No. 77 - Mr. & Mrs. Smith
I talk a little about a cool new spy show and a whole lot about how much I hate The Algorithm. I hate it! I want to swap playlists with people! I don't want numbers and code telling me what to like!
Spies Like Us
On the iPhone, one can organize apps into categories. You can put your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram apps into one category and call it “Social,” put all your banking apps in one category and call it “Banking,” and so on and so forth. When I was using dating apps and job search apps more regularly, I put them all into one category titled “Futures.” They both served the distinct purpose to get me the future I wanted. Its funny to mix business and pleasure like that, but they are often implicitly intwined. Job security can determine when you get married. Having a partner can be a boon for getting ahead - as Alec Baldwin’s character in The Departed once said, “[a] married guy seems more stable; people see the ring, they think at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch.” There are even terms like “work wife” and “work husband” to imply an innocent amount of intimacy within the workplace. Sometimes the work-life balance can be upset and, if your significant other is involved, it can be messy. It is even messier if you and your spouse are globe-trotting super spies.
Mr. & Mrs Smith (2024) is a new television series inspired by the 2005 film of the same name about the intersection between work (spycraft) and home (married life). The Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie film had a distinctly cartoony tone for both its explosive action and its depiction of marriage (lots of heterofatalistic “I hate my wife’s cooking!” jokes), but that couldn’t be further from the style of this new series. It keeps the concept of two spies being married to each other and that’s about it. John (Donald Glover) and Jane (Maya Erksine) are paired up by a mysterious organization to pose as husband and wife as they conduct special espionage operations around the globe. It has a distinctly grounded tone despite the high-concept and treats the central couple’s seeming incompatible nature with nuance. John’s is impulsive and emotional characteristics are often contrasted with Jane is methodical and practical sensibilities which either leads them to high-tension sequences or darkly humorous comedic scenes.
The show is funny in a sort of dry and sardonic way. One episode has John and Jane escorting a hostage (Ron Perlman) across an Italian city filled with hostile agents. Their hostage is an older gentleman involved in the criminal underworld, but because of his age they need to help him through the city streets. They encourage him, calm him down, make sure he’s comfortable in the back seat of the car, and argue with each other about the tone they’re using with him. Through all the bluster and gunfire the allegory becomes so clear; this is a trial run to see what it would be like for them to be parents. Once that becomes obvious, the show pushes it even further to make a baby of this elderly man who has done “some fucked up shit,” but it never goes too broad and keeps the humor understated.
The dry sense of humor is one of the many things that makes the show feel distinctly millennial. John and Jane take this unusual and high risk career out of desperation (“Nobody else would take me” one says - a double entendre) and are paired up seemingly algorithmically (it is heavily implied that the trivial fact that they share a favorite cuisine is why they are paired up.) Even their job interview in the first episode is conducted via self recorded interview, a frightening nightmare for many millennials. The way John and Jane receive their missions and communicate with their superiors enormously resembles jobs in the gig economy like Taskrabbit and Thumbtack. A couple episodes are even directed by Amy Seimetz, a mumblecore filmmaker and actress who’s work often confronts issues like burnout, dating, work, and the horrors of the 21st century through a low-key millennial lens.
Mr. & Mrs Smith is a mere eight episodes and chronicles the highs and lows of John and Jane’s relationship amidst tactical espionage action and the ever watchful eye of their unknown superiors. The mysterious organization they work for has, more or less, co-opted their entire lives, controlling where they live and whom they love. It becomes a question by the end of the show if giving everything to your work, including your love life, is sustainable or if you have to give one up. In a show like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, giving one of those up is going to result in a fight. A fire fight.
All episodes of Mr. & Mrs. Smith are available to stream on Amazon Prime
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Escape the Algorithm
Long ago, people living in Medieval villages probably only saw a handful of images in their entire life. Most likely they would see these images in their Church. In the 90s and the early 00s, many people had a room in their home called “the computer room.” This room was your portal to the World Wide Web. You would sign in, communicate with your friends, argue with strangers on message boards, read your favorite blogs and webcomics, and, when you were all done, you’d shut the computer down and go about your day. At that point in time, for most people, the internet was confined to that one little room. All the memes, all social media, all the trolls and toxic nerds; all of it was locked away in that little room.
Not really the case anymore.
