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MUTATION VECTORS

Status Update

This is a long one this time around. I’ve got two articles here, neither of which is about comics. But they’re in my lane: internet and media.

Podcast: Vamps

The next episode of the Sewer Mutant podcast will drop Thursday. We talk about Vamps by Elaine Lee and William Simpson, which felt like Vertigo’s attempt to cash-in on the “bad girls comics” trend. Seemed appropriate for Halloween. Watch for it in your podcatcher.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

Seeing everything

I’m still thinking about You Can See Everything more than a week after seeing it.

Three things before I get started:

You should refresh yourself on the details of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes before seeing the movie. Behind the Bastards has a two parter that covers the basics if you need a crash course or refresher. (Part 1, Part 2).
It helps to be familiar with Nathan Fielder’s style for context, but it’s not necessary. This movie is still very different from his work on Nathan for You and The Rehearsal.
There’s some stuff in the second half that I won’t “spoil” but otherwise I’m gonna write pretty openly about it.

It feels more serious and journalistic, while still challenging the entire idea of what a documentary is and can be.

But the more I think about it the more I think Fielder got out Fieldered by Holmes. He himself admits this is possible. Wired editor Katie Drummond, from her cover story on Fielder:

I have a 9-year-old daughter, and watching Holmes with her kids in the first half of the film, I felt tremendous empathy for this woman. I was asking myself a lot of questions about her romantic relationships and wondering whether that was at the root of it all along. I wondered if there was something wrong with her. Cognitively wrong with her.

And then I was getting ready to do this interview, and so I read back about everything she had done, about the timing of when she had kids. I went to screen the movie a second time and felt like such a fucking dupe for being close to tears watching her with her little kids. I still feel sad for the kids, but I felt much less empathy for her. I would say, broadly within the journalism community, Bad Blood was the definitive reported account of what she did.

I had a somewhat similar experience: I was questioning my memory of Bad Blood, which I read at least six years ago. That’s why I say you should bone up on her and Theranos before you see You Can See Everything. Fielder is assuming a lot of prior knowledge here.

I think Holmes was more familiar with Fielder’s work than she let on and is essentially playing a Fielder-esque character to short circuit his usual approach. She was overly literal, often obtuse, and baffling in the way Fielder often is when interacting with people on his shows.

Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz covers a lot of the issues I had with Fielder’s approach to this movie in this essay, but it does have “spoilers.”

(I’m putting “spoilers” in quotes here because I don’t think it actually benefits the viewer to not know most of this stuff, but people seem to feel strongly about it so I’m treading carefully.)

I’m overall a lot more sympathetic to Fielder than Shultz. Fielder isn’t a medical testing expert, something he makes clear up front, and he even suggests in the film that might have been part of why Holmes agreed to let him make the documentary. I can believe he didn’t know that the device Holmes shows him in the documentary is not the one that was in contention in court. My issue is that he should have brought in people with more expertise to review the footage. I think the secrecy surrounding the production of the film was a big problem. They were overly cautious about bringing in character witnesses and experts who could have provided valuable context. Fielder says he trusts the audience, which is great, but the film doesn’t give us enough to make an informed opinion on its own.

(I haven’t seen Digger yet but this makes me think about how the entire promotion around that film and the protection of its so-called spoilers were designed to trick moviegoers into thinking they were seeing an entirely different film. What’s with this approach to film marketing this year?)

Two more things on Shultz’s essay:

His suggestion that Holmes deliberately stays in abusive relationships to provide herself with cover is distasteful at best. He provides no real evidence to support this idea. I’ll leave that at that.
Like Shultz, I was struck by how, in one of the final scenes of the movie, Fielder is asked if he left things out that would make Holmes look bad because he had developed an affection for her. He doesn’t deny it. Leaving the question, and his non-answer, in the movie is a deliberate choice. He really does trust his audience.

Even with all those qualms, I do still recommend You Can See Everything. Fielder is playing with the entire notion of what a documentary can be in much the same way he’s been playing with what an unscripted television show can be. It’s worth seeing for that alone.

How the internet ends

This essay was in the original newsletter, but I opted to publish it on LinkedIn instead of Sewer Mutant.

Media Diet

Tabs

I’ve recently switched to using vertical tabs in Firefox and I really should have done so years ago. Back in like 2010 I used the TreeStyleTabs plugin, but switched to using Chrome based-browsers that didn’t have an easy way to implement vertical tabs (at least that I knew of in the early 2010s) and I just got used to not having them. Now both Chome and Firefox can display tabs vertically without a plugin. If you keep as many tabs open as I do (dozens at a time) it makes for a more pleasant experience.

TV and Film

I binged the entire new season of Slow Horses while recovering from a routine medical procedure this week. This really should be obvious at this point, but Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Jackson Lamb really is one of the all-time great television character performances.

Books

I’m listening to the audiobook of What Feeds Below by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne. It’s like a character-driven version of Stalker.

I was skeptical about the “Marvel Midnight” line since it looked like just response to DC’s Absolute line (then again, Absolute looked to me like a response to Marvel bringing back their Ultimate line). But I gotta say Absolute Fantastic Four issue 1 was pretty good and has me looking forward to more. It’s the first Marvel book that’s caught my interest in years. Haven’t looked at the other Midnight books yer.

Podcasts

Behind the Bastards: Part One: How Nuisance Streamers and Rage-Baiting Ate the Internet and Part 2. This is a different use of the term “rage bait” than I’d previously seen. Here it refers to (mostly) white men streaming themselves yelling racist shit in an effort to provoke violent responses so they can justify their own violence.

Logoff

Phew! That really is enough out of me. Til next time!

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