours agent Ali Siam. Pound for pound, Kevon might be one of the most physically and mentally tough and resilient people I know. Hes just bounced back from so much and kept going.

Seymour is now on the proverbial roster bubble heading into the Ravens preseason finale against the Washington Commanders Saturday night at M&T Bank Stadium. Hes probably behind Marlon Humphrey, Marcus Peters, Brandon Stephens, Kyle Fuller and rookies Jalyn Armour-Davis and Damarion Williams in the pecking order and there is no guarantee that the Ravens keep seven corners. No matter, hes faced far longer odds and much greater adversity before.

When I watch him, its surreal, just because I know where he came from, said Drew Pearson, one of Seymours mentors and former football coaches. To watch it at a distance is tough. Not only does he represent the high school he comes from, he represents the whole city. A lot of stuff that goes on in our city, man, its tough, in regards to making it out, in regards to having opportunities. Not once has he shied away from doing the right things. Not once has he quit. Its an amazing story.

Seymour, 28, has been a Raven for less than a year, yet almost everybody you talk to players, coaches, equipment staff, secretaries has a story about an uplifting interaction theyve had with him. He is engaging and full of energy and positivity. And oh, that smile. It is wide and welcoming and it belies years of anger and frustration about things entirely out of his control.

But if you look closely at his 6-foot frame, youll see the signs. There is a tattoo on his right bicep that reads: God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers. Seymour reminds himself of that often. Stretched across his right forearm is his last name. Seymour says that old teammates used to make fun of him for that tattoo, asking if he had it done so he could remember it. If they only knew.

For me, it was more motivation, because I didnt have the same last name as my mom or dad, Seymour said. I used to ask, Where did I get this name from? I had a lot of built-up anger inside because of little things like that and not knowing my dad.

Seymours grandmother once told him that his last name came from a man who was close with his mother, Veronica Starling, and agreed to look after him and his twin brother when their biological father refused to take responsibility. The mans name was Phil Seymour and Kevon still recalls every detail of one glorious evening he and Keon spent with Phil.

He took them to a Pasadena pizza shop and handed them a roll of coins to use in the machines that dispense toys and trinkets. Kevon and Keon filled their little palms and pockets with plastic rings, bouncy balls and figurines called Homies. Afterward, they returned to Starlings apartment, ate pizza and watched a bootleg copy of the movie, Deep Blue Sea.

We never had a movie night before, Seymour said. I thought it was the best night ever.

It ended with Starling summoning her twins downstairs and telling them that Phil wouldnt be around much going forward. It was a pattern that the Seymour boys would regrettably get used to. Their father made a few half-hearted efforts to get back in their lives, but they were always fleeting. For years, Kevon was led to believe that his father was living in North Carolina, when in actuality, he was staying in the Los Angeles area, a relatively short drive away.

I had a chip on my shoulder growing up, Seymour said. I remember there were times where Id just go in the bathroom and just cry, like, If my dad was here, none of this would happen. Id be able to get these shoes and Id be able to get and do this and that.

Seymour slowly learned to appreciate what he did have. Starling was fiercely protective and supportive of her kids. She worked long days at a Los Angeles hospital and would get home some nights around 9 p.m., but she was adamant about cooking a nice meal, even when the kids insisted a bowl of cereal would do just fine. Starling made the familys small apartment feel like a mansion, Seymour said.

Tinnin looked after the boys when her mother couldnt. Keon might as well have been Kevons shadow, the twins doing everything together. There were mentors like Pearson, who invested his own money and time to make sure Kevon was seen by college programs and taught him how to eat and train like a high-level athlete, and Antyone Sims, a high school football coach who told young Kevon something that proved prophetic.

There was also a troubled, yet caring community that recognized Kevons potential and sense of purpose and was determined to shield him from some of the trouble and temptations that derailed so many kids before him.

The majestic Rose Bowl and all its pageantry casts a large shadow over Pasadena. Its only a couple of miles from where Seymour grew up in the Community Arms Apartment complex in the northwestern part of the city. It might as well be a world away.

