Patreon Letter: 1st November 2020 (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

Jackson here with a Patreon Letter for you all. Sorry it’s a little late, it’s for the same reason as ever, I have not been outside my house and garden in eight months and I am losing my mind. No real point expanding on that, you all know.

I feel like, at the end of the month, that I achieved nothing, did not clear my to do lists at all. But that’s not the case, I watched like, all of Psycho-Pass this month. Saw a few movies too. In addition to the regular podcast load. It’s fine. It’s chill. Should probably stop over-promising to myself more than anything. Anyway this is going to be a couple of short takes and anecdotes from the month more than anything, the things I did were either too scattered or incomplete so I don’t really have a big article in me today.

I don’t want to write too much about Psycho-Pass because we talked a little about it on GGP already and I’m sure it will come up again, but I do want to say this: it is fantastic. I loved the show. I watched the first two seasons and the movie, and I intend to watch the rest soon. I even started up the visual novel: it was incredibly boring so I stopped. I’ll wait til I’m out of anime first, see how desperate I am.

The second season (correctly) gets a bad rap and is very noticeably missing Gen Urobuchi in the screenwriter’s slot, but I still had a mostly good time. Even when the show is way dumber, the truth about me is that all I want from media is sad stories about cops in suits smoking and complaining about their lot in life. Psycho-Pass gives that to me in spades, and especially when Gen’s in the writer’s chair, provides it with a razor sharp understanding of the politics at play with this aesthetic. The way the show builds from its obviously dystopian cyberpunk premise to address material world-building concerns such as food production and foreign policy is just chef’s kiss.

The movie in particular I think is something truly special. I’m not going to go into spoilery detail - tho if you haven’t seen it I would urge you to just close the tab and watch the movie - but I want to lay out why I think it’s the true achievement of the series. After watching it, I did what I always do and looked up some of the reactions from fans at the time, and was surprised to see people think it was a side story and distraction, ultimately inconclusive and immaterial to the main plot of Psycho-Pass. Not on par with the greatness of the first season.

And like. Okay, they’re right that it isn’t a movie about Akane and the gang shooting the Sybil System with guns, liberating Japan and saving the world. But that is a hilarious thing that I had never considered people believed possible until seeking out reviews. Instead it’s a precise and story about the mechanisms on which imperialism functions in the 21st century. What does it mean when certain countries own the code on which the world runs? A nation may be independent and free, but when its power rests entirely not just on weapons bought with foreign investment, but on entire algorithmic languages essentially rented as black boxes, what does that independence mean? Psycho-Pass The Movie presents a world that is basically IMF’s wet dream, a war torn dystopia where loyal governments must rent a violent peace from western imperial powers (literally everyone in the movie speaks English as a shared language, America is never invoked but the metaphor could not be clearer), and and points its finger directly at Japan as an agent of empire against other South East Asian nations.

I was genuinely taken aback at how much its punches weren’t pulled. Its in conversation with many other popular works, Patlabor 2 most directly, but the way it takes that movies metaphor of the long shadow of American Interventionalism a step further, and tells a story about an isolationist Japan violently building what is functionally an imperial colony in South East Asia, without a military but through its technological exports and police force is, well it’s just bold. Everyone else needs to step up their game. It makes Shin Godzilla - which came out the year after - look like a child’s scribbling on the walls. It’s a really special movie and it deserves more than to be seen as a pretty good follow up to a classic anime.

Okay, what else.

Oh yeah, I watched the Trial of the Chicago 7 a couple weeks ago but it certainly feels like a billion years. The final scene is already a meme. Time is somehow both standing still and moving impossibly fast in 2020. It already was online but Covid exaggerated both parts to a degree I find uncomfortable.

The movie was very bad, I don’t really need to go over that, but it made me nostalgic for like 2012 when I was doing my screenwriting degree and basically trying to rip off Sorkin as hard as humanly possible. Be nice, I was 18, I’m better now. I went and found my old scripts and holy shit they are embarrassing, but almost more funny is how its clear that even in my useless 18 year old West Wing loving mind, without the politics to express why his works are so insidious and evil, I wanted to fix the problem with his writing that nothing can ever end badly. When you stand up against the corporate demands and try to make something good, the world may shun you, but you will eventually be bailed out and rewarded for your hard work by Clark Gregg, who bought your company and will allow your show to continue because he just likes it that damn much, ratings be damned. The ending of Sports Night is really stupid.

Okay fine I’ll give you one detail. But you can’t tell anyone or make fun of me. I had this series that was basically doing Sports Night but in a school and I had this whole elaborate ending where the cool guy maverick teacher type would be fired, the school becomes an academy, and it’s all intercut with some flashbacks to the 1987 UK Election where Kinnock gets fucking destroyed and all hope for the future dies. It had an ironic ending montage set to Waiting for the Great Leap Forward. I was uh, more of a socdem in those days lmao.

Anyway I refound this very cringe idea where I was like what if Sorkin wrote The Wire Season 4 and laughed a lot because even at my most embarrassing, even at my least self aware, I could not have in my wildest dreams come up with something as completely and totally oppa homeless style awful as the final scene of the Trial of the Chicago 7.

The moral here is never feel too embarrassed about your work to not pursue it. This movie has a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. I haven’t completed any creative work in like five years. I used to write terrible scripts all the time. So which Jackson is truly living, past or present.

Maybe next time I’ll show you the ska songs I wrote in sixth form. I won’t. They’re bad. But I was so happy writing them. I’m now old enough to be weirdly nostalgic for my teen years, even though I remember how deeply, powerfully sad I was during all of them. That doesn’t matter. So these objects and texts remain, on some level embarrassing but on another representative of some probably imagined innocence.

Anyway that’s what I think of when I think of Aaron Sorkin. A man who clearly was never told his work was bad, who never once felt any shame. And now he’s a joke, yes, but only to us, because he’s also incredibly rich and successful and will be for the rest of his life. He wrote The Newsroom, and his punisment was to leave TV and simply write and direct hollywood movies. I would one day like to recapture that fearlessness, and make bad ska songs again.

Not today though, I am exhausted. This year has been so exhausting. I love you all. I’ll see you next month.

-Jackson