Hivemind Times Issue #97

Welcome To The Hivemind Times!

Issue 97 my babies, what is the crack?

Sorry I am kind of watching Love Island UK in the background at the moment. 

Anyway I am so happy to be writing to you, my loyal readers. I know I can say this often but man o man are you all in for a brand new treat next week (awesome gameshow type beat). The new season is full of production surprises and sweet treats around every corner. Some Unlimited drops this week in way of sleepy places tier and Star Wars Episode II How Did It Age coming out this Sunday. 

But man I am stoked for you all to finally sink your disgusting rotten teeth into some of these new segments we have been cooking up. Enjoy the News from the only reliable source in fun out there right now.

- Graydon 

WEEKLY PLAYLIST

Taking my mom to see Gram Nash and Emmy Lou Harris tonight so here’s some of my favorite songs from both respectively <3

- Graydon

MOVIE REVIEW

Suffering for Celluloid #4

The Invite: A Night in the Bunker

(this piece contains spoilers for The Invite)

Olivia Wilde’s The Invite breathes deeply in a room with only so much air to go around; this is to say Wilde’s third feature is a fantastic and claustrophobic achievement that, even with its shortcomings and derivations, is sure to make an audience laugh cringe cry shriek gasp chuckle or slip a dental fricative. The quartette’s cast of first chairs is delicately installed; Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Penelope Cruz all deployed (as performers and stars) like tire spikes & molotovs in a termitic chamber piece. The premise is relatively simple. 

Couple A (Wilde & Rogan) is in the midst of a vicious argument when a chic couple of acquaintances (Norton & Cruz) arrive for a modest dinner gathering to celebrate the completion of Couple A’s renovations. What Wilde goes on to pull from this scenario is in the tradition of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, A Woman Under the Influence, Merrily We Go To Hell, All About Eve, The Red Desert, Annie Hall, Die My Love and the myriad other psychoanalytic couple’s dramas that once flooded cinemas during the 20th century. Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire also comes to mind in its feuds and revelations about the invisibility of the past. 

What ultimately comes of this is a naturalistic melodrama about stagnation, decay, the ways self narrativization can thrash one’s mind, and how time makes humans lose each other. Angela, played expertly like Wilde, has been married to Seth Rogan’s Joe for what feels like eons; during their youth, they were inseparable - but time, parenthood, and work-life balance gradually pried them apart. Now, Rogan’s restless, self-loathing catatonia clashes with Wilde’s neurotic attempts to connect with the outside world; the one night clash that results might as well kick off with the quartet waking up chained to pipes like Saw victims. 

The first time the audience sees Joe, he sits in an empty auditorium with a shroud of dissociation draped on his face; immobile, alone, and vacuous. As the pupils in the small orchestra he’s teaching turn to him expecting feedback, he barely addresses them and sulks out, then bikes home in San Francisco on a foldable bike Angela bought him for commuting. Joe is purposefully, stupidly obstinate - allowing his wife to become an enigma - not even making attempts at what Laura Mulvey might’ve called “demystifying her mystery.” His status as the film creeps along is less like a domineering patriarch, more like a short necked turtle hiding in its shell. Even with his avoidant presence dampening the mood, when the film hits its stride, firecrackers get lit left and right. The movie spins into a tizzy, dazed in the acrid and indelible chemistry these four actors scorched on a bunsen burner. Wilde and DP Adam Newport-Berra also allow the acting to breathe up close and personal, so the scopophilic glee of watching great actors act is abundant. 

What the film fixates on is an utter despair of life lost, time spent with someone who’s become a conjoined burden; a second leg in the sack trundling along. For this couple, an end of their life together is tantamount to death: the loss of seeing their daughter grow up, the demolition of a modus vivendi that has housed their entire adulthood. It follows then that in recent interviews Olivia Wilde has talked about the bratty, childlike bickering as a regressive mechanism; the parallel expressions of people who feel defeated, condescended, and powerless. With her impetuous darting eyes and quavering cries, Angela sometimes recalls Gina Rowland’s performance of Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence; fluttering with a natural brilliance like a poorly adhered poster shivering in the light breath of a fan, waiting for the hold to slip. 