Now we carry supercomputers in our pockets at all times. We are made to be available to everyone at all times and are faced with the confrontational elements of the internet far more often. If you’re on social media, you likely see hundreds of images and videos daily. These images may be made by people (a fact that is slowly starting to change thanks to AI), but they aren’t brought to you by human hands. The words, images, and music you encounter on the internet are likely determined by collection of numbers and code otherwise known as The Algorithm. The Algorithm for each app is designed to pressure you into two things: spend money and keep you there until you do. It wants you to mindlessly and endlessly consume.
Seeing all those images every time I open my phone is addicting. The Algorithm made it that way intentionally. It would be one thing if each image I saw was something meaningful, but the internet is so full of trash that’s meant to be consumed and then forgotten. There’s no way the human brain can be rewired to remember every post I scroll past in my various social media feeds. It’s a numbing effect until I see some noxious opinion that implies that conceptual art is easy, that films without easter eggs are pointless, that human sexuality has no place in art, or some other idiotic consumer brained take. Worst part about it is that it seems like The Algorithm rewards posts like this because they get so much engagement (mostly people telling the original poster that they’re wrong.)
That’s part of the lie about The Algorithm, that it is actually individually curated to you and your interests. If it was, why would I see the awful opinions about video games that I have no interest in playing? Why would I still see ads for True Crime shows and podcasts despite hitting “not interested” each time? The Algorithm isn’t sorting people into various narrow boxes, but it feels more like it is trying to corral everyone into one big box. A friend of mine had told me that while scrolling on Instagram they found a pair of shorts that they thought was personalized to her own style and sensibilities. These ads are targeted after all. After purchasing it she found that she existed in a much wider audience than she thought. The Algorithm had shown that exact pair of shorts to dozens of her peers, some of whom had also purchased it. It proved to her that The Algorithm was influencing her and not the other way around.
It feels radical to say, but if I am spending so much of my time on my phone, then I would like it to be meaningful and intentional. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through an endless feed being manipulated by a string of code, I want my experience to be more rewarding and human, so I have devised a way to try to limit and control The Algorithm’s influence on my life. The plan is simple: manipulate elements of the physical world, encourage more humanity, and escape The Algorithm.
Time and Space
Chris Pine has spoken openly about how he feels about smart phones. In an interview with Josh Horowitz, he expressed how it sucked up all his time and kept him from more rewarding experiences. His diatribe was as follows:
“I had a flip phone for four years, or three years, and I just got an iPhone because I felt pummeled by how difficult being analog… It was very difficult. But, having just gotten this crack machine, it’s really bad. These machines are really, really, really bad…I used to read so many books, Josh. I was fucking murdering these books, just 15 books in like three months. And then [the iPhone] showed up, and it’s…I can tell you everything about Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian, but I can’t tell you a fucking thing about literature. I just want to vomit. I hate myself, such self-loathing about it.”
I’ve shared his sentiments plenty of times because I personally relate to it. I know I’m not alone in succumbing to the allure of the endless scroll. I periodically delete certain apps when I feel they are taking up too much of my time. There is just this perpetual desire to just fill every moment of my day with the bright blue light of my phone.
There’s this theory that I’ve found to be true where your mind associates certain physical spaces with certain activities. Cognitive and emotional associations with, say, your bedroom will influence how your mind and body react to it. If it is only used for sleeping, you will automatically adjust to it. If you tend to stay up all night in bed looking at your phone, that association is disrupted. I’ve found that when I’m in an unfamiliar area, like a new coffee shop, it is a sort of clean slate. I can bring a book and form a new association with the space. As a result, there are several coffee shops nearby me that I use as reading spaces where I can read and have minimal phone usage.
How amusing would it be then to use this mindset with my own home. What if I created a new version of “the computer room” or limited it even further by having one piece of furniture where I allow myself to use my phone. It sounds ridiculous, but the resolution would create that association with that space. No longer would the “crack machine” be calling to me when I’m trying to read a book, write a D&D campaign, or work on my illustrations because I would be in a space that it couldn’t reach me. Even the idea of physically leaving my phone in that space, like one would’ve done with a landline phone, sounds absurd, but that’s the way it used to be.
The alternative is selecting time instead of space. Instead of relegating a specific area where I can use my phone, I determine a time. A friend has timers on her phone that restricts the amount of time each day an app can be used. Another friend of mine told me that he only scrolls through TikTok when he’s at work, so when he’s off the clock he can focus on things he actually wants to do with his free time. Its sort of like the idea of having your “lunch/dinner show” - a tv show that isn’t binged, but only watched whenever one’s eating. Its these sort of thoughts that had me thinking my way of escaping the endless scroll would be treating the feeds as my “morning paper” and only engaging with them during breakfast or during my semi-daily 2:00pm coffee.