The neighborhood, which includes Section 8 housing, carries an apt moniker: The Snake Pits.

If you know anything about a snake pit, thats not a good place where anybody wants to be, said Sims. You have the gangs, the drugs, all those things.

There used to be a TV show called Gangland. That show specifically came to our section, said Pearson, who also grew up in Community Arms. To come from a section like that and to not fall into that, its very rare.

There was an extended time when Seymour accepted what he witnessed as the norm. Hed wake up in the middle of the night, look out his back window and see crackheads having meetings. Hed watch gang initiations, various acts of violence, police storming apartments with guns drawn. Sometimes, it hit entirely too close to home.

Ive been at Jackie Robinson Park playing T-ball when theres shooting going on, Seymour said. You got to hide under a car.

Seymour would listen to classmates talk about their neighborhoods, about playing tag outside, about staying out after it got dark to hang with friends. Hed grow quiet and even went through a phase where he wouldnt volunteer where he was from. Eventually, it became a source of pride.

If youre not from there, you just feel that its dangerous. You dont want to be around, Seymour said. When youre from there, thats home. Ill always go back and show love. Just about all of the friends I grew up with inside there, they didnt make it out. They are either in jail, gang banging or got killed. I lost a lot of friends that I played Pop Warner with, high school ball with.

Seymours grappled with his own immortality, too. He once went to nearby Inglewood to visit his USC teammate and roommate, Devian Shelton, and his mother. He thought he had taken the appropriate precautions. When his then-girlfriend and now wife, Tori, noticed Seymour had on a red Michael Vick Atlanta Falcons jersey, she warned him about wearing the colors traditionally associated with the LA-based Bloods gang.

Seymour changed into a neutral white T-shirt, yet trouble found him anyway. He was outside talking with friends when he started hearing what initially sounded like fireworks.

It was a, Pop, pop, pop, pop, Seymour recalled. And my friends were like, Run.

Seymour did just that, not fully stopping until he darted through the door of a local motel and found a place to hide. When he finally took shelter, Seymour realized he was bleeding from his legs and arms. He quickly deduced that it was not because of gunshot wounds, rather he had sustained cuts and scrapes while tumbling on the street during his dash to safety. The incident triggered an epiphany.

I just didnt want to be a statistic, he said. I looked up to my mom. She was never taken care of and I wanted to be better and give her a better life.

Football was Seymours means of doing that.

It was almost over before it began. As a freshman at John Muir High School, Seymour was told by the head coach to go work out with the running backs. He resisted because he had gotten wind of the fact that the running backs coach wasnt interested in having him. Seymour walked off the field with tears running down his cheeks. He was stopped by Pearson, who questioned the boy about where he was from, who his father was and why he was quitting. Pearson was from the same neighborhood and also grew up without a father in his life. He couldnt relate, however, to quitting, and he told Seymour as much.

I understand it was all emotion. I knew what was in his heart, Pearson said. I couldnt let him do that to himself. I pretty much let him know, If thats the decision for you right now, youll be willing to walk away again. Thats something we dont want. He went back to practice and never looked back.

It would be the first of a plethora of times Seymours resilience and commitment were tested when it comes to football.

Going into his sophomore year, we had 23 seniors graduate. We had a whole new team and we knew we were going to have to rely on Kevon, Sims said. We put him through the wringer to see if he was going to be tough enough to handle varsity at such a young age. We put him in a drill with one of our biggest hitters and we set it up where Kevon had to go one-on-one with this guy. The guy got the best of him. Kevon was upset. He looked dead at me and said, Put me back in there and lets do it again. We knew then that he had the mentality that it takes.

When Sims was trying to convince Seymour to attend Muir High instead of Pasadena High, he made a prediction. He told Seymour that if he listened to coaching and did what he was supposed to do, hed be a high school All-American and attend any college he wanted. Both were proven true. Seymour was on the fast track to the NFL, starting at cornerback in both his sophomore and junior seasons at USC. He had enough of a profile where he considered leaving one year of eligibility on the table and going to the NFL.

