The Buddy System Theory Of Media Consumption

If these ideas are intriguing to you, maybe you wish to subscribe to my newsletter.

Other writing:

• A hater’s guide to the Dane County Farmer’s Market at Tone Madison

Always know where your buddy is

There are basically two reasons why the newsletter is less frequent than I had hoped it would be: Shōgun and illness. Taking on the recapping work of a TV show that dense really took a lot out of me, creatively. But even since the beginning of this newsletter, my good intentions have been foiled by my multiple sclerosis diagnosis (which I wrote about here, just over three years ago). Now I’m lucky: I have no physical limitations, and I have medication that keeps things in check. But living with a chronic illness means living with a certain amount of processing energy, and, well, it’s not always as much as you think it is.

For most of April, I was essentially bedridden while a two-week course of antibiotics wreaked havoc on my system. I’m pretty sure they knocked out the mostly symptomless bacterial infection of my stomach lining, but in the process, they really made me feel like absolute shit. Getting back into a regular pattern of work and exercise and art has been tricky, but last Tuesday I started coming down with my first cold since I started taking an immunosuppressant medication for my MS. That cold has really walloped me, and six days later I’m still not quite ready to be up and at ‘em. That time being sick has robbed me of a lot of opportunities to be creative, but it also gave me time to sit and watch movies. Great fodder for a newsletter if you have the energy to write one. I’m not really sure if I even have the energy right now as I type, but hey: fuck it. Why not try.

Of the movies watched, the most striking one to me was Takeshi Miike’s 13 Assassins. It’s a remake of an earlier samurai film and a pretty straightforward samurai story for Miike who usually works in horror with a tendency for gross-out stuff. And while 13 Assassins is a great movie in its own right (excellent storytelling, incredible action, important stakes), what pulled me in on this rewatch was how in concert it was with Shōgun. When I wrote about Shōgun for Polygon, what truly struck me was how beautifully the show avoided violence, leaving the entire audience on the edge of their seat for a battle that never came. The core of Shōgun is about a Japanese feudal lord who wants to reinstate absolute rule from a military dictatorship in order to usher in a new era of peace in a united Japan. The show takes place at the end of the Sengoku Period, when Japan was carved up into fiefdoms that constantly went to war over land grabs and petty grievances.

In the show, Lord Toranaga is a stand-in for Tokugawa Ieyasu who in real life claimed the title of shōgun and launched the Edo Period which saw Japan prosper economically and socially due to a new strict social order under one leader. Toranaga is cutthroat, conniving, and cruel in his pursuit of the title of shōgun, and the TV show depicts him as grappling with accepting the personal sacrifice of those closest to him in order to win a better world for all of Japan.

13 Assassins, however, takes place in 1844, towards the end of the Edo Period, with the Tokugawa Shōgunate in full decline. The half-brother of the current sitting shōgun is on the verge of being added to the country’s ruling council, but his brutal cruelness and constant habit of slaughtering innocent people to fulfill his blood lust has the shōgun’s Justice Minister worried that the entire country will erupt into war in protest. Worried enough to hire an aging samurai to assassinate him, at least.

As I mentioned earlier, 13 Assassins is a fairly straightforward (and supremely well-executed) samurai movie. But switching gears from Shōgun, the TV show about using relationships to avoid all-out war in order to start an era of peace, and 13 Assassins, the movie about using violence to avoid an all-out war in order to maintain an era of peace, is jarring. In concert with each other, the two works seem to suggest that no matter what you try, power corrupts and eras must end. Shōgun suggests that personal sacrifice in the name of a cause can stay the oncoming onslaught and reduce casualties as much as possible. Markio’s actions are a protest against a warring time in the name of looking for peace. 13 Assassins, however, is a mirror image. In that movie, the aging samurai are lost in an era of peace and long for violence in order to find purpose in a noble death.