Limiting one’s intake of the social media feeds, not allowing all the “targeted” ads, ignorant and hostile opinions, and just internet junk to be floating around you at all times is obviously a good thing. Untangling the physical world from the virtual one feels difficult considering just how tangled they are nowadays. Images of people willing wearing the Apple Vision Pro in public shows a real desire by many to have their phone directly in front of their face at all times despite how devastatingly stupid it makes them look.
The Human Element
I’m tired of numbers and code determining what I want. I want a human with opinions to curate something for me. Some streaming services, like The Criterion Channel, do not have a “for you” section but instead have curated lists of films based around ideas, auteurs, time periods, and other concepts that enhance each other because of their juxtaposition. The Criterion Channel even has a section where filmmakers and artists curate lists of recommended viewing based on their own interests, complete with their own introductions to each film. Other services try to use your data to determine what you might like, but are often so dependent on the simple categories and tags each film has. I don’t think watching The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart, an irreverent adult comedy about satirical versions of pop culture archetypes, means I want to see the latest animated Batman movie just because they’re both animated and science fiction. Offloading the work of curation from a human to The Algorithm’s automation only leads to misleading and lackluster results.
In high school, I remember buying a stack of CDs and, for fun, exchanging mix CDs with friends. We’d make album art, curate them with our favorite tracks, and use them as a way to introduce each other to new bands and sounds. As much as Spotify’s algorithm works to deliver music that I enjoy, it fails to capture the feeling of knowing that another human with tastes and feelings was sharing art with me. I want a person who cares about the art they’re sharing, not a computer calculating what I might like.
I want that with all the art I engage with online. At this point, I don’t want to engage with works that The Algorithm considers to be “content” that’s fed to me. I want to see something made by a human that another human wants me to see. From the selfie to the digital painting to the fifteen second clip from a comedian’s stand-up routine to a photo from a pop star’s performance at the Grammys; behind all these are are human hands with some kind of intent. I do want to see these things and throwing out my smart phone would assuredly make it so I never seem them. I want to engage with it and talk about them, but I want The Algorithm to stay out of it.
I hope I Liked It! does that for its readers, bringing up art with sincere consideration and enthusiastic recommendation. Its my hope that more people come to me in a similar fashion; sending me albums, films, and other art that they love. Not to consume, but to share.
Stray Observations
Film critic Pricilla Page starts her list of her favorite films of 2023 with “Finally!” It appears that the time she took to craft this list was worth it as these bite sized reviews of her top films of 2023 are wonderful, insightful, and fun to read. Her tastes veer more toward action cinema, especially international crime action films, so Page curating this list feels like an excellent way for newcomers to the genre to get a taste for the cream of the crop. Many of my favorites made the list too and, as I mentioned in a previous issue, I loved her analysis of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part One. You can read her list here.
At the Playstation “State of Play”, Hideo Kojima revealed a new trailer for Death Stranding 2 On the Beach. I was a massive fan of the original game as it was a beautiful ode to human connection and it expressed the need for that connection through the game narrative and the gameplay. This sequel follows Sam (Norman Reedus) as he continues his work reconnecting humankind after an arcane apocalypse. The trailer reveals that the world of Death Stranding is just as, if not more, weird as we remember and reveals some new characters with familiar faces. You can watch the nearly ten minute long trailer here:
It only took me two days to finish Ling Ma’s shot story collection Bliss Montage. I had loved her debut novel Severance (which I wrote about here) and I was excited to get my hands on anything else she had written. Excited may have been an understatement because I devoured Bliss Montage. It followed some very similar themes that Severance had, especially talking about the experience of being a second generation immigrant. Ma also utilizes her interest in the surreal, science fiction, and some light elements of horror. It is a strange and terrific collection that I obviously have to recommend.
I am so excited for Longlegs, the new horror film from Osgood Perkins. Not much is known about the project except for the fact that it stars Maika Monroe as a FBI agent tracking a serial killer played by Nicolas Cage. What has me excited about the film is the incredible posters and cryptic copy that comes with them. Each one feels so very very ominous. The first teaser trailer emphasizes vibes and the vibes are creepy as hell. It is slated to release this summer.
Thanks for reading! As always I appreciate you if you made it to the end of this issue. I put a lot of work into my piece about The Algorithm and these feelings about it are very very real. I mean it when I say I want more human curation versus algorithmic curation, so please, as often as you can, send me books albums, artists, movies, and tv shows to enjoy. Not just because you liked them, but because you want to share and talk about them. Don’t forget to share and subscribe!