The film welcomes its own comparisons - chiefly to Mike Nichol’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf; an adaptation of Edward Albee’s seminal play that explores the violence of captive romance through bifocals: one young couple and one older couple. Suited remarkably to its function, Nichol’s stylistic approach to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf strikes a superb compromise of theatric dialogisms and cinematic framing; the film sports gorgeous black and white cinematography and a delicate, considered scope. The Invite takes this opportunity to play like the greats, shrinking the confines to a single apartment, shooting chronologically, permitting longer takes, and opting for 35MM film stock instead of digital. All of these choices press the viewer (and the incumbent couple) further into an intimacy of excoriation usually reserved for private quarters. 

While films with this level of therapeutic honesty between men and women feel like relatively progressive projects, they’ve existed nearly as long as film itself. Films like Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell took on young love, alcoholism, adultery, separation, and recovery as early as 1932. What Wilde brings to the form is taking a radical pursuit of honesty - something like New Sincerity for a living language of therapy-speak and millennial ennui - and putting it on a direct collision course with a shielded masculine irony that feels emblematic of a kind of 21st century man. As funny as Joe’s quips and Freudian slips are at the start, they slowly evolve from deflective or passive aggressive into abrasive refusals to change; anti-adapting to an increasingly serious conversation by playing dumb. 

For all its impressive naturalistic strength, the only slight issue would be the occasionally schematic conflict - floating between captivating spars and tropey meltdowns. Towards the end of the second act, Rogan’s character storms in to angrily do away with his band’s old record, which Norton has put on seemingly to aggravate Rogan. At times the escalation of the arguments is played for what I’ll call stress-sforzando, a post Safdie fetishizing of loud, overlapping arguments & daggers that feel out of place in a film whose ceiling is usually drawn a bit lower; crashing into the otherwise delicate performances like a clipping geiger counter in an abandoned factory. 

Towards the end of the film during a climactic mediation of Angela and Joe performed by Pina, Joe angrily asks Angela what she does all day -- sitting in a space she furnished, stocked with her handmade charcuterie boards, an apartment which is cleanly only at her hand. They step around their true feelings and resentment the whole film, as if their illocutionary acts will manifest a truth they couldn’t scream away. Without their cruel performative utterances at the end of the night how long would they shackle to each other? Their histrionic conflict, based in a constant failure of attention, has become afflicted with a personal detachment only external confrontation could resolve. At the end of the film, the characters have teetered across a canyon’s rickety rope bridge, and it’s unclear whether going back is an option. 

This leaves the viewer in a relational fog, a sort of imprecision and vagueness that might annoy some viewers and haunt others. Inconclusive endings can be tremendously affecting - film theorist Martine Beugnet writes in her book Blur that “the cinematic image is predisposed toward blur… it is also prey to a variety of optical and chemical metamorphoses that endlessly reproduce the palette of the vague, the misty, the fleeting.” Indeed film as a medium plays to its strength with ambiguity - the medium of seeing, but not being privy to a character’s novelistic interiority, allows a provocative melange of emotions to mingle. Throughout the film, characters are framed next to each other from the camera's perspective, but distant physically - creating a kind of visual language for their solipsistic identities, slowly blurring into the background of each other’s lives: are they integrating, distorting, or disappearing? Sure, it’s not Persona, but the subtle sophistication of the filmmaking lends The Invite a real gravitas & solid cohesion between form and content. 

So Wilde finds herself and her body of work anew, reinventing and reasserting her capability as a director and artist, brazenly moulting that tired skin and getting back to basics. In the wake of the tremendously embarrassing flop of Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde has done what some actors-turned-directors could only imagine doing; she made a great film. 

4 Stars

Sidenote: The Invite is Rashida Jones’ and Will Mccormack’s adaptation of Spanish filmmaker Cesc Gay’s play and film The People Upstairs (2022), which has also been adapted and remade for Swiss, Korean, French, and Dutch audiences. 

- Rose Ramdin

THE NEXT NOLAN FILM

QUINN’S CHEMISTRY CLASS

I've spent the past week getting off 7-OH. 7-OH is an alkaloid in kratom that is a partial opioid receptor agonist over 10 times more potent than morphine.

You can buy this stuff at most gas stations and smoke shops. I know, it probably sounds like a joke, but I quit it cold turkey and the withdrawal symptoms were exactly the same as getting off stronger, real opiates. I have been cold sweating, shaking, sensitive skin, insomnia, etc..

Long story short, this stuff is no joke. If you want to try it, don't re-dose, and if you're currently on it make sure you get off asap because it's getting nationwide banned.

- Quinn

SPORTS

POEM OF THE WEEK

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

MERCH