Back to back, the two suggest a never-ending ebb and flow of war and peace, protest and violence, all in the name of control. It’s a powerful enough pairing that suggests most movies and TV shows should have a companion piece for added context. Even if it’s not strictly historical. In sensory science, qualitative analysis is often useless without comparative analysis. That is to say, it’s hard to say one coffee sample scores 80 points out of 100 if you’re not trying it against multiple coffee samples. With that, going forward, I think it’s worth considering programming everything you watch with a counterpoint double feature, when possible. For example, if you’re thinking of queueing up Nope, why not pull up one of American cinema’s great Westerns? Both movies will share a similar structure, and I think Nope’s layers expose themselves better when viewed through that lens.

So, for the rest of this newsletter, I’m going to suggest a pairing based on all the crap I watched this last week when bedridden with a cold. Maybe you’ll like these duos, or maybe I’m just still delirious.

Who can say.

Watch

• Inception and

• Paprika

So this is a classic comparison, as many online fans discussed whether Christopher Nolan was inspired by Paprika for his own investigative dream movie. I think that conversation is irrelevant, though the Blank Check episode about Paprika breaks the two movies down in comparison fairly well. For me, I think it’s worth engaging in just reimagining what a dream is and how your own personal viewpoints but up against the depiction in both movies. Dreams are uniquely personal, and dream experiences are sublimely original. No one has ever had a dream the way you have had a dream, and maybe that’s worth exploring through comparative examples in media.

Watch

• Moneyball and

• Manhunter

No one told me The Accountant starring Ben Affleck was a “magical autism” movie. I got about 1/3rd in and had to call it quits. Then I put on Moneyball again—what a picture! One of the main reasons Moneyball works is that it’s about people who care too much and are trying to reinvent what they know through rigorous process and analysis. And Manhunter, Michael Mann’s adaptation of Red Dragon and Hannibal Lecter’s first on-screen appearance, is basically the same thing. FBI profiler Will Graham walks around the world like an open wound too invested in the murders he’s trying to solve, and his only salvation comes through the distinct procedural and scientific analysis of the modernizing FBI. I think this makes a great double feature.

Watch

• Beau Travail and

• Mean Girls

Beau Travail is a movie about isolated hyperextended masculinity boiling over to disastrous results. Mean Girls is about how unchecked acrimony amongst teenage girls can boil over to disastrous results. I’m not saying it’s a perfect one-to-one comparison, but I do think it’s worth a back-to-back watch. Plus, a little post-Beau Travail comedy can’t hurt.

Watch

• Ferrari and

• Burn After Reading

I loved Ferrari, but I can see where a non-Mann sicko might struggle with this movie. It’s a biopic about a difficult man whose passion for racing drives wedges in his personal life with his wife and his mistress and also gets a lot of people killed. Burn After Reading is a movie about how a farcical turn of events around a perpetually horny Washington DC playboy gets a lot of people killed. Both films wrap up with a dedicated speech from one of the characters summarizing that 1. a lot of people have died, and 2. it all sort of just worked itself out so who cares, anyway.

Watch

• Shin Godzilla and

• Godzilla Minus One

Bonus round: these two movies are obviously in concert with each other, as they’re the two most recent Godzilla movies made in Japan. But where Godzilla Minus One is a breakout international hit focusing on the resolve to face your fears (while also touching on multiple nationalist right-wing propaganda talking points specific to Japan), Shin Godzilla is almost a direct satire of Japan’s overwrought bureaucracy and slow movement to action. Godzilla Minus One is technically the better movie, but to be frank, I found it predictable and convenient and feel like it telegraphed its moves twenty steps ahead. Shin Godzilla, on the other hand, was directed by Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Hideaki Anno, and the movie basically reframes Godzilla as an Evangelion angel. It’s an interesting depiction of how governments aren’t prepared to respond to immediate danger when disaster strikes, which is more poignant for earthquake-susceptible Japan than it is in the United States. Still, I think both movies are better when viewed next to each other. Shin Godzilla focuses on how committee will doom us all, while Godzilla Minus One wants us to believe that anything can be overcome as a team (albeit with strong, nationalist, right-wing propaganda tendencies). Wildly different viewpoints about how to kill a big lizard.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.