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#176 - You've Got Mail: A Michael & Us Symposium (w/ Meagan Day and Branko Marcetic) (Patreon)

Published:
2020-10-11 07:02:11
Edited:
2020-11-29 20:04:14
Imported:
2024-06

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Some topics are too vast, too vital for us to cover on our own. Today, we address one such topic. We invited Jacobin Magazine's Meagan Day and Branko Marcetic for a roundtable discussion of Nora Ephron's YOU'VE GOT MAIL (1998), starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. We discover that this parable for gentrification may be the key to all of politics and culture in the 1990s. PLUS: thoughts on the Harris-Pence VP debate and the famous fly.

"Want to Know What a Return to 'Normal' Will Look Like? Stare Into Mike Pence's Dead Eyes" by Branko Marcetic - https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/mike-pence-vp-vice-presidential-debate-trump


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Oskar

New patreon supporter here. I'm addicted to this podcast! Movie suggestion, for the next time you feel like talking about an actual good movie: the sensational 70's doc "Marjoe" which is about a guy who lives a double life as hippie and pentecostal preacher. For what it's worth it won the acadamy award that year, but it does not get much attention today. It's on vimeo. Really cool movie.

Borat Madingus

On the topic of selling out in recent media, Silicon Valley is premised on whether or not the main character will sell out his company to silicon valley monopolists. Initially, whether or not he’ll sell out his dream of owning a business and becoming a monopolist, and later whether or not he’ll sell out his dream of de-centralizing the internet to undermine the monopolists who want to buy his technology and use it for evil. I do think the ending (spoilers I guess) is different than what Mike Judge would have done in the 1990’s. In Office Space, for example, everyone loses from a material standpoint (except for Milton, a king). What “success” the heroes find is existential, working as a construction worker is more rewarding for Peter because it feels more authentic, so like Sisyphus he can at least enjoy his pointless life. Whereas in Silicon Valley, the heroes choose not to sell out and become monopolists, and they choose to destroy their technology rather than have it be used for evil, but they all end up in pretty good material places anyways (as college professors or running unrelated successful companies). They get to have their cake and eat it too, and so the audience is left with a happy feeling. If it were made in 1990’s, I think the heroes would have ended up working entry-level jobs they hated (or something like that), their reward for doing the right thing in a world that rewards doing the wrong thing. And the audience would be left with discomfort, and forced to reflect on what this says about our own world. The milieu of our late capitalist culture produces satire that can’t bite hard enough to make us question our own reality, rather than unflinching critiques of neo-liberal capitalism like Wayne’s World.

Tony Mines
>>45775878

In fairness to that show, I found for most of it's run it offered a more details-focused critique of capital than Judge's previous work. Given the premise (asking us to accept ongoing that these guys aspirations to succeed in tech are deserving of empathy) it is inevitably going to unlock some cake-eating temporal paradoxes. Does Uber literally own the actual person of Kumail Nanjiani, for instance? But compared next to, say, Idiocracy - which aside from a couple jokes is highly objectionable garbage - Silicon Valley looks like fucking Hour of the Furnaces. I can't remember the finer points of the ending, but I recall they set up various utopian goals, and have them fail at accomplishing any of them without them being sabotaged by the mere presence of the marketplace? So it could be argued that proportionately they fall further. Does anyone in that mileu do anything other than fail upwards, anyway?