A year later, Seymour spent his senior season wondering if he had made a catastrophic choice. His playing time dipped under Clay Helton, one of four head coaches he had in as many years at USC. A few people familiar with the situation said it wasnt a result of anything Seymour did wrong. It was more a matter of new coaches wanting to lean more on players they recruited. Seymour was devastated but never pointed any fingers, at least not publicly. Even now, seven years later, he declines to play the blame game beyond saying that he was treated unfairly.

It would have been age appropriate for him to say how he feels, but when it comes to the football process, sometimes you have to bite the bullet, and sometimes you dont learn that, said Pearson, a defensive assistant at USC for much of Seymours time at the school. The best thing he learned out of there was that life is not fair. The only fair that we know out here is the Pomona Fair and the Orange County Fair.

Seymour still got an invitation to the NFL scouting combine, where he ran a 4.39 40-yard dash time despite not really training for it. Seymour sustained a torn ligament in his ankle in his final college season. He got a medical boot off his foot just days before arriving in Indianapolis for the annual prospect showcase, spread some Tiger Balm on his foot and then toed the line. It was also at the combines medical checkups where Seymour learned that he had been playing for years while mostly blind in one eye. Lasik surgery ultimately fixed that problem.

But the week was mostly spent answering questions from curious NFL scouts, executives and assistant coaches. They, too, wanted to know why a freshman contributor and a sophomore and junior-year starter once considered a likely early-to-mid-round pick barely could get on the field as a senior.

One NFL assistant told Seymour that he heard he had a problem getting along with coaches. Seymour respectfully dismissed that as false. A coach from another team came right out and told Seymour that the perception of him is that hes soft. That one bothered Seymour. Had the coach done any homework on me? Seymour wondered. Did he know where I was from?

The Buffalo Bills drafted Seymour with a sixth-round pick in 2016. There would be Pasadena-area players to follow in his footsteps in the ensuing years. Wide receiver Steven Mitchell earned a roster spot with the Houston Texans as an undrafted free agent in 2018. David Long Jr. was a third-round pick of the Los Angeles Rams in 2019 and was on their Super Bowl team last season. Darnay Holmes was selected by the New York Giants as a fourth-round pick in 2020. Myles Bryant made the New England Patriots as an undrafted free agent that same year.

Those are all guys that looked up to Kevon, Sims said. He was the first guy to make it after a long layoff (for the city).

Seymour has the scars to prove it. There are ones on each shoulder after he had both of his labrums repaired within a month of one another in 2018. He spent that entire season on the Carolina Panthers injured reserve list. Theres another scar on his left wrist, thanks to surgery on his scapholunate ligament. That injury, plus a torn hamstring, spurred his Panthers release in 2019 and forced Seymour into making a choice.

He wasnt healthy enough to pass a physical, so no team was going to sign him in 2019. He had a wife and two young children he needed to support and a psyche that was more fragile than ever before.

I stayed in Carolina and reality started to hit. I was like, Is this it for me? Seymour said. I knew I was going to have to work.

Seymour developed a love of cars in college and he spent a lot of time doting on his Dodge SRT Hellcat. He was already a customer of the Wheel & Tire Exchange in Charlotte and had gotten to know several of the employees there through their relationships with other Panthers. Having a rehabbing NFL player as an employee seemed like an odd dynamic, but it felt very natural to those involved.

Greg Mitchell, an employee at the Wheel & Tire Exchange for the past five years, would walk around with Seymour and meet customers, but then lay back as Seymour carried the conversation. He was certainly still in his element.

It was like a really good friend coming to work with us, said Greg Mitchell. I knew that there were things going on. We didnt get into everything, but hed fill me in on some things. He kept such a good, positive attitude about everything. He was like, I know its going to happen. I know Im going to get back to playing in the league.

Seymour would get in a real early workout at a local Planet Fitness, drop his kids off at school, go to work at the tire shop, pick his kids back up and then work out again in the evening. Having a job was almost therapeutic.

I was getting my mind right, he said. It was so tough for me mentally. I found myself in a low state of mind, not playing and being on the field. I had to get away. I couldnt break down in front of my wife and kids, so Id go there and it uplifted me. The people there gave me so much support.

Seymour and Greg Mitchell still talk regularly, and Seymour will go on FaceTime so he can say hello to his other friends at the tire shop. Other than Seymour, his friends and family members, nobody celebrated his return to the NFL in December 2020 with the Philadelphia Eagles more than the employees at the Wheel & Tire Exchange.

He spent about eight months in the Eagles organization before he was released and again looking for a new NFL home. Siam was hearing from a few teams interested in Seymour, but something just felt right about a workout he had with the Ravens, so much so that he called his wife as soon as it was over and told her that it was where he wanted to be.

It made an impression on Seymour that the Ravens offered to move back his 7 a.m. workout, because he hadnt gotten into town until around midnight the night before after visiting with the Chicago Bears the previous day. Seymour declined. He felt ready. While other squads have instructed him to return the team-issued clothes after a workout, a Ravens official told Seymour to keep theirs. That was before they offered him a practice squad contract.

Seymour played in nine games with the Ravens last season, starting two in what was an injury-depleted secondary. He himself had quadriceps and hamstring injuries. He said it was suggested to him at one point that he should consider shutting it down. Seymour refused. He had already spent too much time off the field in recent months.

He re-signed with the Ravens in January and now, he finds himself with another challenge: trying to crack the 53-man roster at one of the teams deepest positions. Seymour has had a solid camp, by and large, giving up some big gains, but making his share of plays, too.

The first thing that sticks out with him is just his attitude every day, Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald said. Hes a guy that attacks everything.

After a recent training camp practice, Seymour stood outside the weight room and under the hot sun for more than an hour as he retraced his journey to get to this point. He talked with pride about the family hes building with his wife, Tori, and being the supportive father that he never had. The couple, which has been together for more than a decade, has four kids, the oldest 5 years old and the youngest just 8 months.

He talked almost matter-of-factly about things no young boy should have to witness and experience. He choked up when he discussed the influence his mother and people like Pearson have had on his life. He then spoke solemnly about all the personal loss hes endured. His father died in 2020, a few years after he expressed an interest in having a relationship with Seymour, only to not follow through. His sisters sudden death in May is still on Seymours mind, as is the declining health of his grandmother.

Its been one thing after another, he said.

Yet, when the conversation finally ended and Seymour ducked inside the team facility, a smile still stretched across his face.

I used to be so angry, but thankful, too, he said. If I could do this all over again, I wouldnt want it any other way. It shaped me into who I am today. I look at things way differently.

(Top photo: AP / Terrance Williams)

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Ravens cornerback Kevon Seymour is still able to smile through the pain - The Athletic

Saul Basss poster for 1966s Seconds.Source: picryl.com

Reincarnation always seemed worse than Hell to me. Never mind that I feel pretty bound up in this-here body and these-here experiences, one ride on this train is enough. To invest all that love and hatred into one cast of characters, forget everything, and do it all again as a volenot for me. Hell, for all its problems, is at least a place you can put down roots. Its torture, yes, and eternal darkness, but its got the benefit of familiarity. And Heavenhoo boy Heavenhow could you get bored of eternity there? Sure, its a question-begging concept, but what isnt? As Homer Simpsons tells us while banging himself in the head with a bat, wow, up here that feels good! Give me Catholic Heaven any day.

John Frankenheimers Seconds (1966) is an experiment in starting over, in reincarnation with the mind in-tact (a fact made obvious by its German title, Der man, der zweimal lebte, The Man Who Lived Twice). On paper, its classic 60s sci-fi fare, a Twilight Zone episode stretched out to 107 minutes and blessed with the disturbing cinematography of James Wong Howe. Its the tale of a white-headed, gray-flannel suited executive, Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), who abandons his wife and distant daughter to be reborn as Rock Hudson (or, in the movies terms, Antiochus Tony Wilson). Seconds has all the mainstays of mid-century paranoiathe corrupt corporation, evil psychiatrists, spies disguised as friends, generational conflict, and the exhaustion of the happiness offered by the post-war truce between capital and labor. We see shots of a real rhinoplasty operation, witness horribly distorted montages of surgeons, mutilated faces, and glaring medical lights. It all makes sense as a collective American fever dream. Just on these terms, Frankenheimer has made a masterpiece.

But I propose to do one betterto look at Seconds on the other side of the Great American Century. It did poorly in the 60s and it would do poorly today, in large part because the problems it scrutinizes have only become worse. That, and much weirder. Take the notion of reinvention the film plays with. Arthur becomes younger and hotter. He leaves behind his frigid familial relationships on the East Coast for West Coast orgies and nude grape stomping. He is become hippy, fulfiller of dreams. What ruins this shift for him is the public recollection of who he is. The company that subsidized his surgery doesnt like that. But hes defiant; he realizes hes both Arthur and Tony (a man who is recently deceased and whose identity he has essentially stolen, in a horrific presage of the British Undercover Cops and Sex Scandal). And so, he visits his wife and speaks to her as if he were but a friend of Arthurs who wanted to pick up some of his art. His wife, however, doesnt have them anymore and speaks of Arthur as a distant, dissatisfied man. There is nothing but dejection for our protagonist, who is not who he is and feels seen and suffocated in who he was.

Today we can reinvent way more rapidly. Yes, there is ubiquitous plastic surgery. Yes, you can try on a thousand hats as a thousand different accounts. But above all, we are reinvented by attention, by clout. The hyper-competitive marketplace of faces, songs, and styles means an incessant drive to be baptized in the gamer girl bathwater of fame. We all wish to enter what Michael Judge calls the Eikonosphere. Here, Judge says, we willingly and enchantedly accept the parasite Fama, who, no doubt, plans to give every working man a brain slug. This is also an attempt to disappear, to be erased by the very glory that overtakes us, to become small under Gods microscopeor better yet, under the magnifying glass composed of humanitys collective and individuated eyes. Who among us isnt Arthur? Who among us would not be destroyed? Need I tell you how many of my wifes pre-school students want to be YouTubers?

Seconds also highlights sexual blackmail, which we all accept, know exists, and see in movies, yet seem to reject as any meaningful part of the dirty work of politics (Dennis Hastert anyone?). In its time and place, the movies depiction of Arthurs getting drugged and videotaped committing sexual violence might seem like a reflection on MKUltra or the general melting of Americas acid-washed brain. Today, it reeks of Jeffry Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jean-Luc Brunel. In the movies world it is fundamental; it forms the fulcrum of Arthurs decision (or lack thereof) to go through with his transformation. Hows he going to say no when such a tape exists? Equally key, however, it is never brought up again. Sexual blackmail is the invisible knot holding the whole operation together, keeping the Company going and forcing our protagonist under the knife. Qoheleth was right: aint nothing new under the sun.

Whats left but that eternal human desire, immortality? True enough Arthur is not seeking eternal life. But is constant reinvention not just reincarnation? Sure, the Companys clients need to suppress their old selves, but in classic metempsychosis, the old you determines a lot about the new one. This is the fantasy of escape, most ably incarnated today by the ultra-rich, who imagine transferring their consciousnesses to new (perhaps mechanized) bodies. In Seconds, the idea is that the body changes and with it the mind. In our world (as usual), we get the worst all around: the body is often adapted to suit Fama, but not without the ultimate focus on the mind. A rich man must be a smart man, and a smart man must be smart enough to save his consciousness from degradation and eventual demise. As we learn in the film, there is no such escape; you can be damned to be yourself only in the negative sense. To imagine liberation while remaining entirely your own is to imagine slow insanity and eventual subjugation. We run because we can dream up no decent answers to the actual problems facing us. This too is Arthurs cowardice.

Theres too much to say. Seconds is a phenomenal work of art with the technical essentials to back-up, complement, and enhance its vision. Frankenheimer made something special here, something that stands out even now, not as a reflection of the 60s and its angsts (though it is that), but as a remarkably contemporary investigation of our societys basest desires and ways of doing business. A rolling stone picks up moss; it picks up crap as well.

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Wake Me Up When I'm Rock Hudson, then Kill Me - Patheos